Fletch and the Widow Bradley by Gregory McDonald

around in the doorway and called his wife. “Audrey! Fletch is here.”
    “I’m just putting on a dress,” she said through the wall. She sounded like she was in the room with them.
    “Don’t need to put on a dress for me, Audrey,” Fletch said. “Wish you wouldn’t.”
    “I know that, Fletch,” she said, coming into the room and putting her arms around his neck. “But Alston’s home, and we don’t want to embarrass him, right?” She kissed him on the mouth.
    “Right.”
    “Right,” Alston said. “Now would you like a drink?”
    He had picked up his pewter beer stein from the top of the television. Alston had bought the Austrian-style beer stein in Tokyo, Japan, when he and Fletch had been there on Rest and Recuperation.
    “No, thanks.” Audrey had sat on the divan. Fletch flopped into the single chair. “Moxie’s got me going to this cocktail party at her theater tonight.”
    “Moxie?” Alston smiled down at him. “Is Moxie back on the scene?”
    “Yeah. I guess so. Come to think of it, she is. Bumped into her ata hot dog stand the other day. She’s doing her thing—pretending that was the first time we ever met.”
    “That’s Moxie,” Alston said.
    “That’s Moxie.”
    “Did you say she’s pretending you two just met for the first time, the other day?” Audrey laughed.
    “Yeah. Come to think of it, she is.”
    “Moxie, Moxie,” Alston said into his beer.
    “Maybe it is the first time we ever met,” Fletch said. “Moxie is a lot of different people, you know.”
    “All of them women,” Alston said.
    “Moxie’s an actor,” Fletch said, “whether she wants to be or not. She gets into an elevator and uses everybody else standing there as a captive audience. Once in a crowded elevator she turned to me and said,
Really, Jake, it hain’t fair I got pregnant, when you said I wouldn’t—you bein’ my brother and all. What you go sayin’ it wasn’t possible for, when it was, alla time? You heard what the doctor just said—don’t make no difference you bein’ my brother. You tol’ me a tootin’ lie, Hank
.”
    Laughing, Audrey said, “What did you do, Fletch?”
    “Well, the temperature in the elevator went up to about one-hundred-and-thirty degrees fahrenheit. Every one was glowering at me. I wasn’t sure I was going to get out of there alive.”
    “What did you do?” Audrey asked.
    “I said,
Can’t be sure it was me, Stella. Might ha’ been Paw
.”
    Alston slopped a little beer onto his shirt laughing.
    “Was that the last time you two split?” Audrey asked.
    Fletch thought a moment. “Time before that, I think. Last time, her father called from Melbourne, Australia, sobbing, saying he needed her to come play Ophelia, or he had to cancel the tour. She was packed and gone within fifteen minutes.”
    “I never knew Moxie played Ophelia in Australia,” Audrey said.
    “She didn’t. She got there and the role had been filled. Freddy didn’t even remember telephoning her. He said,
How nice of my little girl to come all this way to see her old daddy!
Something like that. Old bastard didn’t even pay her way out, or back. She worked six months on a sheep ranch. Loved every minute of it. Said it was the best time of her life.”
    “So now she’s pretending … what?” Audrey asked. “That you two never met before?”
    “Yeah. She pretends we just met and then refers to a knowledge of me going back years. Sort of eerie.”
    “You two,” Alston said. “Birds of a feather cluck together.”
    “You’re both nuts,” Audrey amplified. “Why don’t you get married? I mean, neither of you should marry anyone else.”
    “Moxie will never marry,” Fletch said. “She has this strange, necessary thing with being in love with whoever she’s playing at the moment. Anyhow, she blames ol’ Freddy for putting her mother in the hospital.”
    “Is she afraid she’ll put you in the hospital?” Alston asked. “Fat chance.”
    “Making love to her has always been