Odd Hours

could not read those extraordinary blue eyes, but at least they were not bright with hostility.
    After a moment, he affectionately pinched my cheek.
    He went to the nearest window and turned his back to me, a genuine spirit watching the fog haunt the night with its legions of false ghosts.
    I recalled “It Was a Very Good Year,” a song that could be read as the sentimental and boastful recollections of an irredeemable Casanova. The poignant melancholy of his interpretation had elevated those words and that music to art.
    For him, the good and the bad years were gone, and what remained was merely forever. Maybe he resisted eternity out of fear based in remorse, though maybe not.
    The next life promised to be without struggle, but everything I had learned about him suggested that he had thrived on struggle. Perhaps he could not imagine an interesting life without it.
    I can imagine it easily enough. After death, whatever I might have to face, I will not linger on this side of the door. In fact, I might cross the threshold at a run.

 
    ELEVEN
    I DID NOT WANT TO LEAVE THE HOUSE BY THE front door. The way my luck was running, I would find the barbarian horde on the porch, about to pay a visit.
    In my dictionary, three bad guys who between them have at least one chin beard, one set of rotten teeth, and three guns qualify as a horde.
    Leaving by the back of the house meant I had to pass the parlor, where Hutch brooded about the wife and son he’d never had and about how lonely and vulnerable he was after losing them.
    I did not mind if he called me an ungrateful little shit again; that was merely rehearsal for a possible visit from a representative of the horde. The quick shower, the change of clothes, and the chat in the kitchen with Hutch had cost me twenty minutes, however, and I was anxious to locate Annamaria.
    “Odd,” he said as I tried to move past the open parlor doors with the stealth of a Special Forces op in camouflage and sound-suppressing footgear.
    “Oh, hi.”
    Roosting in his armchair with a chenille throw across his lap, as if keeping eggs warm in a bird’s nest, he said, “In the kitchen a little while ago, when we were talking about what a useful bit of wardrobe a cardigan can be…”
    “A tattered cardigan,” I qualified.
    “This may seem a peculiar question….”
    “Not to me, sir. Nothing seems peculiar to me anymore.”
    “Were you wearing pants?”
    “Pants?”
    “Later, I had the strangest impression that you hadn’t been wearing any pants.”
    “Well, sir, I never wear pants.”
    “Of course you wear pants. You’re wearing them now.”
    “No, these are jeans. I only have jeans—and one pair of chinos. I don’t consider them pants. Pants are dressier.”
    “You were wearing jeans in the kitchen?”
    As I stood in the parlor doorway, holding a bag of ice to the lump on the side of my head, I said, “Well, I wasn’t wearing chinos, sir.”
    “How very peculiar.”
    “That I wasn’t wearing chinos?”
    “No. That I can’t remember them.”
    “If I wasn’t wearing chinos, you wouldn’t remember them.”
    He thought about what I had said. “That’s true enough.”
    “Just enough, sir,” I agreed, and changed the subject. “I’m going to leave you a note about the dinner casserole.”
    Putting aside the novel he had been reading, he said, “Aren’t you cooking dinner?”
    “I’ve already made it. Chicken enchiladas in tomatillo sauce.”
    “I love your tomatillo enchiladas.”
    “And a rice and green-bean salad.”
    “Does the rice have green sauce, too?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “Oh, good. Do I heat them in the microwave?”
    “That’s right. I’ll leave a note about time and power.”
    “Could you put Post-its on the dishes?”
    “Take the Post-its off before you put the dishes in the oven.”
    “Of course. I wouldn’t make that mistake. Again. Going out?”
    “Just for a little while.”
    “You aren’t leaving for good, are you?”
    “No, sir. And I didn’t steal Corrina’s jewelry, either.”
    “I was a diamond merchant once,” Hutch said. “My wife conspired to have me killed.”
    “Not Corrina.”
    “Barbara Stanwyck. She was having an affair with Bogart, and they were going to run off to Rio with the diamonds. But, of course, something went very wrong for them.”
    “Was it a tsunami?”
    “You have a sly sense of humor, son.”
    “Sorry, sir.”
    “No, no. I like it. I believe my career would have been much bigger if I’d been