Death Before Facebook

daughter. Geoff got her on the goddamn thing.”
    “I don’t understand. How did they know each other?”
    He brought his fist down on her desk. “See? See? You don’t even know. Geoff and I were close, goddamn it! Marguerite didn’t tell you that, did she? I went to see that kid every week after we got divorced, and then welcomed him into my home after I got married again; he came to see Suby in the hospital the day she was born. They were like cousins, those two. Practically brought up together.”
    “I guess I didn’t know that.”
    “That bitch Marguerite’s not gon’ tell you. I don’t know why I ever married her—I must have been crazy.”
    “Maybe you were crazy in love.”
    “With skinny ol’ Marguerite?” He sat back in his chair, regret on his face. “I tried. I really did try. But the only good thing I got out of it was Geoff.”
    “She was very beautiful, I hear.”
    He made a face. “Shee-it. I don’t know, maybe she was. She was my brother’s wife and that was the end of it. I never really paid her any attention. But Leighton, he worshiped her. Thought the sun rose and set on her. Then when he died, she just seemed so… I don’t know, so sad and small somehow. Real fragile, and real burdened. I just felt real, real sorry for her. She had that little boy—bad little kid. Really bad. But then after we were married, he just kind of settled down. He needed a father was all.”
    “Are you saying you married Marguerite because you felt sorry for her?”
    “Well, that was why I started seein’ her. I’d take her and Geoff to the movies, the Audubon Zoo—I thought it was my duty as an uncle. Leighton and I were like that.” He held up two mashed-together fingers. “It was what I had to do for his son and his widow.”
    His eyes clouded as he went back in memory. “Sometimes she’d cook me dinner. Or we’d go out to the lake and get crabs. It just seemed we were together a lot.” He shrugged, apparently trying to piece it together for himself as well as Skip. “It seemed like the thing to do to get married. It sounds kind of funny now, but I did it out of duty, sort of. Can you understand something like that?”
    “Not really.”
    He slammed his fist down again. “That’s how it was, goddamn it! You can believe it or not.”
    “I didn’t say I didn’t believe it. You asked me if I could understand it.”
    “Are you a Catholic?”
    She shook her head.
    “Well, that explains it.”
    When she said nothing, he poked at his chest with the fingers of both hands. His face got redder and redder. “I didn’t get who she was, see. I believed Leighton—did that ever happen to you? Somebody you’re close to likes somebody so much you talk yourself into that person?
    “I remember the first time I met her, I thought, this woman is trouble. She’s up to something I don’t understand. She’s gonna hurt my brother. But then she didn’t and he married her and he kept on thinking she was a saint even though she looked like a goddamn hippie. She had to do that for her job, he said. Because folksingers had to look that way. And I was so dumb I just believed him. You know what? You should always trust your first impressions. I had a lot of clues and I was too dumb to notice. Like what a bad little kid Geoff was.”
    “Bad how?”
    “He was always in your face, always asking for things, demanding things, and throwing tantrums when he didn’t get them. Nothing was ever enough for that kid. I thought it was just natural—his father dies, it upsets a kid. Ha! There’s this other thing—his mother pays no attention to him the first four years of his life, it leaves a real big hole. That’s what the kid was like—some kind of bottomless pit. Of course, Leighton and Marguerite probably fought a lot too. That probably didn’t help.”
    “I thought he thought she was a saint.”
    He looked uncomfortable. “Well, Leighton was different from me. I like a peaceful kind of woman.”
    Right. Subservient, you could even say.
    “I think he was into kissin’ and makin’ up.”
    “Why do you say that?”
    He looked down at his flat, blunt fingers, thoroughly embarrassed. “Because Marguerite was.”
    He seemed inclined to stop there, but Skip was having none of it. When he hadn’t spoken for thirty seconds, she said gently, “Oh?”
    He looked her full in the eye, apparently determined to come clean. “She got me with this helpless act. Then we get married and she wants to go out