Atticus

“What is it downstairs, some kind of a wake?”

“I hear they pretend a friend has played a good trick on the world and they party like they’re in on the joke.” She drank some beer and held the bottle on the mattress. “Their funerals take place a year later when they rebury the body. And then they howl with sadness.”

Atticus looked at a clock by her bed. After two. “Well, morning comes awful early,” he said.

“You know what the name Atticus means? Scott told me. Simplicity, purity, and intelligence.”

“Always making things up, that kid.”

“You two are so interesting. You’re the formidable figure he idolized and struggled not to become, and he’s who you’d be if you didn’t have all your good habits and rules and boundaries.”

“I forgot. You studied psychology.”

Renata flushed and put a hand to her face. “I just realized: I was using the present tense.”

“Hard not to,” he said.

She focused on him and then on her book. “Shall I read to you?” She took his silence as permission, and she beautifully read from Shakespeare’s King John: “‘Grief fills the room up of my absent child, lies in his bed, walks up and down with me, puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words, remembers me of all his gracious parts, stuffs out his vacant garments with his form.’” Renata closed the book and her brown eyes sorrowed as she recited, “‘Then have I reason to be fond of Grief.’”

THREE

Atticus walked out to the pool in his pajamas with hot coffee in a cup. The terra-cotta tiles were cool against his feet, but the salt air was as warm as it is in a parlor of tall windows. A gray freighter was just in sight, forcing its way so slowly it seemed stopped, and a fishing boat with Americans in sunglasses on board was angling out into

the Gulf Stream. Along the salt white beaches, Mexican boys in hotel jackets were kicking out deck chairs and cranking open big umbrellas and putting out the red plastic flags that warned of the undertow with the word peligroso. A swallow flew across the yard and alighted on an upstairs railing. The swallow cocked its head to the right, jabbed a half-smoked cigarette out of an ashtray up there, and then flew away. The cigarette stirred in the wind and rolled along the railing. The frame of the tall sliding glass door between the dining room and the terrace was harshly scratched and indented near its lock as if a pike or a crowbar had forced it open. Either it was thieves, he guessed, or like as not his son forgot his front door keys.

Water was on in a shower upstairs. Atticus finished his coffee and went back inside and turned on the gas burner under the glass coffeepot. Whispers and dish noise had awakened him at sunup as the Mayans tidied the place when their wake was over. One of them had put the Jameson’s whiskey bottle on the red kitchen windowsill. Oranges were in a pink string bag by the refrigerator; copper pans were hanging over the stove. Atticus opened a side cupboard and found it jammed with bottles of spice and vitamins and a plastic bag of chopped green weed, presumably marijuana. Atticus sighed and put a slice of Wonder bread in the toaster. Wires in the toaster glowed orange as he looked out through the sink window’s wooden louvers to an old red Volkswagen that hadn’t been there yesterday. Sketch pads and paints and rolled-up canvases overheaped the seats. His toast popped up and he spooned on jam, thinking, You’ll have to get an inventory. His coffee boiled and he turned off the gas burner. He refilled his cup and sipped from it as he wandered into the dining room. A shotgun shell of a brass lipstick case was standing upright on the sideboard. Hadn’t been there before. Mayans probably found it on the floor when they cleaned up. Atticus took off the top and saw that its blood-red tip was crumbled, and then he saw a faint trace of red on the dining room mirror he was facing.

A freshly showered Renata skipped down the steps in her pink kimono, her hair tangling wetly at her collar. “Aren’t those pajamas smart,” she said, and slipped past him to get four oranges out of the string bag in the kitchen and a paring knife out of a wooden block by the stove.

“I was fishing for compliments,” Atticus said.

“Sleep well?” she asked, but sought no answer. Sleeplessness welted her own eyes, and she seemed petulant and irritated. She halved the oranges and placed them in a juicer, then pulled the juicer’s handle down harder than the oranges demanded.

She wiped a juice glass against the pink silk. “How about some o.j.?”

“Had some.”

Renata drank juice from her glass and slapped the paring knife into the wooden block. “Weird day,” she said. Her voice harbored the hushed abrasion of a shoe on carpet.

His hand wiped a trickle from the hot-water faucet handle. Bad washer. “Looked upstairs for his wallet,” he said. “Expect the police have it still.”

“Don’t know.”

“I found this lipstick.”

She looked at it. “Oh, thanks.” She put it in her kimono pocket.

“Wasn’t my color.”

She faintly smiled. “You’re more a Spring, aren’t you.”

“Well, I try to be.”

Silence hung in the air between them like cigarette smoke.

Atticus finally asked, “Was there a break-in here? Door there looked jimmied open.”

She fell into thought and then she offered, “Either that or he lost his keys. Drunks do lose things.”