When the Light Goes
Page 15
“Where’s Lester?”
“Gone to Fort Worth to the swap meet,” Jenny said. “There’s hardly a day passes that Lester can’t find some kind of swap meet to go to.”
Jenny still had a sparkle in her eyes, and sexy, bony shoulders.
“How long you here for, honey?” she asked.
“I don’t know—a few more minutes, I guess,” he said. “I just came by to see you and Lester. I can’t think of anybody else I even know in this town.”
“Are you happily married, Duane?” Jenny asked, looking him in the eye. “I barely met Annie but I liked her.”
She smiled.
“I guess that means it’s too late for you and me,” she said.
It was an old tease they both enjoyed—it had long been too late for the two of them, and yet beneath the tease Duane felt a sadness; perhaps Jenny felt it too.
“Bobby Lee got a penile implant—it’s improved his mood no end,” Jenny said.
“Bobby Lee got a penile implant?” Duane said, astonished.
“Yep, modern times,” Jenny said. “I guess you’ll miss him. He’s gone to Louisiana with his new sweetie, to a zydeco festival.”
“Well, I’ll be,” Duane said. He gave Jenny Marlow a long hug and a kiss. She had tears in her eyes.
“I’ve a kind of shadowy feeling that we were more than friends once, maybe back during the boom—you know, when things were a little crazy?”
Jenny shook her head.
“Didn’t happen,” she said. “You and I were the ones who weren’t crazy, remember, Duane?”
Duane stopped at the cemetery. He cried at Karla’s grave, cried some more at Ruth Popper’s.
When he looked back at Thalia all he could see was dust—it had been that way when he had been a teenager, coming in at dawn from a night roughnecking on some oil rig. Thalia was a place where the dust seldom entirely settled.
When he left the cemetery he was crying so hard he scraped the gatepost on the passenger side.
Then, stopping only for gas, he drove back to Arizona, to await the return of his lithe and lovely wife.