“If he had one,” Rebecca said doubtfully.
“You don’t think he did?”
“If I’d thought that, I wouldn’t have gotten this far in studying him,” Rebecca said. “Even Swenson was never able to trace him to any other person.” She shrugged. “Everything about your father points to a family man.”
“Everything except that ticket.”
“Yes.”
I let it all pass through my mind slowly, trying to think if I’d ever seen the slightest sign that my father had had his own version of Yolanda Dawes, some pale, slender female with thin, spidery arms, the mythical destroyer of homes. I thought of various possibilities. There was Mrs. Hamilton, the minister’s wife who lived across the street, but she was far older than my father, matronly and overweight, hardly a candidate for romance. Next door, Mrs. Bishop, even older, lay bedridden with rheumatoid arthritis. There were other women in the neighborhood, younger, sleeker, their legs tightly bound in the pedal-pusher pants so common at the time, but it didn’t seem possible that they would have cast a longing glance at the middle-aged man in gray work clothes who sometimes cruised by in his old brown van.
Then, quite suddenly, I thought of someone.
“Well,” I said hesitantly, not wanting to emphasize the point, “there was this one woman who worked for my father.”
Rebecca’s eyes bored into me. “Who?”
“Her name was Nellie Grimes,” I said. “I didn’t know her very well.”
“Was she a neighbor?”
“No. She just worked for my father.”
A divorcee, with a three-year-old daughter, Nellie had begun to work in the hardware store in the fall of 1956. My father had needed someone to straighten out the store’s tangled bookkeeping system, but after doing that, Nellie had stayed on to handle the part of the business my father despised, the dismal mountain of paperwork involved in keeping the store stocked, billing credit customers, even paying the store’s own bills. He’d never liked any of the minutiae of running his own small business, and after Nellie came on, he’d turned all of it over to her. Thorough and highly organized, Nellie had quickly become indispensable to my father, a woman, as I’d once heard him describe her, “of many talents.”
“‘Of many talents,’” Rebecca repeated as she wrote the phrase in her book. “Who did he say that to?”
My own answer surprised me. “My mother.”
“So your mother knew about Nellie Grimes?”
I labored to dismiss the disquieting notion that there might have been an edge of cruelty in my father’s description of Nellie, as if he were bent upon making the contrast between “poor Dottie” and a woman of “many talents” as painful as he could.
“Well, she knew who Nellie was,” I answered casually. “All of us knew who she was, that she was this woman who worked for my father.” I shrugged. “But I don’t think it occurred to any of us that there might have been something going on between them.”
I thought of all the times I’d seen my father and Nellie together, simply standing in one of the store’s cluttered aisles, or hunched over Nellie’s desk in the back, the two of them trying to straighten out some incongruity in the books. Everything had always looked perfectly normal between them. Neither had ever exhibited the slightest sense of a clandestine relationship, of secret hideaways or kisses stolen behind a potted palm.
“It always seemed like an ordinary, professional relationship,” I said.
Rebecca gave me a penetrating look. “Then why did you bring her up?”
“Just as a possibility,” I answered, dismissing it at the same time. “Nothing more than that.”
But it was more than that.
I knew that it was more because of the force with which Nellie had suddenly returned to me. I hadn’t thought of her in years, and yet I saw her exactly as she’d appeared during the time she’d worked for my father.
She was a short, compact woman with curly light-brown hair, always neatly dressed, her lips painted a bright, glossy red. She had called me Skipper for some reason, and at the little birthday party my mother threw for me three months before her murder, Nellie gave me a blue captain’s cap with a large golden anchor stitched across the front. Her daughter was named May, and at the party she’d stood, looking a bit confused, in a lacy white dress, a small, willowy child with long, blond hair and a vacant look in her light green eyes.
“Why did this woman in particular come to mind, Steve?”
“Opportunity, I suppose,” I said. “I mean, they were alone in the store a good deal. It would have been easy for him.”
“Would that have been enough for your father to have an affair?” Rebecca asked. “Just that it would have been convenient?”
The world “affair” struck me as an inappropriate one to use in terms of any relationship my father might have had with Nellie. It seemed too worldly and sophisticated a word for either one of them. Had the “affair” existed at all, it would have been carried out in cheap motel rooms off noisy, commercial roads. Or, perhaps, even worse, just a quick, sweaty tumble in the back of the hardware store. As such, it didn’t strike me as the sort of thing my father would have done.
“No, I don’t think so,” I told Rebecca. “Besides, he never struck me as being driven in that way. Toward sex, I mean, just for itself.” I thought a moment longer, my father’s face returning to me, clothed in the curling smoke that had always seemed to surround him. “Love might have attracted him, though.”
“Could your father have gotten that from Nellie Grimes?” Rebecca asked.
I considered Nellie carefully once again, recalling the round face and hazel eyes, the somewhat large and rolling hips, but more important, the buoyancy of her manner, the uncomplicated happiness and jollity that seemed to pour
