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My heart skipped a beat.
“For what?”
“I was… unnecessarily rough in some of the things I said this morning. It was uncalled for. I’m sorry I reacted that way.”
My heart melted the tiniest bit, and I felt some of the stress drain away.
But then I saw the opening.
A chance to get more information.
Should I push for it?
It was risky…
Should I?
…yes.
“Was it that… girl in the photo?” I asked hesitantly, in a soothing voice. Not accusatory, not jealous.
A long, long silence on the other end.
“Why do you ask?”
“She… she was the only one you got really angry about. The other ones you were kind of like, annoyed with me about, but her… she seemed different.”
Another long pause.
Then a sigh.
“She was a dancer for Lou. She died about a year ago.”
A dancer for Lou.
I hadn’t known that.
“She was a good kid. She lived hard and rough, but she had a good heart. She was smart, too. Just maybe not smart enough to get out when she should have. But she didn’t deserve to go out that way.”
“How did she die?” I asked, though I already knew.
Let’s see if he would tell me the truth.
“She got shot. Probably in a back-alley drug deal. I was trying to get her help… to go to AA meetings, that sort of thing. It didn’t work. I keep telling myself there’s nothing else I could have done, but… it’s one of those things that keep you awake at night. Whenever I think about her, I wonder, ‘Is there something else I could have done? Maybe if I’d done this or that differently, if I’d been harder on her, leaned on her more to get her shit together… would she still be alive?’”
I knew exactly what he was talking about.
Because I’d stayed awake for weeks after her death, asking myself those same questions.
Tears welled up in my eyes.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
“For what?”
That was a good question.
“It sounds like you really cared for her… I’m sorry all that happened.”
