There are few things in the world that make me feel more clueless than a woman's tears. I know that I am supposed to do something comforting and then go slay whatever dragon caused the crying fit, but it has been my experience, in my limited dealings with women, that the tears never come when they should, and they are never about what you might think, and consequently you are reduced to truly stupid options like patting her head and saying, “There there” in the hopes that at some point she will let you in on what the display is actually about.

But Dexter is nothing if not a team player, and so I slid my arm up across her back, put the palm of my hand on her head and patted.

“It's okay” I said, and no matter how stupid that sounded I thought it was a tremendous improvement over “there there'.

True to form, Rita's reply came out of absolutely nowhere that I could hope to predict. I can't lose you” she said.

I certainly had no plans to be lost, and I would gladly have told her so, but she was just hitting her stride now, and the silent sobs were jerking her body and sending a small rivulet of salt water rolling down my chest.

“Oh, Dexter” she sobbed, “what would I do if I lost you, too?” And now, with that word “too', I had somehow joined a completely unexpected and unknown company, presumably of people Rita had carelessly left lying around where they had been easily lost, and she had given me no clue how I had managed to get a seat with that group, or even who they were. Did she mean her first husband, the addict who had beaten and tormented her, Cody and Astor, until they were traumatized into becoming my ideal family? He was in prison now, and I certainly agreed that being lost that way was a bad idea. Or was there some other string of misplaced persons who had slipped through the cracks of Rita's life and been washed away by the rains of mischance?

Then, as if I needed further proof that her thoughts were being beamed to her from a mother ship in orbit beyond Pluto, Rita began to slide her face down my chest, across my stomach —still sobbing, you understand, and leaving a trail of tears that quickly turned cool.

“Just lie still” she sniffled. “You shouldn't exert yourself with a concussion.”

As I said, you never really know what the program is going to be when a woman switches on the tears.

TWENTY-FOUR

Sin determinar

TWENTY-FOUR