“She was a party girl. She stayed out late and drank. Sometimes she danced.”

“What about you? Did you go dancing as well?” I asked, wondering if he was using the word as a metaphor.

“Not often enough to suit her.”

He replaced the unshelled peanut in the bowl and put his big hands in his lap under the table. I could hear a popping sound and I knew he was systematically cracking his knuckles.

“Did she have hobbies or interests?”

“Like what, did she do macramé?” he asked with a touch of bitterness. “Not hardly.”

“Cooking, for instance. Anything like that?”

“She fixed things out of cans. Tamales wrapped in paper. Sometimes she didn’t even bother to dump them in a pan and put them over heat. I know I sound negative and I apologize. She might have had good qualities, just none I could see. She was beautiful, I’ll give her that. She had her hooks in me deep.”

“Why’d you stay?”

“Dumb, I guess. I don’t know, it seems so long ago. Sometimes I can hardly remember what it was like. Not good, I know. Why I stayed was I loved that woman more than life itself.”

“I understand,” I said, though the statement was preposterous, given what I’d heard.

He went on. “Anyway, I’m not the only one who had complaints. She wasn’t happy, but she stayed on, too. At least until she went.”

“Daisy tells me you believe she was having an affair.”

“I know she was.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“Aside from the fact that she told me?”

“Really. What’d she say?”

“She said he was twice the man I was. She said he was a tiger in bed. I don’t want to go into that. She cut me to the quick, which is what she intended.”

“Maybe she was making it up.”

“No, ma’am. Not her. There was someone all right. You can trust me on that.”

“Do you have any idea who?”

“No.”

“There was no one you suspected even the tiniest bit?”

He shook his head. “At first, I thought it was someone from Santa Maria or Orcutt, somewhere like that, but there was never a claim from anyone else about a missing spouse, which is why no one gives credence to anything I say.”

“Let’s talk about you. What’s your story?”

“I don’t have a story. Like what?”

I shrugged. “Were you ever in the military?”