Robert Parker - Family Honor

It was what he did that was one of the issues. He worked in the family business, and the family business was crime. He didn’t do crime. She believed that when he told her. He ran some saloons that the family owned. But... she poured some more wine from the jug into her glass. There was a sort of ravine behind the house that ran down to the ocean, and the waves as they rolled into it sent up a harsh spray. Sitting on the floor she could see only the spray, disembodied from the ocean, appearing rhythmically above the slipping lawn... It wasn’t really that he was from a crime family any more than it was that she was from a cop family. It had to do with much tougher stuff than that and she’d learned early in their separation not to pretend that it was just cops versus robbers. A gull with a white chest and gray wings settled down past her line of vision and disappeared into the ravine and came back up with something in its mouth and flew away. Richie loved her, she knew he did. The fact that her father had spent a lifetime trying to jail his father didn’t help, but that wasn’t what felt so sharp and sore in her soul. Richie was so closed, so interior, so certain of how things were supposed to go, so too much like her father that she felt as if she was dwindling every year they were together, smaller and smaller.

“Dwindle,” she said aloud.

The dog turned her head and cocked it slightly and pricked her big ears a little forward. Sunny drank some wine .

“ Dwindle, dwindle, dwindle .”

Her friend Julie had said once to her that she was too stubborn to dwindle. That her self was so unquenchable, her autonomy needs so sharp, that no one could finally break her to a marriage. Julie was a therapist herself, though not by any means Sunny’s, and maybe she knew something. Whatever had happened they had been forced to admit it didn’t work, after a nine-year struggle. Sitting across from one another in the restaurant of a suburban hotel, they had begun the dissolution.

“What do you want?” Richie had said.

“Nothing.”

Richie had smiled a little bit.

“Hell,” he’d said. “I’ll give you twice that.”

She had smiled an even smaller smile than Richie’s.

“I can’t strike out on my own at your expense,” she had said.

“What about the dog?”

She had been silent, trying to assess what she could stand.

“I want the dog,” she had said. “You can visit.”

He had smiled the small smile again.

“Okay,” he had said. “But she’s not used to squalor. You keep the house.”

“I can’t live in the house.”

“Sell it. Buy one you can live in.”

Sunny had been quiet for a long time, she remembered, wanting to put out her hand to Richie, wanting to say, I don’t mean it, let’s go home. Knowing she could not.

“This is awful,” she said finally.

“Yes.”

And it was done.

Out through the French doors the fishing boat had finally inched out of sight and the horizon was empty. Sunny pulled the dog onto her lap. And sang to her.

“Two drifters, off to see the world/There’s such a lot of world to see.”

She couldn’t remember the words right. Maybe it was two dreamers. Too much wine. The dog lapped the back of Sunny’s hand industriously, her tail thumping. Sunny sipped a little more of her wine. Got to go slow here. She sang again to the dog.

She wanted to be alone, now she was alone. And she didn’t want to be alone. Of course, she wasn’t really alone exactly. She had a husband — ex-husband — she could call on. She had friends. She had parents, even her revolting sister. But whatever this thing was, this as yet unarticulated need that clenched her soul like some sort of psychic cramp, required her to put aside the people who would compromise her aloneness. You lose, you lose; you win, you lose.

“You and me,” she said to the dog. “You and me against the world.”

She hugged the dog against her chest, the dog wriggling to lap at her ear. Sunny’s eyes blurred a little with tears. She rocked the dog gently, sitting on the floor with the jug of wine beside her and her feet outstretched.

“Probably enough wine,” she said out loud, and continued to rock.

One of the good things about being a woman in my profession is that there’s not many of us, so there’s a lot of work available. One of the bad things is figuring out where to carry the gun. When I started as a cop I simply carried the department-issue 9-mm on my gun belt like everyone else. But when I was promoted to detective second grade and was working plainclothes, my problems began. The guys wore their guns on their belts under a jacket, or they hung their shirt out over it. I didn’t own a belt that would support the weight of a handgun. Some of them wore a small piece in an ankle holster. But I am 5’6” and 115 pounds, and wearing anything bigger than an ankle bracelet makes me walk as though I were injured. I also like to wear skirts sometimes and skirt-with-ankle-holster is just not a good look, however carefully coordinated. A shoulder holster is uncomfortable, and looks terrible under clothes. Carrying the thing in my purse meant that it would take me fifteen minutes to find it, and unless I was facing a really slow assailant, I would need to get it out quicker than that. My sister Elizabeth suggested that I had plenty of room to carry the gun in my bra. I have never much liked Elizabeth.

At the gun store, the clerk wanted to show me a Lady-Smith. I declined on principle, and bought a Smith & Wesson .38 Special with a two-inch barrel. With a barrel that short you could probably miss a hippopotamus at thirty feet. But any serious shooting I knew anything about took place at a range of about three feet, and at that range the two-inch barrel was fine. I wore my .38 Special on a wider-than-usual leather belt in a speed holster at the small of my back under a jacket.

Which is the way I was wearing it on an early morning at the beginning of September as I drove through a light rain up a winding half-mile driveway in South Natick, dressed to the teeth in a blue pant suit, a white silk tee shirt, a simple gold chain, and a fabulous pair of matching heels. I was calling on a lot of money. The driveway seemed to be made of crushed seashells. There were bright green trees along each side, made even greener by the rain. Flowering shrubs bloomed in serendipitous places among the trees. The whole landscape, refracted slightly by the rain, made me think of Monet. At the last curve in the driveway the trees gave onto a rolling sweep of green lawn, upon which a white house sat like a great gem on a jeweler’s pad. The vast front was columned, and the Palladian windows seemed two stories high. The drive widened into a circle in front of the house, and then continued around back where, no doubt, unsightly necessities like the garage were hidden.

As soon as I parked the car a black man wearing a white coat came out of the house and opened the door for me. I handed him one of my business cards.

“Ms. Randall,” I said. “For Mr. Patton.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the black man said. “Mr. Patton is expecting you.”

He preceded me to the door and opened it for me. A good-looking black woman in a little French maid’s outfit waited in the absolutely massive front hallway.

“Ms. Randall,” the man said and handed the maid my card.

She took it without looking at it and said, “This way, please, Ms. Randall.”

The foyer was very air-conditioned, even though the rainy September day was not very hot. The maid walked briskly ahead of me, her heels ringing on the stone floor. If her shoes were as uncomfortable as mine, she was as stoic about it as I was. My heels rang on the stone floor, too. The foyer was decorated with some expensively framed landscape paintings, which were hideous, but probably made up for it by costing a lot. Through the French doors at the far end of the foyer I could see a croquet lawn and, beyond that, a more conventional lawn that sloped down to the river at the far bottom.

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