‘Well, sure. . . I love you, Tommy.’
‘I love Ton and Mai and Mom and Dad, I really do, I love all of you so much. . . but I’ve got to be free.’
‘I know, brother. I know. Listen, I’ll call Mom and tell her you’re on your way. Now get moving, you’re almost out of time!’
When Tommy hung up, he saw that Del’s mother was blotting tears from the corners of her eyes.
With a tremor in her voice, she said, ‘This is just so moving. I haven’t been so touched since Ned’s funeral, when Frank Sinatra gave the eulogy.’
Del moved beside her mother’s chair and put a hand on the older woman’s shoulder. ‘Now, now. It’s okay, Mom.’
To Tommy, Mrs. Payne said, ‘Frank was so eloquent. Wasn’t he eloquent, Del?’
‘As always,’ Del said, ‘he was a class act.’
‘Even my policemen were moved to tears,’ Mrs. Payne said. ‘I had to attend the funeral between these two burly guards, of course, because I was under arrest for murder.’
‘I understand,’ Tommy assured her.
‘I never held that against them,’ said Mrs. Payne. ‘They knew I’d shot Ned through the heart, and they couldn’t see it as anything but murder, they were so blind to the truth, but everything turned out all right in the end. Anyway, these two dear policemen were so moved by all the lovely things Frank had to say about Ned, and then when he began to sing “It Was a Very Good Year,” they just broke down and sobbed like babies. I let them share my little pack of Kleenex.’
At a loss for comforting words, Tommy could think of nothing to say except: ‘Such a tragedy, dying so young.’
‘Oh,’ said Del’s mother, ‘Ned wasn’t all that young. Sixty-three when I shot him.’
Fascinated with this peculiar family even as his personal clock of doom ticked rapidly toward the fatal hour, Tommy did some quick mental calculations. ‘If he died eighteen years ago when Del was ten. . . you would have been thirty-two at the time. And he was sixty three?’
Nudging Scootie to the floor, rising from her armchair, Julia Rosalyn Winona Lilith said, ‘It was a May-December romance. I was twenty when we met, and he was over fifty, but from the first moment I saw Ned, I knew he was the one. I wasn’t your ordinary young girl Tommy dear. Oh, I was fiercely hungry for experience, for knowledge. I wanted to devour life. I needed an older man who had been around, who had seen it all someone who could teach me. Ned was glorious. With Elvis singing “Blue Hawaii” – the poor dear had a bad cold, but he came to sing anyway – we married at a chapel in Vegas, nineteen hours after we met, and never regretted it for one minute. On our honeymoon we parachuted into the heart of the Campeche jungle on the Yucatan Peninsula with only two sharp knives, a coil of rope, a map, a compass, and a bottle of good red wine, and we made it out safely to civilization in only fifteen days, more madly in love than ever.’
‘You sure were right,’ Tommy told Del. ‘Your mother’s a hoot.’
Smiling radiantly at her daughter, looking so unlike Tommy’s mother in her ao dais, Winona said, ‘Deliverance, did you really say that about me, dear?’
The two women embraced.
Then Tommy hugged Del’s mother and said, ‘I hope you’ll invite me over some night to watch the David Letterman show.’
‘Of course, dear boy. And I hope you’ll live long enough to have a chance to see it.’
‘Now,’ Del said to Tommy, ‘it’s my turn to meet your mother.’
Mrs. Payne walked them out of the music room, down the great hall, to the front door.
The Jaguar 2+2 was waiting outside in the now rainless November night.
When Tommy opened the passenger-side door and pulled the seat forward, Scootie romped into the back.
As Del went around to the driver’s side, Mrs. Payne called to her daughter from the front door of The Great Pile: ‘When you bite his head off and eat him alive, try to make it quick and painless. He’s such a nice boy.’