“How true.”
“Do you know what Rya said to me when she was helping me pour the coffee after dinner?” Jenny took a sip of her drink. “She asked if I had divorced my first husband because he was a lousy lover.”
“Oh, no! She didn’t really.”
“Oh, yes, she did.”
“I know that girl’s only eleven. But sometimes I wonder..
“Reincarnation?” Jenny asked.
“Maybe that’s it. She’s only eleven years old in this life, but maybe she lived to be seventy in another life. What did you say to her when she asked?”
Jenny shook her head as if she were amazed at her gullibility. Her black hair swung away from her face. “Well, when she saw that I was about to tell her it was none of her business whether or not my first husband was a lousy lover, she told me I mustn’t be cross with her. She said she wasn’t just being nosy. She said she was just a growing girl, a bit mature for her age, who had a perfectly understandable curiosity about adults, love and marriage. Then she really began to con me.”
Paul grimaced. “I can tell you the line she used: Poor little orphan girl. Confused by her own pubescence. Bewildered by a new set of emotions and body chemistry.”
“So she’s used it on you.”
“Many times.”
“And you fell for it?”
“Everyone falls for it.”
“I sure did. I felt so sorry for her. She had a hundred questions-”
“All of them intimate,” Paul said.
“-and I answered all of them. And then I found out the whole conversation was meant to lead up to one line. After she had learned more about my husband than she could ever want to know, she told me that she and her mother had had long talks a year or so before Annie died, and that her mother told her you were just a fantastic lover.”
Paul groaned.
“I said to her, ‘Rya, I believe you’re trying to sell your father to me.’ She got indignant and said that was a terrible thing to think. I said, ‘Well, I can’t believe that your mother ever said anything of the sort to you. How old would you have been then? Six?’ And she said, ‘Six, that’s right. But even when I was six, I was very mature for my age.'”
When he was done laughing, Paul said, “Well, you can’t
blame her. She’s only playing the matchmaker because she likes you. So does Mark.” He leaned toward her and lowered his voice slightly. “So do I.”
She looked down at her drink. “Read any good books lately?” He stirred his Scotch and sighed. “Since I’m such a nice man, I’m supposed to let you change the subject that easily.”
“That’s right.”
Jenny Leigh Edison distrusted romance and feared marriage. Her ex-husband, whose name she had gladly surrendered, was one of those men who despise education, work, and sacrifice, but who nonetheless think they deserve fame and fortune. Because, year after year, he achieved neither goal, he needed some excuse for failure. She made a good one. He said he hadn’t been able to put together a successful band because of her. He hadn’t been able to get a recording contract with a major company because of her. She was holding him back, he said. She was getting in his way, he said. After seven years of supporting him by playing cocktail-bar piano, she suggested that they would both be happier if the marriage were dissolved. At first, he accused her of deserting him, and then he threatened to kill her if she left. She divorced him. “Love and romance aren’t enough to make a marriage work,” she had once told Paul. “You need something else. Maybe it’s respect. Until I do know what it is, I’m in no hurry to get back to the altar.”
Like the nice man that he was, he had changed the subject at her request. They were talking about music when Bob and Emma Thorp came over to the booth and said hello.
Bob Thorp was chief of the four-man police force in Black River. Ordinarily, a town so small would have boasted no more than a single constable. But in Black River, more than a constable was needed to maintain order when the logging camp men came into town for some relaxation; therefore, Big Union Supply Company paid for the four-man force. Bob was a six-foot-two, two-hundred-pound ex-MP with martial arts training. With his square face, deep-set eyes, and low forehead, he looked both dangerous and dim-witted. He could be dangerous, but he was not stupid. He wrote an amusing column for Black River’s weekly newspaper, and the quality of thought and language in those pieces would have been a credit to any big city newspaper’s editorial page. This combination of brute strength and unexpected intelligence made Bob a match even for lumbermen much bigger than he was.