Husband number four was a complete washout. We were only married for six months – five months of which I spent working on a divorce that wouldn't ruin me. After that divorce, I swore off men, took my maiden name back, moved back into this little house I’d inherited from my father and had lived in off and on between husbands, and started reading Tarot cards and selling herbs for a living — two things I'd learned from reading a lot of medieval history.

  Husband Number Three was and is my favorite ex-husband – in fact, I'm not at all sure why we got divorced. Just habit probably. We go out to lunch together when he’s in town on a buying trip and meet often at Jack and Denny’s Barton House where he stays.

  Vicente Bizet y Hidalgo, about six feet of elegant good looks, lives in Mexico City where he runs an import/export business of remarkable profitability. He buys stuff at deep discount here in Denver and sells it out of a big, beautifully decorated store in the Zona Rosa. Vicente is a great bargain hunter – as an experienced ex-shopper, I know. He doesn't come to Denver to buy anything in particular, just whatever he can get at bargain prices. He gets the Denver Post down there in Mexico City, and when he sees a liquidation or close-out, he makes some phone calls and flies up here, loads up the stuff he's already bought, does some more shopping, and flies back. One time we went out to Randolph's Furs before they went out of business and bought out their entire stock of mink, ermine, and lambskin coats. I know Americans who have shopped at Vicente's store and come back crowing that they've scored a major Mexican bargain. I don't tell them that they've only brought it back across the border. I believe Vicente is generously supporting the families of several Mexican customs agents.

  The second Tuesday in March, Vicente and I had agreed to meet at The Buckhorn Exchange, the oldest restaurant in Denver with Liquor License # 1 framed on its rustic walls. It looked like the General Store you see in Western movies: a flat roofed, false-fronted wallflower next to the Light Rail and D&RG tracks. You can only get to it one way, and if you don't know that way, you can forget about eating locally sourced elk steaks, rattlesnake tacos and hot apple pie. In Denver, at least.

  Vicente was at a corner table taken up mostly by a vase of gladioli. The glads were glad and so was I. He stood as I entered and pulled out my chair. As always, he was impeccably dressed in a silver-gray alpaca jacket over the lightest of gray shirts. His warm brown eyes told me he was glad to see me, while I pretended to be only mildly charmed.

  After kissing each other’s cheeks and a little small talk, we started with smoked trout and moved on to the quail. Vicente washed his down with a Wynkoop IPA. I was jealous, but made do with a bottle of Perrier.

  "I ran over Cliff Boyle yesterday," Vicente said around his napkin.

  " 'Ran into,'" I corrected. There are some expressions in English that are nearly impossible to get right. "Really? Where?"

  " 'Ran into'? How can that be? I didn't run into him."

  "No, it's just an expression. You only run over things literally, like with a car or something."

  "I thought that was running across." Vicente lowered his voice for dramatic effect. "I ran across my grandmother in the driveway."

  I laughed. “No, you only run across something you've lost. Or forgotten about. Like an old letter, or a picture, or something."

  "Stupid."

  "Mm. So where did you run into him?"

  "Oh. Well, you know that big decoration place down on Broadway?" I didn't. "No, you know the place I mean. The one with the very, very large ... sculpture? The big yellow piece of steel in the shape of a sort of twisted staircase ..."

  "Oh! The Design Centre."

  "That's it. One of the places that specializes in brass things was liquidating. Well, they say they're going out of business, but I think they are doing some kind of tax cheating, perhaps one of these Chapter 11 things. You know, I see this very often, it is an abuse, and very harmful to small businesses that are really struggling. I knew a man once who simply shipped all of the cash from his business here in Colorado to California. Put it into some kind of orange juice machine business in which he was a silent partner. Then, when all the money was gone – poof! Chapter 11 ..."

  "You were talking about Cliff Boyle."

  “Oh, yes. Sorry. Anyway, I saw Cliff there at that brass shop. He was looking for light fixtures, or some such thing, I can't remember exactly. It seems he's gone into the land development business. Here," he reached into his inside jacket pocket, retrieved his wallet, and pulled out a business card. "Yes. Land and industrial development." He passed the card over to me.

  It was a tan deckled card with assertive red print. Cliff Boyle. HomeLand Development, Inc., Land and Industrial Development, an address up on Capitol Hill, email address, phone, and mobile numbers. I passed the card back. "How long has he been in town? Did he say?"

  "Just a couple of years I gather. What would you say to perhaps a dinner with him one night?"

  "That would be fun, wouldn't it?"

  "Yes, I think so. Interesting what happens to one's friends, don't you think?”

  "Indeed," I said.

  Cliff Boyle wasn’t his real name, actually. Vicente and I had never known his real name. We met Cliff in Mexico City where he had washed up after a bit of unpleasantness with a bogus investment scheme. At the time, I was teaching medieval history for a small liberal arts college. One of my colleagues moonlighted as a kind of reverse “coyote,” getting people work and living quarters in Mexico. He had arranged a new identity and a place to live for Cliff until the problems with the bogus investment scheme cooled off. After they did, in those pre-internet days, Cliff had briefly returned to Denver and stayed with me for about a week and a half at my father’s house while he was looking for a place to live. After that, I lost track of him.

  A few years later, I was visiting Vicente in Mexico City. At about 10:00 one lovely evening in early July, we were having dinner in the Zona Rosa. There was a light damp breeze wafting the scent of lime and fajitas under the bougainvillea arbor covering the sidewalk. The air was magical: somehow the breeze had swept away the pall of car exhaust, and left the city in a cinematic clarity, sparkling lights between the black sky and the shining rain-blackened pavement. The open, lighted windows of the 18th century mansion across the street revealed constantly changing scenes: a woman checking her stockings, two men chatting over glittering glasses, an empty room with an ornate gold mirror, a little girl twirling in a bright pink dress.

  An exceptionally noisy group of Americans occupied a big table at the far end of the cafe. Birthday toasts were in progress with attendant hilarity and climaxing with cries of "Speech! Speech!" and much banging on glassware. A man of about my age stood up. He was wearing a beautifully cut summer gabardine suit, no tie, and an immaculate shirt of the color usually referred to as "diamond white." I immediately recognized Cliff Boyle.

  "Would you like to invite him over?" Vicente asked.

  I thought for a few minutes. It might embarrass him that we’d recognized him, but he hadn’t recognized us. "Let's just send him a drink and see what happens."

  As soon as the drink was delivered, Cliff looked over at us, grinning hugely. "I thought it was you!" he called from his table. "Please! Join us!"

  We saw Cliff regularly after that. He had returned to Mexico not long after leaving my house and had only just begun to prosper: the beautiful suit had no brothers in his closet. After a period of chaotic adjustment, which Cliff would spin yarns about at the drop of a scotch, he'd managed to put together a small tourist service which took people out to the pyramids at Teotihuacan, the gardens at Xochimilco, on walking tours in the old Mercado behind the Zocolo, and out to Chapultepec. Gradually, his reputation grew among English-speaking tourists. I wondered aloud about his encyclopedic knowledge of Mexico City, considering he’d flunked out of college through lack of studying.

  "This is different," he would explain. "This is outdoors! This is partying and I get paid to do it!”

  I left Mexico City - and Vicente - in 2007. Ran off with soon-to-be ex-husband number four for reasons I still don't understand. I believe now that my brain had been liquefied by lack of alcohol. By 2008 I was gratefully single and seeing – just friends of course! — Vicente again. He told me that, after I left, he hadn't been able to muster the emotional will to see Cliff any more, had avoided him in fact, and then lost track of him entirely.

  "Interesting what happens to one's friends, don't you think?"

  "Indeed," I said, recollecting myself. “I wonder how he ended up back here? Yes, let's have dinner with him next time you're in town. At my house."

  "Are you sure? He seems very ... successful ... these days."

  "You mean, you think my house isn't exactly the Brown Palace?"

  Vicente nodded, smiling.

  "Oh, this is just Cliff Boyle!" I laughed. Vicente was still looking doubtful. "No, really, he'll get a kick out of being back in the same old hovel he cowered in long ago. Do him good."

  "Vera, this is dinner, not a course of antibiotics."

  I laughed. "OK, OK. The Brown, then."

  Vicente smiled. I knew he would. He always liked the Brown.

  “Speaking of old friends,” I said around a bite of hot apple pie Vicente and I were sharing, “Are you up for lunch at Jack and Denny’s next time you’re in town? Jack has asked me a couple of times.”

  “Of course! This is always a barrel of monkeys – Denny is such a good cook and Jack is very agreeable.

  “I think you mean ‘barrel of laughs’,” I giggled. Vicente laughed and raised his wine glass to me.

  After lunch, Vicente and I went shopping, happy and comfortable together as always. Around eight o'clock, I drove him out to the airport.

  "Why not come home with me?" he said, as always.

  "This is fine," I answered, as always. "Let's just enjoy ourselves. We're both happy the way we are, and it's pointless to try to get the past back."

  "Mm," he said, cuddling aggressively. "We would be even happier in a pair."

  " 'As a couple.'" I corrected, laughing into his shirt. "'In a pair' means shoes. I'll see you next visit. Call me."

  When I got home, I pulled out my Tarot deck. I cut it and took the top card. It was the six of cups, which shows two children in a garden of star-like flowers. It is early spring; they still wear their winter mittens and hats in spite of the butterscotch sunshine gilding the cottages and church. The card signifies exactly the etymology of "nostalgia": the sweet pain of homesickness for the unrecoverable past. I shed a couple of cheap tears for the way the past slams shut behind us like a glass door, which no amount of banging upon will open.

  Chapter 4: April

  Spring in Denver is always an exercise in one's ability to take a joke. The sky is blue, the brilliant sunshine, without any greenery to take the edge off, hurts your eyes – and it's 40 degrees with an arctic wind. The next day it snows a foot and a half. The next day it floods. The next day it's 80 degrees and you're thinking petunias and tomatoes. The next day it hails.

  Shane's April rent party was an instant replay of the March rent party except that Elena didn't show up in Gerry's kitchen with a black eye – she showed up in the hospital with broken ribs.

  Bare branches were tossing under the streetlights when Gerry called on Saturday, April ninth. "I think there's something really bad going down next door," he said as soon as I picked up my phone. "Can you get right on over here?"

  "Sure," I said, looking at the waif sitting at my card-reading table. Xena had been coming around for readings lately and enjoyed looking at and asking questions about the big jars of herbs on my “dining room” shelves. She was about 20, weighed about 90 pounds, and had recently dyed the shiny tips of her hair moss green, which was the single most unbecoming shade she could have dyed it, but at least it matched her lipstick. She looked consumptive, which was, I think, the point, because upon examining her closely during the reading, I'd detected a very subtle makeup job that created shadows under her eyes and cheekbones. I realized, of course, that when she looked at me, she saw an aging granola eater with no-particular-style brown hair. I could almost hear her thinking: "moisturizer."

  "Listen, Xena," I said after hanging up, "I've got a situation I need to deal with and I need to leave immediately. Could you come back tomorrow, and we'll finish?"

  "OK," she pouted, "Um ... could you just tell me what this means?" She tapped The Hanged Man with one lime green fingertip. Three little worry lines had appeared between her perfectly shaped green brows.

  "It means, generally, a life in suspension. A time between decisions or between the parts of a life. A sort of slack tide right before the turn. It's not necessarily bad. In this position, it indicates that is where you are right now, that you are perhaps on the point of a decision or a change in your life." I couldn’t concentrate because blue and red lights were reflecting onto the ceiling in the front room.

  Xena sighed impatiently. “OK, but what's going to happen? Does this mean that Jason is ...um ... like an alcoholic or something?" She was pointing at the four of cups now, showing a young man contemplating three chalices and being handed the fourth from a cloud.

  "No, Xena, I don't think so. But I can't really do a reading piecemeal like this. Really, I have to go right now. Please come back tomorrow, or whenever, and I'll do a reading for free. Please, Xena..." and I opened the front door and held her coat out.

  She sighed again and puffed out her cheeks. “I’m just curious is all. I want to learn about these cards.” But she climbed coltishly out of her chair and paced over to her coat and out the door. I grabbed my own parka off the hook and followed her down the walk.

  "Anytime, just give me a call, Xena," I called after her.

  She had her back to me, but waggled her fingers over her head.

  Much later I would wish I hadn’t made that offer, that she’d left and never come back, that I hadn’t put her in such terrible danger.

  Two white cop cars, lights flashing, were stopped in front of Shane's house. Elena was being helped into the back seat of one of them by a stocky woman cop wearing a uniform a bit too small for her. I could hear Elena sobbing. The cop handed something else in after Elena – little baby Teo in his carrier, I realized. Then she went around to the driver's side and got in and drove away, one hoot on the siren to warn an oncoming car out of the way.

  "What's going on?" I huffed as soon as I got through Gerry's front door. "Hey, Joe," I was surprised to see him there.

  "Big goddamn fight," said Gerry, and immediately started coughing.

  "My wife heard Elena scream, two, three times," said Joe. "She told me to go on over here and get him to call." He jerked a thumb at Gerry, now hacking away in the bathroom. Experience had taught Joe that if he called, nothing would happen.

  "Where are they taking her?" I asked.

  "Don't know. Hospital maybe."

  "What makes you think so?"

  "He was thumpin’ her pretty good when I come over."

  I thought for a minute. "Denver General, probably," I said to myself mostly. I went into the kitchen and, because of course Gerry didn’t have a computer or cell phone, checked my iPhone for the hospital’s number. Looking for something to write on, I rifled a pile of old newspapers stacked in a yellow and chrome wheeled cart under the wall phone. That was the first time I ever saw Gerry's gun. It was nestled quietly between the newspapers and some old phone books, hidden, but handy.

  I called the main number for Denver General and asked if Elena Perez had been admitted. They transferred me to Patient Services. Patient Services transferred me to Admitting. Admitting transferred me to a Patient Insurance Interviewer. He transferred me to Emergency. I got disconnected. I called back and asked for Emergency. The nurse who eventually answered the Emergency Room phone sounded harried to distraction. He called the switchboard back and commanded her to transfer me back to Admitting. "Oh, here she is," said Admitting. "Elena Perez, right? She just came in a few minutes ago."

  When I got back out to the living room Gerry was sprawled on the sofa, eyes closed, his face the color of a rainy day. Joe was gone.

  The TV was murmuring, ”It was on the evening of June 8th that Sam Harrington saw a mysterious trio of three bright lights in the southern sky as he stepped onto his patio ..." I went over and touched Gerry's hand; he opened his eyes and looked up at me miserably.

  "You OK?" I asked.

  "Prob'ly not," he said. "Is Elena at the hospital?"

  "Yup."

  "Want to go over?"

  "Just waiting for you."

  "Well," Gerry heaved himself into a sitting position and waited a few seconds. "No time like the present. You driving?"

  "You don't have a car," I said.

  "You call that a car?" he said. He knows I'm touchy about my seafoam green ’95 Mercedes, bought in a moment of insanity with some of my divorce settlement from the wife-beater. It has all the mod cons: a rag top, crank down windows, AM-FM radio, illegal air conditioner, and gas mileage that sometimes climbs into the high 20's. The environmental people in Denver keep looking for ways to yank it off the road, but you can take it for a cruise up any pass in the state, and the Mercedes won't feel a thing at 65 or 70. Slide right past the lumbering Winnebagos.

 

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