“She’s only a kid, Dad,” Clete blurted.
“She’s what, eighteen, nineteen years old,” his father said. “That’s old enough.”
“And she looked at him as if he gives milk,” Alicia said. “Everybody at the English was talking.”
“That is quite enough!” Claudia Carzino-Cormano flared. “You’re embarrassing Cletus. That includes you, Jorge!”
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sp; El Coronel did not seem at all repentant, but he moved to another subject.
“We have decided, your mother and I, about the travel arrangements for tomorrow,” he announced to the girls, then stopped. “Why don’t we go into the house? I don’t suppose that you have any champagne chilled, Claudia?”
“You can have coffee. You have had quite enough champagne.”
“A few glasses…”
“Most of two bottles. You convinced yourself that Cletus wrecked the airplane, and that it was your fault. Coffee!”
“As you wish,” Frade said, and marched across the verandah as if he owned it, to sit in a leather armchair. To judge by the cigar humidor and ashtray on a table beside it, he had used the chair before. He opened the humidor, extended it to Clete, who took one of the large black cigars inside.
“I was not at all concerned with Cletus’s ability to fly the airplane. I thought perhaps he had mechanical difficulties, or ran out of fuel.”
“Or became lost, or the wings or the engine fell off. You have an active imagination, precioso, and it was running at full speed.”
“I was speaking of the travel arrangements for tomorrow,” el Coronel said, changing the subject. Again he addressed Isabela and Alicia. “This afternoon, Enrico will come here in the station wagon for the luggage. He and Señora Pellano will carry it to my house, where she will arrange things for your stay. In the morning, your mother and I will drive to Buenos Aires in my Horche, and you will go with Cletus in his Buick. You will have to direct him to my house, as he does not know the way.”
“Is he going to the funeral?” Isabela asked, surprised. Unpleasantly surprised, it was immediately clear.
“Of course he is,” Claudia Carzino-Cormano said quickly, and a little sharply. “Jorge was his cousin.”
“If I have a choice in the matter, I would prefer to drive into Buenos Aires this afternoon with Enrico in the station wagon,” Isabela said.
What did I ever do to you, honey? As far as I’m concerned, I don’t want to go to the goddamned funeral in the first place, and so far as I’m concerned, you can walk to Buenos Aires.
“You will not go with Enrico and Señora Pellano in the station wagon,” her mother said flatly. “It would be unseemly for Cletus and Alicia to travel alone.”
“And it won’t be unseemly for him to be at the funeral?”
“You are excused, Isabela,” Claudia Carzino-Cormano said furiously.
Claudia waited until the sound of Isabela’s high heels on the tile floor of the house had died.
“I’m am so sorry, Cletus,” she said. “I apologize.”
“Did I somehow give offense?”
“She was close to Jorge,” Claudia said.
“Not really,” Alicia added. “But now that he’s dead, she’s convinced herself she was in love with him.”
Her mother looked angrily at her.
“That’s a terrible thing to say!”
“It’s true. She’d wear widow’s black if she thought she could get away with it. It draws attention to her.”
Claudia glowered at her, then shrugged her shoulders and let the remark go unchallenged.