“I don’t know, Bon. I assumed he’d spoken to you.”
Bonnie strained to keep the hurt from her voice. “Did he tell you what happened?”
On the other end, Pete Archibald clucked and ummmed nervously. “Not all the gory details, Bonnie. Everybody-least all the couples I know-go through the occasional bedroom drama. Fights and whatnot. I don’t blame you for not giving me the real story when you called before.”
Bonnie Lamb’s voice rose. “Peter, Max and I aren’t fighting. And I did tell you the real story.” She caught herself. “At least it was the story Max told me.”
After an uncomfortable pause, Pete Archibald said, “Bon, you guys work it out, OK? I don’t want to get in the middle.”
“You’re right, you’re absolutely right.” She noticed that her free hand was balled in a fist and she was rocking sideways in the chair. “Pete, I won’t keep you. But maybe you could tell me what else Max said.”
“Shop talk, Bonnie.”
“For a whole hour?”
“Well, you know your husband. He gets rolling, you know what he’s like.”
Maybe I don’t, Bonnie thought.
She said good-bye to Pete Archibald and hung up. Then she went to Augustine’s room and knocked on the door. When he didn’t answer, she slipped in and sat lightly on the corner of the bed. She thought he was asleep, until he rolled over and said: “Not a good night for the skull room, huh?”
Bonnie Lamb shook her head and began to cry.
Edie Marsh gave it her best shot. For a while, the plan went smoothly. The man from Midwest Casualty took meticulous notes as he followed her from room to room in the Torres house. Many of the couple’s belongings had been pulverized beyond recognition, so Edie began embellishing losses to inflate the claim. She lovingly described the splintered remains of a china cabinet as a priceless antique that Tony inherited from a great-grandmother in San Juan. Pausing before a bare bedroom wall, she pointed to the nails upon which once hung two original (and very expensive) watercolors by the legendary Jean-Claude Jarou, a martyred Haitian artist whom Edie invented off the top of her head. A splintered bedroom bureau became the hand-hewn mahogany vault that had yielded eight cashmere sweaters to the merciless winds of the hurricane.
“Eight sweaters,” said Fred Dove, glancing up from his clipboard. “In Miami?”
“The finest Scottish cashmeres-can you imagine? Ask your wife if it wouldn’t break her heart.”
Fred Dove took a small flashlight from his jacket and went outside to evaluate structural damage. Soon Edie heard barking from the backyard, followed by emphatic human profanities. By the time she got there, both dachshunds had gotten a piece of the insurance man. Edie led him inside, put him in the BarcaLounger, rolled up his cuffs and tended his bloody ankles with Evian and Ivory liquid, which she salvaged from the kitchen.
“I’m glad they’re not rottweilers,” said Fred Dove, soothed by Edie’s ministrations with a soft towel.
Repeatedly she apologized for the attack. “For what it’s worth, they’ve had all their shots,” she said, with no supporting evidence whatsoever.
She instructed Fred Dove to stay in the recliner and keep his feet elevated, to slow the bleeding. Leaning back, he spotted Tony Torres’s Salesman of the Year plaque on the wall. “Pretty impressive,” Fred Dove said.
“Yes, it was quite a big day for us.” Edie beamed, a game simulation of spousely pride.
“And where’s Mister Torres tonight?”
Out of town, Edie replied, at a mobile-home convention in Dallas. For the second time, Fred Dove looked doubtful.
“Even with the hurricane? Must be a pretty important convention.”
“It sure is,” said Edie Marsh. “He’s getting another award.”
“Ah.”
“So he bad to go. I mean, it’d look bad if he didn’t show up. Like he wasn’t grateful or something.”
Fred Dove said, “I suppose so. When will Mister Torres be returning to Miami?”
Edie sighed theatrically. “I just don’t know. Soon, I hope.”
The insurance man attempted to lower the recliner, but it kept springing to the sleep position. Finally Edie Marsh sat on the footrest, enabling Fred Dove to climb out. He said he wanted to reinspect the damage to the master bedroom. Edie said that was fine.