Part Fourteen: Denny

I found out about Denny Sorrels in the second week, and I behaved badly about it for about a month, and I want it in here because leaving it out would make me look considerably better than I was.

Carmen had been seeing him for two and a half years.

He is fifty-one.

He does commercial HVAC — service work, mostly restaurants — and he has two grown daughters and an ex-wife in Round Rock that he is on good terms with, and he drives a work van with his name on the side.

He did not live with them.

That was a decision the two of them had made deliberately and it had, I found out much later, been discussed at some length, and the reason was Beto.

I met him on a Sunday at her apartment, which she had arranged on purpose so that I would meet him in a doorway and not by surprise in a school parking lot, and he put out his hand and said, “Denny.

Good to meet you,” and I said something short.

Then I was unpleasant about him to Carmen on the phone that night, and she let me get about four sentences in and then hung up on me.