82 Desire

her own unhappiness in this family. She is also an activist in the lesbian community, and I have to wonder if this is a path she chose for the lack of good male models.”
    This guy , Skip thought, gives new meaning to the term “self-flagellation.” But if what he was saying was right, he no doubt deserved as much punishment as he’d meted out to poor Baxley and the girls. The fact that he had thought it out so well gave it a revolting fascination.
    “You’re thinking of The Ancient Mariner, aren’t you?”
    “The wedding guest, actually,” Skip said, and Newman was suddenly seized by great, shaking fits of laughter.
    “I like you, girl. You’re a breath of fresh air.”
    “Actually, Mr. Newman, I’m a police officer…”
    “How come a cop knows her Coleridge?”
    This line of inquiry always infuriated her. She didn’t let it go. “You sure are a man who divides people into roles you think they should fit.”
    To her surprise he had another laughing fit. “Touché, Ms. Detective. I deserved that. But your point is well taken. You are a police officer, however overeducated. Let us get back to making good use of the taxpayers’ money.” He looked around him, as if hoping to get his bearings. “Where was I?”
    “Francine.”
    “Ah, yes.” He shook his head. “Francine. I am not her favorite person. As I say, she took the path of over-achievement, and Sarah …” He swept an arm around him, indicating his surroundings “… Sarah settled. She married the first boy who was nice to her, and to our surprise, the marriage worked. Or works, I should say. Sarah and Larry Neville are still married today, but I never expected to see my daughter the wife of an HVAC man.” He paused. “Living in Belle Chasse. Are you familiar with that term—HVAC? Neither was I till I had occasion to learn it. Heating, Ventilation, and Air-Conditioning. Quite a good business. I don’t know if you see what I’m getting at. If I had raised either of my girls to take over the business—to care about it at all—things might have been different. Maybe somebody— somebod y—could have talked some sense into me.
    “As it happened, we were doing all right, while all around us, many wells were playing out, becoming less and less profitable. It was bound to happen to me sometime, but this was our family business and perhaps I still had some absurd notion that Baxley would turn around and I would pass the business to my son. This is where United Oil comes in—they made me an offer and I refused it. I had no one to advise me, no one else who had a stake in the business…”
    His head moved from side to side in unconscious regret, and Skip forbore to ask the obvious: What about your wife? This was a man to whom a professional woman was an “overachiever,” a cop who knew a poem was “overeducated”; not a man who ran decisions past his wife.
    In the hope of speeding things up, Skip said, “You lost the company?”
    He laughed. “Bide your time, young woman. Just bide your time.”
    What a control freak , she thought. He must run Sarah a merry chase.
    “I ran that company for fifteen years, exactly the way my daddy ran it before me, and we ran it just like everyone else in the parish runs their company. Now, I’m not making excuses, I’m just telling you. We were as honest as anybody else, but maybe we weren’t all that careful about the royalties we paid to the landlord—the people we leased the oil field from. Maybe we were a little late, maybe we were a little inaccurate—but we did the best we could.”
    Oh, sure.
    “And one day, out of the clear blue, we got word that we were about to be audited by the State Mineral Board. Now why didn’t this happen to everybody else in the parish? Why didn’t it happen to United Oil? I don’t know why it didn’t, but my company ended up having to make a huge settlement with the fellow to avoid a suit and a scandal and criminal charges and everything else, and the upshot was, we went bankrupt. And now I live in Belle Chasse with Sarah and Larry and Jimmy. Mary Alice did, too, until she died. You know how hard this was on that woman? We used to live in a great big house out by the lake. She had the most beautiful garden you ever saw—loved her roses. And of course, she had her bridge group and her church … and then she had a bankrupt husband who was known to be ‘in some kind of trouble.’”
    Skip shook her head and said, “Mmmph,” to show her sympathy.
    He