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I waited. Listened.

I heard Debbie’s muffled voice, but I couldn’t make out the words.

And then a sound I could make out: the sharp sound of a slap. And another recognizable sound followed right after: that of feet scurrying up the stairs, panic-driven feet.

Debbie slammed the door and looked at me, her face crimson on the left side from the slap, and said, “He’s so drunk he’s crazy. He says… he says come down and fight him like a man, or he’ll come up here and… and cut you.”

Well.

Looked like Pat Nelson and I were going to have our showdown at last. High Noon had taken over a decade to get here, but here it was.

I walked to the door and opened it. Descended the stairs, the walls claustrophobically tight on me. Down at the bottom, in a pool of dim light from a twenty-five-watt bulb next to the tenant mailboxes, was Pat Nelson. I could smell the booze immediately, growing noticeably stronger as I neared him.

He was a mess. He was wearing a tee-shirt with booze soaked down the front of it; his blue jeans, too, were wet with liquor. He was tall, thin to the point of undernourishment, his cheeks still spotted with hints of acne; his hair was right out of the fifties: dyed blond greaser’s hair, with long dark skinny sideburns. His eyes drooped and his lower lip protruded, as if James Dean were the latest thing. His nose was pug, the sort a teenaged girl might find cute-which was his whole problem, really; he was somebody who’d been “cute” ten years ago and had tried to retain the image. He was what the phrase “callow youth” is all about, only he wasn’t a youth.

“Mallory,” he slurred, a near parody of a drunk, “you goddamn bastard, Mallory, put up your hands and fight like a man.”

I punched him once, right in his pug nose, and he went down like an armful of kindling wood.

I headed back up the stairs.

Behind me he was pulling himself back together, pulling himself back onto his feet like the Frankenstein monster coming to life for the first time.

“Mallory!” he shouted, and his voice echoed in the stairwell like somebody shouting down a crap hole. “Mallory, you goddamn bastard, what are you doing with my wife in there!”

And he scrambled up the steps, which I’d climbed about halfway, and I turned my head and saw the glint of his knife in his hand. When I turned, he froze, down two steps from me, and held the knife up for me to see and be scared of.

But it was just a little thing-shiny, probably razor sharp, but a real anticlimax, not much bigger than a pen knife. Oh, it could kill you, but I couldn’t see getting upset about it.

I was just high enough above him to be able to kick the thing out of his hand, and it went clumpety-clump down a couple of steps and lay there. Then I gave him a hard forearm across the chest, and he went clumpety-clump down all the steps and lay there. It wasn’t far enough a fall to hurt him bad, and he was too drunk to feel it, and after he’d looked up at me drunkenly for a moment, he went to sleep.

I walked to the top of the stairs, where I found Debbie standing in the doorway, her face ashen. But she said nothing.

We spent a quiet evening listening to old records that had been popular when we were in school, and when we talked, it wasn’t about Pat, but about old times and old friends, and sometimes about her daughter Cindy. We slept on the couch under a light blanket that protected us from the chugging air conditioner; it was cramped there on the couch, but Debbie was small and we made a nice fit, and neither one of us felt like sleeping in their bed-Pat’s and hers-though it never came up in conversation.

16

It wasn’t a good day for a funeral.

The morning sky was as clear and blue as the surface of a quiet lake. The sun was a cheerful yellow ball. A cooling breeze rolled in off the trees surrounding the cemetery. In those same trees, birds were chirping pleasantly, almost disrespectfully. By all rights it should’ve been miserable. Overcast. Maybe raining. But it wasn’t. It was beautiful. Not a good day for a funeral at all.

Which was okay, because Edward Jonsen had decided against it, anyway. Having a funeral for his mother, that is. He’d had no crystal ball to predict this nonfunereal day; he had just decided to spare all expense.

So there had been no funeral. The paper last night had said, “Graveside services” in lieu of anything else, and here I now was, watching Mrs. Jonsen get planted in the earth, a cold seed not expected to grow. The final resting place for Edward Jonsen’s mother was the family plot, next to her long-gone husband Elwood; her half of the stone had been inscribed years ago, with only the death date freshly chiseled in, unweathered. The casket was a black metallic thing, hardly lavish, but at least it wasn’t a pine box. The service consisted of three minutes of mumbling from some clergyman acquaintance of Jonsen’s.

There were, however, lots of flowers crowded around the graveside, and lots of friends, too: over twenty of them huddled around the hole, looking irritated at the son’s lack of respect for his mother and her death. Most were elderly, peers of Mrs. Jonsen who had made a real effort to come out here, suffering the inconvenience out of a desire to say good-bye to a friend.

Next to Jonsen was an attractive woman of about forty who resembled Mrs. Jonsen a great deal. I took her to be Jonsen’s sister. She was a dark-eyed brunette and was dressed in black, of course, but with no hat and veil, and looked vaguely irritated herself. Whether with Edward Jonsen or just who, I didn’t know.

I was soon to find out.

Directly after the mumble-mouth minister dismissed the disgruntled flock, she approached me. “Are you Mr. Mallory?”

“I’m Mallory, yes,” I said, apprehensive. After all, her brother had pulled a gun on me just the day before.

“I’m Ann Bloom. Ann Jonsen Bloom. Edward is my brother, and….” She glanced over at the open grave. “… that sweet woman was my mother. Could I have a word with you?”

“Sure.”

We walked over to a clump of trees. Edward, in a tentlike gray suit, was standing alone by the graveside. Only one or two people had stopped to speak a word of consolation to him; the others were evidently bitter about what they considered to be his hasty and thoughtless farewell to his mother. Now he was staring at us, his sister and me, clenching and unclenching his fists, obviously wishing he could hear our conversation, and also obviously resenting that conversation.

Ann Jonsen Bloom said, “Forgive my brother. He’s the product of too much pampering… the self-centered baby of our family. One of these moments he’ll realize he’s lost the only person in the world who cared about him, and it’ll hurt him. Right now all that is on his mind is the money he’s lost because of the robbery.”

She paused and gave me a chance to say something, but I had nothing to say. She said, “Edward’s prime concern is money. He’s had dreams for years of Mother’s hidden fortune falling into his hands, and with some justification; he knew that he was the sole heir of her will.”

“Why is that?”

“I’m left out of it at my own request, actually, because I knew Mother wanted to leave the bulk of her estate to Edward. You see, Mr. Mallory, I am married to a very wealthy man, and mother wanted to see that her money and valuables went to the one of her children who needed it most, and all I asked Mother for, when she was writing her will some years ago, was an oil portrait of her that was painted when she was in her twenties. And she gave that to me, then, on the spot.”

“What about all those beautiful antiques of your mother’s?”

“I have no interest in them, no use for them, no room for them. We live in a two-hundred-year-old house filled with the relics of my husband’s family… the possessions of several generations of wealth… and I’ve come to detest the sight of an antique. We spend our happiest time, my family, in a relatively simple summer cottage in the Ozarks. Possessions are a bother. The only thing of my mother’s I want to keep is her memory. I want to hold the memory of her close to me for the rest of my life. Edward can have the rest. The money. The things.”