I scrambled to catch up. “You mean your not being pregnant?”

Greer looked around nervously, as though the editor of the country club newsletter might be crouching behind the cabana, taking notes, or lurking on the other side of the towering stucco wall enclosing at least an acre of backyard. The windows of the guesthouse, opposite the pool, caught the colors of the sunset and turned opaque. “Yes,” she said, and it seemed to me that she’d gone to a lot of trouble, scoping out the landscape, just to say one word.

“Lillian had you checked out at a free clinic in Vegas, remember? You were fine. No STD’s, no residual effects whatsoever. It wasn’t the hooking, Greer.”

She tensed, and what little color she’d had drained from her cheeks. “Keep your voice down!”

“Sorry,” I said, chagrined. I always felt out of place at Greer’s, and I tended to put my foot in my mouth. “You’re alone here, aren’t you? Carmen is gone for the day?”

Carmen was her housekeeper—a very nice woman, but not much for overtime.

Greer nodded miserably. “I didn’t mean to snap,” she said.

I patted her hand. “It’s okay.”

She fortified herself with more wine. I decided it was probably cramps that made her look so woebegone and beaten. “Nothing in my life,” she said, “is ‘okay.’”

Chapter Four

CHAPTER FOUR

I’D LOVE TO report that Greer and I got right to the heart of things, over our dinner of thinly sliced smoked salmon, gourmet bagels and cream cheese with capers, and settled all our collective and individual problems, but we didn’t. Greer drank wine—first hers, then mine. She shook her head when I told her about Heather and the supermarket incident, and said I ought to move to a civilized neighborhood.

What one had to do with the other was beyond me then, and I still don’t exactly get it.

I tried to communicate. I really did. I told her about Lillian and the Tarot cards, and running into Uncle Clive at the nursing home.

She recalled that he was a state senator and wondered aloud if he and his wife would ever make the trip up from Cactus Bend to attend one of her gala parties. It wasn’t so much that Greer was uncaring; she just couldn’t seem to get any kind of grip on the conversational thread.

I would have been better off talking to Chester, and I don’t think the evening did much for Greer, either, except perhaps to provide some brief respite from whatever was weighing on her mind.

At eight-thirty, I thanked my sister for her hospitality, said my goodbyes and left. Greer was a lonely, shrinking figure in my rearview mirror, standing in her brick-paved driveway, watching me out of sight.