She halted on the terrace. “If not for you, Gertie would have died of septic shock.”
“We can’t know that for sure.”
“I know it.”
“What I mean is—there’s no such thing as inevitable fate.”
“On my darkest days I wonder about that,” she said.
“When one big thing changes in your life, everything after that changes, too. If you’d never met me, so many days after would have unfolded differently. Gertie might not have gotten a nosebleed, or if she got it, she might have come to you instead of packing it the way she did.”
“So you’re the cause of nosebleeds now?”
“You know what I mean.”
“If you’re the cause of nosebleeds, prove it. Give me one.”
“I’m not going to give you one.”
“I demand you give me a big, wet nosebleed right this minute.”
I shook my head. “You’re being silly.”
“I don’t think it’s silly to accuse you of false advertising. You claim to be able to provide a service, but when you’re asked to do so, you pretend to have made no such claim.”
“A nosebleed is a service?”
“No less than the service Danny Dutton provides when he comes each week to clean the swimming pool and add chemicals to the water. What would you think of him if he just went for a swim and left, no cleaning, no chemicals, a complete swimming-pool-service fraud?”
“You’re trying to make me laugh.”
“If that’s what I’m doing, it seems to be working. But what I’m really doing is trying to get the damn nosebleed you promised.”
“I might just give you one.”
“Ha! You talk big, but it’s all talk. Look at my schnozzle. Not one drop.”
“Your nose is perfect. No one would call it a schnozzle.”
“I’ll call my nose anything I want to call it—schnozzle, snoot, snout, beak, Fred.”
“You don’t call your nose Fred.”
“Yes I do. I have a masculine side, but it’s all in my nose.”
So we sort of collapsed together on a terrace bench and held each other until I stopped laughing.
Loretta said, “Never ever again say we’d have been better off without you or I’ll give you a nosebleed you’ll never forget. You’re a blessing, pure and simple. Captain Farnam is a mosquito. We’ll swat him away.”
“What about the boy?”
“Addie, Addie, Addie. Since when has a Fairchild ever been afraid of a psychopathic, paranoid, lycanthropic, devil-worshipping kleptomaniac?”
“Since never?”
“You said it. I’m pretty sure I know how Franklin intends to handle this—the same way that I want to handle it. Honey, by four o’clock Thursday afternoon, Captain Farnam will be in jail, charged with extortion, and the boy will be in whatever institution can help him, if in fact he can be helped. Easy peasy.”
Loretta and Franklin had triumphed over so much misfortune, so many reversals, and were toughened by experience. I thought maybe a scheme like Captain’s, for all its evil and potential to result in horrific violence, might nevertheless be countered and defused in ways that he lacked the sophistication to predict. As it turned out, the surprise he promised to spring if Franklin crossed him was not an empty threat. What seemed easy peasy would be anything but that. Such is the world.
