She leaned back in her chair.

“D’you know what you should do,” he said with a wave of his hand. “Take a vacation. Go somewhere quiet and spend a couple of weeks. Relax. Think. And come back.”

“I would love to,” she said, “but I’ve got to be careful with money … I’ve got to think about the future.”

He placed his hand on hers.

“The future, mi hija, is gonna happen whether you think about it or not. It doesn’t need your thoughts. You need thinking about. Go to vacation and think about yourself and see how you gonna prepare you to meet the future.”

She tossed back the balance of the scotch and found herself agreeing with him.

“Are you gonna come with me?”

“No, mi hija. You need to walk this path alone so that when the time comes you can lead someone.”

They spent the rest of the afternoon planning her trip. They would see about the van later.

Using one of Fire’s credit cards, Ian took a room in a small hotel on the cliffs of Negril. He barely ate any of the food that he ordered, and the maid complained to the manager about shit stains in the sheets. Two weeks after checking in, the six quarts of rum and pound of weed he’d brought with him were nearly done. He was hungry but he didn’t eat. No one cared about him. But care they would, he thought, when they saw his emaciation. He’d lost fifteen pounds and was down to a hundred and five. His skin was dry and it sagged around his joints. And he smelled. He hadn’t changed his underwear, taken a bath, or brushed his teeth in all that time.

Margaret. She shadowed his mind as it wandered to the edge of delusion. Sometimes she was with him in bed, mopping his brow and crying. Other times she was calling him on the phone from New York to tell him she was leaving Phil, and was on her way to save him.

Why, he was asking himself this morning, couldn’t he just ask her to leave Phil? He knew why. She’d remind him of her ultimatum, and he wouldn’t be able to meet it, because … he just couldn’t accept her past. The fact that she could accept his was irrelevant. They called this a double standard, but so what? Fuck them. Whoever they were. That was how he felt and he was too old to change. This was the crux of his problem, this knowledge that he was being unfair. A less intelligent or a more evolved man would not have been as troubled. A less intelligent man would not have recognized the incongruity in his argument; a more evolved man would have simply gotten over it or not have made it into an issue in the first place. But Ian was in the middle. And he just couldn’t cope. If he didn’t love her, then he wouldn’t have had a problem. But he did.