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married to my Aunt Dee for 25 years. They didn’t have any children. Aunt Dee was a beautiful woman whose house always looked like a museum. They had plastic runners on their rugs in pathways where you were supposed to walk. When I was a kid, I thought it was a game—like Twister. You had to keep your feet on the plastic. My mother said my Aunt Dee wasn’t bad, just someone who liked things just so. We didn’t see her a lot, I don’t think she really liked us, but my uncle used to come over to our house all the time and put his feet up, as my mother called it. He’d stop by to “see if we needed anything,” and would end up watching the Yankees and drinking a beer or having dinner with us. While my dad was working all hours of every day chasing criminals, he taught me how to play catch with a baseball mitt. When Aunt Dee got breast cancer, my Uncle took care of her until she died. We didn’t see him a lot then, and afterwards, he moved to Florida to go into business with my dad.
    Tweenie is a whole other ballgame. She and my uncle are rocking and hugging and laughing. Tweenie says, “That’s not going to be garlic bread, that’s going to be a garlic pancake.”
    Uncle Paulie breaks away. “Let me get you a glass of wine,” he says to me.
    “Great,” I say and I give him the bottle I’ve brought along. He goes into the house.
    Tweenie sits down next to me. “Oh, my feeties…,” she says kicking off her shoes and peds and putting her bare feet up on the railing.
    “Nice here,” I tell her.
    “It is peaceful, isn’t it?” she answers. “You have been through the wringer, haven’t you?”
    “What?” I say. I put a little effort into my appearance tonight and wore a black sundress, applied some under-eye concealer and everything.
    She puts her feet down and leans toward me. “Don’t take this wrong now. You’re a beautiful woman.”
    I don’t know what to say so I sit there.
    “You are so contained, aren’t you?” she says, “just like your daddy.”
    I wonder how Tweenie and my dad get along. Probably rough waters.
    The sun is beginning to set and the lake is shimmering pinkly. The shade is growing more intense on the fifth green across the lake. Details seem very sharp in this afternoon light. “Oh look, someone’s putting,” I say.
    She looks across the lake at a couple lining up their putts. The woman hits and I can hear the sound of the ball falling in the hole— clup . “Good shot honey,” the guy says. The sound carries so clearly that I can hear the undertone of resentment in the guy’s voice. Tweenie looks at me and smiles.
    My uncle comes out and hands us both a glass of wine, then he goes back inside. Dreamer is sleeping next to Tweenie’s chair. She’s breathing deeply and contentedly. I try to breathe deeply and contentedly too. But I’m no good at stillness anymore. Maybe my friend Joanie is right. Maybe I am on the run.
    My uncle Paulie comes out again with his own glass of wine. “Everything is cooking!” he announces proudly. He holds his glass up, “Here’s to my girls.” We raise our glasses. Tweenie takes a couple sips and then says she’s going to take a shower.
    “How’d you get yourself involved in a murder?” Paulie asks me.
    “I fell into it,” I say.
    “You were always a magnet for trouble,” he says smiling. He was the one I turned to when I was an adolescent and always in trouble with my father. He was the one who laughed when I broke every rule my father set. It was just kid stuff—ignoring curfews, smoking cigarettes in the girl’s locker room, drinking in the woods. But, still, I was always grounded. My uncle never seemed to take it seriously.
    In college, I straightened out my attitude. But, my father was gone by then.
    I started dating bad boys and married professors then. A string of unavailable men. I seemed to always be reading books entitled something like: Why would a smart woman like you do incredibly stupid things like this?
    My