Now she was frowning, giving him a puzzled look.

“But you don’t live right in Palm Beach, do you? I was there once, I loved it. All those big homes on the ocean?”

“No, my property is out in the country. All kinds of trees, flowers…”

“You love nature.”

“I do, yes. I’ll tell you, I like being married, too, and almost was again but changed my mind.”

The reason being, you seldom ever married the woman your wife finds out about and divorces you over. It was another type of law, unwritten, he could have told Leanne about that day at Weeki Wachee, trying to see into her tank top whenever she reached down to scratch at sand fleas biting her legs.

Putting on her serious look, no doubt thinking she was reading his mind, Leanne said, “With your sign, it could happen again when you least expect.”

“I’m ready anytime,” Bob Gibbs said. “How about having dinner with me tonight?”

That was how it began with them nearly seven years ago. Before Leanne had her Experience. Before she hung up her lamé tail, moved to Palm Beach and a few months later they were married.

For a time he continued to accept her strange behavior as part of the cute way she had about her.

Not anymore.

The way it was with them now, Leanne would say, “Big, do you know why you’re not a happy person?”

Here we go.

“Why you drink so much?”

She had told him why enough times that it didn’t matter what he said or if he answered at all. Leanne would maintain that serene, netherworld, airy-fairy expression on her face, one Bob Gibbs had come to believe was pure dumbness, and say, “You’re not happy, Big, ‘cause you let your negative ego control you. You haven’t learned how to open your heart and you won’t even try.”

He might say to her, “How do you know my heart isn’t open?”

“I can see it isn’t.”

“Yeah, how?”

“By your aura.”

“I forgot, my aura. What’s it look like today?”