“But Daddy didn’t know that. He couldn’t have.”
AJ sighed over the line. It was the mid-1980s. A long-distance call was still something of import, minutes gobbling up money the way the still-novel Pac-Man ate his power pills, although my father never objected to me calling AJ. He wanted us to be close. He had encouraged the ritual of our weekly Sunday call and even allowed me to call before rates dropped if I had important news. However, he probably would have been appalled if he had known what we were discussing on this particular Sunday.
“How do you think I know, Lu? He told me so himself.”
“Uh-huh. No way. Daddy never would have been with a married woman. Besides, why would he tell you?”
AJ’s laugh was raw and sad. “I guess he wanted to warn me that everyone screws up sometime. Even our saintly father. He said she was a de facto widow—wouldn’t divorce her husband out of principle, but he was never going to come home, be her husband again.”
“So he argued against his adultery on the basis of a technicality?”
“Other way around. He insisted that he was guilty of adultery despite her situation. But he cared about her, in his way, although he was never going to get serious with any woman. At any rate, she saw the fire as a judgment and left.” A pause. “Miss Maude wasn’t the only one, over the years. There were others. Lu, did you really think our father, who was not quite forty when our mother died, went the rest of his life without female companionship?”
I did. And I still believe that he did not have a single lady friend during the eight-year stretch when it was just the two of us, after AJ left for college. By the time I was in my teens, I was on the alert for love and sex, imagining it everywhere, so how could I not have noticed if it were there?
Then again, how did I not pick up the scent of my father’s pipe tobacco?
Perhaps my adolescent self simply balked at that threshold of my father’s bedroom, as most teenagers do. I hope so. Now I want to believe that my father found a way to meet his needs, that he had a rich and thrilling secret life.
After all, I did, at least for a time.
JANUARY 10
“Your first murder,” Lu’s father says, opening a bottle of wine, one of the better ones in his “cellar”—a corner of the kitchen that now includes two wine refrigerators, one for whites, and one that keeps reds at a steady sixty-four degrees. “Sort of like living in San Francisco,” AJ observed on his last visit, which provoked a pedantic observation from his wife, Lauranne, that San Francisco is not, in fact, sixty-four degrees year-round. Lauranne still doesn’t have a handle on the Brant sense of humor.
Lu glances at the price tag, which her father has forgotten to scrape off. $39.99, some Australian red with a silly name. And it’s just a Saturday night dinner at home, nothing innately special, although they are expecting AJ and that is always a cause to celebrate. AJ lives less than twenty miles away, but his work—his ministry, as Lu likes to tease him, knowing that the term provokes him on several levels—means he’s on the road, on the go, all the time.
“Not my first murder by a long shot,” Lu reminds her father. “My first as state’s attorney. I did several as a deputy. You know, not everyone gets appointed to the state’s attorney’s office. Some of us actually have to run.”