I know—I’d beaten him up once, for leaving.
But it was clear he had to finish.
No one could live like this.
* * *
—
Finally, he did it, he traversed the McAndrew steps.
An old lady answered the door.
She had permed and colored hair—and me, I disagree with him, for this door, it did get glorious, and it was all in the showing up for it.
“Can I help you?”
And Clay, at his very worst, and very best, said, “I’m sorry to bother you, Mrs. McAndrew, but if you don’t mind, is there a chance I could talk to your husband? My name’s Clay Dunbar.”
The old man in the house knew the name.
* * *
—
At the Novacs’ place, they knew him, too, but as the boy they’d seen on the roof.
“Come in,” they said, and they were both so maddeningly sweet to him; so kind to him it hurt. They made tea, and Ted shook his hand, and asked how he was. And Catherine Novac smiled, and it was a smile to keep from dying, or crying, or maybe both; he couldn’t quite decide.
Either way, when he told them, he made sure not to look where she’d sat that day, when they’d listened to the race down south—when the big bay horse had failed. His tea was cold and untouched.
He told them what Saturday night meant.
The mattress, the plastic sheet.
He told them of Matador in the fifth.
He said he loved her from the very first time she’d talked to him, and it was his fault, it was all his fault. Clay cracked, but didn’t break, because he deserved no tears or sympathy. “The night before she fell,” he said, “we met there, we were naked there, and—”
He stopped because Catherine Novac—in a shift of ginger-blondness—had stood and she’d walked toward him. She lifted him gently out of his chair and hugged him hard, so hard, and she patted his short flat hair, and it was so damn nice it hurt.
She said, “You came to us, you came.”
See, for Ted and Catherine Novac, there was no incrimination, at least not for this poor boy.
It was they who brought her to the city.
It was they who knew the risk.
* * *
—
Then there was McAndrew.
Picture frames with horses.
Picture frames with jockeys.