“I was a sap.”
“No.”
“An idiot.”
“No, Frank. You were human,” Tony said. “That’s all. Just human like the rest of us.”
Penny brought the cheeseburgers.
Frank ordered another double Scotch.
“You want to know what made Wilma change her mind?” Frank asked. “You want to know why she finally agreed to marry me?”
“Sure,” Tony said. “But why don’t you eat your burger first.”
Frank ignored the sandwich. “My father died and left me everything. At first it looked like maybe thirty thousand bucks, but then I discovered the old man had collected a bunch of five- and ten-thousand dollar life insurance policies over the past thirty years. After taxes, the estate amounted to ninety thousand dollars.”
“I’ll be damned.”
“With what I had already,” Frank said, “that windfall was enough for Wilma.”
“Maybe you’d have been better off if your father had died poor,” Tony said.
Frank’s red-rimmed eyes grew watery, and for a moment he looked as if he was about to weep. But he blinked rapidly and held back the tears. In a voice laden with despair, he said, “I’m ashamed to admit it, but when I found out how much money was in the estate, I stopped caring about my old man dying. The insurance policies turned up just one week after I buried him, and the moment I found them I thought, Wilma. All of a sudden I was so damned happy I couldn’t stand still. As far as I was concerned, my dad might as well have been dead twenty years. It makes me sick to my stomach to think how I behaved. I mean, my dad and I weren’t really close, but I owed him a lot more grieving than I gave. Jesus, I was one selfish son of a bitch, Tony.”
“It’s over, Frank. It’s done,” Tony said. “And like I said, you were a bit crazy. You weren’t exactly responsible for your actions.”
Frank put both hands over his face and sat that way for a minute, shaking but not crying. Finally, he looked up and said, “So when she saw I had almost a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars, Wilma wanted to marry me. In eight months, she cleaned me out.”
“This is a community property state,” Tony said. “How could she get more than half of what you had?”
“Oh, she didn’t take anything in the divorce.”
“What?”
“Not one penny.”
“Why?”
“It was all gone by then.”
“Gone?”
“Poof!”
“She spent it?”
“Stole it,” Frank said numbly.
Tony put down his cheeseburger, wiped his mouth with a napkin. “Stole it? How?”
Frank was still quite drunk, but suddenly he spoke with an eerie clarity and precision. It seemed important to him that this indictment of her, more than anything else in his story, should be clearly understood. She had left him nothing but his indignation, and now he wanted to share that with Tony. “As soon as we got back from our honeymoon, she announced she was taking over the bookkeeping. She was going to attend to all our banking business, watch over our investments, balance our checkbook. She signed up for a course in investment planning at a business school, and she worked out a detailed budget for us. She was very adamant about it, very businesslike, and I was really pleased because she seemed so much like Barbara Ann.”
“You’d told her that Barbara Ann had done those things?”
“Yeah. Oh, Jesus, yeah. I set myself up to be picked clean. I sure did.”
Suddenly, Tony wasn’t hungry any more.
Frank pushed one shaky hand through his hair. “See, there wasn’t any way I could have suspected her. I mean, she was so good to me. She learned to cook my favorite things. She always wanted to hear about my day when I got home, and she listened with such interest. She didn’t want a lot of clothes or jewelry or anything. We went out to dinner and to the movies now and then, but she always said it was a waste of money; she said she was just as happy staying home with me and watching TV together or just talking. She wasn’t in any hurry to buy a house. She was so … easy-going. She gave me massages when I came home stiff and sore. And in bed … she was fabulous. She was perfect. Except … except … all the time she was cooking and listening and massaging and fucking my brains out, she was….”