Jazz Funeral

wife, I’m not going to start being nice to you—why should I be nice to him?”
    Phil thought he was funny, and usually George would have forced a smile, might have been genuinely amused; he really couldn’t remember the man he’d been two days before, when he’d had his children, when he hadn’t felt so lacerated and naked.
    “Bicker, bicker, bicker,” he said. “Nobody in the whole damn family even knows how to be nice!”
    His brother had said, “You and Patty do it too—come on, admit it, George, you wouldn’t be a Brocato if you didn’t.”
    And before he thought, he didn’t even know what he was saying, George retorted, “We don’t care enough to bother.”
    Phil said nastily, “Well, why not, George?”
    He had no idea what his brother meant by that. He walked away, furious, huffing, but as he got in his car, the words echoed.
    Well, why not, George?
    Phil had said them so accusingly.
    Why not what? Why didn’t he and Patty care? Patty cared. She was like a leech. Why didn’t George care? Care enough to bother bickering with his wife?
    He shook his head, clearing it, wondering if he was short of air—he was sitting in the car, letting it warm up, even though it was eighty-two outside.
    It wasn’t about bickering. But his brother had asked a question that had been nibbling at the edge of his consciousness lately: Why didn’t he care?
    Patty’s who there is to love—why not love her?
    That was the question, wasn’t it? With Ham gone, with Melody gone, missing—she was only missing—with the underbrush cleared out, so to speak, he was feeling closer to Patty, needing her almost.
    This morning he’d almost forgotten what he didn’t like about her. He thought about it. There was nothing wrong with Patty. She was pretty. She was a good mother. She must be a good wife, she did everything wives were supposed to. She wasn’t Dorothy, of course …
    How could you miss a woman who’d been dead for seventeen years?
    He wasn’t exactly sure how a shrink would put it, but he thought he knew the answer, sort of—if you had half a brain, you wouldn’t. You’d get over it.
    Like a man.
    He was humiliated. Was he really in love with a dead woman? But he thought it couldn’t be—he hadn’t been that crazy about her when she was alive.
    He put the car in drive and drove away far too fast.
    Well, if I didn’t love Dorothy because she got pregnant and I got stuck with her, and then I never loved Patty because she wasn’t Dorothy, what the hell’s wrong with me?
    He’d never had a thought like that in his life.
    It’s the damn assholes! The Brocato assholes.
    Looking at them, listening to them, turned his stomach—there must be other ways to live.
    Phil lived near Audubon Park, and to George’s surprise, he found himself going there, heading for the zoo. He had a weird feeling Melody would be there—an overpowering feeling. He was as sure as he was of her name that she was there now, that he’d find her in the next few minutes. Where else would she be? It was her favorite place.
    Yet, once inside, wandering among the moms and kids, the sudden elation left him. It wasn’t such a brilliant deduction he’d made. It was the final fuck-up of a man whose whole life was a fuck-up. Not his whole life. Not his business life. Just this sleepwalking—or whatever it was—involving Dorothy and Melody and Patty.
    And Ham. Maybe Ham most of all.
    What the fuck’s wrong with me?
    I hate myself.
    The zoo wasn’t Melody’s favorite place. Melody was a young woman. He didn’t know the young woman. The zoo had been the child’s favorite. He didn’t know when she had gotten away from him.
    Or when Ham had.

CHAPTER NINETEEN
    George found Patty at home staring out the window, apparently as depressed by her efforts as he was by his. He felt a tenderness for her, an odd identification. “Baby, I know what you’re going through.”
    She looked at him in surprise. He had put his hand on her shoulder. She almost jumped.
    “Listen, I know a guy. A private detective.”
    “You mean the one Johnny Dupre got to spy on his wife?”
    “How’d you know about that?”
    “The man’s pond scum. I don’t want him anywhere near our daughter.”
    He took her hands and tried not to notice the surprise in her eyes. He felt the energy running from her body to his; it was strangely exhilarating. “Patty, I thought we agreed we were going to work together to find her.”
    “I thought we did too.”
    “Did