“Yeah,” she said, “but if it worked that way, then everybody would be crazy rich from scamming the races.”
“Or there’d be no races because they were scammed into ruin, and all those poor horses would be out of work.”
“So you know what that means,” she said.
“Do I?”
“Never scam. Doing the right thing is the easiest thing.”
“You heard that somewhere, did you?”
“I’ve been totally brainwashed.”
“Fathers don’t brainwash their children.”
“Bullsugar.”
“No, really. We propagandize them.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Propaganda is gentler than brainwashing. You often don’t even know it’s happening.”
“Oh, I know it’s happening, all right,” she said. “’Cause it’s like always happening.”
“You’re so terribly, terribly oppressed.”
She sighed. “I endure.”
Jeffy smiled and shook his head. The incredible, magical thing that he, a dreamer, sometimes anticipated had in fact happened a long time ago. Her name was Amity.
A slight breeze issued off the ocean, scented faintly with salt and—he believed, he knew—with exotic fragrances of far nations so subtle the nose could suspect but not quite detect their existence.
After a silence, Amity said, “So it was the right thing to wait seven years?”
“To keep hope alive for seven years. Yeah. Remaining hopeful is always the right way to be.”
“So then wouldn’t it be the right thing to wait another seven?”
“I’ll never stop hoping, sweetheart. But eventually . . . we have to move on.”
Seven years earlier, when Amity was four, Michelle walked out on them. She said that she felt empty, that nothing about her life was the way she had foreseen. She needed to get control of her destiny, and then she could come home to him and Amity.
They’d never heard from her again.
Like Jeffy, Michelle Jamison had been born and raised in sunny Suavidad Beach. Perhaps her sense that her life had gone wrong began when her mother died in childbirth.
Twenty-two years later, just a day after Michelle gave birth to Amity, her beloved father, Jim Jamison, a crew supervisor employed by the power company, was electrocuted while overseeing maintenance on a transformer in a subterranean vault.
Thereafter, Amity’s birthday inevitably reminded Michelle not only of her father’s death but also of the mother who had been lost to her on the day of her own birth. She wasn’t a pessimist, didn’t suffer from depression, was in fact a lively woman with a sparkling sense of humor and a love of life. But at times, she felt that her hometown was a haunted place, that the past would weigh too heavily on her as long as she lived there.
She went away to find herself, and evidently she never did.
Every attempt Jeffy made to locate her led nowhere. The private investigator whom he hired seven years earlier and the one he hired only a year ago failed. A determined woman could reinvent herself so effectively that anyone searching for her would need considerably more resources than Jeffy could tap. Never having known her mother, having lost her dad the day after she gave birth to Amity, beginning to lose her dream of success as a musician, she had been vulnerable. Jeffy blamed himself for failing to recognize the depth of her vulnerability. He wished he had never let her go.
By law, Michelle had been missing long enough to be declared dead by a court, but Jeffy hadn’t taken that solemn step. He refused to think it could be true. If he believed that she was happy in a new life . . . well, then she must be. Belief was a powerful force. He proceeded with a legal action only to dissolve their marriage.
This week, his petition had been approved.