“I thought you’d have more of an objection,” Shpetim said.
To tell the truth, he’d thought she was going to have a screaming fit. Now here they were, in this expensive place. She wasn’t even leaving the first meeting to chance at home.
Lora picked up her menu. “See if you can’t get me a Diet Coke,” she said. “She’s a registered nurse, this Anya Haseri. Did you know that? A registered nurse. That’s a good job. It brings in good money. It teaches a woman things she needs to know as a mother. And you can go back and forth with it, to stay at home when your children are young. Also, it shows that she’s intelligent, and ambitious. You have to care about these things.”
Shpetim did care about those things. He just also cared about other things. And then there was the—irregularity of it. There should have been a meeting of families. Now there were no families, or only their own, which might be worse. If one of the pair wasn’t going to have a family, it ought to be the groom.
The waitress arrived. She had too many teeth, too. Maybe they only hired women who had too many teeth. Shpetim asked for a Diet Coke for Lora and a mineral water for himself. Muslims were not supposed to drink, but he did have a beer now and then, sometimes with Nderi, usually after work. He couldn’t do that now.
“Then there’s this other thing,” he said. “This thing with the police. Maybe this isn’t the best time to plan a wedding.”
Lora put the menu down and gave him what he thought of as “One of Those Looks.” “What would make it not the best time?” she demanded.
Shpetim took a deep breath. “The thing,” he said. “With the police. Because we found that. That thing.”
“The skeleton of the baby.”
“Lora,” Shpetim said. “Somebody will hear you.”
“Well, I don’t see that it matters if they do,” Lora said. “Everybody knows all about it. It’s on the television stations. They’re bringing that man here, that man we saw on American Justice. That’s his problem. It isn’t ours.”
The waitress came back with the drinks. Shpetim wanted to look at his watch. How long were Nderi and Anya going to take?
“It’s not that simple,” he said.
“Shpetim, please, it’s just that simple,” Lora said. “What would make it complicated?”
Shpetim thought he really should have ordered a beer, no matter how bad it would look in front of Anya. He wished he had the nature to overthrow the ban entirely and have a whiskey. He looked at the back of his hand on the table. It looked old.
“It was an old skeleton,” he said finally.
“What?”
“It was an old skeleton,” he said again, getting his courage up. “It had been there a long time. It had—the skin and the flesh had rotted away from the bone, it had done that naturally. Do you see?”
“Of course I see,” Lora said. “But I still don’t see why I should care, or why you should. Of course it was an old skeleton. The television said it had been in that backpack for twelve years. Really, you have to wonder what goes on with these people, the way these people live. They have no morals.”
Shpetim tried again. “It wasn’t in the ground there, where we found it,” he said. “It wasn’t there for twelve years.”
“How do you know?”
“Because we’re working that ground,” Shpetim said. “I’ve been walking over it every day for months—”
“But it was buried. You wouldn’t know if you walked over something buried.”
“It wasn’t buried deep,” Shpetim said. “They found it—they didn’t do anything, practically, and it was right there. And I walked over that ground just the week before. And—”
“And?”
“And it didn’t smell,” Shpetim said. “There. I’ve said it. I’ve been biting my tongue, not to say it to the police. But that backpack couldn’t have been buried in the ground like that for twelve years. It couldn’t have been there a week. And we’re the only ones there. We’re the ones who are on that ground every day. What if one of us put it there?”
“Put a skeleton of a baby?” Lora said.
“Yes.”
“In a backpack that belonged to that man who went missing? That’s what the television said. The backpack belonged to that man who went missing, that they found hanging from the billboard.”
“The skeleton couldn’t have been in the backpack all that time,” Shpetim said. “There would have been—I looked into the backpack and there was nothing in it. No … no—”