82 Desire

marked with a plastic placemat in the shape of a green and white frog, its mouth open, red tongue cocked for a plastic mosquito. The thing looked so hungry she was afraid to put her hand on it.
    “Do you know anything about me, Detective?”
    Skip shook her head, more or less mesmerized already; mesmerization was probably this one’s stock-in-trade.
    “Shall I start at the beginning?”
    “By all means.”
    “I inherited a little company from my father—little oil company in Jefferson Parish named after our family.” He spoke softly and seriously, and a sadness came into his voice. When he said “our,” he made it two syllables, a pronunciation that somehow fit the word, giving it a proprietary, almost familial feel that managed to express what it meant to him. Skip found she was feeling moved and sympathetic, though the story hadn’t even begun.
    “I grew up a child of privilege, taking everything for granted, never expecting to do anything but run my daddy’s little company and marry some nice woman and have fine sons who’d one day run the company. Well, I found the woman—Mary Alice Gingrich, God rest her soul. My wife died six months ago.”
    “I’m sorry,” Skip said, and indeed she was near tears, so complete was this man’s dejection.
    “Oh, so am I,” he said. “And would that she knew how much I loved her.” He lifted his eyes, which had been staring at his own plastic frog, the tongue of which seemed to have captured a stray cornflake. “Forgive me,” he said, and forced a smile, but it wasn’t the practiced, crinkly-eyed variety. This was a tired, apologetic one. “I have a lot of regrets these days and few people who’ll listen to me talk about them.”
    He took a sip and continued. “We had daughters instead of sons—two of them. And I was so disappointed—though not in my girls, never for a minute—just that, for the first time in my selfish, narrow life I didn’t get what I thought it was my God-given right to have. I was so disappointed I made poor Mary Alice keep on trying until we had a boy, which we didn’t until nine years after our daughter Sarah was born.”
    He looked at Skip, narrowing his eyes, perhaps, she thought, to keep her from seeing tears. “You know how they say a boy has the devil in him? Well, our boy was the devil.” He flailed a hand about. “Oh, I know all about hyperactivity and attention deficit and all the things they’ve attributed to children through the years. Sarah says that if Baxley were coming up today, he’d be diagnosed with ADHD. That may be; that may be. All I know is, first he made his mother miserable, and then his sisters, and—in the end—his father as well. When he was a baby, he cried, and when he was a toddler, he tore things up, and when he was ten or eleven, he drank, and when he was twelve, he shoplifted, and after that, he took drugs. Today, I could not honestly tell you where the boy is. He used to ask for money, but that has now become futile.”
    He waved a hand in front of his face, as if swatting a particularly lazy fly. “But I wanted a son and I got a son, at the cost of the whole family’s happiness. Yes, that’s true, Detective. Everything was sacrificed at that altar. And I was angry because the boy was not what I expected. Angry, for God’s sake! My father had never spared the rod—and, in my arrogance, believing that was why I had turned out so almighty well, neither did I. The more I punished, the more he rebelled.”
    Skip glanced nervously at her watch—when she’d said start from the beginning, she hadn’t meant from the beginning of time. She moved her head only slightly, wondering if she should say something, but Newman caught the gesture. “Bear with me, Detective, bear with me. I’ll tell my story in its entirety, or not at all.” He was definitely a man used to getting his way.
    “Because my attention was on that evil boy—on turning him into a perfect little replica of Marion Newman, who in turn, is a near-perfect replica of my father, J. W. Newman—I neglected my wife and abused my two lovely daughters. By abused, Ms., ah, Detective, by abused, I mean I barely noticed them. Everything they did to please me—and it was considerable for a while; in Sarah’s case, it still is—was nothing to me because I was simply incapable of noticing.
    “Francine, my older daughter, took the path of over-achieving and is now a psychiatrist in Atlanta, a path I believe she followed because of