Ralph parked his van behind another one just like it, but with a different logo on the side. Ralph had been perfectly happy rummaging around inside the mortuary, but now he was morose. The detective had upset him, and I thought that was strange. Inside the restaurant there were empty tables everywhere, but when a waiter greeted us, Ralph told him that we wanted to sit upstairs, in a section that was normally closed during the day. “Mama is up there alone,” the waiter said, but Ralph insisted, and we climbed a winding metal staircase and chose a table across the room from the large Italian woman who owned the place. We had to take the chairs down off the table-tops to sit up there. When the woman heard us she welcomed Ralph, waving a big arm and calling out his name. Ralph said hello, but he still had a bad look on his face and when we ordered coffees he finally spoke his mind. “Sometimes we do stupid things for reasons we cannot fathom,” he said, “neither at the time we do them nor afterward, when we try to reflect.”
