It was a dance they were doing, this country waltz, each pretending that Darren was a son who had been waiting for just the right opportunity to take care of his aging mother, that he wasn’t here now solely because she was blackmailing him. Although she never used such a crass word, and neither did he. In fact, the one time he asked her directly about the gun, she’d taken it as his way of asking to spend more time with her, going so far as to invite herself to dinner at his home in Houston, which Darren recognized for the punishment it was. Starting with her ridiculous request for clams casino and Black Forest cake, the recipes for which she actually clipped from an ancient copy of the Ladies’ Home Journal she’d had since she was in high school and mailed to Lisa.

She was drunk when she showed up to their loft in downtown Houston, asking even before her coat was off where the rest of the house was. Lisa hung Bell’s balding rabbit fur in the hallway closet and made a point of squeezing Darren’s hand in solidarity before escorting Bell to the dining-room table. Their windows looked out on Buffalo Bayou, but Bell wasn’t impressed with that either. “We got dirty water in the country too,” she said as Darren pulled out her chair. Lisa wasted no time setting their first course on the table, a chilled onion soup they ate by candlelight. Darren didn’t touch a drop of alcohol all night, watching as Lisa and Bell raced each other to the bottom of a bottle of drugstore chardonnay, his mother’s sole offering.

These past two months, his wife had asked very few questions.