“Stately,” he said.

His voice seemed loud and not his in the thick silence of the almost empty apartment. He took his drink to the kitchen and made himself a ham-and-cheese sandwich and ate standing at the counter, sipping his whiskey between bites. When he was done he made a fresh drink and walked back to the living room and sat back down. He tried to count how many he’d had.

“More than two,” he said.

Again his voice was loud and alien. Stillness was the norm here. He tipped his head back against the chair. Stately, he thought. I like things to be stately.

He fell asleep and woke up in the hard darkness of late night, feeling thick and stupid. He went to bed and didn’t sleep well and got up at daylight with a hangover.

Chapter 30

It was the first week after Labor Day and it still felt like summer except that the kids were back to school. Jesse was glad he wasn’t a kid as he walked past Paradise Junior High School on his way to Carole Genest’s house. Every once in a while one or two leaves on an otherwise green tree would show yellow as he walked along Main Street. There were adults, mostly female, moving about in front of the shopping center, and there was a back-to-business quality that seemed to settle in on a town once school was in session. Jesse had hated school, always. It had something to do with hating to be told what to do, he supposed. On the other hand he’d liked playing baseball and being in the Marines and being a cop in L.A., all of which entailed being told what to do. Maybe he didn’t like being told what to do indoors. Or maybe he didn’t like being instructed. But he didn’t mind being coached . . . He couldn’t figure it out, but it was not a problem he needed to solve, so he put it aside. The big oak tree that loomed over Carole Genest’s driveway was entirely green. Jesse paused under it and looked at the bright lawn that rolled down to Main Street from the big white house. Ten rooms maybe, and a big yard in the middle of town.

Only the youngest Genest kid was home when Carole let Jesse in. He was in the den with some coloring books and some crayons and some little wooden figures scattered about, watching a home shopping show as if it were a performance of King Lear.

“Want some coffee?” Carole said.

“Sure.”

Jesse followed her through the long formal dining room into the big kitchen, paneled in pine, with shiny copper pots hanging from a rack over the stove. The big window at the back of the room looked out at more land behind the house, planted with flowering shrubs and shielded by white pine trees.

“Nice property,” Jesse said. “How much land you got?”

“Three-quarters of an acre,” Carole said. She put coffee into the gold filter basket of a bright blue coffeemaker and added water and turned it on, and sat down at the kitchen table opposite Jesse. She was a pretty woman, with an empty face and wide eyes which always looked a little startled.

“Been here long?”

“Ten years,” she said.

The kid came from the den carrying a ratty-looking stuffed animal by the ear. It was too dilapidated for Jesse to tell what it had been. The child laid the upper half of himself over his mother’s lap and, holding the stuffed animal tightly, started to suck his thumb. Carole patted his head absently.

“You get it as part of the divorce?”

“Yes. And he’s supposed to pay me alimony every month but he doesn’t.”

“Must be tough to keep the payments up,” Jesse said.

“I got to pay taxes quarterly, but at least there’s no mortgage.”

“No mortgage?”

“No. Jo Jo bought it for cash, when we got married.”

“Cash? Really? When was that.”

“Nineteen eighty-six,” she said. “House cost a hundred and fifty-five thousand dollars. Probably worth five now.”

“I should think so,” Jesse said. “Where’d Jo Jo get the cash?”

Carole shook her head. The coffeemaker had stopped gurgling. She raised the kid from her lap and got up and poured them coffee.

“You take anything?” she said.

“Cream and sugar, please. Two sugars.”

“Skim milk okay?”

“Sure.”

She put the coffee down on the table and sat back down. The kid plopped back in her lap and sucked his thumb some more.

“What did you ask me?” Carole said.

“Where Jo Jo got the cash. Hundred and fifty-five thousand is a lot of money. It was even more in 1986.”

“I don’t know,” she said.

Jesse nodded.

“Jo Jo come around since he and I had that talk?” Jesse said.

“No.”

“How are the kids doing?”

Carole shrugged.

“You talk to a shrink at all?”

“How’m I supposed to afford a shrink,” Carole said. “My HMO pays a hundred bucks for counseling. You know how far that goes?”

Jesse nodded.

“How are you getting by, financially?”

Again Carole shrugged. It was a particular kind of shrug. Jesse had seen it often. It was not a gesture of surrender or even of defeat, those were long past. It was a gesture of numbness. It meant no hope.

“You got any family?”

“My mother’s dead,” Carole said. “My father’s in Florida with my stepmother. My father sends me some money.”

“If Jo Jo’s not paying what he’s supposed to you can take him to court.”

“Sure, and pay a lawyer, and have the judge tell Jo Jo to pay and have him not pay, and maybe come around later and beat the shit out of me?”

“I don’t think he’ll do that again,” Jesse said.

“Maybe not if you’re around, he hasn’t bothered me since that time. But how long you going to stay around here?”

“I don’t know,” Jesse said.

“How come he’s scared of you anyway?” Carole said. “I mean, look at him. Look at you. How come he doesn’t get you for slapping him around?”

Jesse looked at the little boy, sucking his thumb on his mother’s lap. How much of all this did he hear? Probably all of it. How much did he understand? Probably too much of it. What could Jesse do about that?

“Well,” Jesse said. “I’m a cop, which carries a little weight, and I carry a gun, which may have a lot of weight.”

“Jo Jo’s got a gun. He used to have two or three around here.”

Jesse nodded.

“So what is it,” Carole said.

Jesse looked at the boy again. Nothing to do about that.

“Jo Jo’s a fake,” Jesse said. “Alone at night, when he can’t sleep, sometimes, for a minute he knows it. And he knows that I know it too.”

“A fake?”

“Sure. He’s strong, and he’s cruel. And that’s a dangerous combination. But he isn’t really tough.”

“And you are?”

Jesse smiled at her.

“Yes, ma’am. I am.”

The boy straightened and whispered in his mother’s ear.

“Okay,” Carole said. “I’ll take you.”

She stood.

“Excuse us a minute,” she said to Jesse and went out of the kitchen with her son.

For a drunk, Jesse thought as he sat in the quiet kitchen, I’m pretty tough for a boozer.

The television blatted in the family room. The kitchen faucet had a slow drip. He wondered if it needed a washer or if she just hadn’t shut it off tightly. Jenn had rarely shut the faucet off tightly. He always had to firm it up when he had walked through the kitchen. She never closed the cabinet doors all the way either. When she had stopped coming home everything had been much more buttoned up.

Carole came back into the kitchen. She got a Fudgsicle from the refrigerator freezer and removed the wrapper and gave the Fudgsicle to the boy.

“More coffee?” she said.

“Sure.”

Jesse held the cup out and Carole poured from the round glass pot.

“When does he start school?” Jesse said, nodding at the boy.

“Kindergarten next year,” Carole said.

The boy showed no sign that he knew they were talking about him. He sat on his mother’s lap, working on the Fudgsicle.

“Can you get a job then?” Jesse said.