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other relative, if I could think of one. And I found myself reading the actual police record of the accident. They gave it to me for the insurance. ” 
    “Was there a lot of insurance?”
    “There wasn’t any at all, but the police didn’t know that. They were just being nice. The truck broadsided her at a quarter after five. They had the time exactly, confirmed by witnesses. They didn’t call me right away—it took a long time to track me down; they had to check back through my California addresses and everything, because Tricia still had the old address in her pocketbook. But it was a quarter after five when it happened, all right. And when Tricia called me on the phone it was a little after six. I was watching the NBC network news.”
    I didn’t say anything right away. I wanted to make sure I was understanding what she was telling me. To help out, I invoked Marlene’s cure-all and ordered coffee from the very English waitress. “American coffee,” I specified, pointing to where it said that in the menu.
    It wasn’t really going to be American coffee, of course, because all French people think that Americans really would put chicory in their coffee if they only knew how, but I was grateful for the distraction so I could think. Irene Madigan left me alone to do it. When the coffee was served, and poured, and tasted, and we had both made a face, I said tentatively, “I suppose you’re absolutely sure about the time.”
    “I thought you’d ask me about that,” she said. “I would, too, if I were you. But, yes, I’m sure. The reason I’m sure …” She hesitated, then shrugged. “The reason I’m sure is that I had just started my period. I was flowing heavily, and I’d waited for the commercial to go to the bathroom, and Tricia’s call caught me on the way to change my Tampax.”
    “So there’s no doubt,” I summed up. “She called you around six.”
    “Right.”
    “That was three-quarters of an hour after she was supposed to have been in the crash.”
    “Yes.”
    “So,” I sighed, reluctantly, “it wasn’t Tricia who was in the crash. You cremated somebody else.”
    “You’ve got it,” Irene Madigan said, and began to cry. Sitting at a restaurant table with a crying woman is not my favorite thing. I avoid it when I can—usually successfully; the last time I’d been in that position was when one of my old girlfriends asked me straight out why I didn’t try to make love to her anymore, and I straight out told her what the mumps had done to me. Which was a mistake. Actually, I should have been the one crying. But the reason doesn’t matter. People look at you. They make up their own scenarios to account for why she’s crying. “He beats her.” 
    “She’s pregnant and he won’t marry her.” Or maybe, in this particular setting, “He lost all their money in the casino and he doesn’t even have the decency to kill himself.” It makes no difference if you’re innocent of all charges. It doesn’t even matter if, actually, you’ve been more of a louse than anyone looking on could possibly guess, and once or twice in the old days I was close enough to that. Whatever. They look at you. And you know damn well that if the crying woman should say exactly the right thing, one of the men in the restaurant would come over and punch your face out.
    This time I was certifiably as innocent as anyone could get. I looked back at the furtive glances and the hostile stares—girls in bikinis, men in shorts, an elderly couple, she in a sort of lavender miniskirt, he with an ice-cream suit and the worst toupee I’ve ever seen, fingering his cane dangerously as he glared at me. I tried to project innocence to them all, and wished I could think of a way to stop Irene Madigan crying.
    Fortunately, she stopped herself.
    “Sorry,” she sniffled, reaching for a dry Kleenex. I patted her hand. She smiled damply back at me, and a lot of the voltage began to go out of the stares. “The thing is,”