And so Mark Hall maintained a pretence of friendship with Larry Crane, sharing a drink with him when there was no way to avoid doing otherwise, even inviting him to that goddamned ruinous wedding, though his wife had made it clear that she didn’t want either Larry or his slovenly wife sullying her daughter’s special day with their presence, and sulked for a week when he informed her that he was paying for the whole fucking day and if she had a problem with his friends, then maybe she should have put more money into her bank account so that she could have paid for the entire wedding herself. Yeah, he’d told her all right. He was a big guy, a great guy, swearing at his wife to cover his own shame and guilt.

Hall figured that he had something on Larry Crane too: after all, they had both been there together, and both were complicit in what had occurred. He’d allowed Larry to dispose of some of what they had found, then had accepted his share of the money gratefully. The cash had enabled Hall to buy a piece of a used car dealership, and he built upon that initial investment to make himself the auto king of northeast Georgia. That was how he was depicted in his newspaper ads and in the TV commercials: he was the Auto King, the Number One Ruler on Prices. Nobody Beats the Auto King. Nobody Can Steal His Crown When It Comes to Value.

It was an empire built on good management, low overheads, and a little blood. Just a little. In the context of all the blood spilled during the war, it was hardly more than a spot. He and Larry never spoke about what happened after that day, and Hall hoped that he would never have to speak of it again until the day he died.

Which, curiously, was kind of what happened, in the end.

Sandy Crane sat on a stool by the kitchen window, watching her husband wrestle a garden hose like he was Tarzan trying to subdue a snake. Bored, she puffed on her menthol cigarette and tipped some of the ash into the sink. Her husband always hated it when she did that. He said it made the sink reek of old mints. Sandy thought the sink stank pretty bad already, and a dab of ash wasn’t going to make a whole lot of difference. If he didn’t have the smell of her cigarettes to whine about, she had no doubt that he would find something else. At least she got a little pleasure out of smoking, which went some way toward helping her to put up with her husband’s shit, and it wasn’t like those fucking cheap cartons that Larry bought for himself smelled any better.

Larry was squatting now, trying to untangle the hose, and failing. It was his own fault. She had told him often enough that if he rolled it up properly instead of throwing it half-assed into the garage, then he wouldn’t have these problems, but then Larry wasn’t one to take advice from anyone, least of all his wife. In a way, he spent his life trying to get out of messes that he created for himself, and she spent her life telling him that she’d told him so.

Speaking of half-assed, the cleft of Larry’s buttocks was clearly visible above the waistband of his pants. She could hardly bear to see him naked now. It pained her, the way everything about him sagged: his buttocks, his belly, his little shriveled organ, now practically hairless like his little shriveled head. Not that she was any bargain herself, but she was younger than her husband and knew how to make the best of what she had and how to hide her deficiencies. A number of men had learned, just a little too late, how deficient Sandy Crane was once her clothes hit the floor, but they’d screwed her anyway. A lesser woman wouldn’t have known whom to despise more: the men or herself. Sandy Crane didn’t worry too much about it and, as in most other areas of her life, settled for despising everyone but herself equally.

She had met Larry when he was already in his fifties, and she was twenty years his junior. He hadn’t been much to look at, even then, but he was in a pretty good position financially. He owned a bar and restaurant in Atlanta, but he sold out when the “faggots” started making the area their own. That was her Larry: dumber than a busload of tongueless morons, so prejudiced that he was incapable of seeing that the gays who were moving into the neigborhood were infinitely classier and wealthier than his existing clientele. He sold the business for maybe a quarter of what it was now worth, and he had seethed over it ever since. If anything, it had made him even more of a sexist, racist bigot than he ever was before, which was saying something, because Larry Crane was already only a couple of holes in a pillowcase away from putting burning crosses in people’s backyards.

Sometimes she wondered why she bothered staying with Larry at all, but the thought was quickly followed by the realization that snatched moments in motel rooms or in other women’s bedrooms were unlikely to be translated into long-term relationships with a sound financial underpinning. At least with Larry she had a house, and a car, and a moderately comfortable lifestyle. His demands were few, and growing fewer now that his sex drive had deserted him entirely. Anyway, he was so coiled up with piss and fury at the world that it was only a matter of time before he had a stroke or a heart attack. That garden hose might yet do her a favor, if she could learn to keep her mouth shut for long enough.

She finished her cigarette, lit another from its dying embers, then tossed the butt in the waste disposal. The newspaper lay on the table, waiting for Larry to return from his labors so that he could have something else to complain about for the rest of the day. She picked it up and flipped through it, conscious that this simple act would be enough to get her husband pissed. He liked to be the first to read the newspaper. He hated the smell of perfume and menthol upon its pages, and raged at the way she wrinkled and tore it as she read, but if she didn’t look at it now, then it would be old news by the time she got to it; old news, what’s more, with Larry’s toilet stink upon it, since her husband seemed to concentrate best when he was sitting on the can, forcing his aged body to perform another racked, dry evacuation.

There was nothing in the newspaper. There never was. Sandy didn’t know quite what she expected to find in there every time she opened it. She just knew that she was always disappointed when she was done. She turned her attention to the mail. She opened all of it, even the letters addressed to her husband. He always bitched and moaned when she did that, but most of the time he ended up passing them on to her to deal with anyway. He just liked to pretend that he still had some say in the matter. This morning, though, Sandy wasn’t in the humor for his bullshit, so she just ripped into what was there in the hope that it might provide her with a little amusement. Most of it was trash, although she laid aside the coupon offers, just in case. There were bills, and offers of bum credit cards, and invitations to subscribe to magazines that would never be read. There was also one official-looking manila envelope. She opened it and read the letter within, then reread it to be sure she’d picked up all of the details. Attached to the letter were two color photocopies of pages from the catalog of an auction house in Boston.

“Holy shit,” said Sandy. “Sweet holy shit.”

Some ash fell onto the page from her cigarette. She brushed it off quickly. Larry’s reading glasses lay on the shelf beside his vitamins and his angina medication. Sandy picked them up and gave them a quick clean with a kitchen towel. Her husband couldn’t read for shit without his glasses.

Larry was still struggling with the hose when her shadow fell across him. He looked up at her.

“Get out of the light, dammit,” he said, then saw what she had done to his newspaper, which, in her distracted state, she had tucked untidily under her arm.