The Sourdough Wars

heaven he cut it off there. If he’d said, “What difference could it possibly make what she said?” thus supplying the third line of a rhyming triplet, I don’t think I could have stood it.
    I figured he was being such a putz because his friend was coming back any second and if I saw him, the game was up. “How long,” I said on impulse, “had you known Peter before he died?”
    “I beg your pardon?” He looked genuinely bewildered.
    “Forget it. Let’s go back to Sally.”
    “Very well.” Deep, resigned sigh. “She said ‘Peter’ first.”
    “I see. ‘Peter, I want to go to the bathroom’? Is that what she said?”
    He glanced at his watch. “I’ve got a lot of things to do, Rebecca.”
    This time I said nothing. I tried to make my silence as stony as possible.
    He spoke at last. “She said ‘Peter.’ And then she paused. In a minute or two she asked for a gun.”
    “A minute or two?”
    “A few seconds, Counselor. Really, why don’t you try a rubber hose?”
    “So she really said, ‘Peter…’ pause, ‘give me a gun.’ ”
    “No, no, no. She said, ‘I
need
a gun. I
need
a gun.’ Need, Rebecca,
need
.”
    “I think I’m getting the message. She said it twice then?”
    “No, no.
I
said it twice. For emphasis.”
    “And did you ask her why she needed a gun?”
    “Of course.” He shrugged. “She didn’t seem to hear me. She paused again for a long time and that’s when she said she needed a bathroom. And then she died, Rebecca. ‘Bathroom’ was her last word. Are you happy now?”
    “Indeed I’m not, Clayton.” I got up, not even needing, as Sally might have said, to simulate a snit. “I could care less what consenting adults do in private. You have no cause to be rude to me.”
    I started to walk haughtily toward the door, thinking how much more effective three-inch heels would have been than Reeboks. But Thompson caught my wrist as I tried to sail past him, seized it in a most ungentlemanly fashion. “As Southerners say,” I said, “unhand me, sir.”
    He looked at his right hand on my wrist as if it had just withered and turned black. “I’m sorry.” He croaked out the words. “So terribly sorry.” And then he did unhand me, uncurling the fingers slowly, giving the impression he’d just acquired them and they weren’t quite user-friendly. He sat down on the couch, looking pale. “My God, it’s come to this.”
    “You got a little excited and grabbed me. No big deal.”
    “I’ve never raised my hand to a woman before.”
    “Clayton, will you please lighten up? In the first place, you didn’t raise your hand to me, and in the second, you did raise your voice, and you’ve been consistently rude to me ever since I got here. I’d much rather hear you apologize for that.”
    “I
am
sorry, Rebecca. Deeply sorry. I’ve been… nervous lately.”
    I sat down, close enough to be comforting but still a respectful distance from him. I spoke softly: “You know, in San Francisco, it’s no big deal to be gay.”
    When I uttered the forbidden word, he seemed to shrink away from me, literally to move backward, though he really didn’t budge. It was as if his whole body somehow winced. I wanted to touch him, to reassure him, but touching didn’t seem to be what he wanted.
    “I was so afraid you’d come in here the other night… that you’d see Ricky. That’s why I pulled that thing about a gun. Listen, I want you to know somethin’. I paid for the smashed window at the bar, and I paid all the medical bills for the guy who got his jaw broken. That was a terrible, terrible thing I did.”
    “Chris and I would have been discreet. It’s no one’s business but yours.”
    “You won’t tell anyone?”
    “Of course not. But Rob already suspects, I guess. We both saw you with your friend the other day, and in this neck of the woods, two guys together usually means romance.”
    He sighed. “Ricky is my first—uh, man. I always knew I was different, but I never had the courage to act on it before. We were going to the Sonoma Mission Inn for the weekend—to celebrate our first week together.”
    “You mean you weren’t sent to check out Sally’s bread?”
    “Oh, that was true, all right. We were just combinin’ business with pleasure. I dropped Ricky off and went to see her. And found her dying.”
    “So you didn’t call the cops because of Ricky. You panicked and just wanted out.”
    He nodded. “I went back and picked him up and we high-tailed