That Part Was True Read Free

through to them. But Dex said, “ You , that’s what’s on my mind.”
    Jack, caught by the backtrack and detecting a level of inquiry in it that he did not want to address, stood without replying and went into the kitchen, where he poured out his beer and took a fresh one from the refrigerator. Coming back into the room, where Dex had propped his bare feet on a low table near the open French doors, he held the bottle up and said, “For your edification—C-Z-E-C-H. Look it up sometime.”
    But Dex’s eyes indicated that he wasn’t going to be so easily diverted.
    â€œI. Is. Fine,” Jack said, forcefully chipper, but his voice and motion of his sitting, opposite Dex in a high-backed Swedish chair, were enfeebled by underlying insincerity.
    â€œWhat’s the deal with Marnie?”
    There was just enough breeze to swell the white muslin of the curtains. Jack, watching them, said, “I don’t know and I don’t care.”
    â€œYes, you do.”
    â€œNo, Dex, I don’t.” He rested his beer on the table that housed Dex’s feet and got up again, returning a moment later with a wooden bowl full of nuts. He put it down, next to the beer, dislodging the feet, with full-stop emphasis.
    â€œSo is she living with this other chick, or what?” Dex said.
    â€œShe’s living with this other chick. Her name is Carla. She’s a librarian from Wisconsin. Now let’s drop the subject.”
    Dex leaned forward and scooped a handful of the nuts with a tight eye on Jack. He’d never, in fifteen years, seen him look the way he looked now: low. Dex was the one who got low, got drunk, got crazy. He shot a few of the nuts into his mouth. “Whooa, these are good,” he said. “What’d you do to ’em?” He opened his hand, gazed admiringly, then ate the rest.
    â€œI rolled them in melted butter and honey and salt…like you care. Just eat them.”
    Dex smiled and stared out at the horizon and Jack stared out at it, too.
    Then Dex asked, “You writing?” Although he knew better.
    â€œLet’s drop the subject,” Jack said for the second time.
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    Later, Jack heated oil and butter in a cast iron skillet and waited till it began to smoke. Then he dropped two steaks onto the pan and flipped them. He had floured the steaks lightly and the flour muddied. He took the meat from the pan, and the pan from the heat, and he pushed the kitchen window open wider before adding a generous, steady pour of red wine to it from the large glass on the counter. Then he put the pan back on the heat, lowered it, and while he waited for the liquid to reduce, lifted the glass again and drained it. Then he stood gazing for a moment at the familiar view of emerald lawn and low hydrangea bushes and ocean, but he didn’t see it. He saw his fiftieth birthday coming straight at him like a freight train.
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    Eve had found the card three years previously on a grim, three-day trip to Cornwall with her mother. They had stayed at an agreeable hotel where the food was outstanding, but Virginia had found nothing to her taste. And with the exception of the half hour she’d spent flirting each evening with the embarrassed young waiter who brought them their six o’clock cocktails, she had been miserable company. Eve, wandering along the picturesque bay front one afternoon while Virginia napped, had bought the card and a small box of fancily packaged fudge. Not because she had any particular purpose for them, but because she had felt self-conscious alone in the shop. She had given the fudge to Gwen and tucked the card into her desk, ready for some occasion that had never arisen.
    Now she was struck by the similarity between the picture on her card and the picture on the postcard that Jack Cooper had sent her, a picture with which she was by now extremely familiar. She turned both the cards over and compared the names of the artists,