“What are you doing here?” Ray Anne asked. She was sitting on the floor of the deck, cross-legged. She was wearing sweatpants, something Lou didn’t imagine she owned. And a long shirt. No bra; her boobs were on her chest. Completely. No further curiosity about the boob job... And she wore leather slippers to keep her piggies warm. This was a side of Ray Anne that Lou had never seen.

“We came to sit shiva,” Lou said. “Word’s out—there was a death.”

“I doubt he’s dead,” Ray Anne said. She sipped from her wineglass. “Just gone.”

“Wow,” Lou said, looking around. “This is really something....”

Carrie put the wine bottle on the deck and slowly, achingly, got down, settling into a beanbag. “If I make even a little profit this year, I’m buying you chairs for your birthday. My knees protest this sitting on the floor. It’ll take both of you to get me on my feet again.” Then she pulled a corkscrew out of her pocket.

“I don’t have glasses up here,” Ray Anne said.

Carrie took a couple of plastic wineglasses out of her other pocket, fixing the stems on them. “I’m a caterer,” she said, deadpan.

“Wow, this is really something,” Lou said again. “Why haven’t I ever seen this before?”

“Because it’s private,” Ray Anne said.

“But Carrie has obviously seen it....”

“I imposed on Ray Anne when Ashley was having her hard time over breaking up with stupid Downy last year, when we were all holding our breath to see if she was suicidal or just brokenhearted. Ray Anne brought me up here. We drank a bottle of wine and talked about all our broken hearts. It helped, except there’s no broken heart like your daughter’s or granddaughter’s. I’d have my heart carved out of my chest a hundred times rather than watch them go through it.”

Lou sat down on a beanbag and reached for a glass of wine.

“How about me?” Ray Anne asked. “How do you like watching me go through it?”

“You’ve been through it before,” Carrie said. “I’m sorry, Ray Anne. But you’re smart and independent and you’ll heal.”

“Maybe not for a few days,” she said.

“Talk about him,” Lou said. “Did you love him?”

“I loved them all,” Ray Anne said, tipping the bottle over her glass. “I really did. But I think I maybe loved Al the best.”

“Don’t you always feel that way?”

“Not always, no,” Ray Anne said. “Sometimes I think they’re fun, or maybe they’re sexy. Or maybe they make a decent living and seem civilized and in want of a good partner. Or...I don’t know. Sometimes they can dance....”

Lou spewed a mouthful of wine. “They can dance?”

“I stopped looking for happily ever after a long time ago,” Ray Anne said. “I haven’t been expecting some perfect man to come along and carry me off on his charger. I just don’t want to be alone all the time. And I like...you know...sex.”

“We know,” Carrie and Lou said at the same time.

“That’s just who I am,” she said. “Al liked everything about me. I knew he never stayed in one place for long but I had no idea he was leaving. It seemed like he had a lot to anchor him here.”

“Like what?”

“Like his job, for one thing. He loved working with Eric. He likes the way Eric does business. He called it ‘straight up,’ which I guess means straightforward and honest. Then he got himself involved in those Russell boys with the sick mother. That oldest one, Justin, he’d started depending on Al. I can believe he walked away from me but I’m having a hard time thinking about him walking away from that boy.”

“Why can you believe he walked away from you?” Lou asked.

Ray Anne shrugged and looked down. “Well, hell. They always leave me before long.”

Lou coughed. “No!” she barked. “No, no, no, no, no! They become mental eventually and fail to see what’s before them! Ray Anne, you’re a good person. You don’t deserve that. I want you to stop thinking you deserve that right now. This second.”

“Well, they do,” she said.

“And you leave them sometimes!”

“Yeah, but...”

“Look, we’re women of some...ahem...experience. We’ve been around. We’ve broken up with a few men, a few of the imbeciles have broken up with us, but this has nothing to do with who and what we are.”

“We are women, watch us roar,” Carrie said tiredly. Then she yawned.

“Except Carrie,” Lou amended.

“I’m a very fast learner. When my husband walked out on me, left me with no income and a small child, I was suddenly and not surprisingly no longer interested in romance. I was interested in paying the rent and grocery bill. And I’ve been perfectly happy that way.”

“You might be happier if you got laid once in a while,” Lou said. To Carrie’s sharp and sudden stare, Lou put up a hand. “Just saying...” Then she pulled her cell phone out of her pocket and rang up a number. “Hey, Joe, honey. Listen, I’m over at Ray Anne’s with Carrie and we’re working our way through a large bottle of wine. I’m going to have to stay over, unless you want to pick me up. Why? Because Ray Anne got dumped and she’s a little depressed.”

“Nice,” Ray Anne said, sipping. “Bitch...”

“You do?” Lou asked into the phone. “That’s so sweet. Don’t be early. I’m going to have to drink a lot of wine to get her through this. Okay. I love you, too.” Then she ended the call and smiled dreamily at her friends. Carrie was reclining on the beanbag, holding her wine perched on her belly. “He likes sleeping with me,” she said.

“That’s good because I don’t,” Ray Anne said.

“So, what’s going to be hardest to give up?” Lou asked.

“Did you know him?”

“A little,” Lou said. “Not well, but he seemed likable.”

“Well, I loved that he was so even-tempered. Nothing really got to him, you know? When he told me about the boys, it made him sad for them. And he cared about them—he drove them to see their mother a few times and we’re talking hours of driving. Hours. He could talk about personal things pretty easily—when have you ever seen that in a man. He was so sensitive and kind and yet did you get a load of that body. I think he said he was fifty-six and he’s hard as a rock. But that smile—he has the greatest smile. He’s funny, too. He’s interesting—he’s done so many different things. He can discuss anything. He’s brilliant, though I suspect he can’t read....”

“What?” Lou said. “What? He can’t read?”

Ray Anne shrugged. “I never had the guts to ask. I think he thinks no one knows. I suspected by the second date—he just glances at the menu and asks me to order. Or he makes an excuse about his glasses—either he forgot them or they’re dirty or something. And he answered a couple of texts I sent him and I know he’s got big thumbs, but seriously, his words were incomprehensible. I bet he can’t read. He listens to books when he’s traveling or falling asleep and he’s listened to some mighty heavy titles, but I asked him once to put vinegar on my shopping list and he just didn’t do it. Maybe it’s dyslexia or something. Or he just never learned, growing up on a farm.”

“But you didn’t ask him?” Lou queried.

She shook her head. “I thought he’d tell me eventually. But I don’t think that’s why he left. He left because...”

“There was a friend in need,” Lou said. “That’s what I heard.”

“Maybe,” she said. “Maybe that’s why he left. But why didn’t he say goodbye? Why didn’t he just tell me he had to leave? We could’ve kept in touch. I didn’t expect him to marry me! So why?”

“I don’t know, kiddo. Men are idiots sometimes.”

Ray Anne sighed. “He was so considerate. So tender. You just don’t expect this from a man like that. When we made love, he was such a wonderful gentleman. We made love up here when there was lightning over the bay.”

“Ew,” Lou said. “It wasn’t on this beanbag, was it?”

Ray Anne made a face and tipped the wine bottle over Lou’s glass. “Just drink.”

A soft snore came from the direction of Carrie’s beanbag. Lou reached over and extracted the plastic wineglass from her hand and put it on the deck.

“She gets up real early,” Lou said. “We’ll wake her when Joe gets here later. We’ll just get a little drunk and talk about Al. When you’re done extolling his virtues we can start to bash on him—that helps. And it better not have been on this beanbag—I’m serious.”

Twenty

Laine saw Genevieve about three times a week when she stopped by Senior’s house. If she came later in the day, she often brought the girls with her. Pax, not so much, given his crazy schedule, but he checked in with her by phone almost every day. Senior was doing very well most days, as long as he was in familiar surroundings. She tried to get him out daily—she took him along to run errands, to drop by the driving range, he even played eighteen holes a few times with a couple of his friends, although that made her terribly nervous, afraid he’d have one of his episodes of dramatic confusion and maybe wander off on the golf course. They also worked out together in the small gym he kept at the house. Exercise almost always had positive results.

For the most part he was lucid, but a day didn’t pass that he wasn’t on another planet—sometimes briefly, sometimes for as long as several hours. There was no question about it, he wasn’t going to get better. It was all about quality of life and realistic expectations. Mornings were usually Senior’s best time, though Laine did catch him headed for the garage one morning, carrying his bag and saying he was going to the hospital for rounds. Convincing him that he wasn’t was quite the battle. It was Mrs. Mulligrew who sidetracked him with “Not until you’ve had your breakfast, Dr. Carrington. Come with me—I’m getting it ready for you right now.”

They went to a support group. Laine went alone at first, then she took Senior with her and he was devastated to see the more critical Alzheimer’s patients there with family members or caregivers, so she was back to going alone. The people were mostly cheerful and encouraging but their lives were changed forever by this thief of the mind. Those afflicted ranged in age from sixty to ninety; some families had been living with Alzheimer’s for almost twenty years!

Senior had been doing a lot of crying. That was one of the ways Laine knew he was having a hard time. He whimpered softly and great big tears rolled down his cheeks when she told him she was going out for a little while. Not every time, but often enough that it filled her with such concern she phoned his doctor. The doctor said this was not unusual and to reassure him that she’d be back.

This was somehow more devastating to her than his blustering, than all the criticism and doubt he’d cast on her for years. To see this big, strong, stubborn man reduced to tears so often just wounded her. But she refused to let it show. “Now, don’t be upset, Dad, I’m just going for a run and I’ll be right back. Jed will be here with you. Why don’t the two of you play some cards or cribbage or something?”

Laine, so good at stiffening her spine, being strong and capable, left her father in the hands of his nurse’s aide, a very agreeable young man who had been with them two weeks and things were starting to fall into a routine.

Until she got back from her five-mile run. Something was not right. While she was cooling down, walking in slow circles around the driveway, she smelled something in the air. Something that smelled like talcum powder mixed with something. So she walked around the garage. She had to edge through some bushes to get to a pretty secluded part of the backyard, where good old Jed was smoking a joint.