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She peeled the shell off a shrimp, dipped the shrimp in a horseradish sauce and put it in her mouth. She reached out and touched my chin lightly with two fingers, as though she were examining for a skin blemish.
“Is that where Weldon hit you?” she asked.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Oh my, such innocence.”
I cleared my throat.
“I was in the supermarket this morning,” she said. “A woman whose husband is a floorman on Weldon’s rig couldn’t stop herself from asking about your welfare.”
Her eyes crinkled at the corners.
“Weldon’s not always a rational man,” I said.
“Why didn’t you arrest him?”
“He’s a tormented man, Boots. He carries a burden nobody should have to carry.”
She stopped chewing. Her eyes looked into mine.
“Lyle told me some things about their childhood, about Weldon’s relationship with Drew,” I said.
A crease went across her brow, and she set her half-eaten shrimp back on the paper plate. The children out on the baseball diamond were tumbling in the dust, their happy cries echoing off the backstop.
“They’re messed up in the head real bad,” I said. “Weldon’s a pain in the butt, all right, but I suspect he wakes up each morning with the Furies after him.”
“He and Drew?” she said, the meaning clear and sad in her eyes now.
“Probably Lyle, too. I said something pretty rough to Weldon about it. So he had a free one coming.”
“That’s an awful story.”
“They’ll probably never tell all of it, either.”
She was quiet for a few moments. Her eyes were flat and turned inward; her hair looked like it was touched with smoke in the broken light through the tree.
“When this is over, maybe we can invite them to dinner,” she said.
“That’d be fine.”
“You wouldn’t mind?”
“No, of course not.”
“Why didn’t anyone—” she began. Then she stopped, coughed in the back of her throat, and said, “I never guessed. Poor Drew.”
I squeezed her hand; but it felt dry and pliant inside mine. Her mouth had the down-turned expression of someone who might have opened a bedroom door at the wrong moment. Then she stood up and began clearing the table, her face concentrating on her work.
“I’m going to invite her to go shopping with me in Lafayette,” she said.
“You think she’d like that?”
“You bet,” I said.
You’ll always be a standup lady, Boots, I thought.
Out on the baseball diamond a shout went up from the children as someone fired the volleyball into the backstop.
