“If you’d cared about my affairs fourteen years ago, we’d still be married. Keep that in mind while you’re scrambling for your rent.”

He hung up without giving me a chance at the last word. So it still rankled, my lack of doelike devotion. Old feelings do indeed die hard.

21

Throwing a Friend to the Wolves

I got to the restaurant ahead of Lotty. A light, bright seafood place on Lincoln, I Popoli has a small garden where I like to sit in summer. During the afternoon, though, heavy storm clouds had moved into the city. It looked as though the unnaturally hot weather might be going to break. I took a table inside.

When I’d waited half an hour I figured Lotty’d been held up by a late-breaking emergency. I ordered a rum-and-tonic to tide me over and settled at the end of the bar, next to the window, where I could watch the street. Rain had started to fall, fat heavy drops that spattered on the pavement like broken eggs. By the time I finished my rum, the drops had built to a heavy curtain of water.

I started wondering if Lotty had crashed the Trans Am and was too chicken to tell me about it. Of course, that wasn’t in Lotty’s character: she had no fear of confrontation. Besides, she saw herself as a constant victim of other reckless maniacs. When I tried to ask her why my cars never suffered the damage hers did, she would pierce me with a stare and change the subject.

I went to the phone in the back of the restaurant to try calling her. I didn’t get an answer, either at the clinic or her apartment, but when I left the booth she was standing in the middle of the room, water dripping around her, looking for me. It was only when I came up to her that I saw she was hurt. She had a graze and a purple lump on her forehead and I could see a stream of blood mixing with the rainwater on her left arm.

“Lotty!” I pulled her to me. “What happened to you?”

“Someone hit me.” Her voice was dull and she held herself stiffly in my embrace.

“Hit you? Hit the car, you mean?”

“You know, Victoria, I think I would like to lie down.”