Page 61 of Such a Good Wife

“Sure he was,” she says right away.

“What?”

“I only remember because I had tickets to Lady Gaga that night in New Orleans. Lacy called, bawling, ’cause little Ronny Lee was sick or something. She was close to getting fired for missing shifts, so she begged me to cover.”

“You’re kidding. He was here.”

“I told her I could only do it if I could scalp the tickets and, man, I got a fortune for them, so it worked out.”

I try to be patient with her story to get to the part I need.

“What time did he come?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Late. I just remember ’cause he usually pays for extra services in the champagne room, but he didn’t that night. He was ignoring me, acting weird.”

“Weird how?”

“I don’t know. He’s usually drinking and hootin’ and hollerin’, ya know. But that night he just sat at a table by himself and didn’t look good, didn’t talk to nobody.”

I think of Joe coming here after the charity event to decompress, maybe still in shock from the crime he’d committed.

“I’m only telling you this ’cause Lacy’s messed up with him again and she’s my friend. God knows there’s plenty of shit he should go to jail for and probably never will, so if you think you got a way to do something, I’m all in.”

“Were you ever involved with him? Outside of here?”

She looks off, into the faceless cluster of bodies down the hall inside the main club room, and lights another cigarette.

“I won’t say anything to Lacy, if you don’t want me to,” I say after a minute of quiet.

“She knows already. I’m not proud of it.” She wraps one long leg around the other. Her cheekbones are high and her lips are full. Her hair, obviously once blond, now dyed a copper red, falls around her neck and she adjusts a shoe strap, unsure whether to confide in me. “They weren’t together at the time, but still. It was a shitty thing to do to a friend. He’s good though, I mean you don’t know how he can talk his way in.” I think of this dual life Joe must live. He poses in photos at charity balls and presents himself as a saint to all the single moms whose kids he coaches. He even dates high-society women now and then and probably treats them like royalty, and then he goes into the slums and lets the devil in him loose. He finds these girls who he thinks of as low-life stripper types he can string along, abuse and keep secret. It makes my stomach flip thinking of it.

“When were you seeing him?”

“Mostly in between when Lacy saw him, the weeks they were on the outs. Then I find out Angela is screwing him too, and—”

“Who’s Angela, she work here?”

“Oh. Yeah.” She gestures with a twirl of her finger to the dressing room behind us. “Luscious is her name at the club. She’s around somewhere. Thing is, we all figured out he’s a shit eventually, ya know. But Lacy, she’s in trouble. She won’t stay away.”

“What exactly did he do, what made you stop seeing him?” I ask. Her eyes fill and she sighs.

“He takes his time, ya know? He gets you to trust him real good. He brings you presents and tells you you’re beautiful. He doesn’t try anything for a good long time. Then, like out of the blue one day he’s different. He’d only ever meet me at my apartment or here. After we did our thing, he got up to go home. I was just kidding with him, you know, trying to be cute, and I pulled him back down on the bed a little and told him to stay.” She wipes away a tear that’s escaped her eye.

“He turned and punched me so hard, he knocked the wind out of me, and while I was trying to get my breath back, he held me down on the bed saying I better never think I can tell him what to do again. I could hear my kids crying in the next room ’cause they heard me scream. He wouldn’t let me go, he just held me there awhile. Then, like, just walked out and left.” She wipes her nose with the inside of her tiny top and shakes her head softly.

“Was that the last time you saw him...romantically?”

“Ya’d think so, right? But that’s what I’m saying. It’s like a total Dr. Phil show. He comes back with apologies and gifts and I give him another chance, and two weeks later, he fuckin’ chokes me ’cause I showed up at Sully’s bar. Like I knew he was even there. He thinks I’m following him, trying to get attention or something. Like he owns the town. When you say it afterward, it sounds really bad, but at the time, I thought—I don’t know, I thought I was in love. I wanted him not to be the man he actually is.”

“How long, then, until you stopped seeing him?”

“It was off and on for a year, maybe.”

“Did he ever do anything else, like other sorts of assault?” I ask. She steps on the butt of her cigarette.

“I gotta go. I got kids at home.” She stands and reaches inside the dressing room for her handbag. “Maybe ask Angela about that. She got the worst of it.”

She hollers inside the door.

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