by Bill Rowe
“A without-prejudice murder threat,” I replied. “Good luck with that in our Supreme Court.”
TWO MONTHS PASSED FROM Brent’s death before Rosie and I went to bed together. She had told me one night over a drink at my place that she now, at last, had the feeling again, for the first time since the funeral, that she was ready to take up where we had left off thirty years before, if I was. She’d woken up that morning with the sensation that it was only yesterday when we’d been together, she said, and she was interested in seeing whether her memories accorded with reality or were just a blissful delusion. “Talk about imposing performance anxiety on a guy,” I replied.
“You’d better be good,” she said.
Our first night together felt to me as if there had never been a time gap. But I did undergo a leap in appreciation that made the experience even better than I remembered. I fully appreciated without urgency every point and plane where our bodies touched, the exquisite smoothness, the actual knowledge, the realization, of warm beloved life beneath. I appreciated the smallness, the narrowness, the compactness of her naked waist when my arms went around it. I appreciated just lying there beside her, admiring her beauty as she lay stretched out on her back—the separate angles, curves, rounds, juts, indents, and clefts—without any overpowering need to do anything right away. The only thing I missed, I told Rosie, that might have improved on the great feeling I’d had when I made love to her, was the fear that my mother was going to catch us at it.
Rosie got up on her elbow: “When did your mother ever catch us…? Oh yeah, that time your squirt nearly dripped on her head from the ceiling. That was close.” She fell over on me laughing.
Now I told her for the first time about my mother seeing our used condom in her toilet after our inaugural adventure in anal intercourse on my bed, and the fuss she’d made about it. Rosie stretched to the length of her arms and looked down at me. “You mean every time I said hello to your mother after that, all she could see in her mind was me being sodomized by her teenaged son?” She flopped over on her back and put her pillow over her head. “Jesus, I’m glad you never told me that at the time.” Her breasts gave two or three gentle heaves of more laughter and she rolled over on top of me and said, “We must try that again one of these days.”
“It’s a deal. How about our little cuddle tonight? Did you like that?”
“Sort of. It was okay. You were… fine.” She looked down at me. “I’ll give you another chance to improve before I have to take drastic steps.”
“Oh, this certainly turned out well,” I said. “Here I am with the police breathing down my neck trying to dig up the evidence to nail me for yet another murder. Any day now, two dope-crazed assassins with extortion and revenge on their minds may decide to kneecap or kill me unless I pay up millions. Meanwhile, I don’t have a cent, and the woman I’m a love-slave to has thirteen million dollars in the bank and holds a promissory note from me for half a million, which she can call in at any time. And now she’s telling me that if I don’t measure up better in bed, I’m history.”
“That’s what I like about a good lawyer. They can cut through the bullshit and get right to the crunch. But you never said anything about me having a penchant for killing people who haven’t treated me nice.” She pinched my thigh.
“You mean me from thirty years ago. I thought you said we’re even.”
“Every murder planner says that. But that’s down the road. First, I need you to help me work out how we can liquidate Brent’s two louts before they get a chance to do something to us.” Rosie turned her face away. “Oh.” Tears were flowing from under her eyelids. “I was so happy, and then I thought about poor Brent.”
“Be happy, Rosie. I know I am for the first time in my adult life.”
“I’m getting there. Do you think we’ll ever be as happy as we were for those few months when we were fourteen or fifteen?”
“That would be asking a lot. But I don’t need to be that happy. Or crazy.”
“Forgetting about the money, Tom, what makes you happier, what you have now, even with all that crap you just described, or when you were peacefully and quietly living and practising law?”
“What we have now. By far. Not even in the same ballpark. How about you? This, or your dreamlike escape from real life into your beautiful old dead languages and literature?”
“This. But I do have the old feeling that I am going to be caught somehow by the cosmic jokester and sent straight back to hell from whence I came in the first place. ‘Rosie O’Dell, go back to hell.’ Remember that? Somebody in school nailed it dead-on.”
“Even if they did write it on the shithouse wall. And I suppose you liked, ‘And take Tommy, your dildo on feet, with you’ too.”
“You left out ‘little, ’” said Rosie. “‘Little dildo on feet.’”
“Where do you think you are, in a public courtroom?”
“That was funny,” she said.
“Strange, I still fail to see the humour.”
She looked at my face. “I mean what you just said about way back then. Not being back then. That wasn’t funny.” She grinned, though, and kissed my lips, and stretched out on top of me, sighing contentedly. “Listen, Tommy, don’t get anxious about it. When I go back to hell, I’m definitely taking you with me.”
Acknowledgements
My sincere thanks to editor Annamarie Beckel and graphic designer Adam Freake for their excellent contributions to this book, and my heartfelt gratitude to Garry, Margo, and Jerry Cranford, Laura Cameron, Bob Woodworth, Peter Hanes, Randy Drover, and Gerard Murphy at Flanker Press for their enthusiastic dedication to publishing and distributing it.