Money was certainly on her mind, Tess noticed. "Are you having, uh, financial difficulties?"
"We're having financial catastrophes. Wink had a five-million-dollar insurance policy, but it doesn't pay off in the event of suicide. By the time you figure closing costs on this place, I'll lose what little equity we have in it. I could sell the business. But the business isn't worth anything without the basketball team, and there's no guarantee there will be a basketball team, or I'll get a piece of it if there is."
"Shit."
"You can say that again. Hey, you want a cup of coffee or something?" Lea asked. "My mom took the kids out for the afternoon so I could be alone for a little while. Although it helps a little, being so busy with the kids. Between cookies and diaper changes, I don't have much time to feel sorry for myself."
"How many children do you have?" Tess asked, as she followed Lea to the rear of the house.
"Three. Three kids in four years. What was I thinking? What was Wink thinking?"
A family room as large as a hotel lobby ran across the back of the house. Tess suppressed a smirk at the needle-point pillows along the sofa, adorned with Springsteen titles: "Born to Run," "Hungry Heart," and "She's the One."
Tess could see how Lea Wynkowski might inspire that last sentiment. Young and fresh looking, she had the kind of beauty that stood up to crying jags and insomnia. Large brown eyes, brown hair a shade lighter, with the shine and bounce of hair in a shampoo commercial. She wore blue jeans, a yellow cotton sweater over a white T-shirt, yellow socks, and no shoes, and she looked better than most women would in couture clothes. Tess had thought men who traded in their first wives went for high-maintenance types the second time around. Lea looked like a first wife, or someone's high school sweetheart. She could be the girl in an early Bruce Springsteen song, lured onto a motorcycle and out of town, knocked up and abandoned. Instead, she was living out the lyrics to "Hungry Heart"-the part about the wife and kids back in Baltimore, left by the guy who went out for a ride and never came back. In his own way, Wink had done just that.
"How are you holding up?" Tess asked. Her sympathy wasn't fake-if anything, the wretched success of her bracelet trick made her feel she owed Lea Wynkowski true compassion.
"I'm not," Lea said. She opened a wooden-and-copper box on the low, distressed pine table in front of her and took out a cigarette. She didn't light the cigarette but held it in her right hand, twirling it like a miniature baton. "I'm in a million little pieces-one for every dollar Wink didn't leave us."
"Your doctor could write a prescription for a sedative."
"I don't want to be sedated. I want to feel what I'm feeling."
"What are you feeling?"
"Pissed." Lea smiled at Tess's surprise. "I know it doesn't sound very elegant, and it's not in any of those grief books my mother keeps bringing me, but it's what I am. I'm pissed. Furious with Wink for what he did to us."
She sniffed the cigarette she was holding, then placed it back in the box. "I gave up smoking the first time I got pregnant, but I never stopped missing it."
"Me, either," Tess said, willing to say anything to find common ground with this strange young woman. Lea's grief was sincere enough, but it was shot through with something darker, something disturbing.
"You have kids?"
"Uh, no, but I gave up cigarettes." Not even this was true. It was one of the few vices Tess had skipped along the way.
"Then you can't know how weird it is. Killing yourself, I mean, when you've got three kids. He loved our girls. He would have killed anyone who hurt them, but now he's hurt them more than anybody else could. I wish I could ask him why."
"Where did you two meet?"
"In Atlantic City. Tooch-Paul Tucci, his best friend-introduced us. Tucci's the one who really likes to gamble, not Wink. But I was a blackjack dealer, so he played blackjack. Won a date with me on a bet. We got married six months later. We would have gotten married even sooner, but-"
"But?"
"But we didn't," she said flatly.
"When was the last time you talked to him?"
"Friday, in the afternoon. He called me at my mom's house in Jersey. Whenever I went away, he called me every day. He was devoted to me."
Yes, a devoted husband, checking in by phone when he wasn't making passes at other women.
"When did you hear about what was in the paper on Sunday?"
"Not until Sunday night, after I got back. I don't know why Wink killed himself over it. That guy who died-I mean, so he had a bad heart. He could have died if some kid jumped out of a closet and said ‘Boo.' It wasn't Wink's fault."
Tess picked her words carefully as possible. "According to the account in the paper, Wink stood over the guy and pistol-whipped him, then bragged about it."
"That's not true. Wink couldn't have done something like that. He's-he was-a pussycat. A sweetie. Anyone who ever knew him loved him."
She stood up and walked over to a large pine armoire, which Tess knew would store the requisite electronic toys. Sure enough, the doors opened to reveal a large TV, stereo, VCR, laser disc player, and two shelves of videotapes. Lea reached behind the videos on the lowest shelf and pulled out a slim book bound in bright blue. Tess read the white lettering on the spine: The Happy Wanderer.
"This is Wink's yearbook from junior high. Before he…went away," Lea said. "He never knew I had it. I found it in his stuff, and I liked to look at it sometimes. Sometimes I wish we were the same age, that we had started going together in sixth grade and been together forever. I would have been good for him."
She handed Tess the book, and its well-worn spine opened automatically to a photograph of Wink, taken with the basketball team. He had been even scrawnier then, but his hair had been close-cropped, so you couldn't tell how curly it was. What an unfashionable hairdo, among the bushy locks and sideburns of the early '70s. Most of the boys looked like they were werewolves, caught in mid-transformation.
"And look here," Lea said, leaning over Tess and turning to the frontspiece. "Look at the things the kids wrote, boys and girls. They all loved him." She traced her fingers over the faded ink. "Right back here and out of sight/I sign my name just for spite." "Make no friends/But keep the old/One is silver/but the other's gold. You're golden, Wink. RGJH 4-ever." "That means Rock Glen Junior High forever." "Love, Lynette." Someone else, presumably a boy, had signed nearby, "Silver and gold. Gag me. Ray-ray."
Tess started to flip through the rest of the pages. Lea tried to snatch the book away from her. But Lea was timid, scared of damaging the precious memento. Curiosity sparking, Tess held it out of arm's length and scanned the pages. It took only a moment to find what Lea didn't want her to see: a classmate's photo had been crossed out with an emphatic black X, the legend "Cunt" written beneath it. Despite these additions, the name was still legible.
"Linda Stolley," Tess read out loud. "If I remember the Beacon-Light's first story, she was Wink's first wife. I guess the divorce wasn't too amicable, if he had to go back and deface her junior high school yearbook picture."
Lea looked scared, but she didn't back down. "She was a…well, I don't like to say that word, but it's what she was. Wink left her years ago, but he never got divorced from her officially. So when he decided to marry me and finally wanted to get a divorce, she held him up for a fortune. Her alimony cost more than the mortgage on this place, but it was the one bill Wink never skipped, I can tell you. Oh no, Miss Linda always had to be paid first no matter what."