“Oh, Arthur,” Lady Alligator murmured. “Can an eagle love a worm? Can the brilliant sun love a dirty light bulb in a truckstop bathroom? Darling, you’ve always known that you captured me like a firefly in a jar. You thought if you didn’t poke holes in the lid I’d be content to suffocate in your sweaty grasp but you dropped the glass and I escaped. And now I’m where I was always meant to be.”
It said this with the deliberate patience of a mother explaining something to an especially dimwitted child. I felt it, then – the anger that had roiled my guts when I opened the drawer and saw the money missing from the Gideon bible. Not because she’d robbed me, but because she’d deceived me. She made me believe she loved me and she left me and I grieved for her, god damn it, I grieved in my own way as though I’d been made a widower and the whole fucking time she was laughing at me.
