Moth Read Free Page B

really.”
    “Then I’ll make us a pot. What the hell.”
    He followed me out to the kitchen, staring with fascination at shelves of canned food and two-year-old coupons stuck under magnets on the refrigerator door, rifling the pages of surreptitious cookbooks, fingering the unholy contents of a spice rack.
    “I don’t know why I’m here,” he told me when the coffee was ready and we were back by the window, he in a beat-up old wingback, me in my usual white wood rocker. “I mean, I know ; but I don’t know how to tell you.”
    He sipped coffee. From his expression it was, in miniature, everything he had hoped for from life.
    “You and LaVerne, you were together a long time.”
    He looked at me. After a moment I nodded.
    “We weren’t.” He looked down. I thought of a Sonny Boy Williamson song: Been gone so long, the carpet’s half faded on the floor. Or possibly it was carpets have faded —hard to tell. Though mine were hardwood. “What I mean is,” he said.
    And we sat there.
    “Yeah,” I said finally. I got up and put on more milk to heat, poured us both refills when it was steaming, settled back. My rocker creaked on the floorboards.
    “I don’t know,” he said. “We got together pretty far along in life. I sure didn’t think there was anyone like LaVerne out there for me, not anymore. All that stuff about candlelight and the perfect mate and little bells going off, that’s what you believe when you’re nineteen or twenty maybe, some of us anyway. Then you get a few years on you and you realize that’s not the way the world is at all, that’s just not how it goes about its business. But still, one day there she was.”
    He looked up at me and his eyes were unguarded, open. “I hardly knew her, Lew. Less than a year. I loved her so much. Sure, I know an awful lot’s gone under the bridge, for both of us, but I still think we’ll have some time, you know? Then one day I look around and she just isn’t there anymore. Like I’m halfway into this terribly important sentence I’ve waited a long time to say and I suddenly realize no one is listening. I don’t know. Maybe I’ve been hoping somehow I’d be able to see LaVerne through your eyes, have more time with her, find out more about her, that way. Stupid, right?”
    “No. Not stupid at all. That’s what people are all about. That’s something we can do for one another. We always get together to bury our dead. And then to bring them back, to remember what their lives were like, afterwards. Though Verne’s life wasn’t one either you or I can easily know or imagine.”
    He nodded.
    “Good. You have to know that before you can know anything else. But I just don’t see what you want me to tell you. That she loved you? She must have, and you must know it. That it’s terrible how she was taken from you? Hell, of course it is, man. Join the fucking club.”
    “You think—” he started, then took another draw of coffee. “I’m sorry. I haven’t made myself at all clear. I didn’t come here for assurances, however much I could use them just now. And yes, I know LaVerne loved me.” He looked up from his cup. “Just as she did you, Lew.”
    Something grabbed my throat and wouldn’t let go. I swallowed coffee. It didn’t help much.
    “There have to be a lot of reasons why I came here. Maybe there’ll be a time to sort them all out later. But primarily I came here to hire you.”
    “Hire me?” I said. It sounded more like hrm.
    “I need a detective, Lew. A good one.”
    “I don’t do that anymore. Hell, I never did it very much. I sat in bars and drank, and eventually guys I was looking for would stumble by and trip over my feet. I’m a teacher now.”
    “And a writer.”
    “Yeah, well, that too. Once you’ve lost your pride, it gets easier, you know: you’ll do almost any damned thing. You start off small, a piece for the local paper, or maybe this tiny little story about growing up, something like that. That’s how they