It wasn’t any of her business.
“You could afford it,” West preached on.
“What you got is a sick relationship. You don’t get away from her, you’ll grow old together.”
“Oh really?” Brazil looked up at West, not appreciating her remarks in the least.
“You know all about it, do you?”
“I’m afraid so,” West said.
“In case you haven’t figured it out yet, Andy, you aren’t the first person in the world to have a co dependent enabling relationship with a parent or spouse. Your mother’s crippling, self-destructive disease is her choice. And it serves one important function. It controls her son. She doesn’t want you to leave, and guess what? So far you haven’t.”
W This was also Hammer’s problem, although she had yet to face it fully. Seth, too, was a cripple. When his powerful, handsome wife breezed in with her trophy in the early morning hours, he was surfing hundreds of cable channels made possible by his eighteen-inch satellite dish on the back porch. Seth liked country western music, and was looking for just the right band. It was not true that he was eating a Tombstone pizza. That had been earlier, when it had gotten to be midnight and his wife still was not home. Now he was working on popcorn drenched with real butter he had melted in the microwave.
Seth Bridges had never been much to look at. Physical beauty was not what had attracted Judy Hammer to him long ago in Little Rock. She had loved his intelligence and gentle patience. They had started out as friends, the way everyone would, were the world filled with good sense. The problem lay in Seth’s capacity. He grew as his wife did for the first ten years. Then he maxed out, and simply could stretch no further as a spiritual, enlightened, big-thinking entity. There was no other way to broaden himself unless he did so in the flesh. Eating, frankly, was what he now did best.
Hammer locked the front door and reset the burglar alarm, making sure the motion sensors were on stay. The house smelled like a movie theater, and she detected a hint of pepperoni beneath a buttery layer of chilled air. Her husband was stretched out on the couch, crunching, fingers shiny with grease as he stuffed popcorn inside a mouth that never completely rested. She walked through the living room without comment as stations changed as fast as Seth could point and shoot. In her bedroom, she angrily set the trophy on the floor, in a closet, with others she never remembered.
She was overwhelmed with fury, and slammed the door, tore her clothes off, and threw them in a chair. She put on her favorite nightshirt, and grabbed her pistol out of her pocketbook, and walked back out into the living room. She’d had it. No more. Enough.
Every mortal had limits. Seth froze mid-shovel when his wife marched in, armed.
“Why drag it out?” she said, towering over him in blue and white striped cotton.
“Why not just kill yourself and get it over with? Go ahead.”
She racked the pistol and offered it to him, butt first. Seth stared at it. He had never seen her like this, and he propped himself up on his elbows.
“What happened tonight?” he asked.
“You and Panesa get into a fight or something?”
“Quite the opposite. If you want to end it, go ahead.”
“You’re crazy,” he said.
“That’s right, well on my way to it, thanks to you.” His wife lowered the gun and put the safety on.
“Seth, tomorrow you go for help. A psychiatrist and your primary care physician. You straighten yourself out. Starting this minute. You’re a pig. A slob. A bore. You’re committing slow suicide and I do not intend to watch a minute longer.”
She snatched the bowl of popcorn out of his oily hands.
“You don’t get it fixed, I’m out of here. Period.”
Brazil and West also were suffering aftershocks from their confrontation in her unmarked car. They had continued arguing about his living situation, by now both of them in a lather as they drove through another rough area of the city. Brazil was glaring at her, and not particularly cognizant of the area or its bad people who were thinking violent thoughts about the cop car cruising past. Brazil wondered what possessed him to want to spend so much of his valuable time with this rude, insensitive, inappropriate deputy chief who was old and backward and, in truth, a jerk.