“What else?”
“He was ordinary. I think that’s the trick. You shouldn’t be ordinary. When she started buying those magazines with the lonely hearts ads in the back, she looked so eager as she flipped through them. I think they made her feel that there might be another kind of man out there.”
He took a final drag of his cigarette and extended his arm, reaching for the ashtray and putting the cigarette out. As he shifted his position, he was able to get a glimpse of her face in profile, looking out the window as she spoke, moonlight bathing her, lips slightly parted.
“A man like in the movies. That’s what the women who write to you want, don’t they? An impossible man.”
“It depends. Some of them are practical. They’re widows who need a husband to help them pay for the rent or the groceries. Others want to marry almost anyone because they feel time is running out and they abhor the idea of people calling them spinsters. Then there are many people who never learned how to live alone. It sounds like your aunt doesn’t fall into any of those categories.”
“I suppose not. I don’t think she’s terrified of being called a spinster; she’s been one long enough. And I don’t think she ever feared living alone, not with me around.”
“Did she have a sweetheart when she was younger? Someone other than that salesman. Someone she might have married.”
“There was a wealthy young man, many years ago. He asked for my mother’s hand in marriage instead of hers and then my mother ran away with another man. It made our family notorious.”
“I see. It must have been fairly humiliating for her.”
“It was fairly humiliating for my mother too, when she had to return to town.”
Inés stood up and drifted closer to the window.
“Let me guess: the cad had impregnated her, and everyone pointed at her.”
“Yes,” Inés said coolly. “They pointed and called me a bastard.”
“Same with me. Although my old man did eventually marry mymother, hauling his heavily pregnant bride to a church to the horror of her parents.”
“At least he was honorable enough to marry her.”
This time he did laugh. She turned and looked at him in confusion. “My father was many things, but honorable was not one of them. But he cared about family in his own way. He didn’t rid himself of me when I was a child, although it might have been easier than dragging a boy with him and raising me all alone. Then again, he put me to work early enough.”
“What happened to your mother?”
“She passed away when I was small. The Spanish flu,” he said, thinking of her smiles and her stories about Arabian princes and genies in bottles. How quickly, how easily, the sickness had carried her away, those lips that had spoken a thousand fairy tales going silent a few days after the disease knocked at their door.
“Mine passed away when I was small too.”
They were quiet and he didn’t like it, because there was an intensity to her silences, and a ceaseless curiosity that made him nervous. He liked talking to her. Words tumbled out of his mouth with a startling ease. He was accustomed to speaking lies, not truths.
“Your father, then, he’s the one who made you into a criminal.”
“It was the family business, so to speak. Some people inherit companies. Others inherit their parents’ looks. The luckless ones inherit their bad habits.”
“You’ve never wanted to do anything different? Only thieving and lying?”
“My old man did what it took to keep us fed, to keep me safe. Besides, I loved the stupid bastard. I did as he said. I didn’t know right from wrong and grew up crooked, I suppose. And then, eventually, it didn’t matter. We were what we were.”
“Maybe when you were little you didn’t understand. But how old are you now?”
“Twenty-nine.”
“That’s old enough to learn better. You’ve never thought about attempting to make a living with an honorable trade?”
“Which trade?”
“You look like the men that star in pictures.”
“Just because I have a pleasant smile doesn’t mean I can act on camera, or that I’d ever be able to weasel my way into a producer’s good graces. Plus, I hate the idea of that sort of work,” he said, and he thought of casting couches and all sorts of entanglements that this naïve girl probably couldn’t understand. For all her bravado, she was still soft at the edges.
