It was a pathetic story. Most crimes of passion and madness were pathetic when you stripped them down to their fundamentals, but that didn’t make them any less painful or any less tragic for everyone concerned.
Haruko was back with Artie, and presumably they would lead a normal life from now on. The Hama family in Petaluma would have to try to live down what their father had done a long time ago in a place he should not have been; and sooner or later, they would. Edgar Ogada would take over the nursery. The Yakuza would install another head of its mizu shobai operations in San Francisco, if they hadn’t already done so. I would share my new office with Eberhardt — for a while, at least-and there would be new jobs and the old ones would become memories, some good and some, like this one, very bad. Life goes on.
But that didn’t make it easy to take on days like today. Wet, dreary days. Dull days. Painful days. Days where the highlight was watching Leo McFate eat a little crow. That had been nice, but it was a transitory thing: he’d digest the crow and pretty soon he’d forget he had ever eaten it and he’d be the same old Leo McFate. I had a hunch we would lock horns again one of these days.
I was feeling low when I got home at five-thirty. The only call on my answering machine made me feel even lower: Kerry, saying she’d be late, she had another meeting that was probably going to last until around seven. Why didn’t I go ahead and have dinner without her.
Well, damn. I went into the kitchen, because the mention of dinner had set my stomach to growling in its empty, plaintive way, and opened the refrigerator and looked inside.
Eggs.
That was all that was in there-eggs.
I’d had eggs for breakfast, I’d had an omelette for lunch, I was sick of them. I was also sick of carrots and cucumbers and celery and lettuce and grapefruit and oranges and yogurt and cottage cheese and RyKrisp and tuna fish and hamburger patties, but mostly I was sick of eggs. I never wanted to eat another egg again. I never wanted to see another egg again.
I slammed the refrigerator door. And stood there for a time, hungry and frustrated. And went and got my coat and headed back out into the rain.
Kerry arrived a few minutes after eight. She rang the bell, but I didn’t go and buzz her in; I knew she’d come up anyway and use her key. Besides, I was lying on the couch and I had no inclination to get up, not even for her.
Pretty soon I heard the key scrape in the lock and she came in. She called, “Hello? Anybody home?” and then she saw me and she said, “Oh, there you are. Why didn’t you-?” Then she stopped talking, and stopped moving too, and stood with her mouth open a little, staring.
Not at me. What she was staring at was the stuff on the coffee table: the six empty Schlitz beer cans and the empty carton that had contained a jumbo deluxe Guido’s House Special pizza with everything on it including anchovies, shrimps, and garlic olives.
I got the stare transferred to me soon enough, at which point it became an accusing glare. “Pizza and beer!” she said. “You broke your diet!”
I gave her a sheepish grin across the distended, the eggless, the satisfyingly full mound of my belly.
“Well?” she demanded. “Don’t just lie there looking fat and complacent. Haven’t you got anything to say?”
“Burp,” I said.