“Do you love Doris?”
“She don’t believe I do.”
“Maybe you should make sure she understands how you feel,” I said. “Maybe you should show that you want her a lot and don’t need her so much.”
“I don’t get it.”
He looked bewildered.
He would never get it, I thought, depressed.
“Just take care of yourself,” I told him. “Don’t expect her to do that for you. Maybe it will make a difference.”
“I don’t earn enough bucks, and that’s it, chapter and verse.”
“I’ll bet your wife doesn’t care so much about money. She’d rather feel important and loved.”
“He’s got a big house and a Chrysler New Yorker.
Brand-new, with leather seats, the whole nine yards.
I did not reply.
“Last year he went to Hawaii for his vacation.”
Marie was getting angry.
“Doris spent most of her life with you. That was her choice, Hawaii or not – ” “Hawaii’s nothing but a tourist trap,” he cut in, lighting a cigarette. “Me, I’d rather go to Buggs Island and fish.”
“Has it occurred to you that Doris might have grown weary of being your mother” “She ain’t my mother,” he snapped.
“Then why is it that since she left, you’ve begun; looking like you desperately need a mother, Marino?”
“Because I don’t got time to sew buttons on, cook, do shit like that.”
“I’m busy, too. I find time for shit like that.”
“Yeah, you also got a maid. You also probably earn a hundred G’s a year ” “I would take care of myself if I earned only ten G’s year,” I said. “I would do it because I have self-respect and because I don’t want anyone to take care of me I simply want to be cared for, and there’s a very big, difference between the two.”
“If you got all the answers, Doc, then how come you’re divorced? And how come your friend Mark’s is in Colorado and you’re here? Don’t sound to me like you wrote the book on relationships.”
I felt a flush creeping up my neck. “Tony did not truly care for me, and when I finally figured that out, I left. As for Mark, he has a problem with commitments.”
“And you were committed to him?”
Marino almost glared at me.
I did not respond.
“How come you didn’t go out west with him? Maybe you’re only committed to being a chief.”
“We were having problems, and certainly part of it was my fault. Mark was angry, went out west, maybe to make a point, maybe just to get away from me,” I said, dismayed that I could not keep the emotion out of my voice. “Professionally, my going with him wouldn’t have been possible, but it was never an option.”
Marino suddenly looked ashamed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know that.”
I was silent.
“Sounds like you and me are in the same boat,” he offered.
“In some ways,” I said, and I did not want to admit to myself what those ways were. “But I’m taking care of myself. If Mark ever reappears, he won’t find me looking like hell, my life down the drain. I want him, but I don’t need him. Maybe you ought to try that with Doris?”
“Yeah.”
He seemed encouraged. “Maybe I will. I think I’m ready for coffee.”
“Do you know how to fix it?”
“You gotta be kidding,” he said, surprised.
“Lesson number one, Marino. Fixing coffee. Step this way.”
While I showed him the technical wonders of a drip coffee maker that required nothing more than a fifty IQ he resumed contemplating this day’s adventures.
“A part of me don’t want to take what Hilda said, seriously,” he explained. “But another part of me has to.
I mean, it sure gave me second thoughts.”
“In what way?”
“Deborah Harvey was shot with a nine-millimeter. They never found the shell. Kind of hard to believe the squirrel could collect the shell out there in the dark. Makes me think Morrell and the rest of them wasn’t looking in the right place. Remember, Hilda wondered if there wasn’t another place, and she mentioned something lost. Something metal that had to do with war. That, could be a spent shell.”