He opened the left-hand closet. It was hers. It was full of dresses and pants on hangers. There were blouses. There was a rack of shoes. He closed it again and turned around and opened the other one. It was Sloop’s. There were a dozen suits, and rows and rows of chinos and blue jeans. Cedar shelves stacked with T-shirts, and dress shirts folded into plastic wraps. A row of neckties. Belts, with fancy buckles. A long row of dusty shoes on the floor. The shoes looked to be about size eleven. He swapped his coffee cup into his other hand and nudged open a suit coat, looking for the label. It was a forty-four long. It would fit a guy about six feet two or three, maybe a hundred and ninety or two hundred pounds. So Sloop was not an especially big guy. Not a giant. But he was a foot taller and twice the weight of his wife. Not the world’s fairest match-up.
There was a photograph frame face-down on top of a stack of shirts. He turned it over. There was a five-by-seven color print under a cream card mat glassed into a lacquered wooden surround. The print showed three guys, young, halfway between boyhood and manhood. Maybe seventeen years old, maybe eighteen. They were standing close together, leaning on the bulging fender of an old-fashioned pick-up truck. They were peering expectantly at the camera, like maybe it was perched close by on a rock and they were waiting for the self-timer to click in. They looked full of youthful energy and excitement. Their whole lives ahead of them, full of infinite possibilities. One of them was Hack Walker, a little slimmer, a little more muscular, a lot more hair. He guessed the other two were Al Eugene and Sloop Greer himself. Teen-aged buddies. Eugene was a head shorter than Sloop, and chubby. Sloop looked like a younger version of Bobby.
He heard the shower shut off and put the photograph back and closed the slider. Moved back to the sitting area. A moment later the bathroom door opened and Carmen came out in a cloud of steam. She was wrapped in two white towels, one around her body, the other bound like a turban around her hair. He looked at her and stayed quiet, unsure of what to say.
“Good morning,” she said in the silence.
“To you, too,” he said.
She unwrapped the turban and shook out her hair. It hung wet and straight.
“It isn’t, though, is it?” she said. “A good morning? It’s a bad morning.”
“I guess,” he said.
“He could be walking out the gate, this exact minute.”
He checked his watch. It was almost seven.
“Any time now,” he said.
“Use the shower if you want,” she said. “I have to go and see to Ellie.”
“O.K.”
He stepped into the bathroom. It was huge, and made out of some kind of reconstituted marble with gold tones in it. It looked like a place he’d once stayed, in Vegas. He used the John and rinsed his mouth at the sink and stripped off his stale clothes and stepped into the shower stall. It was enclosed with bronze-tinted glass and it was enormous. There was a shower head the size of a hubcap above him, and tall pipes in each corner with additional water jets pointing directly at him. He turned the faucet and a huge roaring started up. Then a deluge of warm water hit him from all sides. It was like standing under Niagara Falls. The side jets started pulsing hot and cold and he couldn’t hear himself think. He washed as quickly as he could and soaped his hair and rinsed off and shut it all down.
He took a fresh towel from a stack and dried off as well as he could in the humidity. Wrapped the towel around him and stepped back into the dressing area. Carmen was buttoning her shirt. It was white, and she had white pants on. Gold jewelry. Her skin looked dark against it and her hair was glossy and already curling in the heat.
“That was quick,” she said.
“Hell of a shower,” he said.