Duma Key(106)

Wireman saw my hand go to my head and let up a little. "Look, most of the people she's contacted unofficially have already said hell yes, of course, they'd love to. Your old line foreman Angel Slobotnik told Pam he'd bring you a jar of pickles. She said he sounded thrilled."

"Not pickles, pickled eggs," I said, and Big Ainge's broad, flat, smiling face was for a moment almost close enough to touch. Angel, who had been right there beside me for twenty years, until a major heart attack sidelined him. Angel, whose most common response to any request, no matter how seemingly outrageous, was Can do, boss.

"Pam and I made the flight arrangements," Wireman said. "Not just for the people from Minneapolis-St. Paul, but from other places, as well." He tapped the brochure. "The Air France and Delta flights in here are real, and your daughter Melinda is really booked on em. She knows what's going on. So does Ilse. They're only waiting to be officially invited. Ilse wanted to call you, and Pam told her to wait. She says you have to pull the trigger on this, and whatever she may have been wrong about in the course of your marriage, muchacho, she's right about that."

"All right," I said. "I'm hearing you."

"Good. Now I want to talk to you about the lecture."

I groaned.

"If you do a bunk on the lecture, you'll find it twice as hard to go to the opening-night party-"

I looked at him incredulously.

"What?" he asked. "You disagree?"

"Do a bunk?" I asked. "Do a bunk? What the f**k is that?"

"To cut and run," he said, sounding slightly defensive. "British slang. See for instance Evelyn Waugh, Officers and Gentlemen, 1952."

"See my ass and your face," I said. "Edgar Freemantle, present day."

He flipped me the bird, and just like that we were mostly okay again.

"You sent Pam the pictures, didn't you? You sent her the JPEG file."

"I did."

"How did she react?"

"She was blown away, muchacho."

I sat silently, trying to imagine Pam blown away. I could do it, but the face I saw lighting up in surprise and wonder was a younger face. It had been quite a few years since I'd been able to generate that sort of wind.

Elizabeth was dozing off, but her hair was flying against her cheeks and she pawed at them like a woman troubled by insects. I got up, took an elastic from the pouch on the arm of her wheelchair there was always a good supply of them, in many bright colors and pulled her hair back into a horsetail. The memories of doing this for Melinda and Ilse were sweet and terrible.

"Thank you, Edgar. Thank you, mi amigo."

"So how do I do it?" I asked. I was holding my palm on the side of Elizabeth's head, feeling the smoothness of her hair as I had often felt the smoothness of my daughters' after it had been shampooed; when memory takes its strongest hold, our own bodies become ghosts, haunting us with the gestures of our younger selves. "How do I talk about a process that's at least partially supernatural?"

There. It was out. The root of the matter.

Yet Wireman looked calm. "Edgar!" he exclaimed.

"Edgar what?"

The sonofabitch actually laughed. "If you tell them that... they will believe you. "

I opened my mouth to refute this. Thought of Dal 's work. Thought of that wonderful Van Gogh picture, Starry Night. Thought of certain Andrew Wyeth paintings not Christina's World but his interiors: spare rooms where the light is both sane and strange, as if coming from two directions at the same time. I closed my mouth again.

"I can't tell you just what to say," Wireman said, "but I can give you something like this." He held up the brochure/invitation. "I can give you a template."

"That would help."

"Yeah? Then listen."

I listened.

iv

"Hello?"

I was sitting on the couch in the Florida room. My heart was beating heavily. This was one of those calls everyone's made a few where you simultaneously hope it will go through the first time, so you can get it over with, and hope it won't, so you can put off some hard and probably painful conversation a little while longer.

I got Option One; Pam answered on the first ring. All I could hope was this conversation would go better than the last one. Than the last couple, in fact.

"Pam, it's Edgar."

"Hello, Edgar," she said cautiously. "How are you?"

"I'm... all right. Good. I've been talking with my friend Wireman. He showed me the invitation the two of you worked up." The two of you worked up. That sounded unfriendly. Conspiratorial, even. But what other way was there to put it?

"Yes?" Her voice was impossible to read.

I drew in a breath and jumped. God hates a coward, Wireman says. Among other things. "I called to say thanks. I was being a horse's ass. Your jumping in like that was what I needed."

The silence was long enough for me to wonder if maybe she'd quietly hung up at some point. Then she said, "I'm still here, Eddie I'm just picking myself up off the floor. I can't remember the last time you apologized to me."

Had I apologized? Well... never mind. Close enough, maybe. "Then I'm sorry about that, too," I said.