“She looked much younger than I thought she would,” she said suddenly. “What happened is just too damn bad.”
“Yes, it is,” I said. “It’s just too bad.”
I turned into the drive and stopped, and we got out and went into the house together. Sid peeled off toward the kitchen with a cool drink of something in mind, and I climbed the stairs to our room and changed from the light worsted I was wearing to an old pair of denims cut off above the knees in imitation of Bermuda shorts. With these I wore a seasoned T-shirt and a pair of loafers with part of the heels remaining, and the effect was comfortable if not fashionable. In my opinion, half the fun of being domestic is in looking disreputable, like a bum, and I’ve often defended this opinion against Sid, who does not share it. She tolerates it, however, Sid being in most matters a tolerant person, and I have even suspected her of secretly approving it, in spite of what she says, for she is mildly disreputable herself in more respects than a few.
And so, looking disreputable, like a bum, I went downstairs and into the garage and started the power mower and began to mow the front yard. It was a fairly deep yard from street to house, and you could get a pretty free and easy feeling of being in the stretch every time you made a turn and started from one to the other. I took my time, because it was a hot day and I was in no hurry, and I had only cut about a quarter of the yard, working from one side toward the center, when Sid came out to clip around edges. She was wearing cotton gloves and short shorts, and she waved at me with her clippers from a distance as if she had not seen me for a long time and was surprised and delighted to see me now. She began clipping along the brick border of a flower bed in front of the house, and she looked altogether charming and distracting, but not at all domestic.
I kept right at it until I had finished the front yard, after which I cut the narrow stretch beside the house on the east and then went on into the back. It was a hot day, as I said, very hot in the sun and not much less so in the shade, and by this time my T-shirt was soaked and my mouth was full of cotton. After a couple of times to the alley and back, I killed the engine under a tree with the idea of going into the kitchen for something cold and wet, but then I saw Sid coming out of the house and across the yard with two cans of Schlitz, which met the specifications perfectly, and so I sat down with my back against the tree and waited for Sid to come on with the beer and sit down beside me. We sat there in domesticated contentment under the tree, flank to flank and drinking the cold beer slowly, and it was by way of being a pretty good time after some bad ones until Cotton McBride appeared at the side of the house and came on back to where we were. If it had been necessary at the moment to name the last person in the world I wanted to see, it might not have been Cotton that I named, but he would surely have been in contention. There, however, he was, last or next to last, and I thought under the circumstances that I had better be polite. “Hello, Cotton,” I said. “It’s a hot day.”
“Ninety-eight in the sun,” Cotton said. “I see you’ve been mowing the yard.”
“I’ve been mowing and Sid’s been clipping. We stopped to have a beer.”
“How are you, Mrs. Jones? Those beers look mighty inviting, I’ll tell you that. If I wasn’t on duty, I might have a good cold beer myself.”
“I shouldn’t think one beer would interfere a great deal with your duty,” Sid said. “My experience has been that one beer doesn’t interfere with much of anything.”
“Come on and have one, Cotton,” I said. “It’ll do you good.”
“Well, I shouldn’t, it being against regulations and all, but I may have one at that. Thanks.”
“I’ll go get it and be right back,” Sid said.
“What I came out for, Gid,” Cotton said, “was to have a private talk about something important.”
“Let me tell you something,” Sid said. “There isn’t going to be any private talk that doesn’t include me as one of the private parties, and so you may as well get any notion to the contrary out of your head.”
“I don’t know about that,” Cotton said. “You can’t be intruding on police business, Mrs. Jones.”
“If it’s police business, you had better, in my opinion, be conducting it in a police station, or somewhere besides my backyard.”
“That could be arranged, I guess, if you insist on it.”
“What do you mean, arranged? Are you threatening to arrest Gid? Is that what you mean?”
“I didn’t intend to arrest him. Not yet, anyhow.”
“Not yet? Is that what you said? Not yet?”
“Sid,” I said, “go get Cotton a beer, for God’s sake.”
“I’m not at all sure that I care to give him a beer now,” Sid said. “You may give a beer to someone who is threatening to arrest you if you choose, but I’m not quite so charitable.”
“Oh, come on. Please don’t be unreasonable. Cotton’s only doing his duty as he sees it.”
“It’s a peculiar way to see it, if you ask me. There’s no excuse that I can see for accepting someone’s beer and hospitality with one breath and threatening to arrest him with the next.”
“Never mind the beer,” Cotton said. “I don’t believe I want one after all.”
“Of course you do,” I said. “I’m about through with mine, and I’ll have another one
