I showed the pictures of Kevin Humphries to Millicent. It was a head-and-shoulders shot, a little grainy from being enlarged, but still clear enough for identification. He was wearing a gray tuxedo with black velvet lapels and a ruffled yellow tuxedo shirt with pearl studs. His hair was longish and his neck looked strong. Millicent wrinkled her nose.
“God, who’s that?” she said.
“I was hoping you might recognize him,” I said.
“Him? Ugh.”
“Why ‘ugh’?”
“He’s such an Italian Stallion.”
“I don’t think he’s Italian.”
“Well you know, he’s so hey-let’s-have-a-couple-brewskis.”
“Low-class?”
“Yeah, and so macho man.”
“How can you tell all that from the picture?”
“I don’t know, I just can.”
“Like an ink blot,” I said.
“What?”
“You know, those tests where they show you an ink blot? Ask you what it looks like?”
She shook her head.
“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “I assume you don’t know him.”
“No. Am I supposed to?”
“He’s a plumber,” I said. “Worked once at your house.”
“I don’t pay any attention to plumbers,” Millicent said.
“I was more wondering if your mother did.”
“My mother? A plumber?”
Rosie had a half-chewed tennis ball which she was pushing around the floor in hopes that I might be inspired to throw it for her so she could chase it. She pushed it under the chair by my feet and looked at me. I sighed and picked it up and rolled it down the length of the floor. Rosie dashed after it, skidding on the rug by the television set as she went.
“I don’t know how to say this, exactly, but I think it needs saying. You really probably can’t make judgments about people by the way they look or what they do for a living or what country their ancestors came from.”
“Huh?”
“You’ve grown up in circles that probably made such judgments all the time. Judgments about class, and income, and race, and religion, and work history. It’s not your fault, but if you’re going to outgrow your family you need to stop doing that.”
“Well, I don’t like macho men. Look at his neck.”
“You like Spike, don’t you?”
“He’s not a macho man, he’s gay.”
“There you go again,” I said.
“What?”
Rosie was back with her ball, dropping it on the floor in front of me and picking it up and dropping it.
“Throw the ball for Rosie,” I said.
Millicent picked the ball up and fired it the length of the floor, a lot harder than she needed to, and Rosie was after it, scrambling, as the ball bounced around. I smiled. Millicent was annoyed. Excellent. Annoyed was so much better than disinterested.