I don’t know what I expected – a quick confession, a brash denial, blows between the two suspects – but instead, Ace and Homer just nodded when Santiago mentioned poison and said something to the effect of “how terrible” and “that’s too bad.” To say they underreacted would be, well, an understatement.
But given that my dad almost always underreacted to nearly everything, I wasn’t as surprised as I might have been. It seemed to be a facet of the personalities of some rural men to take anything in stride, at least in a public setting. My dad had been known to fly off the handle and punch a wall or two in his younger years, but only rarely, and only ever in the privacy of his own home.
Now, it seemed like Ace and Homer had received the same stoic training my dad had received, some sort of l
