The Ninth Wife by Amy Stolls Page B

should go.”
    “Of course. Right. I think your friend wants her phone back, too. I just wanted to say I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance to say good-bye last night. I had to run off to a gig.”
    “That’s okay. You missed all the excitement.”
    “So I hear. And I missed your pie, which Gabrielle tells me is to die for.”
    “I pay her to say that.”
    “I doubt that. Listen, can I make it up to you? Would you like to get together?”
    Bess smiles and mouths, Thank you up to the heavens. “Sure.”
    “I’m playing fiddle Tuesday night at the Four P’s in Cleveland Park. I was thinking you could come by. I’m on at eight, but come by anytime.”
    “Okay. Sure. I’ll see you then.” She hangs up before Gabrielle gets back on and says something embarrassing that he could hear. She feels giddy. He asked me out! Hallelujah!
    She’s in the shade now that it’s spread across the table and she shivers from a slight breeze. She holds the Chinese ginger jar and traces its design with her fingertip. How will she protect this delicate vase? It looks too easy to drop or crush. She’s already seeing it in pieces on the table, sharp-edged and dusty. She leaves it for the moment and enters the house. “Hello?” she calls out. She makes her way to the kitchen. Her grandfather is standing by the back window looking out with his hands clasped behind him. He is wearing a threadbare undershirt. The old wrinkled skin on his arms like that of rotten apples hangs on his bones, soft and easily bruised. She could cry for him he looks so vulnerable. “Gramp. You okay?” He looks at her as if he doesn’t recognize her. “Gramp?”
    “Oh, Bessie dear,” he says with little breath behind it.
    “Gramp, where’s Gram? Where’s your shirt?”
    “I don’t know.”
    Bess notices black and blue marks on his arms now that she is standing next to him. Maybe he really is losing his balance and bumping into things. Maybe he needs help, more help than she can give. She turns to look out the window with him, at the old cherry tree and the empty pond. “What are you going to do with all your mannequins?” she asks. But he doesn’t answer. He looks so old, and so lovable. “It’ll be all right,” she says, and reaches out to hold his hand.

Chapter Eight
    I carry around the weight and shame of those years after Lorraine like a hunchback. Sometimes the shame is all I have. My memories are foggy at best. My downward spiral started slow: one drink here, another there to drown out the loneliness. Beer turns to hard liquor, and liquor empties the pockets so you find yourself in seedier places where the local barflies gather around you like fresh dung. Twenty-four years old and three failed marriages, for Christ’s sake. Not to mention my brother dead and gone and me missing the last six years of his life.
    So predictably, I lost my job. I packed up my things and thought it was high time I saw America, for real this time . . . the whole big expanse of it. I hitchhiked from one place to the next, playing my fiddle for handouts and sleeping in two-bit motels, you know the kind that advertise “No Pests,” and you know if they’re advertising that, that’s the least of your worries. I had some skirmishes, but mostly I was okay and after about six months this one trucker said, You like drinking? Gambling? You should go to Vegas , and that’s just what I did.
    I don’t like talking about my year there. It’s hard to be filled with so much regret, and it was regret galore even then, immediate regret, which is the only way I know to talk about my drunken mistake of a marriage to Fawn Gilman.
    Let me tell you straight out that Fawn was twice my age: I was twenty-six, she was fifty-two, and she found that hilarious. In fact, just about everything was hilarious to Fawn. She was hyped up on you-name-it most of the time, coke and martinis mostly, and everything about me—and me and her together—was just too damn funny to her. We met at