Animal Appetite

Gareth. Brat.”
    “Jack called her Brat?”
    Tracy’s eyes flashed. “Not in a mean Way. It was his pet name for her. When she was little, I guess, she had a
    hard time getting out ‘Bronwyn Andrews’—it was sort of a mouthful—and the way she said it, it sounded like ‘Brat.’ ”
    “Tracy, how did you end up going to Jack’s funeral? It seems...”
    She put down her fork and licked her lips. “I read about Jack’s death in the paper. No one told me. Who would’ve? And of course, I never called him. Not even at work. He’d call me now and then from there. And he wrote to me. It seems funny, but he did. Jack had a sort of old-fashioned streak. He’d send notes. Not love letters, nothing like that. Just about what he was doing, shows we’d been to, judges, dogs, where we’d meet, that kind of thing. He died—he was murdered—on a Monday night. Monday, November fourth. I didn’t find out until I read the obituary.” Her voice broke. She reached into her purse, fished around, found a tissue, and blew her nose.
    “I’m so sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to...”
    “It’s okay. I’m all right. It’s just that... I never talk about him. My brother, Jim, knows, but he doesn’t want to hear about him.”
    “What does Drew...?”
    Tracy’s narrow shoulders moved almost imperceptibly back. Instead of giving me an immediate, direct answer, she said, “I’m not the only single parent around.”
    “Far from it. Besides, it’s none of my business.”
    “Drew knows his father died. He knows I’ve never been married. But Jim had lost his wife only a few months before Jack died, so Drew more or less grew up thinking that, uh, parents died, I guess. That it was normal. Marguerite, my sister-in-law, died of leukemia, and Jim needed help raising their kids. So, right after the funeral, I quit my job and moved up here.”
    “Tracy, where did you hear the suggestion that Jack might have killed himself? Unless I missed something, it wasn’t in the paper.” For some reason, I felt as if she wouldn’t want me to look at her while she answered. I fiddled around with what remained of my lobster meat, dunked a piece in the mayonnaise, and ate it.
    Eventually, she said, “Like I told you, I went to Jack’s funeral. I was scared shitless. I don’t know what I expected. That someone would come up to me and...? I don’t know. Anyway, no one did.”
    “You went all alone?”
    “I didn’t have anyone to go with,” she said. “Unless you count Drew. I was two months’ pregnant. As soon as I...” She broke off. “I must’ve read Jack’s obituary a hundred times. It was like, if I read it enough, it’d be someone else. I wasn’t in my right mind. So, the funeral was the next day. I didn’t have a lot of time to think it over. And I just went. Maybe it sounds crazy, but I couldn’t just let Jack die and do nothing. And I had this weird sense that he was... This is nuts, but I had this sensation that he was still alive, that the whole thing was made up. Or if it wasn’t, he’d want me to be there. Or maybe both: that if I didn’t go, he’d be hurt that I’d stayed away. It’s crazy, but that’s how I felt.”
    “It doesn’t sound crazy to me. It sounds like grief.”
    “Well, it sure was. You know, I never expected him to leave her. It wasn’t one of those deals. Jack never made any false promises.”
    “I didn’t think he had.”
    “Well, he didn’t. And I never pressured him. I was going to have an abortion. I wasn’t going to tell him. Jack was never going to know. Then... This is going to sound even crazier, but I guess what made me change my mind was finding Chip.”
    “You’ve lost me.”
    The smile was back again, mischievous and capricious.
    “You found Chip?” I asked.
    “Not exactly. Well, yes and no. I mean, I co-owned Chip, so you couldn’t really say I stole him.”
    “Tracy, Brat Andrews told me that Shaun McGrath killed Chip. You know who Shaun was?”
    “Jack’s partner. But he didn’t—”
    “Tracy, it is widely assumed that Shaun murdered Jack.”
    The news seemed to hit her as a total surprise. At Jack’s funeral, she said, everyone had been whispering about suicide, about how he’d poisoned himself. To the best of her knowledge, the suspicion of murder had been hers alone. She’d kept her eye on the newspapers for anything to do with Jack’s death. Newspapers had been her only source of information. She’d evidently never heard of Mass.