Rating: ★★★★☆ Tags: Mystery Detective, General, Fiction

sounds like
someone’s 
on the rag
–
the guy was laying it on so thick.
Gilpin rubbed his vulpine jaw. ‘So you just wanted a
housewife,’ he said to me, making the proposition seem
reasonable.
‘I wanted – I wanted whatever Amy wanted. I really
didn’t care.’ I appealed to Boney now, Detective Rhonda
Boney with the sympathetic air that seemed at least partly
authentic. (
It’s not
, I reminded myself.) ‘Amy couldn’t decide
what to do here. She couldn’t find a job, and she wasn’t
interested in The Bar. Which is fine, if you want to stay
home, that’s fine, I said. But when she stayed home, she
was unhappy too. And she’d wait for me to fix it. It was like I
was in charge of her happiness.’
Boney said nothing, gave me a face expressionless as
water.
‘And, I mean, it’s fun to be hero for a while, be the
white knight, but it doesn’t really work for long. I couldn’t
make
her be happy. She didn’t want to be happy. So I
thought if she started taking charge of a few practical things

---

—’
‘Like the cat box,’ said Boney.
‘Yeah, clean the cat box, get some groceries, call a
plumber to fix the drip that drove her crazy.’
‘Wow, that sounds like a real happiness plan there.
Lotta yuks.’
‘But my point was, 
do something
. Whatever it is, do
something. Make the most of the situation. Don’t sit and
wait for me to fix everything for you.’ I was speaking loudly, I
realized, and I sounded almost angry, certainly righteous,
but it was such a relief. I’d started with a lie – the cat box –
and turned that into a surprising burst of pure truth, and I
realized why criminals talked too much, because it feels so
good to tell your story to a stranger, someone who won’t
call bullshit, someone forced to listen to your side.
(Someone 
pretending
to listen to your side, I corrected.)
‘So the move back to Missouri?’ Boney said. ‘You
moved Amy here against her wishes?’
‘Against her wishes? No. We did what we had to do. I
had no job, Amy had no job, my mom was sick. I’d do the
same for Amy.’
‘That’s nice of you to 
say
,’ Boney muttered. And
suddenly she reminded me exactly of Amy: the damning
below-breath retorts uttered at the perfect level, so I was
pretty sure I heard them but couldn’t swear to it. And if I
asked what I was supposed to ask – 
What did you say
? –
she’d always say the same: 
Nothing
. I glared at Boney, my
mouth tight, and then I thought: 
Maybe this is part of the
plan, to see how you act toward angry, dissatisfied women
.
I tried to make myself smile, but it only seemed to repulse
her more.

---

‘And you’re able to afford this, Amy working, not
working, whatever, you could swing it financially?’ Gilpin
asked.
‘We’ve had some money problems of late,’ I said.
‘When we first married, Amy was wealthy, like extremely
wealthy.’
‘Right,’ said Boney, ‘those 
Amazing Amy
books.’
‘Yeah, they made a ton of money in the eighties and
nineties. But the publisher dropped them. Said 
Amy
had
run her course. And everything went south. Amy’s parents
had to borrow money from us to stay afloat.’
‘From your wife, you mean?’
‘Right, fine. And then we used most of the last of Amy’s
trust fund to buy the bar, and I’ve been supporting us since.’
‘So when you married Amy, she was very wealthy,’
Gilpin said. I nodded. I was thinking of the hero narrative:
the husband who sticks by his wife through the horrible
decline in her family’s circumstances.
‘So you had a very nice lifetstyle.’
‘Yeah, it was great, it was awesome.’
‘And now she’s near broke, and you’re dealing with a
very different lifestyle than what you married into. What you
signed on for.’
I realized my narrative was completely wrong.
‘Because, okay, we’ve been going over your finances,
Nick, and dang, they don’t look good,’ Gilpin started,
almost turning the accusation into a concern, a worry.
‘The Bar is doing decent,’ I said. ‘It usually takes a new
business three or four years to get out of the red.’
‘It’s those credit cards that got my attention,’ Boney
said. ‘Two hundred and twelve thousand dollars in credit-

---

card debt. I mean, it took my breath away.’ She fanned a
stack of red-ink statements at me.
My parents were fanatics about credit cards – used
only for special purposes, paid off every month.