At dinner I learned that Lloyd, who was in his early fifties, had never married. He had family in Houston, three sisters and a brother, a mother and father still living. He was devoted to them. He owned a small house just outside Las Vegas. He liked to cook. He wasn’t church-going, but the church was important to him in his upbringing, he said. He was a square, but a sweet one. I found my heart going out to him.

How is that some very attractive, even very smart women can’t seem to close on marriage? However appealing they may seem, men don’t finally ask them to marry them. Others of us attract not just men but husbands. Men want to marry us. To protect us? To save us? To have exclusive rights to us? Who knows? Getting men to want to marry somehow wasn’t my problem, though maybe, now that I think of it, it was.

All I know is that, roughly a month after our first dinner together, I became Mrs Lloyd Blakely. Life with Lloyd was calm. Calm seemed just fine. Lloyd made a decent living. I kept my job at Caesar’s Palace. When we visited his family in Houston, I asked him to withhold all the information about my previous marriages. The Blakelys seemed to like me well enough. (I don’t think the same could have been said if I had brought Lloyd back to Batesville to meet my father, which I never did.) My only complaint about my new husband was that, as a fix-it man, he was a pack rat, and would bring home lengths of cable, cannisters, wiring, lumber and other things that were no longer useful at the casinos at which he worked.

Lloyd never said so openly, but he wanted a child—really wanted one. I hadn’t exactly proved the model mother, but maybe now, settled at last, with no pressure on me things would be different. I was forty-three, late for child bearing, yet all my pregnancies—after the initial morning sickness—and births had gone smoothly. So I became pregnant. Lloyd was hoping for a boy, and I told him not to worry— boys were all I was able to produce.

And we did have a boy, Matthew, who turned out to be badly brain-damaged. We had him at a nearby military hospital, and all I can remember is the OB-Gyno man yelling at one of the nurses and leaving the operating room. I later heard that my child’s umbilical cord wound around his neck, choking off his oxygen. You apparently can’t sue the US government for malpractice. What the government did offer was care for my poor baby.

The extent of the damage to Matthew, who turned out to be beautiful, as so many biracial children I’ve noticed are, was pretty complete. He lost just about all powers of locomotion. He was never able to speak. We couldn’t even be sure if he had sight or not. The decision arose about whether to institutionalise Matthew, or care for him at home. Lloyd wouldn’t hear about institutions, where the child’s life was certain to be shortened. Matthew lived to be twenty-nine, and died less than a year after Lloyd died of his third heart attack.

Much of the responsibility for taking care of our child fell to Lloyd. He wanted it that way. He rigged up special contraptions for the child to sit comfortably in. He bathed him. He cleaned him. He moved his own bed into Matthew’s room, so that he could help him if he was uncomfortable during the night. I don’t mean to say that I didn’t do anything—I fed Matthew, I washed and changed his clothes—but Lloyd was the main guy.