Table of Contents

Copyright

Say You’re Sorry

All You Need Is Love

Some You Win

Just in Case

Say You’re Sorry

Wish You Were Here

Naked to the World

No Neutral Ground

You Run

If You Can’t Take the Heat

Real Life

Love Thy Neighbor

Crossing Elysian Fields on a Hot, Hot Day

Say You’re Sorry: 12 Stories of Bad Manners & Criminal Consequences

By Sarah Shankman

Copyright 2014 by Sarah Shankman

Cover Copyright 2014 by Untreed Reads Publishing

Cover Design by Ginny Glass

The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.

Stories previously published in print.

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher or author, except in the case of a reviewer, who may quote brief passages embodied in critical articles or in a review. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This is a work of fiction. The characters, dialogue and events in this book are wholly fictional, and any resemblance to companies and actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

Also by Sarah Shankman and Untreed Reads Publishing

First Kill All the Lawyers

He Was Her Man

Impersonal Attractions

Keeping Secrets

She Walks in Beauty

www.untreedreads.com

Say You’re Sorry

12 Stories of Bad Manners & Criminal Consequences

Sarah Shankman

All You Need Is Love

The whole thing was my mother’s fault.

If she’d said it once, she’d said it a million times: Georgie Ann, you’re thirty-five years old. If you don’t get out and find someone soon, no one’s going to have you.

I tried not to snap back at her, to remind her that she’d been married plenty enough for the both of us. Most of the time I succeeded. Not always. Everyone has their limits, beyond which they ought not to be pushed.

Look, it’s not as if I didn’t have good reason for being love-shy. Why, I’d been nearly destroyed by the flames of passion. But Mother has a convenient memory, the ability to forget that awful day at St. Philip’s when William detonated my heart. Tiny bits of it stuck to the front of my wedding dress like scarlet polka dots.

Doomsday. That’s what I called it, that gorgeous full-throated spring day five years earlier, when I was left at the altar. You think it never really happens, that old cliché. Well, I’m here to tell you, it does.

I had met William in the most romantic way possible. It was a rainy October afternoon here in Nashville, my thirtieth year, the day after Falstaff, my sweet old pussycat, had passed over to his reward. I’d taken my grief out for a walk, was blindly weeping through neighborhood lanes. I’d missed a curb and had fallen, therefore was both damp and lame.

William came motoring along and spotted me snuffling and shuffling, rather like a character in a country song. He leapt from his car and unfurled his handkerchief, pressing it into my hand. “How can I help?” he asked. “I can’t stand seeing a beautiful woman cry. It breaks my heart.”

Any beautiful woman? All beautiful women? I should have asked. But who thinks beyond the end of one’s nose when the compliments are falling like a fine warm rain?

Besides, William was quite dazzling. Wonderfully charming. Incredibly intelligent. Not to mention sweet. And a good deal more handsome than a man has a right to be. Did I say he was tall? I’m only a hair short of six feet in my stocking feet. You might have mistaken us for brother and sister, with our long limbs, blue eyes, and honey-colored ringlets.

The main thing about William, the architect, was that he made me feel safe. From the moment we met, he felt like home. Not the houses I had skimmed through as a child, barely getting my toys put away before my hummingbird of a mother was packing us up for the next perch, the next husband. William was the home I had always dreamt of. A home whose windows at twilight framed golden Norman Rockwell scenes. A cozy kitchen with soup on the stove. An open book resting on a hassock before an easy chair. A man and woman chatting across a table, the tips of their fingers touching.

I should have noted that William designed mostly high rises. You can see his work in major American cities, sleek and phallic and filled with men in suits massaging cash.

On our aborted wedding day, when William finally called—two hours after the guests had gone, stuffed with crab sandwiches, lubricated with champagne, Mother having seen no reason to waste a perfectly good party—William said that he was sorry, very very sorry, horribly sorry, but, did I remember the Atlanta insurance mogul whose offices he’d been designing? Well, it seems as though the man had suddenly dropped dead, and his really-quite-lovely, much-younger widow was terribly distraught. “You know I can’t stand seeing a beautiful woman cry,” William had said. “It breaks my heart. So I offered her my handkerchief, and then….”

I hadn’t thought that a person could endure such pain. Every cell of my body cried out. My lungs grieved, my skin, my cuticles. Sorrow filled my nights as well as my days, jumped at me from photographs, from letters. A single golden hair of William’s ambushed me from a sweater.

The hands of every clock in my apartment stopped at the hour of my abandonment. If they ever moved after that, I never caught them at it. Each hour was one hundred slow murderous years on the rack. Yet rising from my bed of nails was impossible. Diversion, Mother said. I needed diversion. I needed to get out. But how could I?

I was blind with weeping, but I could still hear the whispers: Georgie Ann, the poor thing. Deserted. Altar. Pitiful. Would die myself.

I resigned my job by telephone. “Dr. Wilson,” I croaked at the head of the English department, “the worms are at me. I won’t be back again.”

He protested, of course, but to no avail. How could I stand before a classroom of sweaty undergraduates to explain the sexual imagery of Love’s Labour’s Lost? Navigate the crannies of the heart with Byron, Shelley, Keats, the Three Musketeers of Romanticism?

I couldn’t. For quite a long time, I could do nothing but contemplate my own demise.

I lay upon my bed and considered my father’s old hunting rifle. I pulled it from the back of my closet, loaded it, racked it back and forth. I became enchanted with that racking. It called to me like a siren. But, my mother’s daughter in that regard, I couldn’t bear the thought of blood and brains and teeth and bone splattered across my snowy ceramic tiles.

I dreamed of Virginia Woolf, and one gray afternoon found myself swaying for hours at the edge of Percy Priest Lake, my pockets filled with stones. But my imagination showed me my pale bloated face, nibbled by perch, and I had too much pride to ever let anyone see me like that. So I trudged back home to pore over the labels of antkiller, rosedust, ammonia, to count the sleeping pills my family doctor had scrawled a prescription for, pressed into my hand on the steps of St. Philip’s on Doomsday. He’d had a crumb of crab sandwich on his lip.

Then, of course, there were the days when my agony would flip-flop and point itself outward, full speed ahead, like a divining rod, toward William. And I would recite a rosary of palliatives: guns, knives, ropes, bombs. But those thoughts passed, and in the end I opted for seclusion, solitude, retreat.

I took a very early retirement from the world.

Rilke said it best: “…your solitude will be a hold and home for you…and there you will find all your ways.”

I withdrew into my home. I lived quite comfortably in a rambling top-floor apartment in one of Nashville’s oldest apartment complexes, a gray elephant of a place shingled in softly silvered wood. I had two huge bedrooms, an L-shaped living room with French doors opening into a high-ceilinged dining room, closets galore. I’d moved in when I’d returned to Nashville right after graduate school and had never had any reason to leave.

Now, I thought, I never would. I had a little money from my father. Invested wisely, it would see me through to the grave. I would never have to leave my apartment again. Not alive, anyway.

Five years passed, and I didn’t set foot across my threshold with the sole exception of annual visits to the dentist and doctor. The pansies and petunias in my windowboxes came and went. I cooked. I read. I cut my own hair. Catalogues, mail order, groceries by phone, books, magazines, newspapers, everything I needed came to me. I didn’t desire the world. I didn’t miss it. I was perfectly content.

Mother, of course, wasn’t. She called me noon and night. “Georgie Ann, this isn’t natural. You must go out. You must have a life.”

“I do, Mother. My life.”

She tried every subterfuge known to woman. She said she was dying. I waited, and she didn’t. She proffered a first-class trip around the world. I demurred. The President of the United States was in town. He was coming for dinner. “Really, Mother,” I said.

The next day, there it was in the Nashville Banner. The President and First Lady and the President’s most attractive, not to mention single, campaign advisor, had indeed dined with my mother and stepfather Jack, a major fundraiser here in Tennessee.

“I am sorry I missed that,” I allowed. And I was. I would have horsed myself out for the First Couple.

I shouldn’t have admitted it. Mother saw a chink in my defenses, and she went hog wild.

What she did, precisely, was she burned me out.

She would never admit it, of course, but the very next night after the President’s visit, someone started a fire on my service porch. It gobbled the whole apartment—filled with over-stuffed furniture, old lace, gauzy curtains—in twenty minutes flat. Thank goodness it didn’t spread to other units. I had time to grab only a few clothes, the sterling flatware handed down from Gram, and Wabash, my cat.

Now where was I to go? To Mother’s, it seemed, as she and Jack showed up so conveniently, Stepdad Number Five wheeling his big old Mercedes through the fire trucks. My neighbors had called, Mother said.

“Bullshit,” I spat. “You torched my home.”

“Oh, Georgie Ann,” she said. “Don’t be ridiculous. Come stay with us in Belle Meade. You can have the whole guest wing. You’ll never even see us.”

Having no other choice, I took her up on it. I’d squat in their red brick mansion on the very best street of Nashville’s very best neighborhood, but only for a bit. Seeing that she had to work fast, Mother was parading prospects past my door before I’d washed the smoke from my hair.

“Mr. James here is just stopping by to talk about our portfolio.”

“Mr. Jones is helping Jack with his will.”

“I don’t believe you’ve met Mr. Smythe. He’s down from New York developing that new shopping center.”

There was nothing palpably wrong with any of these men. No two-headed monsters. No machetes secreted behind their backs. Not even a single pot belly.

But I wasn’t interested. I would never be interested. “Look, Mother,” I said, “all I want is to collect my fire insurance and get myself relocated.”

“And lock yourself up again?”

“I can’t see why not.”

It was then that Mother actually rolled on the floor. It was a scene from a bad novel. She screamed and, furthermore, rent her clothing, a perfectly lovely rose-sprigged afternoon dress.

I was impressed.

“Oh, all right, Mother,” I relented. “I’ll go outside, occasionally, if you will promise never ever to try and fix me up again.”

Mother clapped her hands like a little girl. “I’m so delighted, Georgie Ann!”

“Are you delighted enough to call Jack off the insurance agent so I can collect my money and set about finding another place to live?”

She was. She did. And, miracle of miracles, not only did I collect from my renter’s policy, but the owner of the building had coverage also, and I ended up with a quite tidy little sum.

Why, I thought, I could buy a place. I could become, within my modest means, a homeowner.

Mother wasn’t crazy about the idea, but she did suggest a Realtor for me to call, one C. Burton Wylie. I was certain that Mr. Wylie would be single or about-to-be-single, so I phoned Charlotte Dillon.

I’d known her since grammar school. “Charlotte,” I said, “it’s Georgie Ann Bailey. I’m looking for a little house, nothing fancy, close into town. Something with some privacy.”

Charlotte didn’t skip a beat. She didn’t say, “Where the hell have you been the past five years?” but rather, “Give me a couple of days.”

And she was as good as her word. “Meet me at my office at ten,” she said two days later. “I have four or five things I think you might like.”

I was as excited as a new pup. Got all dressed up, the way I used to for men. Well, after all, I told myself, this was a first date. Between me and my new home.

Imagine my dismay when I walked into Charlotte’s office to be greeted by one Alexander Persoff. Tall. Lean. Dark. Black eyes flashing with fire. Ruby-lipped. The man was something one of those romance writers would have dreamed up. In any case, Alexander Persoff was far too handsome to be taking my hand and telling me that Charlotte had fallen down her stairs this morning and would be out of commission for at least a week.

“But I’ll be delighted to help you,” he said. He was a tenor, surprising in a man his size, but the voice was hardly unpleasant.

“No,” I said, back-pedaling, putting one black pump neatly behind the other. “I don’t think so. No. Not.”

“But, Ms. Bailey, I’m sure….”

I didn’t wait to hear what he was sure of, for I was certain that Mother had had a hand in this. Charlotte had no more somersaulted down her stairs than she’d grown two extra toes. Well, good luck to them and hallelujah. Charlotte Dillon and Alexander Persoff were not the only two Realtors in Nashville.

Five minutes later I was stopped at a traffic light, muttering to myself. Granted, some of my decisions might seem eccentric to other folks. But so what? It’s none of their beeswax. Just then, a long black car pulled up beside me, with Alexander Persoff behind the wheel. The next thing I knew, he was leaning into my window.

“Ms. Bailey,” he began, “you must tell me how I’ve offended you.”

“Mr. Persoff, you are going to get run over.”

“No, please, I insist. I must know.” Then the light changed. Horns bleated behind us. Alexander Persoff, down on one knee on the pavement, ignored them. “You must give me another chance.”

“Oh, for Pete’s sakes. Get up and pull over there.” I pointed to a parking lot.

Watching Alexander disembark from his car was like witnessing a mighty oak growing in fast-forward. Do you know the tree I mean, the kind that grows down in Louisiana, a noble king of a tree, but a kindly king you’re just dying to climb, with cozy places you’d love to snuggle into?

If you were interested in trees or men that is.

I was only interested in the former.

Alexander, fully unfolded, stood, the toes of his soft brown loafers edging on the white line between our cars, close but not too close. He must have sensed that if he crowded me, I would jump back into my car and be gone.

I stared up at him. But it was my nose that took him in, for suddenly there was something citrusy in the morning air. Lemons, fresh lemons, heated by the sun. I blinked, and I was standing on a high and rocky coast. The dark sea crashed into the pebbly beach below. Back from the lacy edge of the water, a man and a woman lay on a straw mat, their bronze arms entwined. Their legs. Unfamiliar desire tugged between my own. I willed it to be gone.

Meanwhile, Alexander waited silently for me to speak. He would stand there for eons, I could feel that. He had the tenacity of Penelope, warding off suitors while Ulysses wandered the earth. Patience was not one of my strong suits, though I admired it in others.

“You don’t look like a Realtor,” I said finally.

“I’m not, really.”

I stepped back. I didn’t want to get entangled in his smile, bright with invitation and promise.

“Then why are you posing as a Realtor?” I demanded. “My mother called you, didn’t she?”

Alexander frowned, and I heard the crash of boulders rolling down a steep peak, somewhere in the Caucasus. If he were truly angry, I thought, the avalanche of his unhappiness would burst my eardrums.

“Your mother?” he said. “I don’t know your mother. What I meant was, I sell real estate to keep body and soul together, but my passion is my painting. Portraiture is my true love.”

“Ah.” I felt more than a little foolish.

“So. Will you let me show you some houses? Charlotte said that you were very much in need of a home.”

Yes. Yes, I was. And before I knew what was happening, I had allowed Alexander to seat me in his black chariot, and he was driving me to a house he was certain I would love.

On the way, he told me that his father had been a portrait painter, as had his grandfather who’d escaped from St. Petersburg with a greatcoat, its lining stuffed with the family silver. We Southerners are pushovers for stories that involve sterling flatware. Many of us eat off forks our great-great-grandmothers had hidden from the Yankees.

I sallied forth. I told him about the fire in my apartment, how I’d grabbed my own Grand Imperial along with the cat.

“You don’t say! That’s my family’s pattern, too. What a coincidence.”

Then, in my mind’s eye, I could see a long table set for twenty-four, Alexander’s silver and mine intermingling. Wedding cake would taste the same from both.

But then a bright red flag of danger unfurled. For, it warned, this was not only a man, but a handsome man, and a Realtor to boot. Worse than lawyers. More devious than used car salesmen. Lower than pond scum, lower even than architects.

I stared out at bowered Whitland Avenue, flush with fine old homes. “Let’s go back,” I said. “This neighborhood is far too rich for my blood.”

Alexander raised his right hand from the wheel and held it out like a traffic cop. “Wait,” he said, then pulled into a driveway which opened through a tall green wall of hedge like a secret door.

A long looping drive cut through grass which grew ankle-high, old grass, sedge, grass that had never been cleared by the bulldozer, never plowed, ungrazed native grass, grass that had been here before the first English settlers. The apple trees were more than a century old. Plums. Pears. And, at the end of the drive, a stone house which looked as if it, like the grass, had simply sprung from the earth.

“What is this place?” I wondered.

“It was part of a farm.” Alexander pointed with long arms in either direction. “All the rest of it was sold off, but this has remained, the house and three acres. The owner died a few months ago, one year shy of a hundred. The place needs work, of course, but it has very good bones. Shall we go inside?”

I couldn’t. Out of the car, I plopped down on a stone step, oblivious of my good black skirt. I was dizzy with longing and damp with fear.

This could not be good, the voice inside me said. You didn’t emerge from your cocoon after five years, simply say I want, and then have your heart’s desire handed to you on a plate by a Russian portrait painter, no less, with a cleft in his chin into which your little finger would fit perfectly.

“Are you all right?” Alexander frowned with concern.

“I’m overcome.”

“Ah,” he sighed and sat down beside me. “I thought you’d love the house. What are you afraid of? Tell me.”

Well, now. That was the question, wasn’t it?

I was afraid of love. I had loved William and lost him. I had loved my apartment, and it had burned. I had loved Mother, and she had tossed me like a throw pillow through her many marriages. If I allowed myself to fall in love with this house, and something were to happen to it, well, I didn’t think I could go on. I simply couldn’t. Even now, I could hear Father’s rifle racking like distant thunder.

Finally, Alexander broke my long silence. “Do you tango?”

“What?”

“I bet you do.”

He stood and drew me to my feet, placed a hand at the small of my back, and, humming a familiar Latin tune in my ear, danced me into the house of my heart’s delight.

*

I couldn’t afford The House. The asking price was exactly twice my budget, twice what I’d received from the insurance company.

Alexander said, “You don’t have to pay cash for the whole amount, you know. All you need is a down payment. We’ll get you a mortgage.”

“Well, that’s a grand idea,” said Jack, Stepfather Number Five, “if you can make the payments.”

“What do you mean? Isn’t it like rent?”

It was, except it was considerably more, my rent having been a pittance. Besides, what bank was going to give a mortgage to an unemployed hermit?

“We could lend you the money,” said Mother, “though if you went back to work, you could easily qualify on your own.”

“I wasn’t planning on that, Mother.”

I can hear you thinking, What a lazy woman. But it wasn’t indolence. I just couldn’t. I wasn’t yet ready to go back into the world.

“Welllll,” Mother drawled. “We’d love to help you, you know….”

I hated it when she used that tone. My anger got the best of me and I flung words at her. “Alexander said I could get a mortgage, so I’m sure I can.”

“Alexander?” Mother’s ears perked like a collie’s.

“Alexander Persoff, my Realtor.”

“Alexander Persoff, the portrait painter? The one who did Mimsie Stovall’s portrait? And Sally Touchstone’s?”

“Probably,” I allowed.

“Oh, Georgie Ann.” Mother swooned. “He’s everyone’s favorite extra man. Very handsome, I understand.”

“I suppose,” I said. “But why did he lie to me about getting a mortgage?”

Confronted, Alexander said, “I didn’t quite understand that you’re not employed. And now I see that the income from your investments is not really enough. But don’t worry, Georgie Ann. We’ll find you another house.”

I didn’t want another house. I wanted the stone house hidden behind the tall hedge, The House Alexander had tangoed me into. The House with the center hall, the big square living room off to the right, behind it a mullion-windowed dining room. I could close my eyes and see the silver dully glinting. Behind that stood a kitchen that needed a Godawful amount of work. On the other side of the hall were a library, two tiny bedrooms, one bath. You had to climb the steep-pitched stairs to see the best part. The whole second floor comprised the master suite. I’d replace the fixtures in the bathroom, tear out the mingy closets, make a dressing room. And there was a huge skylight on the north side.

The old lady who’d owned it had been a painter, according to Alexander. Yes, I sniffed, there was still a hint of turpentine in the air.

I wanted this house, oh, how I wanted it. It was meant to be mine. I could feel that in my bones.

Nevertheless, a’house-hunting Alexander and I went. Suddenly, Georgie Ann the recluse was out and about every day. Alexander and I looked at tiny split-timber Tudors, redwood ranches, a dozen white bungalows with green shutters. We trod scores of sagging porches, inspected rows of sad little fixer-uppers. I became familiar with every nook and cranny of Nashville, with zoning, with the ebb and flow of neighborhoods, with furnaces and air-conditioning and basements and easements.

But all of it was bootless. For I was not a child who could be placated with a cherry-flavored lollipop when my heart was set upon a hot fudge sundae. At the end of each day, I sank into my own personal Slough of Despond. Then Alexander would cock an eyebrow. “Shall we?”

“Oh, yes!” I implored.

And then, we’d fly through Music City’s streets and make that quick turn through the tall hedge like fleeing bank robbers. We’d jump from the car, tango down the walk, onto the front porch, through the door, and up the stairs where we would circle through the master suite before settling down to my portrait.

What portrait?

The portrait of me that Alexander was painting, of course.

The notion had come to him that very first day as the two of us wheeled around that glorious second-story suite.

“I love this north light,” he’d said. “And it loves you. Be still, yes, there, just for a moment. Let me look. Oh, yes, it’s a match made in heaven, this light and you. If I could just capture what I see, I know my life would be forever changed.”

Who could say no?

So I posed for him under that wonderful north light two or three afternoons a week. He stashed the portrait in one of the dark closets upstairs. None of the other Realtors ever found it.

For that, I was very glad.

It wasn’t that the painting was shameful. It was art. The thing was Alexander had chosen to paint me nude to the waist, or almost. The top of my right breast was covered by my long blond hair. Then, around my middle, there was the drape of a white dressing gown that seemed, in the narrative of the painting, to have slipped from my shoulders. Behind me, out the window, were the apple trees, the plum, the pear. They were in bloom when Alexander began the portrait. There was fruit before he finished. One glorious afternoon when I was done posing, Alexander fed me a handful of sun-warmed plums, the color of bruises.

The next day, as I sat for him, I imagined what it would be like if Alexander grasped me hard enough to leave such bruises on my upper arms. Not that he had ever touched me, you understand, except for our tangos up the steps and then the occasional adjustment of a curl here, a limb there.

I cannot describe to you what it is like to sit, day after day, half-naked before a man who considers you with total concentration, but does not, as far as you can tell, desire you. After a while I began to hear a ringing in my ears that I finally recognized as the chanting of cloistered nuns raised in endless adoration to their Lord. Brides of Christ, deprived of those most elemental of human needs.

As the painting neared completion, Alexander grew more enthusiastic. “This is going to knock them dead,” he crowed. “I can’t wait to see their faces. After this show, just you wait, Georgie Ann…” He paused, and my heart stopped, waiting for the next words. “…I’ll never have to sell another house.”

That was not exactly what I longed to hear.

For, by now, of course, as you know, clever reader that you are, I was completely besotted with Alexander.

I could spend a day on a consideration of any single detail of his person. Take his hair. The heft of those dark strands, the way they whorled back from his temples like lifted oars. The sweet feathering at the nape of his neck. The glistening of clean pink scalp at the part which I longed to taste. The warm sun-baked smell of the dark locks that brushed against my cheek when we tangoed.

Mother had been right, damn her. She’d promised if I went outside I would find diversion. I had, and now I was not only diverted, but distracted almost beyond bearing. I had Alexander, I had The House, and I had neither.

Yet, in my mind, I held them close, the two inextricably bound. I filled hour after happy hour imagining life with Alexander in The House. He would paint in our second-floor aerie while I sat and read. I could see us in the kitchen preparing dinner together. I chopped neat little mounds of onions and peppers and garlic while he sautéed and stirred and tasted. There we were, sitting side by side in matching chairs in the living room. I read the front section of the paper, he the last. Upstairs, on a night drenched with rain, we embraced and the room rocked with love, threatened to lift off, to take flight, to soar out above the apples and pears, to knock the plums into jam.

I carried one of Alexander’s handkerchiefs in my pocket at all times. I had stolen it, of course, when he wasn’t looking. I caressed the fine lawn with my fingers, read like Braille his block-lettered monogram.

Once, a lifetime ago, back when I was an assistant professor of English, my department chair, an old roué if ever there was one, reached in his pocket in the middle of a department meeting, and pulled out a pair of black lace bikini underpants upon which, absentmindedly, he blew his nose.

I tried to think that I wouldn’t titillate myself in my solitary hours with a pair of Alexander’s briefs, but, had I the chance, you never know.

It was about this time that Mother began saying, “You know I love having you here, Georgie Ann. Hope you stay forever.” When I didn’t respond, she said, “Dear, are you really looking for a house, or is there something else going on?”

As I watched Mother’s mouth, it transformed itself into Alexander’s. You could take a walk upon his bottom lip, it was that generous. The curves of the upper lip were like the fenders of a ’55 Buick. I traced it in my dreams.

Mother said, “Whatever you’re up to, you have to move forward or backward, darling. Forward, preferably.”

“Yes, Mother.” I smiled.

Then came the August day when Alexander announced, “Tomorrow the painting will be finished.” The heat had made a damp cap of his hair, waving it close to his head. He looked like Julius Caesar. “And,” he added solemnly, “I think you ought to know, there’s someone interested in the house.”

The temperature plunged sixty degrees in an instant. I froze.

“My house?”

“I’m afraid so, Georgie Ann. Now, like I said, if you would only go back to work, we could get you a mortgage. Have you thought about it?”

No. Of course not. I had convinced myself that a miracle would occur. My portrait would bring enough for the down payment on The House. Then Alexander would propose. We would live happily ever after, in The House, of course.

Alexander said, “School’s about to start soon. Could you ask the university to take you back on? Even part-time, that would be a show of faith for the mortgage company.”

Go back into the classroom? Speak to sweaty youth about the marriage of true minds? Why, I could no more do that than I could ankle into Kroger’s for canned peaches or plums when all the sweet bounty I ever needed awaited me at The House.

“No,” I choked. “I can’t.”

“You ought to think about it, Georgie Ann.”

Then, before I had time to absorb what Alexander was telling me, August was over, and Labor Day fell quickly behind it, early that year. Sharpened pencils. Back to school. The Season had opened. Mother began planning for her annual opera pilgrimage to New York. Alexander was frantically preparing for his upcoming triumph in Atlanta. When he called, barely once a week now, it was to try to convince me to come to his show. The Callendar Gallery attracted serious collectors, he said. My portrait would be the centerpiece. Everyone would want to meet the model.

That was out of the question, of course. Step not only into the world, but into the spotlight? All those eyes…. The very idea was preposterous.

The night of the opening, I drove over to The House. I would sit on the steps and imagine Alexander in his glory. But when I pulled into the drive, the first thing I saw was a little strip attached to the For Sale sign. Sale Pending. I saw red, the blood flooding behind my eyes. My head threatened to explode. I uprooted the sign and tossed it into the trunk of my car. It would suffocate there. It would die. There would be no Sale Pending.

Nor would I deign to give the matter further consideration.

I could control my thoughts and my actions. Hadn’t I proved that, long ago? I had come that close to doing away with myself, but I hadn’t. I hadn’t killed William either. I had withdrawn, and with that, had overcome.

So, calmly, I sat at the top of the stairs, just outside the door of the master bedroom where Alexander and I had passed so many happy hours. I thought of well-barbered men in dark suits, women in small-shouldered dresses of black and gray and taupe three hundred miles away in Atlanta, staring at my breasts. They would do it ever-so-politely, of course, with the soft murmurings with which well-bred people communicate. I imagined their eyes going wide as they looked, and their mouths making little O’s.

I pulled a plum from my pocket. Mother’s housekeeper had brought it home from the store. I bit into the purple flesh. The juice filled my mouth, not with the nectar of summer but with a tart thin syrup.

I sat at the top of the stairs until there was no more light, and then I felt my way out, the details of The House familiar as a lover’s bones. Back in my bed at Mother’s, nightmares stalked my sleep. The next morning I couldn’t remember much of them, but I felt queasy, as if a buzzard’s wing had brushed me.

I held my breath for Alexander’s call. Three days later (three years, three millennia) it came. The show had been a great success, all the work sold. My portrait had gone for its extravagantly hopeful asking price. A Japanese automotive executive was taking it back to his home near Kyoto. I closed my eyes. I could hear temple bells and people murmuring in a foreign tongue.

“However,” Alexander said, then paused.

I didn’t wait to hear his next words. I knew what they would be, couldn’t bear to hear them from his lips. I hung up and dialed Charlotte. Then I drove out to The House once more.

Even though I’d been forewarned, the new sign, with its red banner, SOLD, was a shock. But not for long. I uprooted it and buried it, along with the earlier sign, in my trunk.

I was sitting at the top of the stairs when Alexander found me, just outside the master suite with the wonderful northern light that I had hoped would someday awaken the two of us, entwined in one another’s arms.

“I knew you’d be here,” he said.

“And I knew you’d come.”

“Georgie Ann, I’m so sorry. But it’s over. You wouldn’t do a thing to stop it, you just sat, frozen, and now the house has been sold.” He dropped a hand to my shoulder. I shrugged it off. He frowned. “You must let it go.”

I didn’t say a word.

Alexander sat down beside me. He took my hand. His touch was cold. I could feel the lies that he’d so carefully rehearsed coursing through his blood. They fell from his mouth like little red ice cubes out the refrigerator door.

“I warned you,” he said, “that someone was seriously interested in the house.”

I raised my hand and stopped his words with my fingers. Then I stood. “Let’s dance, one last time,” I said, and stood upon the hardwood of the upper hall.

“Yes.” He smiled. “Let’s.” I could feel his relief. I was going to be a good sport.

He’d feared, of course, that I would go mad. That I would foam at the mouth. That I would scream and roll on the floor. That snakes would sprout from my head and strike at him. And well he should fear. Had he thought I wouldn’t know?

That one call to Charlotte was all it had taken to confirm my fears. First Alexander had stolen my image with his paints and brushes and sold it into geishadom. Then he’d used that boon to buy The House. It was that magical north light, he’d told Charlotte. It had changed his life. He simply had to have it for his own.

Would Alexander be living in The House alone? I’d asked.

Yes, she said. At least she thought so.

She was lying about that, I could tell.

And so, I slowly raised my arms to Alexander’s for one last tango. He held me close. I smelled lemons. I heard the crashing surf. My breasts pressed against his chest, unwanted, unloved. We marched in slow Argentine splendor across the hardwood floor.

Then back. Then forth again.

The third time, as he spun me out away from him, his heels came very very close to the lip of the top step. I had been watching carefully for this angle, this moment. Then, I simply let go, and the centrifugal force of our swing propelled Alexander backward as surely as if he had been pulling on a rope which had snapped.

He tumbled down, step after step, head over foot, and landed with a sharp crack of his head and neck on the old oak flooring below.

I swooped after him. Leaned over him. Pressed my face close as if for a kiss.

Help me were his last words.

No was mine.

Once he was gone, I brushed my lips across that place at his nape where the dark curls feathered so sweetly, then headed for the door and the nearest phone to call 911. A terrible accident, I cried. Please come.

Too bad. So sad. Such a handsome man. And poised on the brink of fame. The murmurs came from every quarter.

But that didn’t bother me at all. No more than did that last image of Alexander, his neck askew, lying at the bottom of my stairs.

I step over that spot twenty times a day now, with nary a quiver. Like I told you before, my self-control is strong as granite. You could erect a gravestone of it, it would last a millennium.

Besides, I have so many other things on my mind these days. My new job keeps me hopping. Charlotte says she’s never seen anyone catch onto real estate so quickly. She’s forgotten all those months I spent house-hunting. And Alexander was a very good teacher.

But, wait, wait, you say. How could I so blithely jump back into the world, bypass the cloister of the academe for the rough-and-tumble world of commerce? Easily as if I were changing my clothes?

The answer’s simple. The winning, and then the renovation, of The House—my passion, my heart, my soul—required heroic measures, not to mention oodles of cash.

One does what one has to do, for love.

Some You Win

Clementine Jones was leaning out the back screen door of her neat lemon-yellow cottage on New Orleans’s Prytania Street. “I’m going to kill you,” she hollered, her pretty brown face twisted up like one of those fake voudou dolls the tourists bought in the French Quarter.

Her son, Bonaparte—twelve years old and four feet, six inches, and ninety pounds of creative energy—sat about twenty feet up in a magnolia tree. He was listening to Clementine with only half an ear.

He was mad at his mama. This bright and beautiful Saturday morning she’d been vacuuming in his room when all of a sudden she’d stomped into the kitchen where he was dunking powdered doughnuts in his café au lait and snapped, “What’s this?” Clementine was holding a stack of twenty-dollar bills in her upturned palm as if it were a rattlesnake.

He’d looked at it, looked at her, and said, “You have broken the bond of trust which is basic to the parent-child relationship.” Then with one smooth move he’d snatched the cash from her hand, loped out the back door and skinnied up the magnolia that in early April was filled with creamy blossoms that smelled so sweet, one whiff, you were falling-down drunk.

“Bond of trust, bullshit, Bone!” she said now, leaning out the back door. “What I’m gonna break is your young butt if you don’t tell me where this big old pile of money came from. Are you charging those dumb rich white kids for doing their homework again?”

“No, Ma, I’m not.”

“Don’t you No, Ma me in that tone of voice, young man. Like I don’t know you’re your daddy’s son.”

Bone’s daddy, from whom Clementine had been long divorced, was now a quite respectable barbecue restaurateur, but he’d picked up his basic culinary skills at Angola State Prison where he’d done three years for relieving tourists of their jewels and cash.

“Then how come I ain’t six-foot-six like him?” Bone asked.

“A gifted-and-talented young black man on scholarship at a hoity-toity private school ought to know better than to be saying ain’t,” said Clementine, “and quit trying to change the subject. I’m asking you this this one time: Bone, is that you who’s been holding up those bakeries all over town? Is that where you got that cash?”

“Ma, don’t be silly. The Picayune said that dude’s been knocking off those sweet shops is about five foot ten. Not to mention white.”

“I just don’t know what I’m going to do with you.” And with that Clementine plopped down on the grass at the foot of the magnolia and began to cry. “I work hard all day at the Whitney Bank.” She spent her days in a teller’s cage taking in and dealing out currency. Smiling. Being polite to white folks who carefully thumbed their money each time like it was some kind of trick that she could even count to three. “Come home, wash, iron, clean, cook, try to keep our little home together. Only to find you’ve been extorting money from rich white kids so busy taking riding lessons, tennis lessons, soccer lessons, dancing lessons to please their crazy mamas, they can’t find time to do their own English compositions.” It was Clementine’s contention that all the society ladies who lived in the big houses in the Garden District suffered from hereditary insanity brought on by too much adultery, too many whiskey sours, and too few belly laughs.

“Awh, Ma,” Bone said. “I haven’t sold a single page of homework since before Mardi Gras, I swear.”

“Well, don’t try and tell me you haven’t been hanging out in Commander’s and the Bon Ton,” naming two of Bone’s favorite restaurants. Bone had been addicted to good tailoring and haute cuisine almost since birth, passions he’d definitely inherited from his dad. At eleven, Bone had taken two of his little white friends for Sunday brunch in the palmy court at Brennan’s, all of them dressed to the nines in tiny linen suits. Much to the consternation of the waiter, Bone had ordered grandly from the à la carte menu.

Clementine said, “I know you’ve been dining out again. That nice letter you got last week from Commander’s Palace, inviting you, as a valued customer, to come in have a drink on the house, that’s why I searched your room in the first place.”

“Ha! Reading my mail and frisking my room!”

“Bonaparte, boy, I’m fresh out of patience. You better come down right now!” Then Clementine ducked as something floated by her head. She leaned over and picked it up. A twenty-dollar bill. Then another. It was raining cash behind the little yellow cottage on Prytania that was snuggled up in between two of the largest and once-upon-a-time grandest mansions in the Garden District, bearing witness to New Orleans’s housing patterns as well as Southern white folks’ dictum to blacks: Now, y’all can get as close as you want to; just don’t get too big.

*

About four blocks away on First Street, a totally insane piece of white trash named Gordon Armbruster was sitting in a stolen dark green Oldsmobile with his accomplice, a young country woman named Alma Jean who’d felt bad about herself her whole life because she was six feet tall and redheaded and covered head-to-toe with freckles. Alma Jean thought she looked exactly like a giraffe.

“Now, A.J.,” Gordon was saying, “do you understand that this is a big step up in our operation? This is bigger than your ordinary armed robbery. This is bigger than taking out bakeries. This is no small endeavor, and I expect you to play your role perfectly. Do you understand your role?”

“Yes, Gordon.”

Gordon, who was a stringy five-ten with pale blue eyes, bad teeth, and long dirty blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, grabbed Alma Jean’s freckled chin and jerked her head around. “Look me in the eye when you say that, A.J.”

“I understand, Gordon. I understand that when the Rising Sun/Big Easy tour bus pulls up over there,” Alma pointed to a spot under a gigantic live oak tree that stood before a white three-story mansion famous for its wrought-iron balconies, “that I’m to cross the street and fall down in front of the bus door right before the driver opens it.”

“And then?”

“When the driver gets out to help me, I jump up and stick this in his face.” She displayed a silvery Smith and Wesson .38. “And I say, ‘Tell those little Jap tourists to sit their asses back down or I’ll blow your brains out.’”

“Good,” said Gordon. “That’s good, A.J. And when this is all over, when we’ve relieved those rich little rice-eaters of their cash and their cameras and their camcorders and their Rolexes and their diamonds—all of which they own simply because of the screwed-up balance of trade—then what are we going to do?”

“Fly to Switzerland and get all my freckles bleached off.”

Alma said the words like a supplicant reciting a catechism. For Gordon was her savior. He had rescued her, still in her hairnet, from the Acorn Chickens processing plant in north Georgia, pulled her right out of the line where she was boning chicken breasts that would be chopped into nuggets for a fast-food chain. Gordon had said, “You, c’mere,” to Alma and Alma only, right before he’d blasted the manager of Acorn Chickens six ways to Sunday—which was right after the manager had opened the safe.

*

“What on earth was all that noise about?” Cutler Lamb asked when Bone came stomping into the parlor of Cutler’s huge wedding cake of a house next door to the little yellow cottage.

“Nothing. Just Ma with her knickers in a twist. She found the cash I couldn’t get over to you last night.” Bone offered the stack of twenties forward and Cutler took it in his lace-gloved hand.

“Well, isn’t that what mothers are for, worrying about their chicks?” said Cutler, who was wearing an old Mardi Gras gown of white peau de soie that had seen better days, but then so had Cutler. The blond hair upon which a rhinestone tiara sat was over-bleached and frizzy. His body had expanded so that the bodice of the gown fit like a sausage casing. “Bless my mother’s poor departed soul, I’m so glad she’s not here to see me in these reduced circumstances.” Cutler picked up a lace-trimmed linen handkerchief and dabbed at an aquiline, but prominent nose, then poured them each a cup of Earl Grey tea.

“Now, Cutler,” said Bone, sitting himself down in a chair of chartreuse velvet with lion-claw arms which had frightened him when he was a tot. “You know that Zeus is going to get over itself. They’ll parade again. They’ll be back.”

What Bone was referring to was the Krewe of Zeus, one of the oldest and snottiest of the Carnival organizations. Zeus had refused to hold its annual Mardi Gras parade when a city ordinance was passed denying parade permits to krewes which discriminated against blacks and Jews and white trash. This was catastrophic for Cutler, who had long supplemented a fading inheritance by making thousands of huge fluttering paper palm leaves and other gold and silver baubles that decorated Zeus’s floats.

Cutler pursed his scarlet lips into a perfect pout. “Zeus will never parade again. You know they won’t. Those old turtles are never going to admit anybody as precious and black and talented as you.” And at that Cutler, whose family had belonged to Zeus for four generations, leaned over and tousled Bone’s soft black curls. “Those asses have no imagination whatsoever.”

Bone had never wanted to belong to a bunch of boring old rich white people in the first place, but hoped someday to strut his stuff with the all-black Tchoupitoulas Indians who were famous for their beaded and feathered costumes. He said, “Well, Cutler, nobody could ever say you lack imagination, could they? I think your taking all your money out of banks where it’s earning doo-doo for interest and investing it in that catfish co-operative is absolutely wizard.”

“Well, I do too,” said Cutler. “Though I do hate putting you to the trouble with my banking. But you know how I hate going out in the noonday sun what with my fair complexion, and who would want to go out after dark with all those criminals running amok, mugging and raping and shooting people up?”

“I don’t mind one bit,” said Bone. And that was the truth. Cutler paid him twenty dollars for every withdrawal he made from an automated teller machine, and since the maximum you could withdraw from a single account in one day was five hundred dollars, and Cutler was investing a lot more than that in catfish, Bone’s fees were mounting up. “Now where do you want me to go today? I did your banks in the Quarter yesterday. So the two here in the neighborhood would be next?”

“Yes. Take five hundred from the Whitney Bank at Jackson and St. Charles and then another five from the First National on Louisiana. Tomorrow you can take the ferry over to Algiers and do those.”

“You got it,” said Bone, tucking Cutler’s plastic bank cards into the back pocket of his freshly pressed Ralph Lauren khaki shorts which went nicely with his scarlet knit shirt. In a flash, he was out the door and pedaling away on his ten-speed Japanese bike.

Cutler waved him off from inside a heavily draped floor-to-ceiling window that opened onto the broad porch. Then Cutler poured himself another cup of tea and settled down to wait. It was a shame, he thought, well, sort of a shame, to have to involve an innocent youth in his nefarious scheme, but then, on the other hand, he was helping keep the child in crème brûlée and designer suits, and besides, Bone was the only person he knew and trusted who was short enough to avoid the security cameras at the automatic cash machines.

*

The problem was that the Japanese tourists were in such an all-fired hurry to take pictures of one other standing in front of the mansion on First Street that they swarmed right off the bus when the driver opened the door and all over Alma and her Smith & Wesson .38 without paying her a lick of attention.

“Wait just a damned minute,” she hollered, jumping to her feet and waving the pistol, but it didn’t do a bit of good.

Those little people with their neat haircuts and designer suits were smiling and chattering and posing and clicking and clicking and clicking.

*

“Well, aren’t you cute?” said the crazy white lady in the bright pink-and-green golf outfit standing behind Bone in the line at the cash machine at the Whitney Bank. She was the mother of his friend Trey Bunting, and actually Bone had been at her house for hot dogs, though he was sure she didn’t remember. Between her golf and her drinking and keeping track of Mr. Bunting’s mistresses, Miz Bunting was so busy she hardly had time to turn around.

“Yes, ma’am,” said Bone. He knew that if you agreed with adults, they’d just leave you alone. Well, usually.

“Does your mother know that you are using her ATM card?”

“Yes, ma’am, she does,” Bone lied.

“Does she know that you are taking that much money out? My goodness! Five hundred dollars!”

What Bone wanted to say was, Do you know that it is rude to crowd somebody at a cash machine, not to mention looking over their shoulder and counting their money? But he didn’t. He didn’t have breath to waste on Trey’s crazy mom, because what he was doing was wondering how long this business with Cutler was going to last. Was it going to string out long enough for him to finish paying for the new blue-and-white seersucker suit he’d put on lay-away at Togs & Trousers? And, furthermore, what was Cutler really up to here with all these bank transactions? Not buying catfish stock, for sure. You didn’t use cash to buy stock, Bone knew that. Well, whatever it was, Bone didn’t really care, as long as he got his suit. And maybe an oyster lunch or two at Casamento’s.

Bone was so deep into thinking about tailoring and fine food while he headed for his bike that he didn’t see the man with the short haircut and the tell-tale lump of a shoulder holster under the arm of his navy blue suit come up and tap Trey’s mom on the arm and start talking to her really seriously.

Bone was pedaling along on Coliseum Street, thinking about maybe staging a dinner for his friends at Gautreaux’s that he understood did this wonderful softshell crab, when, at the corner of First Street, Blam!

A little Japanese man running hellbent for leather smacked into him and knocked him off his bike. Then a white dude with a blond ponytail yelled at a tall red-headed white lady with lots of freckles, “A.J., girl, you have unfortunately fucked up bad.”

And, Blam! Ponytail shot her right in the mouth. As she fell, blood and brains splattered all over a whole bunch of Japanese who had hit the ground.

“Give me all your cash! Your jewelry! Your cameras!” Ponytail screamed. He was wild-eyed, like a spooked horse, and slinging spit. The Japanese froze on the ground.

“Now!” yelled Ponytail. And when they didn’t move fast enough, Blam!

A young Japanese man in a brown suit fell back, shot dead through his left eye. Bone thought he was going to faint or throw up, but he was too terrified to do anything but keep lying there on the pavement beside his bike, hoping he was invisible.

But he wasn’t. “Nigger!” Ponytail screamed. Bone surveyed the scene, moving his eyes without lifting his head. Yep, the white trash killer meant him, all right. There were no other black people around. “Get your little black ass over here before I count to three or…”

He didn’t need to finish the statement. Bone hustled.

“Yes, sir?”

“I need some help here. Get yourself over there in the middle of those Japs and relieve them of their valuables.”

“Yes, sir.” Bone hated to do it, but he didn’t see that he had any option other than dying real young.

“Japs!” Ponytail screamed. “Do you hear me? Just hand this little black boy your stuff, and there won’t be any problems. Keep anything back, and you’re dead. Do you understand?”

The tourists seemed to read him loud and clear. As Bone tiptoed among them, they handed him diamonds and pearls and cash and camcorders and gold chains and watches and cameras and one tiny lady even gave him her alligator loafers. For one brief moment Bone was tempted to slip them on, for she was about his size and he’d seen the same pair at Ralph Lauren for $550, but it just wouldn’t be right, and besides, Ponytail was stone crazy.

“Throw it all in the car!” Ponytail waved his silver pistol at a green Oldsmobile.

Bone hustled over to it, opened the passenger door, and had started tossing merchandise in when Blam! Ponytail blasted another Japanese tourist as a warning for them all to lie low and let him make his getaway. At the blast, Bone jumped and his body pitched forward into the Olds. He tried to back out, but it was too late. Ponytail had leaped in through the driver’s side, cranked up the engine, and they were flying down Prytania.

*

The man with the short haircut and the shoulder holster under his navy blue wool suit was named Special Agent Tom McGuire, and he was very pissed off. It wasn’t so much that he minded having to come in from Washington to consult with the local agent on a case that should have been closed weeks ago. He was always glad to visit the Big Easy. Except nobody told him the temperature in New Orleans was 85, and he was sweating like a pig in his navy serge. But what had really gotten his wind up was his early morning meeting in the office of Kendall Arthur Stanley, the president and CEO of New Orleans Cookin’, who was the subject of the case on which McGuire had been called in to consult.

“Sit down, McGuire,” Stanley had said, not so much issuing an invitation as an order when he pointed at one of the two red leather chairs on the other side of his antique mahogany desk. Stanley’s expensively appointed, book-lined office reminded you that he’d been a rich lawyer before he’d become an even richer packager of imitation Creole frozen TV dinners. “Now listen, McGuire, I know you’ve been sent down here to clean up the local agents’ mess, but I have to tell you that I am singularly unimpressed with y’all so far.”

“Well, Mr. Stanley, that’s—” McGuire had started, but Stanley, a tall, meaty, good-looking man with wings of wavy silver hair, McGuire’d put him at about fifty-five, went right on.

“It’s a simple matter, really. Some damned fool son-of-a-bitch gets it in his mind to mail me one of my frozen crawfish étouffée dinners that he’s sprinkled with razor blades and broken glass, and then writes me a semi-illiterate note demanding a half-million bucks or he says he’s going to randomly doctor my product the same way in grocery stores. You all tell me to make a down payment of a hundred grand in these two numbered accounts the blackmailer’s set up at the First National and the Whitney banks.”

“Mr. Stanley, I know—”

“You don’t know shit! None of you know the first goddamn thing! What I know is that I deposited the hundred grand, and the son-of-a-bitch has managed to withdraw $35,000 from automatic cash machines all over Orleans and Jefferson Parishes. He’s making a fool of you all, he’s robbing me blind, and I won’t have it, do you understand! I am someone in this community. My family has lived in the Garden District for ten generations. I have been president of the Boston Club. Furthermore, I’m captain of Zeus.” And with that, Kendall Arthur Stanley slammed his fist down on the antique mahogany so hard a silver-framed photograph of a bunch of fat guys in Mardi Gras costumes jumped off and the glass shattered.

Tom McGuire, who’d grown up on the wrong side of the tracks in Boston and worked his way through school, hated Stanley’s kind of pompous bastard so much, he was tempted to let the damned case slide. Let the stuffed shirt bleed a little more cash. Except there was always the chance the blackmailer might carry through on his threat and some consumer might swallow a razor blade.

Nope, the blackmailer had to be stopped.

Though last night McGuire had tried a New Orleans Cookin’ jambalaya, and it was his opinion that the city ought to sue Stanley for using its name on this donkey doo-doo.

But what really frosted him was that the local agents had dropped the ball. They kept focusing on the fact that they could never catch the culprit in the banks’ surveillance cameras, a fact that had mystified and stymied them, and completely missed the obvious: there was a pattern to the withdrawals.

Today, unless McGuire missed his guess, was Garden District day. He didn’t know how the perpetrator had slipped past him at the Whitney. The silly blond lady in the pink-and-green golf clothes he’d nabbed hadn’t known dick and furthermore, had been one transaction after the one he was looking for, but by God, he was going to be ready at the First National. He had already radioed the local cops for backup.

*

“Excuse me, sir,” Bone said to Ponytail as they roared down Prytania in the green Oldsmobile. “I don’t mean to bother you, but could you let me out?” Bone knew it was a long shot, but what the heck? The man might.

Ponytail just laughed. He had a really ugly laugh like all the bad guys in horror movies. The guys who liked to set people’s barns afire, torture cats.

Now they were coming up on Bone’s house. There was his ma, Clementine, stomping across the yard with that determined look on her face, headed toward Cutler’s front steps.

“Uh oh,” said Bone. He could feel it in his gut. Clementine was onto him.

“What?” Ponytail turned and looked at him, jerking the wheel so they almost crashed into old Miz Guste’s front yard and her yardman, Henry.

“Nothing.”

“Don’t you nothing me, boy. I’ve been nothinged all my life, and I’m sick of it, do you understand?” And with that, Ponytail jammed the silver revolver hard in Bone’s left ear.

It seemed to Bone that if there were ever a time to tell the truth and nothing but the truth, so help him, God, this was it.

So he did. He told Ponytail all about doing Cutler’s banking and his mama not knowing about it, and how she’d say he ought to do favors for neighbors and friends like Cutler without charging for it, and then she’d whip his butt and make him give back all the cash he’d earned, and he could kiss his blue-and-white seersucker suit goodbye, when Ponytail barked, “Which bank?”

“Well,” said Bone, “I already went to the Whitney, but if you take a right on Louisiana and cross over St. Charles to that office building on the corner, there’s the First National….”

“If you’re lying to me, you’re dead. Do you understand?” said Ponytail minutes later as they climbed out of the Olds and walked past a wall of hot pink bougainvillea toward the bank.

“I understand,” Bone said solemnly, thinking he was probably going to be dead anyway before this whole thing was over with. But, on the other hand, he was a Sagittarius, and his was a lucky sign. “What you want me to do is walk up to the machine the way I always do and deduct the five hundred dollars and hand it to you and you’ll let me go. Right?”

“Right.”

The honky son of a bitch is going to shoot me dead, is what Bone thought. And he was right. That was exactly what Gordon Armbruster, aka Ponytail, was going to do—because why would he want a smart little kid who could ID him running around—except just before they went through the door to the lobby and the cash machines, Gordon turned around and grabbed the plastic bank card out of Bone’s hand.

“What’s the code?” he said.

“M-A-M-E.”

“Mame?”

“Uh-huh, it’s Cutler’s favorite musical,” said Bone, but before he could finish, Gordon had marched over to the machine and punched in the code, and the silent beeper on Special Agent McGuire’s belt was activated by the bank’s computer, and McGuire stepped forward from just inside the bank’s main door. Bone could feel the blast of air-conditioning on his skinny arms.

“Sir?” Special Agent McGuire said to Gordon.

Gordon whirled with a mad dog snarl on his face. He reached for his .38, and McGuire yelled Freeze! which Gordon didn’t do, of course. So McGuire shot him in the shin. Gordon’s Smith & Wesson made that now-familiar Blam! that Bone thought he would hear forever in his dreams, but Gordon’s shot missed and ricocheted around the small lobby, at which Bone decided to get the hell out of there. He slipped toward the glass door and was almost through it when a volley of gunshots rang out, and Gordon Armbruster’s body did a weird jerky dance as the bullets of New Orleans’s finest punched his liver, his lungs, his gut. Bone ran.

*

Later that afternoon, looking both ways before he left the cottage, Bone crept over to Cutler’s. “I withdrew the five hundred from the Whitney, and then—” he started, but never finished as Cutler swept him to his sequined chest. “You poor sweetheart. You dear thing. You could have died, and all because of me. You could have been shot.”

Blam! Bone had been lying in the tub since he’d gotten home trying to erase that sound. Blam! Blami Blam! Those poor tourists and that redhead, splattered all over First Street. So far, Clementine’s lemon bubble bath hadn’t made him feel a bit better. He didn’t know what ever would. For a while there, he’d been high on adrenaline, but now he felt sick to his stomach.

And scared.

“Look, it’s all over the TV,” said Cutler, pointing. A woman newscaster with big blond hair and lots of teeth was standing right there under that live oak tree where the Rising Sun/Big Easy tour bus had parked.

“…a woman who seemed to be an accomplice of Gordon Armbruster,” she was saying, “and two tourists from Osaka, Japan, were shot here,” she pointed, “and here, and here.”

“And you were there.” Cutler buried his face in his hands and sobbed. “They said there was this little black boy on a bike that bastard snatched up and drove to the First National. I knew it was you! Oh, Bone!”

Bone couldn’t stand seeing a grown man cry, even if he was wearing a dress. He changed the subject to get Cutler’s mind off the shooting. “So, tell me, Cut, what was the real deal with the banks?”

Cutler explained the New Orleans Cookin’ scam.

“Jesus, man, how’d you think that up?”

“I didn’t. I read about it in the Picayune. A Scotland Yard detective did the exact same thing in London, except,” Cutler picked at his gown, “he was man enough to gather his own money from the cash machines. He wore a motorcycle crash helmet with one of those dark face guards so the security cameras at the banks couldn’t photograph him.”

“And I was too short, right? Cool, Cutler, very cool.”

“You’re not mad at me? I put your life on the line, not to mention your freedom. Of course, I’ll do at least twenty years. That’s what they gave the Scotland Yard detective. But I’m sure I can talk them into letting you walk. You’re only a kid, and you didn’t know what I was up to.”

“Wait, Cutler, hush,” said Bone. He pointed at the TV. “Who’s that they’re interviewing now?”

“Oh, Jesus. It’s Kendall Arthur Stanley, that ass who owns New Orleans Cookin’.”

“Shhhhh.”

“…appreciate the wonderful cooperation of the FBI and the New Orleans Police Department in stopping this terrible Armbruster man who not only killed our unfortunate Japanese visitors but extorted thousands from New Orleans Cookin’. But you can be assured that New Orleans Cookin’s jambalaya and crawfish étouffée and blackened redfish are not only of the highest quality but completely free of….”

“He’s doing a commercial,” said Cutler. “A fucking commercial. I can’t believe it.”

“We’re home free!” Bone was jumping up and down on Cutler’s purple taffeta sofa. “Don’t you get it, Cut? They think the shooter was the extortionist!”

On the television, Kendall Arthur Stanley was still talking. “And New Orleans Cookin’ is offering a reward of five hundred dollars as a token of our appreciation to the little boy who was kidnapped by Armbruster at the shooting on First Street and dragged to the bank.”

Five hundred dollars! Bone forgot the shooting, the blood, the guts, the screaming. All he could see was his seersucker suit flying out of the store, softshell crab piled high on fancy china, alligator loafers, a new dress for Clementine….

Bone looked at Cutler and Cutler looked back at him and handed over the five hundred Bone had withdrawn from the Whitney that morning.

Cutler said, “There’s plenty more where that came from. Don’t even think about that reward, y’hear, honey? Put it out of your mind.”

Just in Case

For almost twenty years, as long as she’d had the grocery store, Momma had kept her gun right there on a shelf beneath the cash register. The old Colt revolver, a smaller version of the ones cowboys drew from their hips in the Saturday Westerns, was at the ready, just in case.

“In case of what?” I asked again and again with a child’s insistence.

The gun nestled beside a small square cigar box, the repository for each and every silver dollar that came sliding across the smooth wooden counter. When the box was full, Momma and I would, with great ceremony, take it to the bank, where the heavy coins were translated into numbers carefully inscribed in purple ink in my savings book. Both the cigar box and the Colt were off-limits to my small hands—and loaded.

“In case of trouble,” Momma said.

Before Daddy and I had come to town, Momma, who was my stepmother actually, had run the tiny corner grocery store in West Cypress, Louisiana—a burg in the northeastern corner of the state—all alone. She’d worked twelve hours every day but Sunday through the bone-hard years of the thirties and early forties. She’d opened for business early and never closed until after dark.

Then Daddy had climbed onto a Greyhound bus in New York City—Momma’s letters in his pocket, me, a baby squalling on his hip—and made the long trip south. My own mother dead since I was two weeks old, he was in need of another, and Momma’s hands itched for a baby girl. The two of them had reached a tentative understanding via the U.S. mail, and three days after Daddy stepped off that Greyhound into the heart of Dixie, the deal was sealed.

Daddy wasn’t great shakes in the store. He was shy. He was a Yankee. He stuttered. But even so, he provided relief for Momma, giving her time to rest a bit when she wasn’t looking after me.

They’d quickly fallen into a pattern: she’d open in the mornings, then Daddy would take over for the long middle stretch of the day. Come early evening, she’d close up, maybe keeping the door open a bit later in the summer when the days were longer, selling an after-supper ice-cream cone or two while she caught up on paperwork.

One such evening the summer I was nine found Momma sitting on the high metal stool behind the cash register, toting up bills. Daddy had gone downtown to play dominoes with his cronies. It was getting on toward eight, dusk falling, and the store was dim, but Momma hadn’t switched on a light yet, saving the electricity. I was doing some accounting too, emptying the cigar box of my silver dollars, stacking them in tens. Then I asked Momma about the Colt for the millionth-and-first time.

“No, there never has been any trouble. Not yet.” She answered slowly, as if she didn’t really mean it.

“But there could be?”

Momma shook her head. “You can never be too careful in this world.”

At that a cold hand gripped my guts, and I wished I hadn’t asked the question. Momma’s dark outlook weighed heavily on me. I was an only child. I didn’t want to be careful. I didn’t want to worry. I slipped out from behind the counter and twirled down the center aisle, then on through the front door, outside, into the world.

I stepped over a couple of crispy red worms that hadn’t made it across the burning desert of concrete earlier in the day. Then I looked to the right.

If the trouble were coming, it’d surely be from that direction. Not because it was north—though it was—but because that way lay the quarters. Colored quarters. That’s what everybody called the neighborhood that began just on the other side of the drainage ditch that marked our modern property line.

“You have to watch them, the colored,” Momma warned. “They’ll steal you blind.”

Why, I wondered, would people steal if they could just walk in our store without a dime and ask for what they wanted? A box of cornmeal, three yards of checkered gingham, two scoops of strawberry ice cream from the icebox so deep I couldn’t reach the bottom. Momma or Daddy would write up the purchases in the credit book with their name penciled on the top, and they’d pay when they could.

“Who stole?” I asked Momma. “When? What’d they take?”

Her mouth grew tight. “Don’t dispute my word, Emma. I know what I’m talking about.”

Out on the sidewalk the light grew softer, fading. The kerosene tank, with its sharp smell, made popping noises as it cooled. There was something about this time of day that made me wish I had a sister. Or a brother, an older brother. Someone to play with after all the other kids had gone home to supper. But I didn’t, and Momma said I wasn’t going to either. This world, she said, was such a terrible place that she didn’t want to bring another child into it. That’s why she’d wanted me, she said, because I was already here.

What was so terrible about the world, I wondered.

Then I made a quick run through the hopscotch grid I’d chalked on the sidewalk in front of the store. One, two, three boxes on a single foot. Both feet for the double box. A fourth single. I was about to twirl myself midair for the last double, the trickiest maneuver of the game, trying not to step on the lines, when I spied two little colored boys lollygagging down the road in my direction.

I’d seen these children countless times before, though I didn’t know their names. One boy was near my age, the other a year older. I knew that they lived in the very first house—small, unpainted, sagging porch—on the other side of the drainage ditch. Sometimes when I played with my friends among the blackberry brambles and paths that lined the ditch, I saw the boys, but we never talked. They went to the colored school, and we lived in different worlds on either side of that narrow strip of water.

“’Scuse me,” they said shyly as they passed by me, climbed the step, and slipped inside the store.

I stepped up and watched through the screen door as they headed for the big square red Co-cola box filled with not-quite-freezing water, but cold enough to make my fingers ache when I fished for a soda. Momma left off toting up bills to keep an eye on them.

Would she pull out the Colt and shoot them if they tried to steal something? I wondered. No, surely not. She’d just holler at them. Momma’s voice, even when there was no reason to be upset that I could see, always reminded me of a fire bell.

She was still watching the boys, who hadn’t made their choices yet. She stood and crossed the center aisle, hovering over them. “What do you want?” she asked. “Don’t keep that box open all night.”

The boys murmured words I couldn’t hear, and Momma reached in and fiddled out two wet bottles. One orange NeHi. One Delaware Punch. She didn’t mind the icy plunge. Momma was tough. She was always talking about how she’d had to learn to be, growing up on a farm. “Life’s no tea party, Emma. The sooner you learn that, the better.” The boys unknotted their coins, twisted into the corner of a handkerchief, and handed them over. Momma counted them, a couple of times, then her eyes followed the boys all the way out the door, past me.

It must be exhausting, I thought, being Momma. Always expecting trouble, ready to jump on it before it jumped on her. Just watching her made me tired—and uneasy too. Trouble, her posture said, her fingers scrabbling, poking, never soothing. Trouble everywhere, just biding its time.

Like the mahogany-colored water bug with great ugly pincers scuttling across the other end of the step I’d been standing on, peering into the store. I’d seen these bugs stomped flat, their insides, like soft white cheese, revealed. I didn’t know which was worse, a live water bug or a squashed one, but I did know I didn’t want this one running across my toes, bare in my sandals. I jumped down. You can have the step, Mr. Water Bug.

Then down the street cruised a big green Buick, two-tone, light green and dark, with heavy rounded chrome bumpers, a parade of tiny portholes down its sides. I’d spent many hours out here in front of the store, watching cars, and the Buick was my favorite. When I was grown, I was determined to have one of my own.

I told Momma that, and she shook her head. “Why are you always wanting things that cost so much? You have to learn to save, Emma.”

I was saving. The bank had piles of silver dollars I’d handed over. Silver dollars with my name on them.

“Hey, girl.”

I turned to my left, startled. I hadn’t heard anyone coming. But there looking down at me were a pair of blue eyes pale and cool as the ice floating in the Co-cola box. Above them, a hank of long dirty-blond hair. The young man looked to be about the age of Momma’s nephew A.J., eighteen, nineteen, somewhere in there. But I’d never seen this young man before.

“What’re you doing?” he asked.

“Nothing.” I climbed up backward, onto the step again.

“Are you going in the store?”

“In a little while,” I said, “when Momma’s ready to close up.”

“Oooooooh.” He dragged the word out long. “I see, it’s your momma’s store. And you’re out here holding down the fort.”

I didn’t know exactly what he meant by that, but I knew that he was teasing because of that long Oh and the way he grinned. He had a mouthful of long white teeth.

The young man kept right on grinning as lightning bugs began to flirt behind his blue-jeaned legs. He wore a blue-and-white-striped short-sleeved shirt, the bottoms of the sleeves rolled to show large round muscles poised to jump like frogs beneath his freckled skin. There was an air of excitement about this young man. Much like my black-eyed step-cousin, A.J., he made something expand within my chest. Every time I saw A.J. when we went to visit his family’s farm, I felt crazy, like I wanted to jump out of the hayloft. I would float for a while, I thought, if I leaped high and wide—and then I’d land in A.J.’s arms.

Now I jumped flat-footed, back down the short step onto the sidewalk. “I’m not holding down any fort or anything else,” I said. Then I twirled in a circle as if I were wearing my tap-dancing costume with the silver top and short skirt of scarlet net instead of faded blue shorts and a yellow blouse.

The young man’s grin grew wider. “She sells Co-colas, this momma of yours?”

“She sure does,” I said, proudly. “Ice cold.”

“Then, if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll buy me one.” He opened the screen, then paused and looked back at me, holding it wide, like a gentleman. “Sure you won’t change your mind about coming in?”

I already had.

Momma had switched on the light above the counter, its pull chain hanging down above her head. Dull red and blue coin wrappers were spread out on the smooth wooden countertop before her, the change from the register piled in short silver and copper towers. She’d looked up at the chiming of the brass bell on the door. The single light bulb reflected off her rimless glasses. “Hey,” she said to the young man, “can I help you?”

“Sure can,” he said. “This little girl of yours says you sell the coldest Co-colas in the neighborhood.”

I hadn’t said that, but I was flattered by his exaggeration.

“Well, I don’t know about that.” Momma smiled at me.

“Mind if I help myself?” The young man reached in the icebox, pulled one out, popped the cap, and sucked half of it down in one greedy swig, his Adam’s apple bobbing. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “This sure is a nice place you got yourself here.”

Momma and I both craned around the little store. Six hundred square feet jammed with rows of canned goods, a long meat counter, the cold boxes for milk, soft drinks, ice cream. Bolts of fabric. Sacks of flour. A handful of fresh fruits and vegetables in bins in front beneath the two plate-glass windows, Seventh Street Grocery painted on each in careful gold outlined in black.

“Why, thank you,” Momma said.

“I love the store,” I said.

And why not? It was like having a real playhouse with real people who gave me real money I rang up on the old cash register with its elaborate scrollwork and keys with numbers printed deep into the ivory. I loved sitting on the high metal stool behind the register, where Momma was perched now. I especially loved the glass-topped candy counter at her left hand. Hershey bars with almonds were my favorite. Then there were Necco wafers, the black ones tasting of licorice, Tootsie Pops, Almond Joys.

“I always wanted to have me a store,” the young man said, taking a measured sip of Co-cola, slowing down now.

“Oh no, you don’t,” said Momma. “It’s awfully hard work. It might look easy, but it’s not.”

“I ain’t afraid of work.”

“Of course not,” Momma said. Then, “What do you do?”

We waited for an answer. Rodeo rider, I thought. Now that I’d had time for a closer look, he resembled a man I’d seen the summer before holding on for dear life to a bucking bronco.

But the young man didn’t say. He cocked his head toward the door in the back of the store, which led to our four-room apartment, and asked, “You and the little girl live back there?”

Before Momma could answer, I jumped in. “We do. Me and Momma and my daddy. But Daddy’s not here. If you want to see him, you’ll have to go downtown to the Trenton Street Bar, where he’s playing dominoes.”

Momma’s hand snaked across the counter and gave me a sharp poke in the shoulder. I turned and stared at her. What?

“You don’t say.” There was the young man’s grin again, those crooked white teeth.

“What did you say you do?” Momma asked, something funny in her voice. A note I’d never heard before.

“Meeeeee?” He drew the word out longer than that Oh earlier, longer than you’d think a person could, punctuating it with a laugh.

Then, all in one movement, as if performing a bit of choreography learned in dancing school, the young man swigged the Co-cola dry, slammed the bottle down on the counter a lot harder than was polite, wheeled and kicked the front door shut, then stretched one hand long and locked the bolt.

When he turned back around to face us, that same hand held a shiny pistol.

“What I do mostly is rob banks,” he said, his voice gruff now. “Except when the banks are closed, and I need some quick cash, then I lower myself to knocking off little old grocery stores.” He laughed, a nervous crazy sound, for just a bit. Then, deadly serious, he said, “I’ll shoot you, ma’am, if I have to. If you don’t empty that cash register into a paper bag.”

I couldn’t see Momma’s face because the moment the man had kicked the door shut, Momma had pushed me to the floor. Scoot! she’d hissed, and scoot I had. Now I was on the far side of a row of canned goods—tomatoes, green beans, spinach, creamed corn—crawling like a snake on my belly. I didn’t have to see her, however, to know that Momma’s mouth was real tight when she said, “If you think I’m going to give up my cash, you’re going to have to go ahead and shoot me. I work too hard for my money to be handing it over to you.”

I hoped the robber didn’t plan on arguing with her. There was no point once Momma’s mouth tightened. Forget changing her mind. When Momma got mad, she didn’t even blink, her eyes boring into you like her fingers, poking, prying.

Suddenly, the young man remembered me. “Where’s that little girl?!” he shouted.

“I don’t know,” Momma said.

“Don’t be smart with me, lady!”

I scootched another foot, two, three feet, dust in my nose, splinters in my elbows. All I needed was about six feet more, and I’d have it. I’d fling myself out that door and run for help. I could do it, I knew I could. I wasn’t the tiniest bit scared. Things that went Boo! in the night were frightening. Bad dreams. The things that lived under my bed. The thought of all three of us, as Momma often warned, starving to death. But for some reason this dreamboat bronco-rider, bank-robber-turned-corner-grocery desperado didn’t frighten me one bit.

Though I was sure as heck startled when he fired that shiny pistol. Kapow! it went, and I lurched sideways, lifting a foot right off the floor. At the same time, Momma screamed, “Nooooo!”

And then I was spattered with wet. I’m hit! I thought. He’s shot through the shelves and got me! I looked down for the blood, only to find something yellow and sticky and…sweet. To my left a blue can of Dole’s pineapple juice spurted like a nicked aorta.

“Emma!” Momma shrieked, and I scrambled up and ran around the corner of the shelves waving my hands to show her that I was okay.

“Oh, my God!” she screamed again, seeing the wet stain on my shirt.

The desperado whirled, pointing his gun straight at me. Keeping my distance from him, I said, “I’m okay, Momma. It’s pineapple juice, not blood.”

“Shut up!” he snapped. “You both shut up.”

But Momma wouldn’t. “I’ll give you the money! Don’t shoot again! Don’t hurt my daughter!”

He was looking back and forth between the two of us. “Get over here,” he snarled at me, waggling his gun.

I was about to do as he said when at the corner of my eye, on the other side of the plate glass, there appeared the two little boys who had been in earlier for cold drinks. They’d probably forgotten something, their momma had to send them back to the store.

I don’t know what I’m going to do with the two of you. You’d lose your heads if they weren’t screwed on. Now, get back over there to Miss Rosalie’s before she closes, and bring me my…

There was no telling how long they’d been standing there, but their eyes, wide as could be, said that they’d heard the shot. They seemed frozen, wanting ever so bad to run, but unable. Help, I mouthed, Help. Without making a sound. Then I turned back to Momma, to the young man, to his shiny gun.

And to Momma’s.

For while the desperado had turned, concentrating on me, she’d reached beneath the counter, run her fingers across my cigar box of silver dollars, and pulled out her Colt. Now she was pointing it straight at the young man with the ice-blue eyes.

“You hurt my daughter,” she snapped, “and I’ll kill you.” Motioning, as she spoke, with her free hand for me to join her behind the counter.

I folded myself into her skirt as if I were three years old rather than a big girl.

“Come on, lady,” the young man wheedled. “You don’t want to be doing this. Just give me the money, and I’ll go.”

“I can’t do that,” Momma said.

He couldn’t believe it. “Are you crazy?”

Momma shook her head silently. No. The two of them stood there, locked in a battle of wills and nerves, their guns pointed at each other. Both of them breathing hard like they’d been running a race. I could smell Momma’s sweat, metallic, like hot pennies.

“Why don’t you just go on?” Momma said to the young man. “Git.”

She might have convinced him. I thought I could see him wavering. Until, that is, that last word. With git she’d gone one step too far, crossed into the territory of insult.

“Git?” the desperado screamed. “Who the hell do you think you’re talking to here? I’m a man, you understand? I had me a job at a tire company in Jonesboro. Worked ten hours a day. Hot, dirty, nigger work, but I was glad to have it. Had me a little house, a car, a wife…” He shook his head. “Then I got laid off.”

“Doesn’t mean you can’t get another job,” said Momma, who’d chopped cotton since she was six, cleaned tables in the cafeteria of the normal school where she’d studied, had worked her whole life through. Loved work, truth be told.

“I tried,” the young man whined, his mouth turning down at the corners. “There ain’t no more jobs in Jonesboro. I come over here, thinking my luck’d be better. But it ain’t.”

“You have to keep trying,” said Momma. “A man can’t be just giving up.”

“I ain’t a quitter! That’s what you think?” The young man’s face flushed. “That’s what my daddy always said, I was a quitter.” Then he grinned sourly, a different grin than I’d seen before. “Guess I showed him, didn’t I?”

“I wouldn’t know about that,” said Momma.

I looked back and forth between them as they spoke. It was a strange sight, this conversation they were having from either side of the cash register, with weapons drawn.

“I sure did show that old man,” the young man said. “My daddy. Showed him good.” Then he made popping sounds with his mouth, like I did with my friends, when we played shoot ’em up. Punctuating each burst with a flick of his silver revolver. “So you see.” He leaned closer to Momma then, as if he were a girlfriend about to share a secret. “I don’t have nothing to lose.”

Then, in the far distance, I could hear the wail of a siren on the warm night air, and my heart jumped. A police car, I thought. The little boys’ momma had called the police. The men in blue were riding to our rescue like Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, or my favorite movie cowboy, Tim Holt.

Our desperado heard the siren too. Those blue eyes cut back and forth. “Okay,” he said, his voice toughening. “Hand the money over now.”

“You make a move, I’ll shoot you,” Momma said. “Don’t think I won’t.”

The sirens grew louder. Closer. They were just around the corner now.

The desperado couldn’t wait a minute longer. I could almost hear his thoughts: Fish or cut bait. He gave Momma one long last look, then whirled and ran for it. For a moment I thought he was going to crash right into the plate-glass door, but he paused long enough to unlock the bolt.

Momma and I both leaned forward to watch him go. Once his feet touched the concrete, his limbs stretched long. The bug light made a halo of his blond hair for just a moment. He could outrun the police, I thought. He would. He’d get away.

But then the police car raced right past us down Seventh Street, its red lights whirling. The dark shapes of the officers inside, urgent with the effort of going fast, faster, didn’t even give our desperado a glance.

With their passing, he put on the brakes. Stopped. Turned. Looked back in at us, Momma and me, staring out at him. Those icy eyes twinkled as a grin split his face. Then he threw his head back and looked up as if he were thanking the Lord. Lowering his chin once more, he raised his shiny pistol toward his forehead as if in salute. Then turned it and took aim straight at the two of us, Momma and me, standing there, frozen,on the other side of the glass.

I imagined the snick of the trigger, though I knew I couldn’t hear it through the door.

Braced myself for the blow.

And, kapow, he fell.

Momma shot him!

Momma shot him?

But wait! She hadn’t moved.

Then from out of the darkness behind the desperado—crumpled on the cement now, his dark blood flowing toward the chalked lines of my hopscotch—stepped a black man in khaki work pants and an undershirt that glowed stark white against his skin. A shotgun dangled from the crook of his left arm.

“I didn’t see as I had any other choice,” he said to Momma as she and I joined him, the three of us staring down at the young man dying on the sidewalk. “My boys said, ‘Call the cops!’ I said, ‘You know we don’t have no phone.’ So I came, fast as I could, with my gun.”

“Thank you, Joe,” Momma said, stepping toward the man, her hand out as if she were going to shake his. But she didn’t, not quite. She stopped just before she touched him. “I surely do appreciate it. I really do.”

I was amazed that Momma knew this man and his name. I didn’t think that I’d ever seen him before. Or if I had, he hadn’t registered. But then, the lives of the people who lived on the other side of the drainage ditch, no more than a hundred yards away, were unknown to me. They lived in a totally different universe.

“I wouldn’t been surprised,” Joe replied, “you shot him yourself. Nawh, it wouldn’t have surprised me at all. You one tough woman, Miss Rosalie. We all know that. Running this store all by your lonesome all those years ’fore Mr. Jake come.”

Momma didn’t get many compliments, which didn’t mean she didn’t like it when one came her way. She stood tall and looked proud. “I would have, if I’d had to. I told him that. I told him I’d shoot him if he even thought about hurting Emma. Before I’d give him my money either. I work too hard for it to be giving it to any stickup man.”

* * *

No stickup man ever came Momma’s way again. That night was the only brush she ever had with crime, which didn’t mean that she didn’t continue to be vigilant. Just in case.

Years passed. The Krogers and Piggly Wigglys and changing times had long put corner grocery stores like ours out of business, but still Momma held on to her Colt, even after she had the old store and the apartment behind it demolished and built a little brick ranch house farther back from the street. She kept the Colt in a dresser drawer, spare bullets rattling around every time she opened and closed it.

“Somebody might break into the house,” she said. “Someone from the quarters.”

It didn’t do any good to remind her that the only person who’d ever bothered her over all those years was blue-eyed and blond-haired. Momma knew what she knew.

When I was emptying out the house after her death a few years ago—at eighty-four of a heart attack while she was hoeing in her garden out behind the house—I thought about that Colt. I hadn’t run across it, and I wondered when she had gotten rid of it. How? And why?

Still, I gasped a little, surprised, when I spied the old gun lying beneath her bed among a tangle of hoses and dust bunnies and long-discarded magazines. How many years had it been resting there? Was it loaded? Rusted? Might it go off at a jiggle?

I placed a call to the police station, which was no longer downtown but farther out where younger people were building houses. No hurry, I said, but in no time at all, a bright and shiny officer appeared, young enough to be the grandson of one of those policemen speeding past our store forty years earlier. I knew he wasn’t, though, because there’d been no black police officers back then. Polite, but clearly amused at my concern, he pulled the Colt from its resting place.

“Wow!” he said, holding the pistol up. “This is an old one. A beaut.”

It was a beauty, as guns go. Darkened with age but just as I remembered it, long-barreled like pistols in the Westerns I’d grown up on. Heavy. A plate on either side of the grip of some pre-plastic material, crosshatched and scrolled with the word Colt inscribed within a graceful oval.

The handsome young policeman flipped the chamber open. “It’s loaded, all right. Your momma was ready. Except…” He eyed the revolver closely. “Come on outside. Let me show you something.”

We stepped out into the backyard. Along our side of the ditch bloomed an eight-foot-high wall of red roses that Momma had planted before I was born. The young policeman in the crisp navy uniform aimed Momma’s Colt toward the ditch and pulled the trigger.

Nothing. The barrel revolved and the trigger clicked, but the Colt didn’t fire.

He pulled again, to the same result.

No shot, no bullet, no nothing.

“The firing pin’s bent,” he said. “It’s a good thing your momma never needed to shoot anybody ’cause this gun never would of fired in a million years.”

I thanked the young policeman kindly, and after he was gone, packed the Colt in a box of mementos I intended to take back to the big city with me. Just in case, I told myself, I might ever forget the long-ago night when that good neighbor, a man named Joe, made a giant step across the line that separated our lives from his for just long enough to save us and then stepped back to the other side again.

Say You’re Sorry

Down in Baton Rouge darkness had fallen, and the official State of Louisiana fireworks display could finally begin. An expectant, sunburned crowd filled the Capitol lawn. Children sat on their fathers’ shoulders dribbling half-eaten ice-cream cones down their backs. Teenaged couples held hands, willing their palms not to sweat. Then, for the fifth time that day, the Capital City High School Marching Band struck up the opening notes of “The Star-Spangled Banner” and everyone rose, some more proud than others to be Americans in this summer whose television stars included Senator Sam Ervin and the whole panoply of Watergate crooks.

As the crowd sang the words bombs bursting in air, red, white, and blue rockets shrieked across the clear evening sky, exploding into mushrooms of light that reflected in the clear eyes of children and then floated, trailing off into vapor. The fireworks would continue for half an hour, each barrage of sound and light more spectacular than the one before, punctuations of oohs and ahs joining the growing roar until the grand finale that smothered all reverberations except its thunderous self, reminding more than one Vietnam veteran, who leaned against a crutch or sat in a wheelchair, of sounds he’d just as soon forget, but couldn’t.

Across town from the Capitol lawn on a narrow street that intersected Front, Loubella Simms sat alone on her porch steps and watched the lights above the treetops. She lighted one long cigarette off another and sipped iced tea from a sweating glass.

Inside the darkened living room, her battered hi-fi repeated the same record over and over, Sweet Emma and her band from the New Orleans Preservation Hall playing Dixieland. Slide- man, a trombone player and one of Loubella’s friends and admirers, had brought her the record, which was now worn scratchy, but she didn’t mind. It didn’t have all that much further to go.

With that thought, she ran a hand inside her faded pink seersucker housecoat and trailed her fingers across her pendulous left breast.

The sweet man named Isaac was the one who had found the spot first.

Now who was Isaac? He was the one who bought the River City Hotel (read “whorehouse”) from the sheriff who had bought it from Blanche, the former mistress of River City and the woman who, out of misplaced jealousy, had had Loubella locked up.

“Honey,” Isaac’d said to her one night when they were lying in bed together, nothing serious, just sipping bourbon and messing around. “Honey, I…” And then he’d hesitated as he’d realized he was about to drop a stone into waters whose circles might never stop.

“What?”

“I think I feel something here.”

“’Course you do, sugar. You feel what you always feel when you get the mood on you.”

“No, I don’t.” His voice had become serious so that Loubella had sat up in bed and switched on the light.

She’d put her hand atop his, and together their hands moved in a slow circle.

Then she’d slipped her fingers beneath, and she, too, felt what he was talking about. The lump was about the size of her smallest fingernail, but round like an egg yolk.

She took a deep breath, and when she let it out the lie came with it: “Oh, that’s been there for a long time. I get them all the time, little old lumps like chicken fat.”

“That’s not true, Loubella. You know it’s not.”

She’d waved off his words and pulled him to her, smothering his worrying with her mouth.

But after he’d gone, after he’d looked her straight in the eye and ordered her to see a doctor the very next day, and after she’d nodded that she would, she’d lain awake for a long time tracing her fingertips over and over the spot.

It wasn’t gone the next morning or the one after that. In fact, it grew larger all the time, as if it were a child inside her doubling and redoubling until it could draw its own breath.

“The doctor said nothing, it’s nothing, just as I told you,” she answered her lover when he asked her about it.

Actually the doctor had said nothing because she had never gone to see him. A couple of times she had picked up the phone to call for an appointment, but then had dropped it back into its black cradle as if it were a snake.

There was no way that she was going to let anyone cut off her breast.

Why, she said to herself this Fourth of July night as she watched the fireworks explode into the air, she’d be so lopsided she’d fall off the sidewalk into the street. And she managed a crooked smile at the thought of that.

When she’d been a young girl and these ridiculous things had sprouted themselves like ever-larger fruit—oranges, cantaloupes, then finally watermelons—on her chest, she’d been ashamed. The boys had opened their legs as she’d passed, touched themselves, and sniffed after her as if she were a dog permanently in heat. But then when she’d seen that her breasts were to be her meal ticket, as no other opportunity had presented itself, she’d said, “So be it.” She’d never loved her bosoms even though she’d named them Lou and Bella and had pretended that she appreciated the men who looked at her chest. But in time she’d grown used to her bounty, and parting with half of it was something that she simply couldn’t bring herself to do.

She knew the consequences. She didn’t need a doctor to tell her that. And before long she could feel the sickness growing, reaching out beneath her armpits, putting feelers into her groin. Now there was no call to remove her breast; it was already too late.

Loubella leaned her back against the step and lit another cigarette, watching the smoke curl into the night air. In a moment she’d get up and flip the record to the other side and put on a pot of water. It was too hot a night for coffee, but she wanted it anyway—sweet and black, the perfect end to a perfect day.

And she couldn’t imagine one more perfect. Isaac had come over about noon and they’d had a long, gentle time in bed. Then they’d taken a cool shower together and she’d spread out their holiday dinner: fried chicken, potato salad with sour cream (her secret ingredient), baked beans, and pineapple upside-down cake.

“Honey,” Isaac had said, “you should have been a cook.”

“I should have been lots of things. But I’m stuck with what I’ve been. It’s a little too late.”

“It’s never too late, Loubella.”

But she’d seen the look in his eyes, and she knew he could see what looked back at her from her mirror these days. She could smell it too. They both knew she was already holding hands with a bad-breathed lover, Mr. Death.

Then they’d sat for a while on the porch playing gin rummy, right out in the open, not caring who came by. Not that Isaac had ever been big on sneaking and hiding, but in some ways he was circumspect. Not this day. Not this Fourth of July, which was also Loubella’s birthday. She was forty-six.

“Lordy, lordy, who’d of thought I’d be getting so old?”

“And so beautiful.” He’d kissed her and placed among the cards before them a little jeweler’s box.

Inside was a diamond solitaire, a big sparkling beauty of an engagement ring.

They smiled at each other, Loubella’s gold tooth shining like a ray of sunlight. They smiled, for they both understood the symbolism and yet knew that in that sense the ring didn’t mean a goddamned thing.

For her lover was married, a Baton Rouge businessman who carried considerable weight, and he wasn’t about to toss over everything to marry a retired whore. Not that they would have had time to do that anyway, even though divorces could be had now in only six months. Both of them knew that Loubella didn’t have that much time left.

She held her hand out before her now that he was gone, watching the diamond catch the fireworks’ light, admiring the token of his love like a sixteen-year-old girl. She savored both it and the favor she’d asked of him, which he’d granted—making the phone call without missing a beat.

Loubella, she said to herself now, all in all you’ve had a good life.

The whoring hadn’t gotten her, nor the drugs, nor the time in jail. She’d risen above them all like cream coming to the top. And these last few years with Isaac, tending her little house and the bar in his now respectable River City, they’d been all she’d ever hoped for, more than she’d ever dreamed.

And in just a little while it would be over. For Loubella was not waiting for Mr. Death to name the time. She would do that herself. Not for her the long hoping and the slow snipping, a breast here, a womb there, all her hair falling out, what was left of her fading beauty gone, till there was nothing left but the tubes and high hospital bed and the drugs dripping into her veins, the drugs that didn’t quite smother the smells or the pain.

She heard the big car coming even before she saw its headlights. She sat up straight and a tingle ran right down the back of her neck.

Oh, it had been such a while since she’d seen her enemy’s face. This time was going to be so sweet.

Now the heavy door of the Cadillac slammed, just once, which meant Blanche hadn’t brought her husband Aces with her. Well, it would have been nice to have them both, but Aces didn’t really matter. Blanche had been the hand behind the hand that turned the key that locked the door that kept her imprisoned eleven and a half years, almost one quarter of her life.

“Evening, Blanche,” Loubella called from the steps. She had been sitting there for a while growing cats’ eyes and could see into the night.

“Loubella?” Blanche stopped dead still as she recognized the voice.

“Sure ’nuff. Come on in.”

Blanche came closer now. Good Lord have mercy, how she’d aged! The golden girl was gone. And here in her place stood a middle-aged pouty pigeon in a blue dress that was too tight, stretched across the bulging stomach and the spreading butt. Ah, beautiful Blanche, Loubella thought, has all that barbecue caught up with you at last?

“Isaac called and gave me this address. Said he wanted to talk some business.” Blanche’s voice was wary.

“He does.”

“Well, where is he?” Blanche stood uneasily, shifting her considerable weight.

“Inside.” Loubella gestured up toward the porch, pointing at a wicker chair. “But why don’t you sit out here with me for a minute first ’fore you go in? Give yourself a rest.”

Loubella watched Blanche’s mouth open and close. No, not a pouty pigeon. Now she reminded Loubella of a chicken, an old rusty hen, ready for the pot.

“Would you like some coffee?” Loubella kept her voice ever so light.

“Why, yes,” said Blanche, smoothing her dress across her stomach with nervous little hands. She hadn’t seen Loubella since before she’d been sent away. “I guess I would. Yes, that would be awfully nice.”

Loubella smiled her still-pretty smile, full lips pulled back from teeth that were perfect and white except for that one spot of gold, which was nothing but vanity. Then she disappeared into the house.

Blanche fidgeted in the wicker chair. She smoothed and resmoothed her lap, adjusted her rings, tried to find a place to plant her twisting feet. Though age had slowed her down, now she felt fourteen again, flighty as a bird just this moment locked in a cage. She hadn’t expected Loubella gliding toward her now, carrying a tray with two pretty china cups, so delicate that, between the pattern of violets, they were translucent.

“Oh,” Loubella said then, just as her rear end touched her chair. “I forgot the cake. Would you like some?”

“No, I just couldn’t. Thank you.” Blanche listened to herself playacting that she wasn’t unnerved. Woman, she thought, butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth.

“Sure you could.” Loubella smiled. “Have some cake.”

Blanche wondered if the other woman were mocking her little jelly rolls of fat. She really must go on a diet, but then it always had been hard for her to deny herself anything she wanted to put in her mouth.

“You’ve got to have some of my birthday cake.”

“Your birthday. Why, of course it is. The Fourth. I’d forgotten.”

And she had, but she remembered now.

When they were girls, even though Loubella was almost ten years younger than she, she’d never missed Loubella’s birthday party. It was the event of the summer. Loubella’s grandmother, who was her entire family, had taken her in when everyone else, for one reason or another, had disappeared, would churn peach ice cream for the whole neighborhood, spread tables with ham and chicken, once even saved to pay a three-piece band who’d played for dancing in the street beneath Japanese lanterns until the last pair of happy feet stopped. After that night Blanche had said to her mother that Loubella was going to grow up thinking the entire country celebrated her birthday, not knowing it belonged to the whole United States.

“That little girl has no family but her Mamaw, Blanche, who gives her this one day. Begrudging her that, child, you ought to be ashamed.”

And Blanche had been. She’d tried to make up for her jealousy by pretending to be the big sister Loubella had never had.

She remembered holding Loubella, a dark-haired little girl, a doll baby, balancing her on her knees while she divided her hair into sections and braided her pigtails. She taught her to swim at the edge of the river, along with a couple of other little kids. She’d baptized them first, pouring water over their heads with a handleless cup, making up the words as she went along.

“And the Baby Jesus watch over you and carry your little soul straight to heaven without no detours if you drown,” she’d said. Loubella’s brown eyes had grown wide like saucers plopped into her face.

Yes, there’d been a long time when she’d truly loved the girl Loubella, had mothered her and smiled proudly at the mention of her name.

Now, from atop her coffee cup, she slid a look toward the woman and felt a flash of regret, then shame. How fragile friendship could be. How was it you spent years with someone—your minds so intertwined you didn’t even need to pick up the phone but could just transmit thoughts—laughed together, loved each other, and then things changed? There was a misunderstanding, an angry word that grew into a great wrong as you carried it around in your hand, blowing on it to give it life until, like a flame, it had a will of its own. But it had been more than a cross word, hadn’t it, that thing that had turned her love for Loubella to hate?

It had begun one July when Parnell, then Blanche’s husband and owner of River City, decided to pick up where Loubella’s mamaw had left off and in a fit of flamboyance treated his girls to a trip on a paddleboat all the way down the river to New Orleans. He’d said that his girls didn’t have to work on the Fourth, but Blanche had known that that was just his excuse to throw a party for Loubella.

Before that, when Blanche had come back to Baton Rouge to marry Parnell and had found Loubella in his stable of whores, it had made her sad for a bit, but then a woman had to do what she had to do. For a while she and Loubella had carried on together like they had when they were girls. They’d run into each other on the back stairs, Loubella in a yellow silk wrapper that glowed like fireflies, and then they’d sit right down on the steps, their legs tucked back against them within their encircling arms, gossiping and giggling with no mind for the passing hours, reaching their hands out and patting one another on a knee or a shoulder, little butterflies of affection, easy, easy, old love.

But Parnell had noticed, and he hadn’t liked it, not one bit.

“You don’t need that whore teaching you tricks, Blanche,” he said. “Unless you planning on turning pro.”

“Parnell! You know Lou and I’ve been friends since we were girls!”

“I know what you been. You think I didn’t grow up in this very same neighborhood? But Loubella works for me, woman. She’s my whore. Just ’cause she don’t punch no time clock don’t mean she ain’t on salary. And the lady of the house don’t fraternize with the help.”

Well. Blanche hadn’t believed a word of that. She knew there was something more tiptoeing around in Parnell’s big head. She also knew that he sampled the goods from time to time, like a moonshiner sipping his own whiskey, and she guessed that included Loubella too. But then, she enjoyed a taste of other sweetmeat her own self now and again, so she wasn’t about to be calling the kettle black.

And every once in a while, like naughty children ignoring all warnings, she and Loubella still slipped off to have a good visit, and whatever quick and dirty passed between her husband and her friend was no part of that.

But then there’d been Loubella’s Fourth of July birthday and the paddleboat and—worse than catching them in bed together, because what would that mean, after all, a little roll in the hay between two people who trafficked in flesh—she’d seen their eyes meet.

Again and again throughout that afternoon, she’d watched that connection between them, as simple and direct as plugging in a lamp. Their glances crossed and caught and held, and Blanche had to turn her gaze away, for if Parnell had leaned over and slowly licked Loubella’s naked eyeball, the act could not have been more intimate. Everything else in the entire world, including her, oh yes, including her, fell away. And Blanche, who had never had that kind of communion with another human being in her whole life but recognized it when she saw it, hated Loubella from that very afternoon to this.

So she’d punished her, hadn’t she, she’d punished her good. Planted a load of dope in her room, then called the cops to raid her own joint. It was hers by then, Aces having already pulled the trigger that morning so long ago, pulled the trigger that had blasted Parnell’s head and sent it rolling and tumbling like a child’s ball down Front. She’d married Aces right after that, before they sent him up for a little stay in Angola.

Now she looked up at Loubella from the edge of her violet-sprigged coffee cup and all the years fell away. There before her was the face of the little girl with birthday candles shining in her eyes, the little girl she’d loved as her own. Parnell had been dead for so many years, and he hadn’t been worth shaking a stick at, anyway. What had all that been about? Blanche wondered what would happen if she reached out and patted Loubella’s cheek and said, “I’m sorry I was so mean.” Would Loubella understand that if she could do it all over again she’d do it differently?

Loubella caught her look and that old communion of spirits that ran between them straighter than the string of a child’s tin-can telephone told her what Blanche was thinking.

She smiled and her gold tooth twinkled. Blanche’s heart lurched. That tooth had always reminded her of Parnell’s with his diamond, but no, no, forget Parnell. He was what had brought her to this pass in the first place. Maybe that had been her problem all along, paying attention to men, my God, there had been so many of them, when there were other folks, plenty of other folks, her family, her children, all those women who could have been her sisters, sitting right there in her face big as life—hell, maybe they were life—and she had looked right through them like they were water, past them to whatever man was waggling his dick like it was a magic wand that would turn her into a fairy princess with its touch. Well, you been touched by them wands plenty times, ain’t you, woman, and you ain’t no princess yet. But here was Loubella smiling at her. Maybe it wasn’t too late.

“You gonna come in the house and sample some of my cake or not?” Loubella was asking.

“Why, I’d be proud to,” Blanche answered, rising from her chair and feeling like she was floating. Something had been released in her, and she felt light and wispy as a pink cloud. “And by the way, happy birthday, Miss Loubella.”

“Thank you, Miss Blanche.” Loubella ducked her head as if she were suddenly shy. Why, yes, Blanche thought. The little girl is still there. We can start over. It’s not too late.

Blanche watched Loubella bustling around her neat kitchen, and suddenly the two girls of long ago had swapped places. Now Loubella was the momma, the momma Blanche had never really been to anyone. For the small acts of mothering Blanche had practiced on Loubella had not followed her into adulthood. Now that she thought about it, she couldn’t remember ever plaiting her own daughters’ hair, though she must have. And she’d certainly never taught Jesse to swim. Who had done all those things—washed their clothes, cooked the countless meals her children must have eaten—because indeed they had grown up. It all seemed like such a blur now, those years of their childhood. She remembered a few snatches, but the pictures in her mind were duplicates of the pictures she’d pasted in a photo album. The kids standing in front of one of her new Cadillacs. All three of them lined up on the porch of River City. Jesse in a new white suit for one of her weddings, she couldn’t remember which.

But there were no photographs of the three children sitting with Blanche reading or storytelling or fixing a hem. Did their grandmother Lucretia have pictures like that in her photo album? she wondered. Did people take pictures of a woman serving dinner to her family?

Well, they ought to. Not that she would ever be caught dead in one, but look now, here, at Loubella putting food on the table in front of her. Those sturdy hands carefully placing the little violet-sprigged dessert plate that matched the cup and saucer, they were delivering more than a piece of cake, more like a gift of love.

“Loubella!” Blanche exclaimed suddenly, for her eye had finally caught the diamond sparkler upon Loubella’s left hand, and her mind quickly jumped from its maternal meditation back to the more familiar territory of earthy goods. “Good Lord have mercy, where did you get that pretty thing?” And in an instant Blanche, with an eye accustomed to weighing and assessing, had its value appraised as precisely as if she’d examined it with a scale and a jeweler’s loupe.

“Isaac.” Loubella smiled. “It’s Isaac’s birthday present to me.”

With that, Blanche remembered why she’d come in the first place.

“Where is Isaac?” she asked, looking around the room as if he might be hiding behind the sugar canister or underneath the table with its plastic lace tablecloth.

“Oh, he slipped out the back to get some Scotch. Said we ought to have a proper celebration and I’d just run clean out. But I’ve got some bourbon. Could I sweeten your coffee with a little nip?” And before Blanche could answer, Loubella had poured her a generous dollop, filling her coffee cup to the brim.

“But I thought you said he was here, inside. Didn’t you say that a little while ago?”

“He was. He’ll be right back. Go ahead, Blanche, drink up.”

Blanche took a sip and then another. The dark, sweet coffee and the alcohol warmed her blood even hotter on this July delta night. She could feel it coursing right down to her toes. And the warmth distracted her for a moment from the other questions that had popped into her mind. Like, what did Isaac want? What was the deal he had mentioned? Why had he given her Loubella’s address? And what was it between them, anyway, his giving Loubella a diamond as if she were a decent woman?

Loubella answered that last one even before Blanche threw it out.

“That Isaac, he is the sweetest man. We’ve been keeping company, you know, for quite some time.”

“Well, I swear. I never knew that.”

“Honey, there’s lots of things you don’t know about Loubella. It’s not exactly as if we been in touch.”

Blanche lowered her gaze then. Here it comes. This wasn’t going to be as easy as she’d thought.

But in a moment all was calm again. She’d mistaken a passing cloud for a storm gathering. And before she knew it, Loubella was sweetening up her coffee again, and they were leaned back in their chairs, Loubella tucking her feet up, her legs in the circle of her arms, and it was like they were back on the service steps of River City gossiping about folks like Parnell had never come between them, as if his head had never rolled down Front.

“Tell me ’bout your children. What’s Jesse up to?”

“Well, I guess he’s doing all right. Married. Uh-huh.” She paused a moment, thinking about that. And then with pride in her voice said, “He called me today just to say hello.”

“He lives in California, doesn’t he? They come and visit you?”

“Uh-huh. Once. Stopped by my house.” She put her cup down, and this time Loubella didn’t even bother with the coffee, just filled it with bourbon, straight up. “Why, I think that day they said they’d been by to see you too.”

“That’s right.”

“Can’t say as I thought much of her.”

“Why not?”

Blanche just shrugged. You’d have to be mother to a son to understand that.

Loubella rose then, steady as a rock, for no alcohol had passed her lips, just coffee and a few bites of cake. As she skirted the back door, she reached out and tested it, just to make sure. Before Blanche came, she had locked that dead bolt from the inside and dropped the key in her garbage sack. Of course, Blanche didn’t know that.

“Way things are these days, you can never be too safe,” Loubella said.

Blanche nodded. “Ain’t that the truth. Why, just last week, I was reading in the paper about some crazy boys downtown grabbed a woman on her way home, arms full of groceries and…”

Loubella wasn’t listening, except to a plan she’d run through her mind so many times that it had become a script. She couldn’t hear Blanche because she was following that script. Now she read the line that said, “Excuse yourself,” and she did.

“Bathroom,” she said.

“Sure, honey. Me too, after you.”

Loubella closed the kitchen door behind her and headed down a little hall to her bedroom where she picked up the red five-gallon can of gasoline she’d earlier placed inside. She tipped the nozzle, splashed the bed, and began a damp trail that followed her as if to her mamaw’s house. In the living room she locked the front door from the inside and hid that key, too, beneath a cushion of her favorite chair. Then she doused the chair, the sofa, the faded Persian rug. After that she did what she’d said, went into the bathroom and relieved herself. For she wanted to be perfectly at ease for this last best part, the cherry on her ice cream sundae.

Then she rejoined Blanche, who had been sitting there drinking another couple of fingers of bourbon that she didn’t need. Loubella frowned. She wanted Blanche slowed, but not so drunk that she missed a moment of the impending horror show.

“Honey, I been thinking about what I said about Jesse and that girl, his wife, uh…”

“Lily,” Loubella said.

“That’s right, Lily, and then I was thinking about you and Isaac. You did say—” And then she stopped. “Jesus Christ, Loubella, what is that smell?”

Loubella settled herself back at the table and plopped down the can she was still holding, planted it on the floor.

“Gas,” she answered.

Blanche jumped up, holding a hand to her breast. “The line’s busted!” She reached for Loubella’s arm. “Come on, honey, we got to get out of here!”

Loubella smiled at her as serenely as if she’d just gotten up off her knees from prayer and knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that her supplication had been answered.

Blanche saw that and suddenly her blood ran cold.

Well, forget Loubella. She was getting out of here. She pushed past her to the back door and jerked at it. It didn’t open. She jerked again. “The door’s locked!” she screamed.

Already she was hysterical. This was better than Loubella had even dreamed. She just kept on watching as if Blanche were a picture show, a movie she had waited a long time to see.

“Aren’t you going to do something? You just going to sit there?” Blanche’s voice shrilled with terror and disbelief.

Of course, Blanche had always thought that nothing very bad was going to happen to her, and up until now, she’d been right.

As if in answer, though without saying a word, Loubella stood, picked up the gasoline can, which until now Blanche hadn’t spotted, and heaved it toward her, splattering Blanche’s baby-blue dress.

Blanche screamed. She stood in one place with her hands in fists atop her head and screamed. You would have thought she could already feel the flames.

“What are you doing?”

“What does it look like, Blanche?” Loubella’s words were slow and calm. “I’m killing you. Actually, I’m killing us both.” And with that she reached over into a cabinet drawer and pulled out a revolver and placed it before her among the violet-sprigged china and the near-empty bottle of bourbon and the remains of birthday cake. The gun didn’t look very much at home.

Blanche was jumping around now as if a fire were licking at her underpants. She whirled and raced out of the room. Loubella could hear her battering at the front door.

“It ain’t no use, Blanche,” she called. “The doors are locked, and Isaac put bars on the windows last year. You might as well come on back in here.”

Blanche blundered around a while longer before she did as she was told.

She was whimpering. Big tears were rolling down her face. “No, no, no,” she whispered over and over.

“You think you can always get your own way, don’t you, Miss Blanche? Well, this time you can’t.”

“Why?” Blanche wailed.

“Why what?”

“Why are you doing this to me?”

“Why, Blanche, I can’t believe you don’t know how much I hate your guts.”

Blanche reeled around the room, scrabbling at the things on the kitchen cabinet, grabbed a dishtowel, and dabbed at the front of her dress.

“Don’t worry about it being stained, honey. Ain’t nothing of it going to be left.”

Blanche began to scream again. Someone would hear her. Surely someone would.

But it was the night of July Fourth. Hardly anyone was home. And those who were, were mostly drunk. Besides, nobody ever paid much attention to a woman screaming in this neighborhood. They figured whoever she was she was getting what she deserved, and if she didn’t, she either ought to get the hell out or pick up a skillet and show the man what for.

“I didn’t mean any of it, Loubella, I’m sorry.” And she started to cry again, not paying any attention to her dripping nose. “I was gonna tell you tonight, just a while ago, that if I had to do it all over, I’d do it different, I swear.”

“That may be true, but those years are already long gone.”

“Oh, Loubella.” Blanche fell to her knees, scratching on the floor at Loubella’s feet. “Please, don’t do this.”

“Remember when you baptized me in the river?” asked Loubella in a faraway, dreamy voice.

“Yes.” Blanche was sobbing, her face buried in Loubella’s knees.

“Remember how you prayed that if we drowned, the Baby Jesus would take us straight to heaven with no stops in between?”

“Yes.” Blanche’s answer was muffled. But in it was just a whisper of hope. Maybe if Loubella could remember those days, when Blanche had been kind, she could find a bit of mercy in her heart.

“Remember how you poured the water over our heads with that old broken cup?”

Blanche nodded. And with that she felt liquid pour all over her hair, dribble down her neck.

But it wasn’t river water. It was gasoline—high test.

Blanche jumped up and screamed. And screamed. And screamed. She couldn’t stop now. Liquid ran down her legs too. Gasoline and urine mixed together, for Blanche had completely lost control of herself.

“You never should have done what you did, Blanche. Parnell may have loved me, but he married you. He would have given you anything on earth you wanted.”

“I know. I know,” Blanche moaned.

“He was too good for you, bitch. You know, you’re the one who was the whore. I did it ’cause I had to. You did it ’cause you liked it. ’Cause you wanted everything. You always was a greedy gut, even as a girl. ‘That’s mine,’ you’d say. Licking a biscuit so nobody else would touch it. ‘Mine,’ no matter what.”

Blanche kept on moaning. She had stopped twitching around the room and had fallen back in her chair as if she’d returned for another cup of coffee, another drink, except that her head was down on the table buried in her arms, and the liquid running down her face was a mixture of gasoline and tears.

“And Parnell was yours. But those years you took from me—those eleven years, six months, and nine days—that quarter of my life I spent in jail, those wasn’t yours to take. Those were mine.”

“I know. I know.”

“Say you’re sorry, Blanche.” Loubella’s voice was very soft and very cold.

Blanche’s head snapped up.

“I am sorry.”

“But not as sorry as you’re gonna be.”

At that, Loubella reached into her wrapper pocket and pulled out a box of wooden kitchen matches. She struck one and dropped it. The floor burst into licking tongues of red and yellow.

In that moment, Blanche saw her chance. Quick as a snake, her hand grabbed the revolver sitting on the table and she fired it without thinking, striking Loubella in the breast.

Loubella reeled backward. Laughter poured from her throat while crimson pumped from a hole in the pale pink wrapper, from right near the spot where her cancer was now cheated from its slower march toward death.

“Thank you, Blanche,” Loubella whispered, and even as she died, she struck and dropped another match.

It was then that Blanche realized, too late, far too late, that she had shot the wrong person. She should have shot herself. For a bullet through the brain was much quicker—why, it hardly compared to burning to death.

The gas can exploded then, and flames engulfed her dress, her hair, her face.

She reached one twisting hand toward the revolver, where she’d dropped it on the table. Maybe it still wasn’t too late. But it was. For Loubella had loaded only one bullet in the chamber. She’d known that whether she fired it or Blanche did, one was all she’d want or need.

The curtains were on fire now, the rugs, the sofa, the bed, the walls, the floor. And in the midst of it, caroming from one small room to another, from door to window to door, was the fireball that was Blanche. That didn’t last very long, though. Soon she dropped and writhed, white teeth showing and glimmers of bone, as beautiful Blanche, blackened like a redfish, fried and crisped and barbecued to a turn, just a little before midnight on this evening of July the Fourth.

Wish You Were Here

Ask Lydia Soniat what she hated most about summer vacation. Ask her the last day of July while she was packing the car. She’d push her damp dark curls off her pretty face—even prettier than she was twenty years earlier as a debutante and Queen of Mardi Gras—kick a tire of her husband Clay’s Mercedes, and drawl, This son of a bitch, I think.

It wasn’t the car, of course. A four-door top-of-the-line dark green 560 SEL, one in a line of perennially new sedans Clay ordered from Tar Heel Import Motors in downtown Raleigh as if he were renewing a magazine subscription. Though, in truth, she much preferred the little blue Mustang convertible she’d had for fifteen years—ten years before Dr. Clay Prescott, a very handsome (and successful) nutritionist visiting New Orleans for a medical meeting, had first had her. In the garden shed in the midst of a cocktail party at Dr. Taliferro’s big old house in the Garden District, after far too many Salty Dogs.

No, it wasn’t the car. What she hated was the packing. Every summer Clay’s list of essentials grew longer and longer. Now dressed in white tennis shorts, she stood glaring at this year’s list, her lean strong legs planted wide in their driveway as if to prevent her from being bowled over.

And every year at the end of August as she repacked the car for the drive back to Raleigh, which she’d never be able to call home, she asked the same question: Clay, why don’t we just leave all this stuff down here?

Down where? he’d counter in that monotone he adopted when he really wanted to be a pain in the butt, which was often.

Down here in Hilton Head where your mother has rented us a place each August for the past five years. Down here in the Orange County of the South, where you have an orgasm every time you face off three other Mercedes at a four-way stop. Down here in the middle of the Rolex, tennis bracelet, and yacht club wars.

But where would we leave it, he’d drone in the same monotone, ignoring her sarcasm. We’ve taken a different place each year. (He didn’t add, Always trading up. That was a given.)

At your mother’s, Lydia would finally scream. At your mother’s goddamned wedding cake of a house in historic little old Beaufort, half an hour from the beach. The one you bought for her, restored for her, keep up for her so the two of you can pretend she’s Southern gentry instead of a retired schoolteacher. Leave this crap in one of those goddamned guest rooms whose door she’s never darkened.

Oh, no. Clay couldn’t impose on Mother.

But with her…. “Darlin’,” he’d started up just last week. When Clay wanted something he got more Southern, reminding Lydia of the Yankee actresses in Steel Magnolias. It was enough to make your skin crawl. “Darlin’, you don’t mind getting our things together, do you, just this once more? I’m so busy at the clinic….” Then he’d trailed off.

She sat now atop her one large suitcase and stared at our things, thinking how if she did it right this time, she could squeeze in her paints and canvases instead of scratching around for new supplies down there. Also thinking about Bali. She really liked the idea of Bali. The beautiful masks. The dances. The Balinese were all artists. Or Borneo. And she wasn’t too old yet to go trekking in Nepal. Sweat trickled between her breasts inside her sports bra.

“You don’t get over in the shade, you gonna give yourself sunstroke.” That was Susan, her next-door neighbor, tennis partner, and best friend.

Best friend in Raleigh, that is. Raleigh–Durham–Chapel Hill, the famed Research Triangle, where Clay had dragged her off to from New Orleans. Home of the Prescott Clinic, his wonderfully successful (until recently) fat farm.

“Don’t talk to me like I’m some idjit,” Lydia said to Susan who stood next to her now, holding up one small square hand to block the blistering sun.

Susan saying, “I don’t know why you don’t get Mattie to do this. Or at least stay in the garage.”

“I have more respect for my help. Besides, who else could ever figure this mess out? And I have to spread it out before I can fit it all in—it’s like a goddamned jigsaw puzzle.”

Susan kicked a carton with the toe of her tennis shoe. “I see you’re taking the veggies.”

“Oh, yes. The no-sugar, no-salt, no-fat, no-taste canned carrots, peas, corn, and spinach. As if the vegetable stands on the island won’t be overflowing with corn and tomatoes.”

“Tomatoes! See, I knew there was something you liked about it down there. Of course, I always thought you were crazy—whining about having to leave Raleigh in this heat and spend August lying around at the beach. Watching those strong young lifeguards.” Susan shivered in her little white tennis dress at the very thought.

“I tell you what. You pack up this car, drive all day nonstop, spend a month of afternoons waiting for Clay to finish up on the golf course and come home and entertain Mother Prescott who always ‘drops by’ just when my painting gets going. You do that and I’ll stay home and screw Robert.”

Susan giggled. “You’d hate screwing Robert.”

“How do you know?”

“Because it’s boring.”

“Honey, it all loses its shine after awhile. Even with Moby Dick. Though, I must say, occasionally he still—” And then she stared off, chewing on her bottom lip like it tasted good.

Susan giggled again. Lydia had never made any secret of the heroic size of her husband’s equipment and the pleasure they enjoyed when he got around to making the effort.

Now Lydia leaned up against the side of the dark green Mercedes, then jumped. “Owh! That’s hot. Let’s go inside, swap some lies.”

“You got any iced tea?”

“Long Island iced tea?”

“Sounds good to me.”

Lydia squinted at the stainless steel and gold sports watch Clay had given her for Christmas—a not-so-subtle reminder that he’d rather she were outside getting some exercise than inside making art. What did he care if her work had so piqued the interest of a New York gallery they were giving her a show in the fall?

“Almost noon,” she said. “Time for a pop. Especially today. Maybe it’ll give me the strength to deal with Clay’s four suitcases, his golf clubs, three boxes of books and journals he’s never gonna read, the towels, pillows, sheets, cotton blankets—”

After the shimmering outdoors, it was dark and cool inside. They walked to the back of Lydia’s two-story whitewashed brick house—planted among ancient towering trees in Old Raleigh—to a glassed sunroom where Lydia grew hibiscus, palms, and banana trees and pretended she was in New Orleans. Lydia mixed their drinks at a wet bar and they settled into wrought iron chairs with bright yellow cushions.

“I can’t believe you’re taking linens,” Susan continued. “You’d think if you paid ten thousand dollars rent a month—”

“That was two years ago. It’s fifteen this time.”

“Fifteen thousand dollars! Jesus! The ex and I bought a house for that when we were first out of college. Clay’s really gone around the bend.”

“My dear.” Lydia dropped into her best imitation of a Hilton Head “society” real estate agent. “‘That’s nothing for a place in a good neighborhood on the water. Why you know those people on the other side can’t even see the beach for the condos.’ Clay eats that stuff up.”

Lydia, who had no money of her own, came from that stratosphere of old New Orleans society where cash wasn’t nearly as important as blood. Nor was she was much impressed by either. On the other hand, Lydia was used to creature comforts, which she’d grown up with before her father’s fortune had dissolved like a teaspoon of the sugar, upon which it had been built, stirred into a cup of hot coffee.

Comforts, yes. Ostentation, no. She’d married Clay for the former—that and his sexual prowess and charming manners. Recently all three seemed to be on a downhill slide. In fact, Lydia had suggested to Clay that if things weren’t going so well at the clinic and they were in a tight, maybe they ought to forget about Hilton Head this summer. That had made him mad, even less sexy, and less charming.

Susan still couldn’t get over it. “All that dough, and the linens aren’t included—”

“Have you forgotten who we’re talking about here? Dr. Clay Prescott does not sleep on other people’s sheets, period. Eat other people’s food, if he can possibly avoid it. And he’s been threatening to have a little outhouse built on wheels to pull behind the car—you know, like a boat—so he won’t ever have to squat where other people have.”

“Lydia, you’re joking.”

“Why would I make up stuff about Clay when the reality is so bizarre?”

“Do you really think he’s crazy?”

“I think all men are crazy. Not that they can’t be fun, especially if you like to dance. And a lady does need an escort. But they’re basically mad, and you are too, if you take them seriously.”

“You think it’s their hormones?”

“Definitely their hormones.” Lydia took a long pull on her drink. Then held it out and stared at it as if it had tea leaves in the bottom, could tell her the secrets of the universe. “And their generally selfish and feckless dispositions.”

“They’re not all feckless.”

“All of ’em I’ve ever married’ve been.”

“Well, maybe you’ve just had a run of bad luck.”

Then they both hooted with laughter, because, if you counted Clay as a failure, which Susan definitely would, Lydia was batting zero for three.

Paul, Lydia’s first husband, a lawyer and her childhood sweetheart, left her a big house in the Garden District but no money to keep it up when he drove off drunk into Lake Pontchartrain with his arm around a redhead. Cleve, her second, was a state senator who frequently didn’t make it home past the hot-sheet motels on Airline Highway between the Capitol in Baton Rouge and New Orleans. And he’d had to give back what was left of his ill-gotten gains when they sent him off to serve a little time for accepting payoffs from the oil companies.

But Lydia was still fond of him. “You know,” she said now, “Cleve was so funny. I do love a man who can make me laugh.”

That was Susan’s cue. She stood up, lurching a little because they were now on their second drink, and Susan, who was a chronic dieter, had eaten neither breakfast nor lunch. She poked out her stomach, tucked her chin, raised one hand preparatory to doing her imitation of Cleve Cowthran—whom she’d never met.

“No man, woman, or child, or dog is safe in the state of Louisiana while the legislature is in session.”

Lydia’s laughter was silvery. “You never get a New Orleans accent right, but then nobody does. And that’s true, too, about nobody being safe. Even more so now. Those idiots in Baton Rouge, if it isn’t abortion they’re outlawing, it’s music. Last year they tried to abolish the dirty blues.”

Susan shook her head. “Place sounds insane, incestuous, and incredibly decadent. I never understood why you’re still so fond of it.”

Lydia enumerated the reasons on her strong thin fingers. Everything about Lydia was strong and thin, the way Clay liked them.

“One, we New Orleanians all love decadence. Two, I was born there. Three, my mother was born there. Four, my grandmothers were born there. Five…”

“This is gonna go on about seven generations, isn’t it? Which is why you think New Orleans is the South—and North Carolina isn’t. We’re too far north geographically and too impoverished genealogically.”

“Not to mention culturally. And gastronomically. You ever hear of anybody coming to North Carolina to eat? To dance? To party? Except for college kids, people come here to lose weight. Hell, it’s easy.”

Susan wouldn’t be baited. “Your family only counts as one. Decadence is two.”

“Okay, okay. Three, I grew up there, as did everybody in the whole world I love—except you.”

“And Clay.”

Lydia just gave her a look. “And four, New Orleans is different from any other place on earth. It’s funky and it’s grand and even though it’s fallen on hard times and it can be very snobby, it’s, well, like the lady said, he’s a son of a bitch, but he’s my son of a bitch.”

“Is that how you feel about Clay?”

Lydia thought about that for a minute. “Most of the time. And then he does something so incredibly sweet, it reminds me of how he used to be. When he brought me roses every Saturday. Gave me a present on the fifteenth of each month, the anniversary of our first get-together out in Dr. Taliferro’s garden shed.” Lydia’s face softened with a faraway look.

And Susan was jealous of her friend’s past, if not her present. “I hate your guts.” She held out her glass. “Hit me again.”

Lydia made herself another, also. Or, at least, made a show of doing so. But just like the first two, her glass contained no alcohol. For today, Lydia needed all her faculties.

“You wanta know why I hate you?” Susan continued.

“Because I’m so cute. And if you keep talking like that, I’m gonna cut you out of my will. Not a single lifeguard.”

“Because you’re smart. And talented. And skinny.”

“Men don’t care about smart or talented. And you’d be skinny too, if you lived with Dr. Fat. Fat,” she intoned seriously, “is the enemy.”

“Hell, it’s easy for you. I’m always going to have these thighs.”

That was true about Susan’s thighs. But it wasn’t true that Lydia didn’t have to work hard at keeping trim. One of her favorite lines was that when she turned forty a year ago and her metabolism died, she’d scattered its ashes in the parking lot of the Dunkin’ Donuts. “Besides tennis, you know I go to the gym every single day, which I despise. As much as I love sweets.”

But when they married Clay had insisted she give up Baskin-Robbins, Häagen-Dazs, fudge brownies, Bananas Foster, Crème brulée. “And I couldn’t have bread pudding at the Bon Ton even if I did go back home.”

“What I never understood is why you don’t—go home.”

“It’s too painful. I could never leave again.”

“And, why you let Clay bully you into this stupid vacation every August if you hate it so much. Why don’t you go off somewhere on your own? Or with me?”

Lydia shrugged. Clay counted on her going. She and Susan had been over this same ground a million times. And they both knew the answer. You made your bed—you made compromises.

That’s what marriage was. Compromises. Adjustments. In exchange for, in her case, financial security, companionship, good sex occasionally.

She and Susan had both hoped, each time, for enduring love, but had learned to tote up and value the alternatives. Besides, as Lydia said, you struck out three times, it was likely you’d marry a facsimile of the same son of a bitch again.

“Well,” Susan sighed, “most days it’s worth it. And God knows, in between engagements, I absolutely hated being an extra woman. A town like this, no one invites you to nothing. Hell, we don’t. Maybe it’s different other places…New York….”

“You know what Clay really hates?” Susan looked up, Lydia’s tone was so strange. “He really hates it when we’re down there in August, when I’m not painting, I’m out on the front porch—that’s the one non-negotiable, a front porch—writing postcards.”

“So?”

“I write them to everyone I’ve ever known back home. Hundreds of them, to all the people I miss and long for.”

“Yeah?”

“They all say the same thing.”

“You can drag out a punch line longer than anyone I know.”

“Wish you were here, that’s what they say.”

“So what? That’s a perfectly normal, if incredibly banal, thing to write. Having a wonderful time. Wish you were here.”

“I never say the Having a wonderful time part. It really frosts him.”

It really did. She thought about that later, after Susan had gone home to take a nap and recover from her Long Island iced teas; they could play tennis later. Those postcards, a symbol of Lydia’s discontent, made Clay livid.

She wondered: Was that one of the reasons he was having her murdered? Maybe. That and her life insurance policy which paid out two million dollars.

*

In the Sunset Motel on Highway 401 on the outskirts of Fuquay-Varina, seventeen miles south of Raleigh, Dr. Clay Prescott really was having a wonderful time, though he wouldn’t be sending any postcards. An absolutely kinky wonderful time.

Well, kinky for him.

First of all, he was in bed with someone who wasn’t his wife.

Second, that someone, a wealthy young woman named Janine, a former patient who’d relapsed, was FAT. Not just fat. FAT. She was fat-lady-in-the-circus fat with delicious breasts bigger than his head and an ass the size of an easy chair. For easy rocking, he said to himself, as he did just that.

Third, and kinkiest of all, the bed was littered with those little Styrofoam containers from McDonald’s. They had just scarfed down two big bags of salty greasy yummy things with cute names Clay had never even heard of. And now they were wallowing in the remains on Clay’s sheets from home. He hadn’t been able to go that far.

“How much longer now, dumpling?” the woman beneath him asked.

“I didn’t think you ever wanted me to stop.”

“Not that, silly. You know.” She paused delicately.

He sighed. “Trust me. I told you I’d dump her. But these things take time. We can’t get too restless.” Nor he too careless. He had to watch what he said to Janine in the midst of the passion and the french fries.

“She’s gonna do it to you, lambkin.”

“Janine.” He didn’t want to talk about it. Especially since he might not have to marry Janine and her money to save the clinic if all went as planned.

“I’m sorry, sweetie pie. I’m just so worried that scrawny old bitch is gonna try to steal your clinic right from under you when you divorce her.”

“Don’t worry your pretty little head about it.” And then his hand fell on a few stray fries they’d missed. He dangled them over her greedy mouth. “Eat up.”

*

It was funny how Lydia found out.

She reran the scene now, once again outside in the driveway working on the packing which wasn’t going well at all. Now, if she could just wedge Clay’s wooden beach chair—they didn’t make them like that anymore, he said, so everyone knew you’d been in Hilton Head forever—on a diagonal, she could lay the garment bag with his freshly cleaned summer tuxedo, his white linen jacket, his seersucker, his madras, his khakis, across it.

She’d found out because of pie.

Every once in a while, when she couldn’t stand it a minute longer, she’d sneak over to Merle Valentine’s coffee shop that served fourteen varieties—all made from scratch. You had your standards: apple, apple crumb, peach, lemon meringue, chocolate cream, cherry, sweet potato, pecan, chocolate-pecan, lemon chess, etc. But Lydia’s all-time favorite was a Midwestern specialty made from a recipe brought to Miz Merle by a Mayflower truck driver. Rum raisin with lots of sour cream sitting atop Miz Merle’s crumbly, flaky pie crust the secret to which, everybody knew, but nobody could do it the same, was orange juice.

Just a week ago Lydia had been sitting at the counter nursing a cup of coffee while she ran through all the possibilities for pie sin, taking her time, savoring it, when she heard a man down the way order a BLT, light on the mahnez.

Mayonnaise. There was only one place she’d ever heard it said like that, and that was New Orleans.

She was feeling perky that day, Clay having rolled over at seven and, instead of giving her his standard early morning grumpy face and a list of errands, he’d risen magnificently to the occasion with a mixture of ardor and calisthenics that had left her atingle. Then he got up and brought her chicory coffee with hot milk like he used to do every morning back at the beginning, back in the sweet old days.

She was feeling so good, in fact, that when she heard the voice of home, she couldn’t resist sliding two stools closer to the stranger and saying, “Bet you a hundred dollars I can tell you where you’re from.”

An older man, small, dark, with black eyes and olive skin, glistening gray hair, an open-necked white shirt—he jumped.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you. It’s just that I’m from New Orleans and….” He was looking at her so strangely that she’d trailed off.

Finally, in his rough, unmistakable accent, Mid-City she’d guess, he said, “I live in Miami now.” Then he gestured with his coffee cup. “They don’t know how to make coffee there either. Think they do, the Cubans.”

“But not like the Café du Monde,” she laughed.

“No.” Then he turned on the stool and gave her a long look. A long, long look. “You grew up Uptown?”

She nodded. “We lived on St. Charles. The riverside, between Third and Fourth.” And then, in that way of Southerners, began to place herself in the world through her family. “I’m a Soniat. My daddy was Leland Soniat. My mother a Bergeron. We called her Missie, but her real name was Melanie. Now, my grandfather on my—”

“Leland Soniat. Sugar business.”

“That’s right! Did you know him?”

The old man pulled a white handkerchief out of his back pocket, rubbed it across his forehead. He was sweating, despite Miz Merle’s three tons of air-conditioning.

“I did a job for him once.”

“Really! Mr.—” She held out her hand. Gallo, he said. Anthony Gallo. She could call him Tony. She did, asking him what kind of work he did, he did a job for her father.

“Odds and ends,” he said. “Odds and ends.”

“You had your own business?”

He laughed softly. “No. I wouldn’t say that. I was sort of a contractor.”

“I see.”

He took a long swig of his coffee, made a face, then drained the cup. “No, you don’t.” He didn’t say it rudely. In fact, his gravelly voice was gentle as a caress, a hand on the side of a lover’s neck. Then he seemed to make some sort of decision. He said, “I moved to Miami after Mr. Marcellos went up. But for a while I worked for Joseph Cangiano. You know Joey?”

Who didn’t? Joey the Horse. Heir apparent to Carlos Marcellos, the big boss.

“I met you once,” he went on. “You were about twelve. Having lunch with your daddy at Galatoire’s.”

What kind of job could he have done for her father? But then she tamped the question down. There were so many things about men’s business that the knowing of wouldn’t make you smarter—just sorrier. Better to let it go.

“So, what are you doing in Raleigh?” He asked that one, though it could have gone either way.

“I live here with my husband.”

“Bet you a hundred dollars I can tell you his name,” said Tony Gallo in that sweet voice, giving her a long sad look that made her blood run cold.

*

By six o’clock, Lydia, after three tries, had finished packing the car, which gave her time for a quick set of tennis with Susan and a shower before Clay arrived home.

He pulled into the driveway in their black Cherokee and tooted the horn. Walked around the Mercedes, patting it like a prize bull. Waved to her as she came out of the house. “Looking good.” She knew he meant the car. “You ready to roll?”

“Crack of dawn,” she smiled.

“There’s my girl.” He pulled her to him, gave her a hug. She felt good to him, though a little scrawny after the pillowy Janine whom he’d left not so long ago. In a way, he felt bad about the trip. He knew she didn’t want, never wanted, to go.

And it would be her last vacation, after all. But, if you considered it that way, what difference did it make?

He stepped back and took another look at the car. Lydia had done a great job of shoehorning everything in. They were all set. Off for their usual August. Except sometime, sooner or later, he didn’t know when, that was the arrangement, Lydia would meet with a terrible accident.

He actually got tears in his eyes, thinking about it. Oh yeah, he was going to make a very tragic, not to mention attractive, widower.

The meeting with the man from Miami he’d found through a man who knew a man had come off like clockwork. At first Clay was shocked the man was so old, but he was a professional, alright. He’d scoped out the details, taken his down payment, all cash, old bills, of course. Assured Clay it was a piece of cake.

“Can you do—can you do it—with no blood?” Clay asked at the last minute. Then shrugged. They’d agreed that Clay would know none of the details so there’d be nothing to give away, but, “I’d like for it to be as painless as possible.”

He’d always been embarrassed, a doctor and he couldn’t stomach the sight of blood. Of course, in his specialty, it was never an issue.

“No problem,” the old man had nodded. “I do custom work.”

*

The alarm sounded at five o’clock. Rise and shine. Lydia groaned.

“Come on,” said Clay, who was already up, showered, and dressed in khakis and a madras shirt. “Here’s your coffee. Drink up. Long and winding road ahead of us.”

Corny, he was so corny. Lydia peeled one eye open. “Clay, would it be impossible, absolutely impossible, to stop somewhere along the way? There’s that place everybody talks about in Pawleys Island, we could even stay over? We have our own linens.” She asked this every year. But she knew it was more complicated than that. Then they’d have to eat out and God knows dragons that way lay.

And for five years he’d said, “Oh, you magnolias are so delicate. Come on, darlin’.” There was that put-on accent. “Let’s make some hay before the sun shines. Hit the road.”

Was there ever a man so cornball? She thought about that while she dressed in a red linen shirt and matching walking shorts, slapped on some lipstick and mascara. Dropped a few final things in a tote bag, walked through the house one last time, touching, fluffing things here and there, and out the side door. She locked it behind her.

Clay was behind the wheel in the driveway, the motor already warmed up. Not that it needed warming on this first day of August. Barely light and already in the low eighties. Humid. It was going to be another scorcher.

“Oh, that air-conditioning feels so good.” She slipped into the leather seat beside him. There wasn’t room for another single thing in the car. The trunk, the back seat, the luggage rack were jammed.

“There’s my good little packer. You deserve to be cool.”

“Oh, God! The cooler with the sandwiches and the fruit juice. I almost forgot it.”

Clay tsked. Shook his head, impatient. “Well?” He gunned the motor.

“I won’t be but a minute.” She grabbed her keys and jumped out of the car.

That was okay. The delay would give him a chance to fiddle with the radio. He liked to listen to talk shows. Lydia hated them. But if he found one now, it would take her a while to ask him to change it. She was feisty, but polite. So polite. And slow. What was keeping her? Probably stopped for one last pee.

He turned around and looked at the back seat. She’d left an opening so he could see through the rearview mirror. She really was amazing. Now, if she’d just hurry up, they could arrive in time for him to grab his clubs and get in a few holes before the cocktail hour.

He glanced at the dashboard clock. Five-thirty. Where was she? The hell with the neighbors—he tooted the horn.

Then he looked down, reached over, and ran his fingers across her raised initials on the tote bag. When would it be? The business with Lydia? Well, the old man from Miami was right, it was better not to know. Of course he was right. That was his business. His specialty. Just like Clay had a specialty. When you wanted a job done right, the best thing, even though it had been very expensive, you hired a pro.

Five thirty-five. She’d been in there ten minutes. What could she be doing? Changing her clothes? Jesus! Women. He’d go roust her. He sighed and pushed the heavy car door open.

“Lydia! Ly-dia!” He entered the house through the side door.

No answer.

“Lydia?” She wasn’t in the laundry room. Well, he hadn’t expected her to be. Nor in the living room where the furniture stood weird and lumpy under its white-draped covers. Lydia always insisted that Mattie help her close up the house as if they were going forever. She wasn’t in the breakfast room. Nor the dining room where everything was put away, even the china cabinet emptied. Lydia must have asked Mattie to polish and store her family things, silver and crystal. He called up the stairs. She was probably in their bedroom, fiddling with something. “Lydia!”

Silence.

Of course! The heat must have made him stupid. The cooler would be in the kitchen. She was probably in there stuffing down another bowl of cereal. Or maybe she’d hidden away some doughnuts. She did that sometimes, didn’t think he knew.

Back through the living room, dining room, he pushed the swinging door into the all-white kitchen and heard himself scream.

And scream and scream and scream. Oh Jesus! God Almighty!

Blood, blood, blood, blood. Everything was splattered scarlet.

Gore dripped down the cabinet fronts, off the tile counter tops, pooled onto the tile floor. The kitchen was a slaughterhouse. An abattoir.

Clay screamed again. No, no, no, no! He couldn’t help himself. And then he wretched. The sight, the stench, he couldn’t stand it. He wretched again and, leaning over holding his own forehead, vomited on the floor.

The room reeled.

What was he going to do? What? It had all gone wrong.

He couldn’t believe this. It had to be some kind of joke. Or maybe he was dreaming.

Then he stepped forward. Stopped. NO! No tracks.

That thought was a little tardy, though Clay didn’t know it.

But wait. He shook his hands in front of his body like someone flipping water. Let’s get real here. Take this a piece at a time. Like where was she? He scanned the room, his eyes flicking up and down, side to side. Okay, where was Lydia? Her body?

Then cupping a hand over his nose, he gingerly leaned to his left. Maybe she was over there, behind the work island. No way. Wrong. But there was the cooler, standing all alone.

He hugged his arms across his ribs, grabbing his elbows. He rocked back on his heels, tried to gather himself. Where the hell was she? Had that dope, that incredibly ignorant fancy-pants Miami fuck-up—God, he knew he should never have trusted a wop—shot her, slit her throat, whatever the hell he had done, here, and then dragged her out? To where?

Besides, Mr. Miami wasn’t supposed to do it now. And he’d promised there wouldn’t be any blood. Custom work, he’d said. Custom! Shit.

And what was he supposed to do? He wasn’t supposed to have to do anything. That’s what he paid the man top dollar for.

Suddenly Clay couldn’t breathe. He wheeled. Whatever else, he had to get out of here. He had to get out of this house right now.

He ran, the thick pale carpeting that Lydia had loved muffling his footfalls, back through the dining room, the living room, the hall. He didn’t see the fainter and fainter track he left here and there, fine droplets of blood.

He was almost out the door, but wait! He hadn’t checked her New Orleans room. Could the bastard have left her there, with all that glass? Oh, God.

He ran through the library, down the little back hall, and there….

He froze. Someone was talking. He almost choked, then sucked it up and crept closer.

It was Lydia! She was alive. Christ! How mangled? How bad? And would she know…?

He gentled the door open. There were her banana trees. Her hibiscus. Her palms. And her voice. The far door, leading to the backyard and the alleyway, was open.

“Go to your car, Clay. Go to the car.”

That’s what the little tape player sitting on a glass-topped table said, over and over. He stared at it for a long time.

“Go to your car, Clay. Go to the car.”

He went to the car.

She wasn’t there. He snatched the door open.

Inside, his car phone was ringing.

“Clay?” It was Lydia’s voice! She was alive! Oh, God! He was thrilled. He was devastated.

“Lydia! I—”

“Don’t talk,” she interrupted. “Just listen. Yes, the blood is mine. I’m such a wonderfully efficient donor to my own causes. It’s only a pint, but it looks like a lot more, doesn’t it? Sort of like a Pollock.”

Clay couldn’t believe what he was hearing. What was she talking about? Art? Now?

“You’ll need to make some very quick and careful decisions about what you’re going to say. Because no matter how hard you try, you’re never going to clean up all that blood. And you’ve probably stepped in some.”

Clay started, lifted up one deck shoe, groaned. His heart was pounding. His ears were ringing.

“Of course, you don’t know where else I may have spilled a little. Now, I think you’re going to have to forget about the insurance money. Besides, you’re no longer the beneficiary. That’s now Planned Parenthood, back home.” Then her voice shifted gears a tad, but still she was very calm. She might have been talking about plans for a cocktail party for some of his confederates. “You’re going to have to think in other terms—to pay me the money you owe me.”

“What—”

“Please don’t interrupt, Clay. I don’t have much time before my plane, and I want to make sure you understand before I go.”

“Where are you?”

Lydia ignored the question. “I think that for my investment in our partnership, the charming dinner parties, entertaining your so boring cohorts, keeping you and your house, putting up with your mother, the dreary summers, the packing, not to mention your attempt to have me murdered—well, I’d like a lump sum. Two million seems about right. Has a familiar ring.”

Clay’s heart beat out a funeral dirge. Why not? He might as well be dead. It was all over.

Lydia continued, “Yes, that would do it nicely. I’m afraid you’ll have to sell the clinic, but you should be able to get that for it, even in its reduced circumstances, don’t you think? And surely you’ll find something else, someone else.”

“You’ve got to be k—”

“Kidding, Clay? I’m serious as death. And, should you decide not to pay me the money, I think you’ll find that in addition to the business of the blood, my old family friend, Mr. Gallo, might have to mention your indiscretion to certain parties.”

Clay ground his teeth. Family friend! The fucker said he was from Miami!

“Soon I’ll be sending you the number of the Swiss account where you can deposit the cash. After the New York show, I’ll be traveling around the world. But for starters, I’ll be sitting on a porch somewhere with warm days and cool nights, overlooking the water. Doing a few more paintings. Writing some postcards.” Then Lydia paused and took a deep breath, exhaling the words, “Goodbye, Clay.”

“Wait! Lydia! Don’t go!”

“Oh, yes, I almost forgot. You really should unpack the car soon. Then there’s the kitchen—and all that blood. Better start now, before it gets much hotter.”

“You bitch!”

“You know, Clay, I’m glad you said that. It makes me know for sure I’ve done the right thing. For once. And oh—”

He could see her beautiful wide mouth in his mind, making that oh.

“—I’m going to have a wonderful time, Clay. Such a wonderful time.”

Then like a bird on the wing, Lydia flew free. She was long gone.

Naked to the World

“So round up the usual suspects,” Sam said, her eyes still glued to her computer. “And can’t you read? The sign says Keep Out. I’m on deadline here, Jane.”

“What the hell do you mean—usual? There’s nothing usual about somebody stealing all my clothes!”

Sam Adams leaned back and gave Jane Wildwood, her protégé at the Constitution, a long look. When Jane was mad her scarlet hair seemed to take on an even brighter hue. This July 3rd morning it was flaming.

“Later, kiddo. This piece on the creep who sold the sausages he made from his girlfriend’s ex to the Italian deli on Peachtree is already an hour overdue.”

“I’m standing here naked to the world, and you’re telling me sausage is more important.”

It was the kind of line that caused even the most jaded heads in the city room to swivel.

Sam signed, punched SAVE on her keyboard. She thought for a long moment about reminding Jane that her being naked, not that she was, wasn’t exactly big news. When Sam had stumbled over her the previous year, Jane was a poet working part-time as a stripper in a sleaze club called Tight Squeeze.

Sam had done a lot of counseling with Jane about defining her goals. She had some now. “I’m going to hunt down and kill the mothers who broke into my apartment last night and stole every stitch of my clothes.”

“Except this, I presume.” Sam ran her eyes up and down Jane’s ensemble, which didn’t take much: one black cotton pullover, one hot pink elastic cinch belt, and one microscopic wisp of black Spandex which covered her panties, assuming she was wearing any, by an inch. “Well, at least the guy didn’t give himself a hernia.”

Jane’s green eyes narrowed. “Which means what?”

“That you have a wide and highly interesting variety of wearing apparel, sweet thing, but no single piece is bigger than an Ace bandage. Your whole closet must have weighed in at what—twelve pounds? About the same as Harpo?” Who was Sam’s Shih Tzu.

“Very funny. Just because I don’t wear old lady clothes—”

Sam, so crazed with work she didn’t even know what day it was, glanced down at her own red silk blouse and knee-grazing black skirt. “Forty does not an old lady make, and watch your mouth.”

“So are you going to help me, or what?”

Sam stared at her watch, back at the computer screen, then reached in her desk drawer and scooted out a credit card. “Go to Rich’s, buy some new threads.”

“No, thank you.” Jane was halfway out the door. “You can’t be bothered, I’m sure Marcia can help me find the burglar. I can do the killing by myself. Adios.”

Marcia, another reporter who was ten years Sam’s junior, already had a true crime book contract with a hefty advance and was breathing heavily down her neck. Sam heard herself saying, “Give me half an hour, and I’ll be right with you.”

* * *

They had their feet propped up on Sam’s desk and were sipping fresh cups of coffee.

“Tell me again what the cop said.”

“He was standing out on my balcony. You know how the back yard slopes there, so my place is really up three stories instead of two?”

Sam pictured Jane’s apartment on Peachtree Circle in one of the few multi-residence buildings in the elegant old in-town Ansley Park neighborhood.

“And he said, Damn tall burglar. There were no ladder marks in the grass. Though the door from the balcony to the living room was open like they’d come in that way. This was some time in between six—when I came home and changed, I left about six-thirty—and eleven, when I got home.”

“And the lock on the front door?”

“Ditto. Open.”

“But not broken?”

Jane shook her head.

“So they had keys.”

“That’s what the cop thought.”

“Did he dust for prints?”

“They sent this really cute guy over later. He printed me too.”

“I bet he did. And?”

“They said they’d get back to me. But they didn’t seem very hopeful.”

“You said nothing else was missing. TV? Stereo? None of the usual fenceable loot?”

“Only clothes. All of them. Plus shoes, underwear, garter belts and other recreational items, pantyhose. It was like they set out to do this one thing.”

“Anything else?”

“Yeah. The toilet seat was up.”

“So we’re supposed to think it was a man who stopped mid-heist to take a leak. So noted. Okay, let’s make a list.” Sam flipped open a reporter’s notebook. “Who would want your clothes?”

“A pervert.”

“Right. But how many of those do you know?”

“Hey, I was a stripper, remember? Thousands.”

“Thousands you gave keys to?”

“Nope.”

Sam thought for a minute. “Who would want to make you this mad? Harass you? Pull this kind of stunt as some kind of message? Punishment?”

“Like an old boyfriend?”

“Exactly.”

“Bobby LaRue.”

Sam shuddered at the name. Morotcycle-riding Bobby of the black leather and chains was one of her least favorites of Jane’s beaus. “But you got your keys back from him, right?”

Jane shrugged.

“Why not?”

“Seemed like a lot of trouble. Besides, his brother’s a safe cracker, what difference would it make?”

Sam stuck out the tip of her tongue as she wrote. “Number one. Bobby. Do they get any worse?”

“Sure. I’ve dated Attila the Hun, Sly Stallone, and Pete Rose, but none of them got keys.”

“So who did? I have a set but I’m not mad at you, and I swear I didn’t take your pantyhose. What about your neighbor next door?”

“Craig!” Jane smacked herself in the forehead. “That’s right, I did give Craig keys. But I don’t think he’s my size and we’ve got no beef.”

“Also from what you’ve said he’s the world’s leading preppie. Isn’t he the one who married his wife because they liked the same designers?”

“Patti. There you go. But I’m not exactly your Polo queen, so I don’t think either of them was lusting after my wardrobe. Besides, he’s an up and coming at MegaCard. Junior execs for credit card companies don’t steal, do they?”

“Don’t be so sure. So, did you talk to them? Ask if they heard anything last night?”

“I didn’t get a chance to. I’ll call them today.”

“Okay, now, who else has keys? Friends?”

“Sally.”

“Sally’s not your friend, she’s your penance for past sins. Has she slit her wrists this week?”

“You can be very insulting, you know that? I don’t talk about your friends like that.”

“I don’t have any friends like that.”

“That’s because they’ve all gone to the old folks home.”

Ignoring that, Sam was suddenly struck by a terrible thought. “You didn’t roll over for Hoke, did you?”

The paper’s managing editor, whose assistant Jane was, fancied himself in competition with Carl Bernstein for the title of journalism’s chief ladykiller. And his wife Lois was famous for her reprisals.

“Mix business and bed? You think I’m stupid?”

“That’s a relief. Keys, keys, so who else’s got keys?”

“Finito. Except—”

“Who?”

Jane looked around as if the walls had ears. Then mouthed the words Dick Loudermilk.

“Trick! No, please, not Trick.”

Jane shrugged. Who was she to resist the advances of Georgia’s junior senator who had plowed the fields of Atlanta’s fairest flowers—each of whom thought she was going to be the one on his arm when he ascended to the White House. Except Jane, of course. Jane was too smart to confuse sex and politics. She said, “But he is a great dancer and he’s burning hell in bed.”

“So maybe you could go on TV with that testimonial during his next campaign. Anybody else? Do I need a fresh piece of paper?”

“None rush to mind.”

“Okay. How about you’ll talk with Craig and Patti, Bobby LaRue. I’ll take Sally and the good senator.

“And do what?”

“Start calling, visiting.”

“I dial these people up and say tell me who did it and/or bring back my clothes. This is what you call finding the burglar?”

“Investigating is talking, Jane. Talking and listening. Listening more than talking. It’ll be a novel experience for you.”

*

I can’t help you if you’ve exceeded your limit,” said Craig, Jane’s next-door neighbor, on the phone. “I’m not in that division.”

“I don’t even have a MegaCard,” said Jane.

“You don’t! MegaCard is the South’s answer to American Express. We plow the profits back into Dixie. Screw the Eastern establishment.” He paused, lowered his voice. “Are you some kind of Communist, Jane?”

“No, I’m a vegetarian. And I’m sorry to bother you at work. Why are you there on a holiday weekend anyway? Nevermind. Somebody ripped off my apartment last night, and—”

“No!”

“Did you hear anything? See anything? It had to happen sometime between six-thirty and eleven.”

“Nothing. We weren’t home. We were at a financial planning seminar. The market. Commodities. It was great. There are new sessions starting all the time. You should come.”

“About my apartment, Craig.”

“Right. No, we didn’t get home till after eleven. But, wait, I did hear someone talking outside after that. I was just about to listen to my motivation tapes—I fall asleep to them every night, and—”

“After eleven it was me. And the cops.”

“Cops! Gosh! What did they take? TV? VCR? Microwave? CDs?”

Jane thought she ought to start taking notes on what people said when she told them the burglar took only her clothes.

*

“Sam! Darlin’, come on in. It’s wonderful to see you again.” Then Senator Loudermilk dropped his voice a full octave, one of his favorite tricks. “You look fabulous. But then you always do.”

Sam smiled. Wasn’t it nice that some things never changed? Like Dick Loudermilk’s flirtatiousness. On the other hand, while she was holding her own, due to good genes, long legs, and hard sweaty walks, she was hardly the girl she was when she and Dick were in school.

Now the senator loped around the side of his massive mahogany desk, enveloping her in a well-tailored hug that smelled of expensive aftershave.

“Looking good yourself, Dick,” she said. And he was. Richard P. Loudermilk was of the clean-limbed great big old boy school. With lots of white teeth and an athlete’s grace. Could he scale a balcony in one leap?

“To what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?” Now he was pouring her a glass of iced tea from a crystal pitcher. Holding small silver tongs above a dish of sugar cubes. “One or two?”

She held up two fingers. “Just a social call.”

“Bullshit. We haven’t had a social engagement since you shoved me out of a boat in the middle of Lake Lanier for trying to get my hand down your swimsuit. That must have been—” and then he winked—“well, we don’t know how to count that high, slow-witted Southerners, do we?”

“You home for the Fourth, Dick? You all are still in session, aren’t you?”

“Oh yeah. Making the world safe for democracy. Couple of days here, wave the flag, shake some hands, eat some pig, had a little brushfire I had to attend to.” He gave her a big wink.

“Really? Anyone I know?”

“Nawh. Nawh.” The ice in his glass tinkled. “Not what you think. Bid’nis. Utilities bid’nis. Your innuendo, guess that means you haven’t heard my big news.”

“You’re getting married.”

His blue eyes, which after all the years of horsetrading he could still make guileless, opened wide. “Then you do know!?”

“You are getting married?”

“Yep.” Dick stuck a soon-to-be-elder-statesman pose. “To Mandy Overhiser.”

“As in Senator Overhiser’s daughter?” Overhiser being the most powerful, not to mention most conservative, Democrat in the Senate. And from the West. “That’s not a marriage, that’s a geographical and philosophical merger.”

“Wow, Sam. Such cynicism is not becoming to a lady.”

“I’m no lady, and neither is my friend Jane Wildwood.”

At that, Dick blanched.

Ah-ha, thought Sam, for it was a major hit when the wily poker face even moved.

“Now, Sam, Jane is a wonderful girl, and you know, we all have our little indiscretions we’d just as soon forget. As I remember you used to keep company with that Dr. Talbot who’s now the state’s chief medical—.”

“Forget it, Dick. All I want to know is did you steal all Jane Wildwood’s clothes?”

“Did I—do you th—did I wha—?”

Dick Loudermilk’s laugh was one of the best things about him. Now it bounced off the walls of his office, ricocheting so long and loud that when the good senator’s secretary peeked in to see if they were alright, both Sam and Dick were both wiping their tears, limp on the sofa.

*

“You go first.”

So Jane did, filling Sam in on what Craig said.

“So zilch. Nada. He didn’t hear or see a thing. He said Patti had dropped home to pick up something about six, before they went to their meeting, and she didn’t see anyone either—except Miss Bitsie, the landlady, who dropped by to deliver in person, can you believe it, a rent increase for them. I bet I’m next. I saw her too, but she just waved at me with her big fake smile as I was going out. Craig was so pissed. After all, they are moving. Have put in a bid on a house.”

“Good for them, Jane, but let’s stick to what’s important. The other tenants?”

“What do you mean?”

“You questioned all the other tenants in the building?”

“You didn’t say to do that. You just said to talk to Craig because he has keys.”

“Jane, Jane.”

“Don’t Jane, Jane me. You sound like my mother. You’re off visiting with Dick Loudermilk, doing God knows what, and now it occurs to you I should talk with everybody in my building?”

“Well, sweetie, they’re your clothes.”

*

Jane stomped into her apartment. Slammed the door. Switched on the A/C. Threw herself down on the sofa.

She was pooped. And hot. And sweaty.

It had been a hard day of ringing doorbells, punching in numbers on phones.

And what’d she have?

Not a damned thing. Only eight apartments in the building, but most of the tenants were out of town for the holiday, had left yesterday, which meant they couldn’t have seen anything, and even if they had, wouldn’t be back till day after tomorrow.

Old Mrs. Pettigrew in the front said she thought she’d seen the gas man, but that may have been the day before. Besides, Mrs. Pettigrew sometimes saw General Sherman riding down Piedmont on his horse.

Bobby LaRue was in jail. He and his brother had bit off a job bigger than they could chew. So Bobby hadn’t bothered to say goodbye, but then there was no real reason to. The last time they had spoken, Jane made it clear she’d have a pot of boiling Crisco ready to pour on his head if he stormed her battlements again. He actually had come over her balcony once. Pole-vaulted. Just showing off. At the time, she’d thought it was kind of cute.

Anyway, scratch Bobby.

What she needed right now was a glass of ice water.

But first she needed to get out of these stinky clothes. Why the hell hadn’t she taken Sam up on her offer, the Rich’s credit card? She was getting pretty ripe in the good old Atlanta summertime. She stripped, threw her duds in a pile on the floor. She’d rinse them out later. Started naked into the kitchen, when suddenly her eye caught a pile of magazines and catalogues on the floor. A Victoria’s Secret catalogue on top. They belonged in a wicker wastebasket.

Jane froze.

Somebody had been here. Could be here now. All of a sudden everything seemed to be outlined in halos. There was something funny in the air. The faint odor of cigar smoke.

Jane’s heart pounded. “Hello?” she called. “Hello?”

* * *

Sam knew she could just as easily talk with Jane’s weird friend Sally on the phone, but this was a chance to see her apartment. Sam never got enough of seeing how people lived. And once inside, she couldn’t stay out of their medicine cabinets.

Staring now into Sally’s, she found among the deodorant, depilatories, and toothpaste twelve fresh packs of single-edged razor blades, six vials of prescription sleeping pills, and a Colt .38 Super. Given Sally’s history as a girl who attempted suicide with the regularity that most people floss their teeth, there were no surprises. Except for the gun.

From her living room, Sally, a tiny peroxide blonde, was talking around a wad of chewing gum almost bigger than she was.

“It’s funny you should call. I was just thinking about you.”

“Oh, really? Thanks for the use of your john.” Sam came out of the bathroom fluffing up her dark curls. She looked around the living room, which was strewn with half-filled cardboard boxes and suitcases. Somehow she didn’t have the feeling it had been any neater before Sally started packing. “Why would you be thinking of me?”

“Well, you know that story you wrote about the men who were killed by that crazy woman who met them through personal ads?”

“Right.” Sam nodded at Sally while trying to sneak a peek at the clothes tumbling out of the boxes. None of those looked like Jane’s. But then, who could be sure? Sally had a thing for spandex too. Though whereas Jane pretty much stuck to basic black, Sally’s taste covered the rainbow. A model/actress/exercise instructor, this was her professional wardrobe. “So, you liked the story, or you answered a personal ad?”

“Yeah, that’s why I’m moving.”

Sally was moving. Craig and Patti were moving. Dick was in town for a minute, then out again. Was there a trend here?

“To be with your new fellow?”

“Right.” Sally’s little blonde head bobbed up and down. “That’s right. I’m going to be near him. To wait for him.” Coming from Sally’s mouth the words sounded like pop lyrics.

“Why wait?”

“Well, it’ll be a while before he gets out. But I thought if I moved to New Orleans, I’ve always loved New Orleans, and I could live in the Quarter, he’s about an hour away.”

“And where exactly is he?”

“In Angola.”

“The prison Angola?”

“Yeah.” Sally blew a big bubble. It was turquoise—which matched the earrings she was wearing—until it popped. “It’s the funniest thing.”

“His being in prison?”

“No. My meeting him. That’s the part about the ads—I was telling you. I answered one of those ads from a guy, you know, in jail wanting to be a pen pal with somebody, and guess who it was?”

“I give.”

“Bobby LaRue. Jane’s old boyfriend. Isn’t that the funniest thing you ever heard?”

“That’s quite a coincidence. Did you know him through Jane?”

“Oh, sure. I went with her more than once to bail him out. For, you know, little stuff.”

“Does Jane know?”

“Oh, no.” Sally’s eyes widened. “And you have to cross your heart and hope to die you won’t tell her. She’s been so good to me, got me out of Tight Squeeze after she left, helped me get my job at Shake Your Bootie, that’s the exercise studio. I feel so bad—”

“Do you think she’d care?”

“Well, I would. I’d be mad as hell. Do you want a beer?”

“No, thanks.”

“Didn’t you say you wanted to talk with me about something about Jane?”

“I do. Somebody stole all her clothes last night. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”

“Her clothes! How awful! No way! You don’t suspect me, do you? We’re not even the same size. She’s a lot bigger than me.”

“No. It’s just that you have keys to her apartment—”

“No. No, I don’t.”

“You don’t?”

“No. About a month ago somebody broke into my apartment and took everything that wasn’t nailed down. Including Jane’s keys.”

“Was that before or after Bobby went to jail?”

Sally just stared at her, hands on her hips. Then, “I don’t know what you mean. Are you inferring that Bobby took her keys? I’ll have you know Bobby was safely in jail long before that.”

“Were they labeled?”

“What? Her keys? Sure, they said, Jane’s keys.”

“With her address?”

“No. I don’t think so. Why?”

Well, that was that. Sam shook her head. “Never mind. So, you’re moving today?”

At that, Sally got down off her huff. “Tomorrow.” She smiled at the thought. “Bobby’s mom is helping me. She thinks it’s neat I’m moving near Bobby. And her other son too, Jimmy. They both got arrested together on that job in New Orleans. So she can come and stay with me and visit them. You know, she did the sweetest thing after I got robbed.”

“Really?” Sam was already halfway out the door. “What’s that?”

“She gave me Bobby’s gun.”

*

Jane was sitting on the sofa in Sam’s apartment in her Uncle George’s big house when Sam got home.

“Peaches let me in,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind.”

“Mi casa, su casa, sweetie. You look like something’s definitely up. Am I right?”

“Positivo.” Then she told Sam about being frozen stock-still and naked in her apartment. Knowing someone had been there. Was there.

“My God! And then what?”

“Well, I kept hollering and hollering, and nothing happened, so finally I said screw it, went on into the kitchen and got a glass of ice water and a butcher knife and I marched back into the bathroom. No one there, not even behind the shower curtain. Bedroom. Zilch. Threw open the closet.”

“Jesus! Braver woman that I, Wildwood. All of this naked?”

“What the hell, it didn’t seem like an occasion to get dressed up for—and, let us remember, I didn’t have any fresh clothes.”

It was then Sam noticed that Jane had changed. These weren’t the same things she was wearing this morning.

“Guess what was in my closet?”

“The boogie man?”

“My clothes.”

“You’re kidding!”

Jane threw her hands up, shrugged. “Why would I lie?”

“All of them?”

“Well—almost all. The things I’m sure are missing are a long black lacy robe Dick gave me. A few pieces of underwear—the sexiest kind of stuff—you know. A white chiffon blouse with pockets over the bazooms. But it’s hard to remember everything I had.”

“I can imagine. Plus the shock of seeing it all back there. Was the front door open? How about the balcony?”

“Both locked. Deadbolt and all.”

“The toilet seat? Any cigar smoke?”

“Nope. Everything cool. Just the clothes.”

“This is so strange.”

“I know. And you want to hear something even weirder?”

“Weirder than Sally moving to New Orleans to be near your old flame Bobby LaRue? Got himself locked up in ’gola with his bro? Sally said she met him through a personal ad.”

Jane screamed. “That little bitch! I can’t believe it!”

“Y’all hold it down in there.” It was Peaches passing in the hall. “Decent people thinking about going to bed. Don’t need all this hollering.”

“You upset?” Sam fanned Jane with a magazine.

“Upset? I’m hysterical. Sally and Bobby LaRue? That’s the funniest thing I’ve ever heard.”

“Good. When you get the use of yourself, tell me what’s weirder than your clothes coming home.”

Jane clicked back in. “You’re really gonna love this. So I was sitting there on my sofa, having taken a bath, enjoying the luxury of changing my clothes, when Craig knocked on my door.”

“And?”

“Now you have to keep this quiet. He’ll lose his job.”

Sam gave her a look. Asking an investigative reporter to be discreet was like asking a winning pitcher to cut off both his arms. But then, she wasn’t doing a story, was she? She could try. “What?”

“Remember I told you when I talked with him he was all in an uproar because Miss Bitsie, our landlady, had been by to drop off a rent increase notice?”

“Something. You said she waved at you. Didn’t seem important.”

“Well, then,” Jane grinned, “you missed the good part.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Well, Craig was pissed as hell at Miss Bitsie, so—”

“Why does this Miss Bitsie ring a bell? Is she one of those Buckhead bluehairs?”

“No, no, no. I’ve told you about them. She’s little woman to our landlord, Old Holier Than Thou, Sue Your Butt Chuckie Walters. Though come to think of it, she’s not so little. Actually, she’s about my size.”

“Ah ha!”

“Hold on. He has those kind of slicked-up cracker-come-to-town looks. Tall. Lean. Kind of anxious around the eyes. They’re both about forty. She looks like a former showgirl. Vegas. Miami Beach. You know the type. Miss Pettigrew in 1A told me once there was some gossip about what she did before she met Chuckie. But nothing definitive.”

“And he’s the former hellraiser, present religious fanatic, and Atlanta’s most litigious lawyer to boot.”

“That’s our Chuckie. Did I tell you he recently hit somebody in Piedmont Park when he was out bike riding with Miss Bitsie and then sued the victim? Said he was maliciously obstructing his right of way. And they’re suing for Bitsie too. For the trauma and mental anguish of breaking a fingernail. Anyway, Craig was so pissed about the rent increase and her nerve dropping by in her gigantic Mercedes, like they need the money, he went right to Big Betsy—”

“Betsy?”

“MegaCard’s megacomputer in the sky—and pulled up all Bitsie and Chuckie’s records.”

“Oh, my goodness. Isn’t that terrible?” Butter wouldn’t have melted in Sam’s mouth as she considered the possibilities. “What’d he find?”

“Well, at first Craig didn’t think he had anything interesting. Except it made him even madder to see the volume of charges that this pair makes each month. I mean, the money just flows—”

“And?”

“Here. Look for yourself.” Jane handed Sam a sheaf of computer printouts detailing specific charges.

Chuckie should have owned stock in Saks’s men’s department. He was Calvin Kleined and Giorgio Armanied up the wazoo. And the interior designers at Rich’s must have sent flowers every time the Walters picked up the phone. Custom drapes, upholstery, antiques to make their West Paces Ferry house rival Versailles. A pool cover that was mechanized. Silver. Crystal. Alligator luggage. Travel all over the world.

“Wowsa!”

“And they pay their bills. But what’s not here?” Jane grinned.

“Twenty questions, right?”

“Right.”

And then Sam saw it. “No clothes for Miss Bitsie.”

“You got it.”

The pieces fell into place. “You saw her last night on your way out. And more importantly, she saw you leaving. And she’s the landlady. She must have keys.”

“Most important, she never buys any clothes. Unless she pays cash for them, or uses another card. Which seems unlikely, because Craig said they’re in some Big Spenders MegaClub and get oodles of bonuses for being rich and doing everything on this card.

“So this is how she shops. In tenants’ closets. Around the city they own about a thousand apartments. She takes a bunch of clothes, plants a couple of false clues like the toilet and the cigar, browses at her leisure, then I guess returns the stuff she doesn’t want. Actually, I’m sort of insulted she kept so little.”

“Jane, this is nuts.”

“Well, Miss Bitsie is nuts. After I figured this out, I called Charlie downtown. Luckily, he was in, booking some father-raper.”

“And he traced her for you.”

“You wouldn’t believe the woman’s record. Barbara is her real name. Barbara maiden name Winslow. She was a Vegas showgirl, just like I thought. But she was also, and still is, obviously, a very weird klepto. She served time in California with guess who?”

“Uncle.”

“Patty Hearst.”

“Great. So now what? It’s going to be pretty hard to get the boys downtown to press charges against her unless they can tie her to some other burglaries.”

“Charlie says it would be tough to do. Most people don’t even report them. He punched up records on a couple reports in the Walters’ properties in the last year, and usually other stuff is taken too.”

“How about the fingerprint reports?”

“Charlie ran hers against it. Nada.”

“So?”

“If I kick up a stink, Chuckie’s going to sue the do-waddy out of me, right? I’m already going to have to find another place to live pronto. I can’t keep Bitsie in black lace.”

“You’ll let the burglary drop?”

“Oh, no. No, no.”

Sam didn’t like the look on Jane’s face. She’d seen Cheshire cats who looked less smug.

“Breaking in her house and stealing all her clothes is illegal, Jane.”

“I’d never dream of doing such a thing.”

“So’s burning down her house.”

“I know.” Then Jane flipped a credit card at Sam across the coffee table.

“You’re giving me back my Rich’s—no, you didn’t take—what is this, Jane? Barbara Walters. You have Barbara Walters’s MegaCard?”

“Bitsie’s card.”

“Oh. Right. Bitsie—Barbara. You stole her credit card? You’re going to charge replacements for the things she took from you? Don’t you think she’s canceled it by now, Jane?”

“No. This is a new card. And she can’t cancel it. And I’m not going to charge things for me.”

“I give. And I’m getting older by the minute here. Just lay it out.”

“This,” Jane tapped on the coffee table with the gold plastic, “card happens to be a special issue. I will use it to shop for Bitsie and Bitsie only. Nor for me. That would be illegal.”

“You don’t think shopping for her with this is illegal?”

“It’s a fine line.”

“Who’d you get this from?” Then it dawned. “From Craig? Craig has put himself and his career on the line this way because he’s mad at her for raising the rent when he’s moving away? Seems a little rash.”

“No,” said Jane. “Actually, you know I have a few old friends in useful places—”

“Please.” Jane’s résumé and the contacts she’d made through her days of go-go dancing, stripping, and other extracurricular activities were things Sam never wanted to know.

“And there’s a friendly banker downtown who just can’t wait to give Craig and Patti a house loan. So, anyway, every time she cancels the card, Craig will issue another. That is, until I get bored. Actually, I think a few weeks of nonstop deliveries to her house of fabulous clothes should just about do it. Wildwood’s Born to Shopping Service. What do you think?”

“How about Naked Came I?”

“Clothes Make the Woman.”

“Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing.”

“Dressed to Kill.”

“Uh-oh. Naked Truth.”

“Cut from the Same Cloth.”

“Fits You to a T.”

“Fits You Like a Glove.”

“Survival of the Fittest. Speaking of which, let’s go downstairs and raid Peaches’s icebox.”

“Refrigerator.”

“Whatever.”

No Neutral Ground

Diana stood, distracted—furious, actually—on the St. Charles neutral ground. A late spring afternoon, the rain was pouring on that grassy median strip down the middle of the boulevard where the streetcars run.

It wasn’t like Diana to let her emotions get the best of her. The chair of the English Department of the university just across the way, Diana Banks was a focused woman. An extremely busy focused woman. On her plate: a creative writing seminar, the deadline looming for a collection of her own short stories, endless committee meetings, and a department contentious as the Balkans.

The peacekeeping was particularly wearisome. Just this afternoon, even before the incident that had moved her to rage, Diana had said to her friend Abby, “Cristabel is having another nervous breakdown. Peter’s complaining that Marcus isn’t pulling his load on the honors issue. And Gloria and Phil are at it again, duking it out on the hiring committee.”

“As if hiring itself weren’t demanding enough, right here at term’s end,” Abby, a university research librarian, commiserated.

“I know. We’ve got to make a decision this week on the new instructor. And snipe, snipe, snipe, that’s all Gloria’s done since Phil won the editorship of the journal. I wish she’d just go ahead and slash his tires, get it out of her system.”

Diana had called to see if Abby could give her a ride to pick up her car from the repair shop. Her friend couldn’t, but while Diana had her ear, why not vent a little?

Abby had laughed. “Well, you know what they say about academe.”

“The politics are so bitter because the stakes are so low? And we’re locked together forever, like lifers with no parole.”

“Tell me about it. Despite the pain of hiring, if it weren’t for the occasional new blood, I think I’d shoot my brains out. Speaking of which, did you see the new men’s baseball coach? A dead ringer for the young George Clooney. Hubba hubba.”

“You’re a naughty woman, Abigail Markson. I’m telling Steve on you.”

“How do you think we’ve stayed married twenty-six years? It’s my dirty mind that keeps Steve panting.”

But Diana hadn’t heard Abby’s answer. Her friend’s hubba hubba had taken her elsewhere.

Taken her to thoughts of Rob, an adjunct in her own department and one of the candidates for the full-time position. The candidate she was rooting for. No, amend that. The candidate Diana was set on hiring, come hell or high water.

Rob, Rob, Rob, that’s where Diana’s mind was now, while her body stood in the downpour, waiting for the streetcar. Behind her sprawled Audubon Park, its green lawns puddling, mighty spreading oaks spectral through the mist.

“The bod of a thirty-year-old,” Rob had whispered to Diana more than once, the sweet words more intoxicating than the small crystal pitcher of Sazerac that had become part of their pre-loving pas de deux.

Clever man, Rob.

What words could a woman hovering on the cusp of fifty more want to hear?

Now, from behind her, from Riverbend, Diana heard the hum of the streetcar approaching. Here it came, rain pelting off the top of the olive-green electric car from the 1920s trimmed with reddish mahogany. She climbed on impatiently, her black mood not improved by the dripping gaggle of tourists, the handful of laughing students.

Thank God, there on the river side of the car was a pair of empty seats. Diana piled her things in the aisle seat to discourage takers. She turned, then frowned at her reflection in the window, her brunette curls gone to frizz.

“Sexy, sexy hair” was another endearment Rob had murmured more than once, loosing it from the barrettes keeping it out of her face. Keeping it more professional.

Certainly no paean to her intellect had ever flipped the same switch as Rob’s honeyed pillow talk about her looks. Not for Diana, who’d been told since girlhood how smart she was.

“This little girl of mine’s gonna be a lawyer, you mark my words,” her daddy had said more than once. At seventy-five, he was finally retiring this year, crowned in glory, sheriff of the rural parish in the northern part of the state where she’d grown up. “Gonna be a lawyer and world-class skeet shooter.”

Her mother had given him a hard look when he’d talked like that. Smart girls, lawyers, didn’t find husbands, and she’d never approved of his dragging their only child along with the dogs and the guns on hunting expeditions. Though Diana had been a pudgy child, her teeth a train wreck, so what were her chances of a decent husband anyway?

But braces had fixed Diana’s smile, and she’d grown out of the pudge into a rather attractive woman. When she’d returned south from Boston with a shiny new Ph.D. in hand, the engagement ring she’d sported was even more dazzling.

“How long were you married?” Rob had asked her on their second date, about six months earlier, just before Thanksgiving.

Their second surreptitious date. Dinner at a place out by the lake where no one ever went anymore.

Diana closed her eyes and settled into the streetcar’s mahogany slotted seat, rainwater dripping off her cherry-red raincoat. Audubon Park disappeared, and a bit of her anger, too, as she let the memory of that evening wash over her.

It wasn’t really the done thing, a department chair dating an adjunct, one of that roving band of academic gypsies who subsisted by stringing together a class at one college here, another there, praying for full-time faculty to retire or die so a real job, with benefits and decent pay, would open up.

Also, Rob was twelve years her junior. Boy toy. Diana could just see the smirks.

“Honey, I was divorced before you were born,” she’d laughed, that second date.

“Awh, come on.” Rob had laid his slow grin on her. Cocked one eyebrow beneath dark golden locks.

He was a near dead ringer for Harry Connick, Jr., that lean, languorous home-grown crooner, that hunka hunka burnin’ love. Rob had then tapped her hand with one long finger, his touch like heat lightning.

*

Now the streetcar was passing Temple Sinai, a simple stone building with three tall iron doors. Diana never passed the temple without smiling at the memory of David Markson, Abby and Steve’s son, manfully delivering his bar mitzvah speech from the bema with not a hint of the stutter that had tortured his childhood. He was an ear-nose-and-throat surgeon now, doing a postdoc. Diana couldn’t be prouder of David.

She had no children of her own.

She often said that her students were her children. Not the same, of course, but she did invest enormous passion and energy in them. Something very much like love.

*

“Nawh, really, tell me,” Rob had insisted. “How long did that lucky man enjoy the supreme pleasure of your company?” Exaggerating his south Alabama drawl.

Sharecroppers, he’d said, his people. Po’ whites. Diana wasn’t so sure that that was true, but it fit Rob’s bad-boy image. The slightly dangerous English instructor/bartender/writer. He was working on a noir screenplay. L.A. Confidential meets The Big Easy.

Diana had been writing a collection of short stories for a couple of years now, stories linked by various characters’ connections to Lafayette Cemetery No. 1, just around the corner from her house.

“And how could that fool stand to give you up?” Rob kept pushing. “Or did he die of consumption or somethin’?”

No, that wasn’t what happened to Richard, the smart-as-a-whip, thin-as-a-whippet, handsome young Jewish dentist she’d met in grad school in Cambridge. Richard had always thought New Orleans was “ever so romantic” and had been thrilled to pieces when the university had tendered Diana a position.

He’d also been thrilled with the house they’d found in the heart of the Garden District, on Fourth near Coliseum.

He’d been thrilled with fixing it up, spending endless hours in antiques and junk stores on Magazine Street. Talking fabrics and color chips with designers. Meeting with armies of landscapers, gardeners, painters, plasterers.

What hadn’t thrilled Richard was Diana’s snuggling close to him after they switched off the ever-so-charming lamps he’d chosen for their ever-so-handsome bedside tables. He was the only man Diana had ever lived with, so it had taken her a long while to realize that she wasn’t the problem.

She’d been crushed, then furious, and, ultimately, humiliated when Richard, and the truth, finally came out.

“Three years,” she’d answered Rob, letting him lead her onto the dance floor of the place out by the lake where nobody went anymore. Nobody she knew, anyway. “We were married three years from start to finish.”

Diana loved to dance. She and Richard had been like Fred and Ginger on the dance floor, one of the ways, she’d realized later, he’d seduced her into marrying him.

And why? Now there was a mystery. Richard had said he’d loved her, truly, deeply loved her, but—

It was a big but.

She’d been talking about Richard earlier today in her creative-writing seminar. Obliquely, of course.

Revenge was the theme she’d assigned the class for their next stories, and they’d spent nearly an hour discussing that primal urge: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.

One girl recounted her humiliation by a bully at summer camp, and how she’d stolen the bully’s diary and photocopied the juiciest pages, then turned them into mess-hall placemats.

There was talk of turning the other cheek.

Destroying someone with kindness.

And what exactly did that Bible passage mean: “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord”?

It had been more than twenty years now since Richard had left Diana for Jeffrey, a lighting designer. At first she’d lain awake night after night, plotting to burn down their ever-so-elegant house, just around the corner, dammit, from hers. When she did sleep, poison, knives, guns, ropes, and bottomless caverns filled her dreams.

After a while, she’d rested easier, but she’d never forgiven Richard. She’d tried, but maybe she was too much her daddy’s little girl. She knew her dad had never meant the first half of that old lawman’s adage: Forgive your enemies, but never turn your back on them. When Richard was dying of AIDS, there was a little part of her that felt—not that she was proud of it, but there it was—Serves you right.

Diana had never married again. Not even close. Which is not to say that she hadn’t had her share of good times. This was New Orleans, after all, the country’s epicenter of good times. Laissez les bons temps rouler. Diana had dated quite a bit, in fact, keeping rather steady company with more than one beau.

But there’d been no one with whom she was willing to take the plunge—the risk of incurring that kind of pain again. Not that the decision was conscious. Diana had scores of rationalizations for avoiding commitment. Her suitors were too needy, too controlling, too depressed, too married to golf, too fat, or too just plain damned boring.

And they all drank too much.

Of course, nearly everyone in NOLA overindulged. The philosophy was you might as well drink, smoke too, eat all the fried foods you wanted here in the murder capital of the U.S.A. Carpe diem was the general consensus, ’cuz any day now a bad guy might hit you in the head just a little too hard.

(In fact, just this week, there’d been two home intrusions in Diana’s very own block, one especially frightening, as the owners had been home, the burglars armed.)

Then there were the poisons spewed by the petrochemical plants up and down the river, delivering cancer to the water, the air, the land.

And don’t forget the surety that one of these days a hurricane would blow your house down.

Such fatalism was part of the city’s charm. That sense of living on the edge lent a certain frisson to the everyday, the humdrum.

Just like the part-time, no-strings (no-pain) pleasures of a handsome man.

As Handsome Rob had twirled Diana around the floor on that second date, he’d asked the question she’d heard a million times: “How come nobody’s snagged you since?”

“Maybe I’m just too picky.” Her standard response.

“Picky? I can sure understand that. Woman like you, picky, that makes sense.”

Then Rob had flung her out with one strong arm, let her stay there distanced from his touch, his body’s heat, his scent—a mix of lime, smoke, leather, and sweat—until she began to long for him as if he were cool water on an August afternoon. An eternity, then he reeled her back in.

She’d laughed, trying to cover her yen for him. He was an adjunct, for chrissakes, and way too young.

Buckwheat Zydeco came on the jukebox with “Give Me a Squeeze, Please,” and she’d begun a step-pause-step-step by her lonesome.

“Or maybe nobody’s been able to keep up,” she’d teased.

In north Louisiana, where Diana was raised among the Southern Baptists and the even more conservative sects—Assembly of God, Church of Christ, Church of the Nazarene—dancing was frowned upon if not outright forbidden.

What was that old joke…?

Why do Baptists disapprove of screwing?

Because it looks too much like dancing.

There was, of course, the flailing around that the Pentecostals called divine: a kind of non-partnered floor-flopping punctuated by speaking in tongues and foaming at the mouth.

South Louisiana, NOLA its capital, was a whole other continent. In NOLA everybody danced.

“Can’t keep up? Oh yeah?” Then Clever, Handsome, Hot Rob had grabbed her in his arms and whirled her around the floor in one floating side step after another until she was breathless. And damp.

Then he’d taken her home and slid her right into bed.

*

Over her own thoughts, the drumming rain, and the hum of the streetcar, Diana heard a familiar voice from a few seats up. “I’ve got so much work, really, I’m ready to kill myself.” Pause. Giggle. “And a hot date with You Know Who.”

“I know. Me, too.” Sigh. “The work, not the hot date. But I’m kinda looking forward to doing that story for Banks.”

It was the mention of her own name that made Diana crane a look forward, and, yes, there two rows directly in front of her, she spotted the unmistakable red-gold mane of Amber Reynolds.

Amber would be the one with the hot date: a real dazzler, campus queen bee, and a bit of a bitch, but still, one of Diana’s favorites. Amber was a talented writer with a great eye for detail.

Beside her, Chloe McClain, Amber’s dark-haired, less attractive, and even more talented friend.

Diana was quite fond of both of them.

Probably going downtown to shop, she thought.

“I’m going to write about my wicked stepmother,” said Chloe, in that penetrating voice all girls seemed to have these days. Too nasal. Too loud. Broadcasting their business. “You know, about how I really tried when my dad married her, after my mom died, but she was so awful to me. Though she was sweet as pie when Dad was around. Then one day—”

*

The streetcar rattled on past the columned mansions of St. Charles, the sidewalks a tumble of concrete uprooted by dripping oaks. It stopped every couple of blocks. Thirteen miles from one end, Carrollton and Claiborne to its terminus downtown at Canal, though it was only about ten, the part of it from the university to Erato Street, just before Lee Circle, where Diana would get off to walk a few blocks to the auto shop. The trip would take forty-five minutes, more or less. Breakdowns on the streetcar line were more common than not.

Up ahead Diana spotted the Milton Latter Library, housed in a Neo-Italianate mansion, a gorgeous old pile occupying the entire block between Soniat and Dufossat Streets and one of the city’s two small hills.

And a landmark in her love affair with Rob. How fitting, she always thought, that it was a library where their games had begun.

*

Chloe’s voice rose even higher. “I was always telling Wicked Stepmom she ought to be more careful about locking the car when she parked it. And she always blew me off. Like, Yadda yadda, Chloe.

“Then one day she had borrowed Dad’s BMW that he loved more than life itself, and she drove it, like just two blocks, to the store, she coulda/shoulda walked her fat butt, and left it unlocked, naturally, in the parking lot. So I stole it.”

*

“Vivien Leigh lived there, in what’s the library now,” a tourist with a tight blond perm said to her red-faced husband, the two of them sitting directly in front of Diana, behind Amber and Chloe, “when she married a rich local lumberman.”

“Actually, it was Marguerite Clark, a star of the silent screen,” said Diana, leaning forward despite her desire for solitude. She couldn’t resist correcting the tourist, the schoolteacher in her, she supposed.

“Oh, really?”

Yes. The house had been built by a department-store magnate, then was bought by elegant Harry Williams, the lumber baron and aviation pioneer who was said to have charm to burn—the charm that won Marguerite, a rival of Mary Pickford. The house was given to the city for a public library by a later owner, in memory of a son who died in World War II.

“It’s worth seeing,” said Diana. “The two front downstairs rooms are gorgeous, with frescoed ceilings imported from France. The large reading room has a Flemish mantel over an onyx fireplace.”

*

It was the green Louis XIV French parlor that was Diana’s favorite, however, with its curtains and wall panels of cherry-red brocaded damask and a magnificent crystal chandelier.

“Let’s go to the Latter tomorrow afternoon,” Rob had said casually, about a week after they’d discovered themselves to be a sweet fit.

“The library?”

Diana had really meant it when she’d told Rob that, no, she obviously couldn’t resist his charms, but really, truly, they were going to have to be discreet.

“Just pretend that I’m married,” she’d said. “It simply won’t do to have us gossiped about around school. It isn’t appropriate.”

“Inappropriate,” he’d teased. Then he’d lowered his voice to that husky register that made her bone marrow vibrate and commanded, “The library.”

The truth was Diana was so lust-struck at that point, she’d have followed Rob if he’d jumped off the Huey P. Long Bridge.

“There’s something I want to show you,” he’d added. “I’ll meet you in the parlor. Wait for me there.”

At the appointed time Diana had settled herself onto the parlor’s crimson loveseat. Moments later, an older, elegant couple, in their seventies, had taken chairs to one side of Diana’s perch. They began leafing through travel books, planning a trip to France, obviously not their first.

Then another man entered the parlor. For a moment Diana didn’t recognize Rob. He’d donned serious horn-rims and slicked his hair back with a silvery gel. A baggy jacket made him look older—and heavier.

She had to stifle her hoot of surprise and delight. A disguise! Oh, Clever Rob. She’d said discreet and…

But he warned her into silence with a raised finger and a shake of his head.

“Here’s the book you asked for, miss,” he said, as if he were a librarian, handing her a large-format volume.

The older couple looked up briefly, smiled, then bent their heads back to their research.

“Let me show you what I was talking about.” Rob gestured with an open hand. Could he join her on the loveseat?

The book was a collection of exquisite erotica. Beautifully rendered line drawings of the seduction of a young man by a voluptuous older woman.

“Where did you find this?” she’d whispered.

“Shhhh,” he’d cautioned. Library. No talking.

The older couple smiled once more.

Five minutes later found Diana and her younger paramour locked together in the single-occupancy Ladies’ Room, half naked and crazy, crazy, crazy.

*

“Maybe we’ll come back and see the library tomorrow,” said the permed blond tourist. “Howard wants to go back to the hotel and take a nap before we have dinner.” She paused, then added smugly, “At Antoine’s.”

Of course. Sure, the Oysters Rockefeller were still good, and the pommes de terre souffles terrific, but Diana could have told the blonde of a hundred better places both high and low, Bayona to Domilise’s Po-Boys. But tourists always wanted to drop Our dinner at Antoine’s into conversation back home.

*

Once again, the girls’ voices. “Shut up!” said Amber. “You did not steal your dad’s car!”

“Oh, yeah. I’d been scheming for this. I was so ready. I’d nabbed a pair of her panties out of the clothes basket—”

“Yewh!”

“And I left them under the driver’s seat with a ripped condom wrapper. So the cops find the car about five minutes after Dad dials nine-one-one, a Beemer emergency, all ranting. And then, when the cops bring it back, he’s going over his ride, inch by inch, and—”

“Hello! Panties! Condom! But how would he know for sure they were hers? Not the girlfriend of the banger who pinched it?”

“’Cuz she always wore this one kind of black panties, really expensive, and REALLY big—”

Diana laughed. So did Howard, the tourist hubby in front of her. The wife elbowed him.

Not funny, Howard.

*

After the Latter, Diana and Rob had fun seeing just how creative (and discreet) they could be.

Let’s Pretend was a good model.

The operating principle was fantasy and role-playing (while hidden in plain sight).

And disguises were an essential part of secrecy, weren’t they? The weeks leading up to Mardi Gras, with its masks and costumes, had been a particularly interesting time.

But there were parades and dress-up balls of one kind or another in New Orleans practically every day.

Not all of their encounters were production numbers, of course. Many nights Rob came visiting, and they made dinner and then love with no games, no frills.

Oh, maybe just a bit of “Let’s pretend I’m the cable guy.” Rob tapping on the sun-porch door, the front doorbell broken for eons. Diana answering his knock in the black silk dressing gown he loved.

Or she’d remind him, “…that time you had me meet you at the bar in the Maple Leaf, and we pretended that we were strangers.”

“Yeah, and you let someone buy you a drink before I got there, and then we almost came to blows over who you were going home with.”

“I loved that,” she sighed.

She loved him, too.

*

“I’m crazy in love with him,” cooed Amber.

Passengers up and down the streetcar grinned. Ah, youth.

“He is so much fun. Last weekend we went dancing at the Rock ’n’ Bowl. He’s a mad dancer, and when we rolled out of there, like one a.m., he said, “Wanta go for a drive?’ And the next thing I knew, we were all the way down in Grand Isle. A friend of his has a beach cottage there.”

“Oh, I’ve always wanted to go,” said Chloe. “Was it as romantic as Chopin portrayed it?”

Now Diana smiled. Such smart, literary girls, alluding to Kate Chopin’s feminist-novel-before-its-time, The Awakening, while talking about boys.

“It was heaven,” sighed Amber. “He was fabulous, sweet as could be the whole time. And we stayed for the sunset the next evening. I’ve never seen such a sunset.”

“Oh, I wish I were in love,” Chloe longed.

“You will be. Any minute now. You’ll see.”

*

Love, oh love, the last thing that Diana had expected. Or wanted.

The affair with Rob was meant to be like all the others. Just for fun, right?

Though unlike her other lovers, Rob wasn’t just a roll in the hay who managed to hold her attention for a candle’s length. He also sported that perfect trifecta of intelligence, imagination, and sweetness.

Rob wasn’t just for laughs.

Rather, he made her laugh.

What a world of difference between those two.

(Though sometimes she asked herself, as their games-playing grew ever more filigreed, Is this love or sexual obsession?)

In any case, how ridiculous that the one who’d finally battered down the gates, bridged the moat, and scaled the steep walls to her heart/whatever was so inappropriate.

An adjunct! A baby adjunct. A man without a full-time job in the very field at whose apex she stood.

Okay, at thirty-seven, Rob wasn’t really a baby, but still…

The moment she’d realized that she could no longer imagine her life without him, she’d begun to fret.

What if he grew tired of her? What if he wandered? Someone at the university uncovered their secret and compromised her position? What? What? What?

Yet losing implied having. She had no claim on Rob. It wasn’t as if they used the L word.

Diana worked herself into a perfect frenzy. Her love-making took on a desperate edge. What new trick to titillate her lover? She spent hours poring over the Good Vibrations catalogue.

“Is something bothering you?” he asked.

“No. Why?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. You seem, what, worried about something. Need more space? Want to see less of me?”

“No!”

He laughed. “More of me?” The question delivered with that cocked eyebrow, a fiddling with his top shirt button. Followed by a sweet tumble.

Get a grip, she told herself. Don’t screw this up. Don’t be a ridiculous older woman. Don’t grasp.

And then, late February, Rob used the L word.

It just wasn’t the one she wanted to hear.

“Livingston,” he said. “It’s a small liberal-arts school in Cambridge, Mass. Great rep. An old friend’s in the English department there. Gave me the heads-up that they’re going to have a full-time slot. He has a lot of pull. You loved Cambridge, right?” Then he’d stopped, seeing her face. “Oh, honey bun, you know I don’t want to leave. I love New Orleans. I love being here with you.” Then, finally, finally, dear Lord, “I love…you.”

And there it was. He loved her, but also he needed a real job. With real tenure. Real benefits. Real pay. Real retirement.

“Have you already applied?”

“Well, yeah. I mean…”

“I know. I know.” She’d hugged him close. And then the question occurred. “Other places, too?”

He shook his head into her shoulder. “Livingston’s the only one where I have some kind of inside chance.”

What was he talking about? Was she not an insider at the university right here? Did she have no influence?

But what she didn’t have, unfortunately, was an opening in her department. No retirements on the horizon. No one on leave who might not return. And no one was ever fired unless—to use the infamous words of ex-governor Edwin Edwards speaking of himself as a shoo-in for a second term—he were “caught in bed with a dead girl or a live boy.”

Then lightning struck. Diana had an inspiration. There was one possibility. A little tricky, but possibly doable. Probably. No, definitely. She would make it work.

And, oh, what sweet revenge: exchanging Arnold Venable for Rob.

* * *

“I just wish we could spend more time together,” Amber complained. “But he’s so busy. And then there’s—”

Chloe jumped in, “Yeah, but you’re busy, too. Like have you finished your senior thesis for the psych course?”

“No. But he’s helping me with it. I mean, he’s been reading what I’ve got, and he makes such great suggestions.”

“Well, sure, he’s—”

Then Amber interrupted. “Look! The Columns. Ohmygawd! We spent the most incredible night there.”

A heavyset woman across the aisle from Amber and Chloe shook her head. A frown of disapproval rumpled her handsome brown face. A church lady, no doubt.

Diana, however, smiled. The Columns Hotel, once upon a time a family mansion, had starred as Madame Nell’s bordello in the film Pretty Baby. In actuality, the late 19thearly 20th century’s red-light district, Storyville, had been downtown, fronting Basin Street.

The Columns did, however, possess an aura of naughtier, bygone times: its bar elegant with chandeliers and fireplaces, the rooms upstairs tricked out in flocked-velvet Victorian finery. Diana and Rob had frolicked there one night in an amazing four-poster bed.

Now she spied their private balcony, right there. That’s where they’d sipped morning-after mimosas.

*

Arnold Venable had been the department chair for eons before Diana took that post, and few were the toes he hadn’t mangled. Even when young, which he certainly wasn’t anymore, Arnold had been imperious, affecting a British accent, grandly furnishing his office with Persian carpets, subdued lighting, and a slender walnut desk. Arnold didn’t hold office hours; he received. He held court. And he’d long ago perfected the art of slipping a silver dagger into one’s soft spots, his targets universal. University president to office cleaner, no one escaped Arnold’s withering blue gaze or razor tongue.

Immediately upon succeeding Arnold as chair, some six years earlier, Diana had been swamped by the English faculty’s campaigning for a piece of the pie of privileges he’d hoarded.

“Not fair that Arnold never takes a lower-division class.”

“Not fair that he’s had a lock on Shakespeare and the Romantic poets from time immemorial.”

Diana couldn’t agree more, having herself suffered from Arnold’s barbs and slights, and drawing up that next term’s class load, she assigned Arnold a section of English 101. Freshman grunt composition. Arnold refused it, sneering as if she’d handed him a bag of manure.

Fine. So be it. And, as was the university policy, Arnold taught less than a full load, though for full pay.

This pattern had continued year after year, with Arnold accruing an ever-growing debt of classes owed.

Just a week after Rob’s announcement of his application to Livingston College, Diana had casually, ever so coolly, brought up The Arnold Situation at lunch with an administrative dean.

He’d jumped. “We absolutely must do something. Just yesterday the president was laying down the law about tightening all financial belts, closing all loopholes. Now.” He’d leaned closer to Diana. “Do you have any ideas?”

Why, yes, she did.

“Three sections of 101?” Arnold had slammed through Diana’s office door without knocking. He’d delivered the question as if she were a ridiculous child who’d donned a clown outfit for a wedding.

“Yes. Three. Close the door, Arnold. Come in and sit down.”

Then Diana had the delicious pleasure of explaining to Arnold Venable that he’d reached the end of the line. Administration had done the toting—she handed the figures across her desk to him—and he was in arrears for so many classes untaught but salaried that he must a) teach whatever offered with zero compensation for the next two years, b) pay back the money advanced, or c) take early retirement, effective the end of the term, and the debt would be forgiven.

Within hours Arnold had begun packing the leather-bound tomes that lined the walls of his office.

Oh, what sweetness, what joy as, later that same evening, just as Rob, spent from love-making, sleepily pulled up the sheets, she whispered into his ear, “Guess what?”

And wasn’t it terrific that they’d been so discreet, that no one at the university knew that they were lovers? Now Rob’s application for the position could be tendered like any other candidate’s.

Any other, except, of course, that he had the advantage of being a known quantity. Well-liked by both students and faculty, Rob had done a terrific job with his classes. Yes, Rob definitely had the edge.

“Darlin’, you genius, you Wonder Woman!” He’d jumped out of bed and danced his happy dance. Then he’d grabbed Diana up and two-stepped her around the room.

He was a shoo-in, Diana exulted. He’d win the post, and then, and then… Well, after a semester or so it wouldn’t be so untoward, would it, if they were to “begin” dating? No, the age difference between them would never lessen, but with the change in Rob’s status, their having a liaison—and, well, who knew where that might lead?—wouldn’t be nearly so scandalous.

*

“When’s he going to tell her?” Chloe asked.

“Not for a while yet. The timing’s got to be right.”

Hmmm, thought Diana. Amber’s boyfriend already had another girl.

The church lady was shaking her head again.

From somewhere beyond the Mississippi, thunder rumbled, and the church lady rolled her eyes.

See? Lord don’t like that nonsense. That fooling around with somebody else’s man? You go doin’ that stuff, ain’t nobody gonna want you.

Oh, please. Diana read the church lady’s body language. It’s not that serious. Amber’s young, and men really are like streetcars. There’s always another one.

*

The stumbling block to Diana’s plan was the presence of those sworn enemies, Gloria and Phil, on the hiring committee. They—dammit—and Diana were the three designees from the English department, and while Phil gave Rob highest marks, Gloria was busy with equivocations.

Just to spite Phil.

The other five members, from various departments and branches of administration, were poised to approve Rob and get on with it. End of term and summer vacation were within sniffing distance. Everybody was antsy.

“I really think she has stronger qualifications,” said Gloria, tapping the application folder of a young blond thing from California. Yes, she’d interviewed beautifully, this smart cookie with the body of a Victoria’s Secret model.

“But her concentration is feminist theory. We don’t need another one of those,” said Phil.

“Now, wait a minute!” steamed Gloria, who was herself a feminist theorist.

Diana shook her head. What the hell was Gloria thinking? Did she really want a younger woman, particularly someone who looked like that, in her sandbox?

“Well,” said the dean, trying not to drool on the blonde’s app. “I have to agree, she is an attractive candidate.”

Diana was beside herself. She couldn’t support Rob too strongly for fear of arousing suspicion, though maybe that was just paranoia. Yet both Phil and Gloria would rather die than give an inch to the other.

“Well, what about Dawn Moriyama?” ventured another committee member.

Jesus. The Japanese-American candidate, a distant third on paper, and she’d stumbled badly in the interview. But once they got into ethnic-diversity territory, Diana’s ship would have sailed.

Phil looked at Gloria. Gloria looked at Phil. They both shrugged. Why not?

With that, Diana stood, collecting her papers. “We should sleep on this,” she insisted, slapping down her department chair’s prerogative like a trump card. “I think we’ve lost our way.”

Everyone groaned but agreed to one more meeting.

*

“He has so much to lose, if he doesn’t play it right,” said Amber.

The church lady shook her head so hard Diana thought she might cross the aisle, grab Amber, and shake her, too.

Now it sounded as if Amber were involved with a married man. A beautiful young thing like her, a whole world of gorgeous young single boys to choose from?

“You think she’s the vengeful type?” Chloe wondered.

She.

The wife.

*

“Do you think it’s possible,” Diana had said to Gloria, taking her arm as they crossed the quad after the committee meeting, “that your attitude toward Phil is clouding your judgment? Just a tad?”

Gloria had stiffened, pulled her arm free, and turned to Diana with a blank stare. “No,” she said flatly. “I don’t.”

“Now, Gloria…”

“Don’t you Now, Gloria me. I just don’t happen to think Rob is the best candidate.”

“You know Moriyama’s not going to make the cut. Do you really want that young hottie lusting after your classes?”

Gloria recoiled, then struck. “Don’t talk to me about young hotties, Diana. Not when you’re throwing all your weight behind your own.”

Just like that. Gut-shot, Diana reeled. Her skin stung with a thousand pricks of adrenaline. Her world tilted, whirled.

“I don’t know what you mean,” she finally managed.

“I think you do,” said Gloria with a wintry smile. “Just so you know, I’ve not discussed your…indiscretion…with anyone else.”

So clever, Gloria, hoarding her intelligence like gold until it would bring the greatest yield.

“I’ll give you Rob. You’ll give me the classes I want in perpetuity. And the editorship of the journal.”

“Gloria, even if there were reason to…“

Gloria’s smile was cruel. She had the goods, and she knew it.

“I can’t guarantee…”

“I’m sure you’ll work it out.” With that, Gloria gave Diana her back and strode away. Then she paused, turned. “Pleasure grows ever more expensive, don’t you know, Diana, as time moves along.”

*

Blackmail. That’s what it was. Blackmail, plain and simple. After she picked up her car should she drive to the NOPD district office on Magazine and report Gloria? Or did blackmail fall under Vice, housed on South Broad?

Right. Diana could just hear herself explaining the situation to a cop up to his ears in murder, home invasion, tourist muggings, drugs, child abuse, and the thousand and one other felonies perpetrated in New Orleans every day. The city was a sewer of crime.

No. Gloria had her. There were no two ways around it. Diana had been furious and sick with disbelief.

Though now that she’d this streetcar ride to collect herself a bit, to reflect, and to taste once more through the mouth of memory the many pleasures of her sweetheart, she’d realized her id would allow no other choice: If this were the price of keeping Rob, so be it.

But she still needed to frame her response to Gloria. Generous but cool, that was the ticket. Agreeable, yet firm. God forbid that Gloria think she now had carte blanche.

Maybe what she ought to do, after she picked up Picayune, her much-loved little brown Mercedes 280L roadster, was turn up her tape of Tina Turner’s “Proud Mary” and take the causeway to her favorite dive in Abita Springs. Soothe herself with an oyster po’boy and a couple of beers. Yes, the long drive across the lake always cleared her head.

The streetcar rattled on. Diana could see the freeway overpass up ahead, beyond it Lee Circle where a statue of General Robert E. Lee stood upon a tall pillar, facing north, so he’d never have his back to his enemies. She wasn’t far now from her stop.

Rob wasn’t coming over till much later this evening. Nineish, he’d said. Then she could give him the good news, minus the complicating details. With Gloria’s vote, his job was in the bag. They’d crack open a bottle of champagne, celebrate. Maybe play one of their favorite games. Strangers assigned to a sleeping car on the Sunset Limited to Los Angeles? Or…wait. Rob had suggested something earlier on the phone. Still rattled by Gloria, she couldn’t remember what….

*

“Vengeful? Well, I never thought so, particularly, but when we were brainstorming in class today, I totally changed my mind.”

“Yeah,” Chloe agreed. “That story she told about how, a long time ago, somebody wronged her, and she fantasized about burning his house down? But then, like she said, everyone has revenge fantasies. The real question is whether people act on them or not.”

“I know,” said Amber. “But just the way she said it, Burn his house down, it gave me shivers.”

*

Wait a minute. Diana was about to pull the signal cord, gathering her things. The girls were talking about Amber’s married boyfriend, Amber did say he was married, didn’t she, and now they were talking about her class? Her story assignment? Her?

“He’s been so careful,” Amber continued. “And it’s really brilliant, the way that whole pitiful charade she’s insisted on, his being her secret boyfriend, has played right into his plan. But once he has the job, well, anyway, by Christmas of next year, he can dump her. And then we can go public. My momma is crazy about him, you know. She thinks he’s the spit and image of Harry Connick, Jr.”

“And your dad likes Rob, too, right?”

“Oh yeah, he…”

*

Diana didn’t hear Amber’s reply as she stumbled blindly through the rear exit door and fell out into the rain.

Her feet had barely hit the wet grass of the neutral ground when her stomach heaved and she spewed hot yellow vomit.

“Oh my God!” someone cried.

“Ma’am? Can I help you?” another asked.

But Diana waved them away. Please don’t. Don’t look at me. Don’t touch me. Don’t pity me. Don’t.

She didn’t remember much between that spinning moment and stepping out of a taxi at her own doorstep. She must have hailed the cab, must have realized she couldn’t drive, her ears ringing, her eyes blind to this world.

Once inside her house, Diana fell on all fours to the faded red-and-blue Kirman in the foyer, one of the ever-so-tasteful treasures Richard had left behind. She writhed. She howled like a dog. She tore at her hair, her clothes. She cursed Rob’s name. She cursed Amber.

And then Amber’s words cut through the din and the frenzy: pitiful, secret boyfriend, played into his plan, the job, dump her.

Amber, the golden girl. Amber, one of her favorites. Amber, whom she’d taken to her heart. Amber, the fresh young bitch.

Pitiful, pitiful, pitiful, the chorus resounded.

They’d made a fool of her. A tidal wave of shame washed her from top to bottom.

Eventually, after what seemed a year, a decade, an eternity of agony, Diana made it to the sideboard and sloshed three fingers of bourbon into a glass. As she tossed it back, her stomach lurched once, then settled, and the amber fire felt good.

Excellent, in fact. The burn in her belly would help her focus.

Not as if there were that much to decide, really. Not many options.

First, of course, she’d “compromise.” She’d withdraw her support for Rob’s candidacy and cast her vote for the young blond feminist.

That would be just desserts for Gloria and take care of the job question.

Not that it would be even a step toward addressing the hatred that had begun to bubble in her belly for Rob. Oh, Rob. Rob, Rob, Rob. A bubble that would eventually fill her to bursting, she was certain of it. Just like the hatred she’d felt for Richard. The hatred that had had her dreaming of fire, rat poison, knives, guns. The hatred that still lingered even now, long after AIDS had devoured him. And the need to get even. There was no way such humiliation could go unpunished. Revenge would be hers.

But first things first. No position for Rob. No reward for Gloria.

Though, wait. Not too hasty. What might Gloria serve up in return? Thwarted Gloria, who no more wanted the blond hottie hired than she wanted a third arm, the young woman just a tool in her scheme? Diana had long been witness to Gloria’s wrath. Gloria would not take being crossed lightly.

No. She couldn’t risk it. She needed to think.

Just then Diana’s phone began to ring. Let it. She sloshed more bourbon into her glass. Let it ring, ring, ring off the hook. There was no one on God’s green earth she wanted to talk to. No one. She couldn’t even imagine forming words.

Once again Diana doubled over with pain. Hot tears cascaded down her face like boiling rain. She felt as if someone had ripped her skin off in one piece, discarded everything inside but for her hatred, then left the husk. She was a semblance of a human being. But only a facsimile. She would never be whole again. Never.

Then a deep voice boomed through her answering machine. “Hey, darling, it’s Fred.” Her neighbor, a lawyer, and the head of the block association.

“Just wanted to remind you you need to be hypervigilant until the cops catch this burglarizing s.o.b. Not that there won’t be another one right behind him. Marcia Pennington said she thought she heard somebody snooping around her back porch this afternoon. Lock up and batten down, hon.”

*

Diana froze, staring in the direction of Fred’s voice, her glass halfway to her lips. Now she remembered what Rob had said earlier. Now she recalled the game he’d proposed.

*

Two hours later, a little after ten, Diana’s living room. Fred, in striped pajama bottoms and a faded Tulane T-shirt, stood with a strong arm around Diana. The red-and-blue flashers atop the small fleet of NOPD cruisers outside lit up the room, lending it an eerie carnival air.

“Like I said, I called her and reminded her to be extra vigilant,” Fred rumbled to the officer in charge, Officer Jackson, a mountainous black man whose powder-blue uniform shirt was damp with the rain still pouring outside.

“Absolutely.” Jackson nodded. “Way things been in this neighborhood recently, you can’t be too careful.”

“But I wasn’t careful!” Diana cried, her face smudged with tears. “If only I’d checked the outside door to the sun porch, he’d never have gotten that far. It’s my fault. I’ll never forgive myself,” Diana wailed, shaking her head. “Never.”

Behind them, back through the dining room, was the sun porch in question. Rob’s body lay half-in, half-out of the French doors between it and the dining room, his blood pooling on the hardwood in a dark red lake.

Fred hugged her tighter. “Now, darlin’, you know it wasn’t your fault. How were you to know that boy would come round so late to talk? Stupid ass, like that was the way to get a job? Busting onto your sun porch ’cuz your front doorbell’s broke?”

“But I should have recognized him,” Diana moaned, running a hand through her hair, clutching at her black silk dressing gown. “Like I said, he’d mentioned something at school today about dropping by, and I’d said, no, that wasn’t a good idea. It wasn’t appropriate.…”

“Ma’am, it was dark. It was raining. Way he was dressed? Break-ins all over the neighborhood. It’s a shame, but what’re you gonna do?” Officer Jackson shook his massive head slowly, looking for all the world like a giant mournful Rottweiler. “I say, despite the mistaken ID, it’s a good thing you had that gun.”

He cast an envious eye on Diana’s 12-gauge Italian-made Verona lying on the loveseat in the living room where she’d tossed it before calling 911. Over four thousand dollars’ worth of high-tensile steel and Turkish walnut, the shotgun had been a gift from her dad after she’d won a statewide women’s skeet competition.

“And,” the officer went on, “what kind of fool goes around in the middle of the night tapping on folks’ doors, all in black, stocking cap pulled down so you can barely see his face? I’d a thought he was a burglar myself. Yep, burglar for sure.”

*

Rob had let himself in, as he did every time they’d played burglar. He’d come through the unlocked outside door of the sun porch, then stood jiggling the locked interior French doors.

Diana had entered from the kitchen, the black silk dressing gown he loved half-open. She was naked underneath.

The way the game went, he’d jiggle the door harder. She’d shrink, then shriek, “Oh no! Please go away!”

Her gown would fall open. He’d bang the door, bang it again, and just before he looked to be about to dash a pane of glass, reach in, and unlock the deadbolt from inside, she’d open it. He’d race through and grab her up, her robe falling to the hardwood. Sometimes they’d make it up the stairs. Sometimes they wouldn’t. This time, he’d jiggled the door hard. And harder yet. But Diana didn’t open the door.

“You bastard!” she screamed, reaching for the shotgun she’d propped against the china cabinet. She threw its beautiful steely length to her right shoulder. Such a sweet fit.

Rob’s eyes grew wide. What? Then he’d laughed. A new wrinkle in their game. A twist.

“Oh, baby,” he crooned. “You got a gun? I got a gun, too.” He winked. “Got a red-hot pistol for you, darling.” His face was pressed against the glass.

*

Louisiana is a right-to-bear-arms state, but there might be some gray area here, legally speaking, considering that Rob wasn’t actually all the way inside the house.

Shoot ’em. Then drag ’em through the window. Every schoolchild knew that.

She obviously couldn’t let him in from the sun porch, however. Why would she open her door to a burglar?

Luckily, she’d had plenty of time to make a plan, weigh the options, after Fred’s call. Before Rob’s first footstep on the porch.

A woman alone in a house. A college professor. Department chair. Sheriff’s daughter! Recent home invasions in the neighborhood. A rainy night. A man in black.

This was, after all, Louisiana, where a jury had taken only three hours to acquit a Baton Rouge homeowner of shooting and killing a Japanese student whose crime had been ringing his bell. The kid had been dazzling in his all-white Saturday Night Fever suit before it blossomed blood-red, he and his friend mistaking the house for one down the street where a Halloween party was being held.

*

Diana wanted Rob as close as possible.

You didn’t have to be a crack shot; any fool could hit someone with a shotgun loaded with buckshot, and many heedless fools did. The pellets covered a fairly wide pattern from a distance.

But if you wanted to kill someone, you stepped closer, closer, closer still. Then the pellets would rip a huge hole.

That was what Diana wanted, tit for tat, to tear her lover to pieces.

“Come on, sweetheart.” Rob had urged her closer with an upturned hand, fingers wiggling, a tough-guy gesture. In character. Playing a role.

She’d racked the shotgun, loving that sound. Loving the well-oiled smell of it. Loving to shoot.

She’d pulled the trigger, racked again, firing twice through the French doors. The first blast had ripped Rob’s heart loose and flung it against his chest wall. The second took out his guts.

*

Fred stayed until everyone was gone. “Just a formality,” Officer Jackson had assured them of the crime-scene crew. “Want to follow procedure here. Dot all our i’s and cross all our t’s. I’m sure you appreciate that, being a lawman’s daughter. No question but this has every appearance of a home invasion.”

After the EMS vehicle carried Rob’s body away and the last cruiser departed, Fred urged Diana to come home with him, to spend the night with his family.

“No. No, thanks, Fred,” she assured him. “You’ve been a brick. I couldn’t ask for a better friend. But really, I’ll be okay.”

And she would be, Diana thought later, lying in the stillness of her bedroom, the lilac-papered boudoir where she and Rob had shared so many delicious romps.

She had her prestigious job. Her ever-so-terrific house. A raft of good friends. And she lived in the Big Easy.

Then, over the rain on the rooftop, she could hear Rob crooning Brother Ray’s words just as surely as if his head were on the pillow next to hers.

Well it don’t make no difference if you’re young or old…

no matter whether, rainy weather…

you got to get yourself together…

and let the good times roll….

With that, Diana’s heart convulsed once more with loss. Dear God, she’d miss him so. Rob, the last of her lovers, she was sure of it. She could never, ever again expose herself to such grief.

Her final scream of anguish ripped through the sweet-scented room, and then quiet blanketed it once more. After that, there was nothing, nothing but her own breathing and the falling rain.

Just before tipping over into darkness, Diana thought, First thing. First thing, bright and early, she’d call Gloria and tell her about the awful accident.

Gloria would understand. Gloria would get it. And Gloria would keep her mouth shut, or…

And Amber?

Well, she was young, with the recklessness of a true beauty. What was one boyfriend, more or less, to such a girl? Besides, Amber was smart and clever enough to protect herself.

And Chloe? Chloe had already tasted the fruit of revenge and found it sweet.

With that, Diana turned over and dove headlong into the blissful sleep of the avenged.

She dreamed it rained so hard and rained so long that the pumping stations failed. The water rose and rose until all the streets flooded. She saw herself floating in her darling little Mercedes roadster, its top down, past Lafayette Cemetery No. 1, then hanging a right into the middle of St. Charles. She was waving like a homecoming queen, smiling and waving and flirting to beat the band, floating, floating, floating down the neutral ground.

You Run

San Clemente, California, June 1976

Thirty years since Richard Milhous Nixon’s first campaign for Congress, bankrolled by Pat Nixon’s selling her interest in her family farm.

Twenty-four years since the 1952 presidential election when Richard Nixon’s campaign funding was called into question and Pat sat by her husband’s side as he made his “Checkers” speech, telling the nation about their dog, Pat’s “Republican” cloth coat, and laying out the details of every cent they owned and owed.

Sixteen years since Nixon lost his presidential bid to John F. Kennedy by two-tenths of one percent of the popular vote and promised Pat that he would never again run for public office.

Fourteen years since Nixon’s defeat in the 1962 California gubernatorial election.

Eight years since Nixon’s decision, made without consulting his wife, to run for president once again.

Four years since the break-ins at the Watergate offices of the Democratic National Committee in Washington, D.C.

Almost two years since Richard Milhous Nixon, the only president ever drummed out of office, retreated with Thelma Catherine “Pat” Ryan Nixon to San Clemente and their vacation house, La Casa Pacifica.

Two months since the publication of Bernstein and Woodward’s The Final Days, a minute-by-minute account of the death throes of the Nixon presidency.

One month before Pat Nixon would suffer her first debilitating stroke.

Perched above the sea, the long white-stuccoed house with the red tile roof was within earshot of Camp Pendleton, and sometimes, at night, if you listened hard, even over the waves, you could hear shelling and rifle fire from the ghosts of young Marines, killed in Vietnam, who’d trained there.

The house was light and bright inside, but eerily still. As the visitor entered, it struck him that La Casa Pacifica felt as if no one had ever laughed within its walls.

Pat Nixon, wearing a white blouse, a lightweight navy cardigan, navy trousers, and a smile, received her guest in a sitting room on the north side of the house. From there they could see her gardens: eucalyptus and beach palms, gardenias, purple gazanias, and pink and white geraniums. A man in grubby workclothes bent over an azalea border.

Mrs. Nixon and her visitor settled in chairs cater-cornered from one another. It was the cocktail hour, five p.m. Manolo Sanchez, who’d been with the Nixons for years, brought in a silver tray holding decanters of bourbon and scotch, glasses, and ice. “I work with the gardeners,” Pat Nixon said, sipping her drink. “Sometimes I’m out there six, seven hours a day. Gardening has almost kept me sane.” She laughed a small laugh. “The first year I went through four pairs of canvas gloves. All that ground cover there,” she gestured, “that’s where the rose garden used to be.”

The visitor blinked, remembering that Pat Nixon, for all her love of gardening, hadn’t spent much time in the Rose Garden at the White House. Those grounds had not been a pleasant place what with the war protesters raging just outside the fence, surveillance helicopters whirring above their heads. He could still hear the chanting: One, two, three, four, we don’t want your fuckin’ war.

“How’s the president?” he asked.

“He’s…” Pat Nixon paused, then began again. “He’s fine. He’s working on his memoirs, you know. Trying to sort it all out.” She stopped once more and stared out the window for a bit. Then she brightened. “His health’s much better. It was good to hear from you during the phlebitis, the surgery—”

“Yes, well,” the visitor murmured.

“We heard from thousands of people, you know. Ordinary people.”

“That’s good. I’m glad. People cared, you know.”

Pat Nixon shook her head as if she hadn’t heard him. “Dick’s illness came so quickly on the heels of our leaving Washington, that the jackals jumped on that too. They said he wasn’t really ill, that he was faking so he wouldn’t have to appear at the trial. Haldeman, Erlichman, Mitchell. He almost died, you know. A year and a half ago, and he’s only now really recuperated.”

“Difficult times,” the visitor said. “But I’m glad to hear he’s well.”

Pat smoothed the fabric of her trousers. “He is not well. He will never be well. They will never let him be well. They will never let him be.”

The visitor nodded. What Pat Nixon said was true. Richard Nixon had always been a lightning rod for hatred. (Or was it his self-hatred that attracted even more ill will?) A wag he had once read said that while JFK represented America’s dreams, its aspirations, who Everyman wanted to be, Nixon represented what the average American was: sweaty, ill-at-ease, plagued by paranoia and self-doubt.

Pat Nixon said, “Judge Sirica sent a team of three doctors from Washington to examine him, to make sure he was too ill to testify.”

“I remember. That was inexcusable.”

From somewhere down a far hall, a dock sounded the quarter hour. When its tolling was done, silence crept through the house once more like a cold fog.

Silence was the thing that had struck him most about the Nixons over the years. He’d flown with them several times in the helicopter up to Camp David and watched them sit side-by-side the entire trip without saying a single word. No one else had dared to speak: the doctor, the Secret Service guys, the military aide. They’d been very awkward journeys.

It had been like that in the White House too. The Nixons had led almost completely separate lives. The president rarely ate dinner with his wife. He didn’t consult her about matters that should have fallen into her purview—menus, entertainment for state affairs—and certainly not policy matters.

The visitor had asked her once, “Does the president try out speeches on you?” Pat Nixon had answered, “He never tries anything out on me.”

It was ironic, he thought. For while Nixon was a whiz at speaking extemporaneously, he looked so miserable and so phony, that no matter how well informed he was, his public appearances were always a disaster. Whereas Pat, who detested public speaking, was fabulous at it. She conveyed warmth and sincerity, the generosity of spirit that was truly hers, without turning a hair. When she went to South America on her own, after the Lima quake, they’d loved her. Just as they’d applauded her in Africa, as a person, as an ambassador of her country’s and her own goodwill.

Perhaps, he thought, there was the crux of it. Pat Nixon loved people, loved helping people, but she hated politics, politicians, and the whole political process. Whereas, while Nixon was interested in people, fascinated by them, in fact, his interest was cool and detached, as if he were a Martian, studying humans. Socially inept and horrible at small talk, he adored the political arena.

“You know,” Pat said now, her voice soft, with the sound of the faraway in it, “that very first election, when Dick ran for Congress in 1946, I sold my part of our family farm in Artesia to my brother Tram for three thousand dollars. We spent most of the money printing pamphlets to introduce Dick to the voters.”

The visitor remembered. She’d told him this story before. But he nodded, Go on.

“And I was so naive, that was before I learned how vicious politics can be, that I was thrilled when a labor leader requested fifty pamphlets. I didn’t realize that he was the opposition, that he’d use the pamphlets against us, or at best, throw them in the trash. But Dick was already wiser than I to the way these things worked, and he said I had to suspect everyone. So the next time there was a large request, I questioned the caller and got him to fess up that he was a Democrat.

“And you know, it wasn’t long after that our campaign office was broken into. They took all the pamphlets that my money had paid for, every last one of them we hadn’t yet distributed. We had such a slim chance of winning that election. No one knew Dick. We desperately needed those pamphlets. But did anyone care about our break-in?” She shook her blond head. “No, of course not. No one knew how devastating the loss of those pamphlets was to us. No wonder I couldn’t understand the fuss over Watergate. By that time, I knew all too well the way the game was played. How could anyone think that this wasn’t business as usual?” She paused, then added. “No, people have no idea.”

Her visitor said, “I just read an article the other day about a young congressman who came to Washington thinking it was all about limos and parties and making momentous decisions.”

Pat’s laughter was not a pretty sound. “Thought he was going to make a difference, did he? Well, you know,” she said, settling again into her chair, “that’s what Dick and I thought, back at the beginning. That first term, he threw himself into the work. There was the Alger Hiss case, and, of course, the Committee on Un-American Activities, and Dick was trying so hard to drum up support for the Marshall Plan, to help the Europeans who were starving after the war, we didn’t even discuss whether or not he would run for office in ’48. It was never a question. It was simply a given. You run. You run until you can’t run anymore.”

She paused. “Of course, while Dick was routing out Communists and taking care of the world, and working for the Dewey candidacy of ’48, I was home in California, pregnant with Julie, taking care of Tricia, who was a baby, and looking after Dick’s parents, both of whom were in failing health. Plus they were going through a terrible patch with that little farm of theirs. It was a hard time. I finally told Dick how hard it was. I said that I needed him to be around a little more.” She ran her right thumb over the fingers of her left hand, glancing off her wedding band. “You know what he did? He wrote me a letter. In it he said that he’d try to spend more time at home.”

Then Pat Nixon stood and turned and looked out past the gardener, out to sea, out at the horizon. “He was so caught up in it all. He was going to do such great things. Though I think I saw from that first election, back in ’46, how hard it would be to actually accomplish good. I saw that politics were more complicated than that. That they’d never let us…” She paused. “Let him accomplish much of anything, or if they did, it would be at a terrible price. But it wasn’t us anymore, you know. Not what we wanted. Dick stopped listening to me in that very first race. He thought his political consultant knew more than I did.”

She strode back and forth before the window now. The visitor was struck by how thin she was—and how tightly wound. “Those people, those consultants. There are thousands of them, of you, a never-ending army of advisors and handlers and counselors. All with your own agendas. With your lists. All wanting to play. You wanted to play, didn’t you? To play at politics?”

“Yes, I did,” the visitor said. “I did.”

“Why?” She’d wheeled and thrown the word at him.

He found himself startled. Why? Why had he wanted to participate in the Big Game? No one had ever asked him that before. No one, in all those years…

Pat was smiling at him, her head canted to one side. “Don’t try to answer,” she said. “I know you can’t, because the answer is a part of who you are. That kind of lust is in your blood. You have to play. You start out saying, telling yourself, that it’s about honor or nobility or governance or justice or the will of the people. Like Dick, you may start out believing that. But before long, you have to see the truth. You have to recognize that politics is nothing more than one long powerplay. An exercise in ego.” She held up her hands. Empty. Then she plopped back in her chair. “You know what I think? That you ought to play at politics in an arena. Strip down, then use your fangs and claws and bludgeons, your skill at dirty tricks, your fists, your feet. Just go ahead and get filthy, knee-deep in blood and sweat. Stomp on your opponent’s throat, then listen for the crowd’s roar. Do it out in the fresh air, where everyone can see. Stand proud and show your hands, covered in shit and blood. All of you, Republicans, Democrats, whatever you call yourselves, what difference does it make? You are politicians.” Pat Nixon spat the last word off her tongue as if it were a bug which had crept into her drink.

Her visitor sat. He had no response.

Now Pat Nixon was on her feet again, her posture as ramrod straight as it had always been. He’d forgotten how pretty she was. Even now, at sixty-four, she was still quite lovely, with young flashing eyes, the eyes of a girl whose father, Will, a gold miner, had nicknamed Babe. Her pale gold hair would be as close as Will Ryan ever got to the real thing.

“Pat Buchanan,” she said. “Pat told them at the hearings that everyone was knee-deep in muck. Those high-and-mighty Democrats, sitting there in judgment as if their souls were saved, asked him what he’d do in the way of political tactics, and he said, ‘Anything that is not immoral, unethical, illegal, or unprecedented in previous Democratic campaigns.’” Pat Nixon clapped her hands together. “Oh, I loved that. But no one wanted to hear it. They were out for Dick’s blood, and they didn’t want to hear that everyone was guilty. The FBI operations under Kennedy and Johnson were much more serious. They didn’t want to know how Kennedy stole the 1960 election from us. Stole it. He did.” Pat Nixon’s voice rose as she warmed to her subject like a revival minister under the big tent, the hot lights. “That LBJ bugged the 1968 campaign plane. That Bobby Kennedy used everything he could put his hands on to get Jimmy Hoffa. That Adlai Stevenson’s workers bugged JFK at the ’56 convention. That JFK in peacetime tapped well over a hundred individuals, way more than the wartime Nixon administration. Did they want to hear that LBJ had wiretaps on Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King at the Democratic Convention? That Bobby in turn tapped King? That FDR’s son John once said to a columnist, ‘Hell, my father just about invented bugging. He had them spread all over, and thought nothing of it.’ That Roosevelt had taps on Charles Lindbergh? No, of course not.” She slowed now, and her voice dropped, almost to a whisper. “It all depends on which side you’re on, doesn’t it? The Washington Post adored publishing papers stolen from the senatorial committee investigating Watergate. It all depends on which office you’re burglarizing, doesn’t it?”

Yes, he agreed. It does. It did. It will.

“The Post,” Pat Nixon repeated. “The goddamned Washington Post.” Then she said, “Have you read it?”

He nodded. The Final Days. He knew that’s what she meant, Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s new book about Nixon’s last days in the White House. The same reporters who had so doggedly pursued the story of the Watergate break-in. Who had broken story after incriminating story about the president and the president’s men.

“They’re all over the TV,” she said. “The two of them, gloating about that piece of trash. We can’t even watch Bonanza without running into them.”

Pat turned then and fixed her eyes upon her visitor. “If you read the book carefully, you can see it. You know that, don’t you?”

He shook his head. “No, that’s not true. I really don’t think so. Well, maybe, if you knew what to look for. But like I told you, back then, and I’m telling you now, no one’s ever going to know.”

Pat Nixon’s hand trembled slightly as she lowered her glass of bourbon to the tabletop. “Not that it made any earthly difference what we did, of course. Nothing could have turned things around, not once they smelled blood.”

“Absolutely. But you should never regret any of it. You did what you could, and that’s what’s important.”

“What I could?” Her laughter spiraled high. “What could I ever do? Once I made the decision to stick it out, not to divorce him, back in 1962, I’d made my bed, hadn’t I? Then, after he lost California. After that…well, it was over, really. We didn’t talk. We didn’t have any kind of real relationship.” She lifted her drink again and took a long pull. “I was just along for the ride. For the girls. For appearances. And I did a little good for a few people.”

“A little! You did wonders.”

“No, no,” she waved him off. “Even if I had, if I did help a few, nobody wanted to know about it. Even that business about trying to fix up the White House, that most ladylike of tasks. It was worn, you know. Filthy with those millions of visitors and hundreds of parties, but Lady Bird was smart, knew better than to try to touch a thing. And when I set to it, they screamed. I had dared to touch Jackie’s handiwork.”

“Yes, but in the end, you did so much more than she did in the White House. All those wonderful antiques. Twice as many as she acquired.”

Pat shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. I enjoyed it. And I was glad to do it. And Jackie herself was so sweet, she could see what I’d done with the house, when I arranged for her and the children to come and visit that time, to see her portrait. The children hardly remembered the place. She was quite lovely, you know.’’

He nodded. “She knew how hard it was for you. And she could have told you, even when you didn’t see it, that people loved you. They did. All those children you visited and helped…”

Pat raised a hand. “Do not,” she said, her voice clipped and low and dangerous, with long spaces between each word. “Do not patronize me. They hated me. I was attached to Dick, and no matter what I did, they’d hate me for that. They presumed…” Her voice broke. She stopped. Then she said, the words like shards of glass, “They called me Plastic Pat.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “The last thing on earth I’d want to do is bring all that….”

Her head jerked up. That carefully coifed head. The only time she’d ever appeared in public with her hair undone was the day Nixon resigned. She said, “But that’s why you’re here, isn’t it? To talk about our feeble plan. Our attempt… To remind me how stupid I was, thinking that I could save us some shred of dignity by siccing Woodward and Bernstein on some of those horrible little men. Those insects. Those bottom feeders.” Her lip curled with disgust. “Why did we think that if we fed them bits of the story, of what we knew, or at least I knew, that they would stay away from Dick?” She waved her hand in front of her chest, above her heart. “That they would leave us alone? That they would go off on another track? That they would desist? All it did was unlock doors and open closets I didn’t even know existed.”

“It was a good plan,” he said. “It was. It was solid.” As he said the words, he was back in a dark parking garage in the middle of the night reliving the subterfuge, the fright, the cloak and dagger silliness of it all. And the sweat. Jesus, how long had he lived in his own stink? “It just didn’t work.”

“Because of those damned tapes,” she hissed. “My God! Those tapes!”

“They were bad,” he agreed. “Very bad.”

She closed her eyes. “They killed us. Dick was so stupid. Those goddamn tapes. After that, well…” She shook her head. “There was nothing we could do, was there? Didn’t matter how many times you met with Woodward, that son of a bitch, what you told him, who you sacrificed. Deep Throat!” She hooted suddenly, her face merry with laughter. “Dick was offended by that, you know. As much as by the leak, he was offended by the image. For all of his language, he’s such a prude.”

She laughed again, and he could see, just for a moment, the fun-loving girl she’d once been. But he had to correct her on one point. “We weren’t a leak,” he said. “We were a counteroffensive.”

“Oh,” she sighed, “we thought so. I did, anyway. I thought for the longest time the mess was all their fault. The plumbers, the Cubans, Haldeman, all of them out of control, acting on their own. I thought Dick was above all that, that he didn’t know.” She knocked back the last of her drink and reached for the crystal decanter of bourbon which Manolo had left on the silver tray. “What was I thinking? How could Dick not have known where every single body was buried?” She poured herself two fingers, three. “And to think that he did nothing to protect us. That he recorded it all. Was he mad?”

The visitor shook his head silently. He had no answers. He never had.

“No,” Pat Nixon said. “Dick wasn’t crazy. At least, not in the way you think. He made those tapes to prove to himself that he was president.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You heard me. So he could listen to them in the privacy of his study and know that he was really the president of the United States.”

“Surely—” he began, but Pat Nixon cut him off.

“You don’t think I’m going to let you get away with this, do you?” She was suddenly standing again, turning toward the huge plate glass window with her drink.

On the other side of the glass, the gardener in the scruffy clothes unbent from the white geraniums he’d been tending. In his arms he held a very ugly automatic weapon.

From behind him, three other men—tall, broad-shouldered, with the short haircuts of the Secret Service—appeared, all armed. They stood still as statues, their weaponry shining in the late afternoon California sun. It was much too pretty a day to die, the visitor thought.

“I always knew,” Pat said, “that this day would come. That one afternoon I’d be sitting here reading, minding what little business of my own I have left, and you would call and ask to come visiting. With your hand out.”

“My hand is not out,” he said. “You’ve misread me.”

She leaned forward. “Do not screw with me. Don’t even try. I’ve been screwed over by much bigger men than you.” She may have been a schoolteacher back in Whittier, but this day, she spoke like a general.

“I assure you—”

“Do not assure me. Do not lie to me. And most of all, do not threaten me.”

He nodded, very slightly, not wanting to alarm the armed men on the other side of the glass. “It seems to me that you’re the one doing the threatening.”

“No. I am simply telling you the way things are. These men are loyal to me. I have told them a story about you that they believe because they want to believe it. Because they want to think that they are on the right side. That there is a right side. And that their lives make sense. These years. Watergate. The whole thing has been such a goddamned mess. It would be good for them, a catharsis, don’t you see, if they could kill someone. To take slow and deliberate aim and kill someone. Do you know what I mean?”

He nodded slowly. Yes, he did. He knew exactly what she meant. He had often thought the same thing. How satisfying it would be to string someone up. The Roman arena idea she had, that was precisely the ticket. A public execution, a bloodletting in the open air, that’s what they needed so they could begin to forget about the waste and the ruin and the stupidity. Then they could begin to see a little daylight. To feel better about themselves.

But, in the absence of that he’d thought, a little money might be nice. After all, things had gotten rough. A little silver in his palm…

He could see now that he’d been wrong.

Pat Nixon watched him nod and said, “Good. That’s good. Now, here’s what you do. You will pick yourself up and you will go away and you will never ever again in your lifetime bother any of us again. For if you do, do not misunderstand or underestimate what I’m saying to you, they,” she turned and smiled through the glass at the men, still at ready-alert, “will track you down and eat you. Do you understand what I’m saying? Eat you.”

“I understand,” he said. And then, very slowly, very carefully, his hands out from his sides to show that he was unarmed, that he meant no harm, no, not really, he was innocent as a babe, the visitor backed out of the room. Then he turned and ran as hard as he could.

Pat Nixon offered the Secret Service men a small smile and a nod that, in lieu of blood, they accepted. Then they saluted sharply and withdrew.

Whereupon Pat Nixon returned to her chair, freshened her drink, and picked up her book, a Taylor Caldwell novel of international intrigue, of plots and counterplots and conspiracies. Once more the silence enveloped the many rooms of the rambling house. Deep deep inside somewhere, in a dim quarter, Richard Milhous Nixon pored over his papers, hashed and rehashed, twisted and turned, and stewed. Pat Nixon had never visited that room, nor would she ever. Back in her bright, flowered perch above the sea, Pat Nixon found the page where she’d left off reading and resumed the story of imaginary people running, running, running. She settled into her chair and reached for her glass, secure in the knowledge that, at long last, her own running was done.

If You Can’t Take the Heat

Jane Millman stood at her kitchen counter dicing water chestnuts and peanuts. Along with creamy chunks of cooked taro, they would serve as toppings for the tapioca pudding with coconut cream she’d already prepared. The dessert, as popular in Thailand as apple pie was to Americans, was a dish Jane had learned the previous year.

Before. That was how Jane thought of everything back then. Before.

Now Jane wiped her chopping board clean and donned a pair of rubber gloves to chop raw taro root. It had been a long time since she’d done much more than microwave a TV dinner or heat a bowl of soup.

As Jane worked her chef’s knife up and down, she realized how much she’d missed cooking. The pleasures of kitchen tasks. Pungent flavors. Now she was ready for it all again, especially Thai food, a longtime favorite, with its balance of hot, sour, sweet, bitter, and salt. The cuisine held many surprises for the Western palate, such as the way sugar added to a hot and sour sauce mellowed and married the other ingredients.

Jane thought families were like that too. People combined with the sweetness of love became an entity even better than its individual parts. The Magnificent Millmans were, for sure: Max, her beloved husband, and their precious girls, Frannie and Hope. When she was ten, Frannie had composed a family song.

Max, Jane, Frannie, and Hope

You don’t like us, you’re a dope

We rock, we roll, we boogie too

Just about nothing we can’t do

Magnificent Millmans,

One in a jillions

Boop-boop-e-doop. Boop-boop-e-do.

At that memory, a wave of anguish lapped up and over Jane’s shoulders, threatening to knock her to her knees. All grief was terrible, but this past year had been so much harder than anything she’d ever imagined. Her mother’s death had been devastating, but this…

At first Jane thought she simply couldn’t bear it, that surely she would die, that a heart could not continue to beat under the weight of so much pain. Then, one day, she realized that she’d gone an entire hour without despair. Then two. And so it went, but even yet, fifteen months since Before, there were moments like this. Then the tide of anguish would recede; Jane would continue.

And so, Jane finished chopping the raw taro and slid it with the knife’s edge into a small bowl of Chinese scarlet, then washed her rubber gloves under the tap. She lined up all the bowls on her kitchen counter: a half-dozen cups of tapioca, three small blue bowls for the other condiments, the scarlet for the raw taro.

Jane was ready for her guest. She settled onto a stool at her kitchen counter. She could hardly wait.

*

Looking back, Jane thought, it all began that May afternoon, fifteen months earlier, a Saturday, when Natalie stopped by for coffee. Though it was hard to know. Human relationships are so complex, the ribbons of events so intertwined, others’ hearts and minds so unknown (even if those hearts once beat beneath your own) that it’s difficult to point your finger and say, There, then, that’s the place and time my life began to unravel.

But it would do, that coffee.

Natalie, who had long lived across the street and a couple of doors down, had knocked at Jane’s back door.

“Come on in!” Jane said. “I was just thinking about you.”

“You’re sure I’m not interrupting?” Natalie gave a nod to the food spread across the kitchen counter: garlic, green onion, cilantro, lemongrass, and a small bonfire of Thai chillies, tiny prik kee noo.

“No, no, I’ve got plenty of time. Nobody’s coming till seven. Did I tell you I was taking a Thai cooking class?”

“Really? I love Thai food. Especially the hot stuff.” Natalie plopped on a stool at Jane’s counter where Max usually sat. A pair of the reading glasses he bought by the score marked his spot as clearly as a place card. Natalie picked up a bit of chilli along with a sprig of cilantro.

“Watch it!” Jane warned. The tiny peppers were incendiary.

But Natalie had already popped the pepper in her mouth, and a look of bliss transfigured her round face. “Yum. You know I’ve always been crazy for hot.” Then, casually, she asked, “So, who’s your company?”

“Max’s brother, Ed, and his wife, Jean. The guys have some family business to sort out.” Jane heard herself explaining more than she needed to. She felt guilty about not seeing Natalie more often. It had been a while since they’d had her over for dinner.

Not that Jane didn’t like Natalie. Her intelligence and quick wit had always amused Jane, though her tongue had grown rather sharper since her divorce. But Natalie was a friend, a buddy, a neighbor she could count on, and Jane’s elder daughter, Frannie, and Natalie’s daughter, Megan, who was away at college now, had been off-and-on-again chums since they were tots.

Jane knew it was difficult for Natalie, being all alone now—particularly in this neighborhood. Their tree-bowered street in the Rockridge section of Oakland, just south of the Berkeley line, was like a throwback to the fifties. Every old house was large and well kept, every yard was neat, and everyone was married, with children—and very caught up with their families.

Of course, after the divorce Natalie could have sold her house and moved across the bay to San Francisco. But she hadn’t wanted to move in Megan’s senior year, and, anyway, she did most of her work from home.

Natalie wrote a column, five days a week, for a San Francisco newspaper, about anything and everything that struck her fancy. Pretty glamorous, thought Jane, who’d been a do-gooder all her life, starting with her rabble-rousing days at UC Berkeley. She’d become a welfare caseworker, and now she was the chief administrator of Oakland’s child care services. An admirable profession, perhaps, but hardly as jazzy as Natalie’s.

Natalie nibbled another bit of hot, then reached for a plate of brownies Jane had made for her ever-hungry teenagers. “May I?”

“Help yourself. There’s plenty.”

Natalie laughed. “Gotta keep up my weight.”

Natalie was a wonderful-looking woman, with an impish face and dark curly hair marked with a blaze of white, but she had put on more than a little poundage since Jack’s desertion. She was forever nibbling, taking a bite of this or that. More than once Jane had heard Natalie’s justification: “You know what Catherine Deneuve said. At a certain age, a woman can have her face or she can have her figure, but not both.”

Jane wondered about that. At forty-six, she was only a year younger than Natalie, but so far had refused to give up the good fight against middle-age spread. She liked working out and visited her gym regularly. On the other hand, she did have more wrinkles than Natalie. Maybe there was something to keeping those cheeks plumped.

Also, Jane told herself, Natalie’s job kept her young. Researching her column gave her entree to all kinds of worlds.

Jane said, “I loved that series you wrote last week on bumper stickers. It was so funny. Imagine using your turn signals. It’s just amazing how you can take one little thing like that and spin it and spin it. I don’t know how you do that.”

“Yep, that’s me.” Natalie broke a second brownie in half. “Natalie, the Queen of Trivia.”

“No, no, I think it’s wonderful, what you do.”

Natalie shrugged. “I guess. You wouldn’t believe how hard it is sometimes to come up with something to write about.”

“I’m sure. But look at how you get to follow your fancy. You have such freedom.”

Natalie frowned. “You know, Jane, sometimes there’s such a thing as too much freedom. Since Jack left and Megan’s off at school, my life has no structure. I feel like I have to invent it all over again every day. You know, make it up? Things just aren’t automatic like they used to be.”

No, Jane thought, they wouldn’t be. One of the things she’d loved about being part of a couple from the very beginning was the framework a relationship gave to life. Having a partner meant you had a schedule, endless things to do, and then with the kids, too many things.

“I know it must be hard,” Jane said, thinking, not for the first time, how gifted Natalie was at laying on guilt. “On the other hand, you can take classes, travel, do whatever you want.” Jane was thinking that if she were in Natalie’s shoes, she’d be off on that tour of Thailand her cooking teacher, Kasma, was leading.

Natalie didn’t seem to hear her. “I’ve been thinking maybe I ought to sell the house and move into the city after all. Of course, Megan doesn’t want me to, but then, how often is she going to be home? Aren’t you lucky, you and Max, that you’ll have Hope for another year, after Frannie’s gone?”

“Yes, we are. Max and I are very lucky.” Jane had had difficulty conceiving, and after taking fertility drugs had feared quintuplets, but instead, her daughters had been born, blam-blam, twelve months apart. Healthy, beautiful, and smart. “Very lucky.”

“Now, of course,” Natalie said, “I wish I’d had more, a houseful of kids. Maybe Jack would have felt guiltier. Maybe he wouldn’t have felt the need to run off and marry a child.” Natalie’s mouth twisted with bitterness.

It was that, Jane thought, later, that last comment which made her reach into her bag of conversational topics and come up with Frannie. She was feeling sorry for Natalie, and at the same time, guilty about her own happiness, so she offered up Frannie as proof that her life wasn’t perfect.

It hadn’t felt like sacrifice at the time. Jane had wanted to discuss her concern about the business with Frannie with someone, but not Max, not right then. He was so preoccupied with the way things had been going with his practice, medicine being what it was these days, that Jane didn’t want to bother him. And though Natalie had her quirks, she had always been a good sounding board. Wasn’t that what women friends were best at: listening to one another puzzling and repuzzling life’s everyday vicissitudes? Listening and offering sympathy? And advice, if asked?

Do you think I should get my hair cut?

What should I do if he’s seeing her again?

Should I tell her she’s really being a bitch, or let it go?

What would women do without their friends? Without girl talk, that safety zone they share with women they trust?

So Jane leapt in. “Double your kids isn’t always double your pleasure, Natalie. To tell you the truth, I’ve been plenty worried about Frannie lately.”

“Frannie? You’re kidding.”

Natalie’s skepticism was understandable. After all, blithe, blonde Frannie was a star. She’d be graduating at the top of her class in a couple of weeks. She was a state champion distance runner. And she’d won admission to Yale with a partial scholarship, which had amazed even Jane.

Hope was also a great student, though she was having a rockier passage through adolescence than her older sister. As Max joked, “My younger daughter doesn’t speak Adult, though her French is flawless and her Italian’s not bad.”

“I found something in Frannie’s room,” Jane blurted, and then, the moment the words left her lips, she wished she could take them back. It was as if she could see a newspaper headline in banner type, blaring out the news that should have been kept in the bosom of the family. But now it was too late. There they were, her words, cast into the wind.

Natalie’s gaze was bright, avid, like a bird’s. “What kind of thing? Are you talking about drugs?”

“No, no.” Jane shook her head emphatically. Though she’d wondered that herself. Of course, she’d imagined a million possibilities, tried out all sorts of scenarios in the past few days. “I feel awful,” she said, not exactly answering Natalie’s question, not answering it at all, really, “as if I were snooping.”

Jane hadn’t been snooping, not the first time anyway. Nor the second, really. Okay, the second more than the first, her suspicions having been piqued, but the first time was perfectly innocent. Jane had been looking for a favorite silver pin, an art deco design with a chubby angel atop it. The pin wasn’t valuable, not in monetary terms, but her dear friend Cecilia had given it to her, a parting gift before she and her husband had been transferred back to Cleveland. Frannie had a habit of borrowing her things without asking. Jane had spoken to her about it more than once.

“Sure, sure, Mom,” Frannie had said. “But if you’re not using something at the time, why can’t I?”

“Because it’s not yours. Because it’s mine.”

“Well, God, I guess.”

But Frannie had never really understood, and in a way, Jane was proud of Frannie’s lack of concern about material possessions. Frannie and her friends had always shared their belongings and frequently wore one another’s clothes. “It’s very Berkeley,” Max had teased Jane. “You raised her to share and share alike, but you forgot to tell her you didn’t mean your stuff.”

Not the stuff I care about, Jane had told herself, as she’d stepped into Frannie’s room to search for the pin. I just don’t want her to lose something I treasure.

Jane had never been great at absorbing loss, and the disproportionate despair she was feeling at the time over misplacing even the smallest item—a paring knife, a sock—she could lay at the recent death of her mother, Frances. Since that, the loss of one thing was the loss of all. She’d wept over a straw hat left behind at a picnic.

Jane knew that there were those (a different breed of cat) who blithely cut their losses and moved on. She’d recently read a magazine piece in which movie mogul Barry Diller talked about his defeat in the battle for control of Paramount. “They won. We lost. Next.” Unthinkable. After her mom, Jane didn’t want to let go of another single thing in her life. She knew, intellectually, that she was trying to hold back death, and that was impossible. But the knowing didn’t make things any better. She wanted her loved ones, Max and the girls and their dog, Bingo, to live forever. She wanted everything—her keys, her gloves, her jewelry, her memory, her life—to stay just where it belonged.

Jane looked up. Natalie was still waiting for an answer. What had she found in Frannie’s room when she was looking for her pin?

“So, anyway, I fought my way through the girl debris to search the top of her dresser, but the pin wasn’t there. Sometimes Frannie actually puts things in her jewelry box in the top drawer, so I took a quick peek in there.” Going through her daughter’s bureau. It was such a cliché. And such a no-no.

“I used to do it all the time when Megan was still home,” Natalie said, matter-of-factly, tapping another pepper onto her tongue. “I mean, you have to know what your kids are up to. It’s not like they’re going to tell you anything.”

Jane was shocked. “No, no, I don’t do that. Never. Just, this one time, and…”

Natalie shrugged. “So, what was it? Birth control? Frannie’s seventeen, Jane. You ought to be glad that she’s careful.”

Jane shook her head emphatically. She didn’t want to even skirt a discussion of Frannie’s sex life or lack of it with Natalie. Or with anyone, for that matter. “I didn’t find anything in her dresser. I just took the peek in her jewelry box. Then I thought, Maybe she’s left the pin on a blouse or a jacket. So I opened her closet.”

“Jesus. She didn’t have a boy stashed in there, did she?”

Jane had to laugh, and the laughter felt good. The hand of anxiety that had been clutching her gut released its grip and she could breathe more freely. “No, no boy.” She laughed again at the idea of the imaginary boy’s frightened face, his goofy grin as he tried to explain. But then her mind’s eye fastened on the memory of what she’d seen hanging there, and her stomach tightened once more. “It was a skirt.”

“A skirt?”

“A brand-new skirt. Short. Black. With the sales tag. A hundred and sixty dollars.”

“Wow! So, what’d you think?”

Jane shrugged. “I didn’t know what to think. It wasn’t something that Frannie would have bought. Certainly not without consulting me, not at that price. She doesn’t have that kind of money. Her Saturday job at the card store pays peanuts.”

“So, did you ask her?”

“Not right away. I guess I was hoping that she’d bring it up.”

“Because you didn’t want her to know you’d gone in her things?”

Jane nodded. That was it, precisely. She’d felt guilty. Plus she simply hadn’t known how to broach the subject.

“How long did you wait?”

“A couple of days.”

“And then?”

Jane was about to answer when they heard, “Hi, Mom. Hi, Natalie.” It was Hope, her dark curls a tangle, her voluptuous sixteen-year-old body camouflaged by a baggy polo shirt and torn jeans. Hope opened the refrigerator and stuck her head inside.

“Hi, honey!” Jane said brightly. “What’s up?”

Hope only shrugged. She obviously felt that she’d already said enough. Then it took her a while to figure out what she wanted for a snack, and next Max called from his Saturday run to the hardware store. He needed Jane’s input on choosing a color of paint for his office. Jane had to scoot.

*

The very next afternoon, Natalie called. “I made this killer apple tart from a recipe I found in a magazine at the doctor’s office. If you don’t come over and help me, I’m going to eat the whole thing myself.”

Jane didn’t really have the time, but she still felt bad about not having included Natalie in their dinner the night before. They really had had a wonderful visit with Ed and Jean.

And the tart was delicious. “Fabulous,” said Jane.

“Thanks.” Then Natalie leaned across the table. “So, did Frannie tell you about the skirt?”

It was then that Jane realized that it wasn’t her company Natalie was hungry for. Nor was fear of her own gluttony her motivation. It was Natalie’s curiosity that needed to be satisfied. But Jane didn’t mind. Not really. Now that she’d unburdened half the story, she figured she might as well finish the tale and gain her friend’s input.

“No,” she said, “Frannie never did mention it. I waited until I couldn’t stand it anymore, and then I finally said something.” Jane shook her head, remembering. “It was bad.”

“Frannie stole the skirt?”

“No, no. She said she had no idea where it came from. That it had simply appeared in her closet.”

“What!”

“That was my response. Then, too, Frannie was upset because I’d gone into her things. And even more upset that I hadn’t broached the subject right away. ‘You didn’t say anything because you thought I stole it, right, Mom?’”

Natalie said, “But didn’t she think it was possible that you’d bought her the skirt? That it was a surprise? That she ought to have thanked you?”

“Natalie, when is the day I’m going to spend that kind of money on an article of clothing for a seventeen-year-old girl?”

“Appeared, huh? Just appeared? That’s what Frannie said?”

“From thin air.”

“Did you talk to Hope? Is it possible this was her idea of a practical joke?”

“I tried. She just gave me The Look and stomped out of the room.”

“How about Max?”

“Well, I didn’t want to involve him, but last night, I cracked. You know what he said? ‘How can a foot of fabric cost that kind of money?’”

Jane and Natalie laughed. Men.

“So what do you think?” Natalie said.

“Not a clue. I’ve never known Frannie to shoplift. Except once, when she was a little bitty thing, and she walked out of a store with a Barbie. I made her take it back and apologize. You know, she has a pretty strict moral code.”

“Megan took a salad spinner from Macy’s when she was six. She got as far as the elevator. She said she liked the way it went ’round.” Natalie paused. “Now, Jane, do I remember correctly, that you said the skirt was the first thing? Does that mean you found something else?”

Jane had been half-hoping that Natalie would forget. But here it was. She nodded. “I’m afraid so. Pearl earrings. Frannie has a pair of her own. Both girls do. But these were black.”

“Black pearls. Ooh-la-la. Very sophisticated.”

“I know. That’s why they stood out in the mess of stuff on top of Frannie’s dresser.”

“You went back and looked in her room again?”

“Not exactly. It was more like, I don’t know, it sounds stupid, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the skirt, and it was as if I’d put myself in some sort of trance, and I was thinking, Okay, I’ll pretend I’m the person who put the skirt in Frannie’s closet. And I was standing there, in the doorway of her room, trying to imagine that, trying to be that person, a part of me standing back and trying to see that person, when I spied the earrings.”

“And?”

Jane shrugged. “Frannie went ballistic. She said she hadn’t even noticed them. She said that somebody is trying to make her look like a thief, trying to drive her crazy, and she doesn’t know who or why. She’s doubly furious that I found the earrings. To tell you the truth, I’m pretty mad at myself. I shouldn’t have been in her room.”

“But you weren’t snooping. Not really.”

“I’m not sure what the hell I was doing. I want to believe Frannie, of course. And I do. She’s always been such a grand kid. Then I find myself thinking, Why would she do this now? Why would she go crazy now?”

“Well, maybe it’s a weird form of senioritis. A temporary thing. Maybe she’s freaked about leaving home, going off to Yale. Everyone’s made such a big deal about it. Y-A-L-E. Maybe she feels like pressured, is afraid she won’t do well, and she’s just acting out.”

“I’ve thought of that and more. I stay up nights trying one story, then another. And Hope’s gone crazy too. I asked her about the earrings, and, well, you know this stage she’s going through. ‘Search me,’ she screamed, ‘if you think I’m a thief!’ Then she stormed into her room and started pulling out clothes, books…. She threw that pitiful macramé thing she wears sometimes as a necklace on the floor. ‘Look!’ she said. ‘Go through everything.’ It was awful.”

“The sibling rivalry thing doesn’t help.”

“I know. That’s never changed, since they were tots. We thought because they were so close in age that it wouldn’t happen, but it’s always been there, in one way or another. That’s one thing, Natalie, to be said for having a single child.”

Natalie nodded around a mouthful of her second slice of tart.

“But, on the other hand, in the past few years, Hope’s pretty much screened out Frannie. She doesn’t pay much attention to her sister. She has her own friends, her own life.”

“Nonetheless, Frannie’s getting into Yale has to have made some impression on her. Don’t you think Hope’s jealous? It seems natural that she would be.”

“I don’t know,” Jane shrugged. “Hope’s grades are just as great as Frannie’s ever were. Actually, she’s been talking about med school, thinking about colleges with good premed programs. Harvard, maybe. I hope she doesn’t set her sights too high.”

“On the other hand, she might make it.”

“Yep. Of course, another option she’s considering is bagging college and hitchhiking to New York to earn her keep playing guitar in the subways.”

“Oh, God! Please, anything but New York.” Natalie’s Megan was in school there, but she seemed to be majoring in the bright lights of the big city. “So, what are you going to do?”

“I don’t know. Keep our fingers crossed, I guess. Pray that the whole thing goes back to wherever it came from.”

*

It was a couple of days later that the tiny box, glowing with Tiffany’s distinctive light blue, showed up on Frannie’s bed.

“Look at this!” Frannie shrieked, shoving the box under Jane’s nose as if it were poop and Jane the offending pooch. “Where the hell did this come from? Why is this happening to me?”

Jane didn’t bother frowning at Frannie’s language. She wondered the same thing. Where the hell had the box come from? Why was this happening?

“What is it?” she asked the furious Frannie. “Show me.”

With trembling hands, Frannie opened the box and removed the silver bangle bracelet with the tip of one finger, as if she really didn’t want to touch it.

“Jesus,” Jane breathed. “Still in the box. You think it’s a gift?”

“Precisely.” Frannie spit out the words. “A graduation gift. Everybody’s been getting this exact bracelet.”

“So? Maybe somebody gave you one, too.”

“Sure, Mom. One of my best friends thought it would be a really cool idea to give me this bracelet, unwrapped, with no card. To just leave it on my damned bed!” Then Frannie dissolved in tears. She couldn’t stop crying, and her sobs ripped at Jane’s heart.

“I don’t know what to do,” Jane now said to Natalie across the table.

“Have you considered calling the police?”

“What could I say to them, Natalie? ‘Someone is coming into my house and leaving my elder daughter gifts. And we want them to stop.’”

“I see what you mean. But, on the other hand, maybe they know where the stuff is coming from. I mean, maybe someone’s reported it missing.”

“Perhaps. I don’t know.”

“Have you talked with Hope again?”

“I had to. I’ve been trying to think about this logically. It’s hard because, for one thing, you know we’ve always left our back door open; anyone could come in. But I’m trying to zero in on the kids who have regular access to our house. Frannie’s circle of friends is small and incredibly tight. It’s hard to imagine any of them doing anything to make her look bad. So I sat Hope down and asked about her friends, especially Heather, who’s been so needy since her parents divorced.” Jane caught herself. Damn. She hadn’t meant to say that. Megan had gone through a rough time at the beginning of Natalie and Jack’s divorce. In fact, she’d run away.

Natalie waved away her apology. “So what about Heather? What did Hope say?”

“That it might make sense if things were being stolen from Frannie. But the other way around? Why would her friends, Heather or anyone, want to give things to Frannie? And Hope’s got a point, you know. This whole thing’s so crazy. What does it mean?”

“I think that’s what you have to figure out, Jane. Either Frannie’s taking these things and has made up this whole scenario to cover her tracks, or someone is trying to make it look that way, trying to make Frannie look like a thief. Now, who would want to do that? And why?”

*

Monday evening, Jane called Natalie. “We know who the bracelet belongs to.”

“I’m coming right over,” said Natalie. Within minutes she was sitting at Jane’s counter, watching her chop onions—or trying to. She was so upset, it would be better, Natalie knew, if she put down the knife.

“Lisa Broadhurst. It’s her bracelet.”

“She’s in Frannie’s class?”

Jane nodded. “A friend of Frannie’s. Not a close friend, but a friend. Frannie said everyone at school is talking about someone having stolen Lisa’s bracelet, and Lisa’s very distressed, of course.”

“How about the skirt and the pearl earrings? Were those hers too?”

“Frannie didn’t know. And she couldn’t very well ask, could she? I mean, not without incriminating herself. Incriminating! Jesus, I sound like Court TV.” Jane dropped her head into her hands. “Lisa’s parents have called the police.”

“Did Frannie tell Lisa that she has the bracelet?”

“No. She couldn’t figure out how to do that. ‘What am I going to say, Mom? How am I going to tell her? She’s going to think I took it, that I went into her house and took it.’”

“Well, she has a point there,” said Natalie. “How did you advise her?”

“I told her to try to calm down. To wait. I called Max at the office, and he’s coming home early, and we’re going to sit down and talk this thing through.” Jane paused. “Max thinks we ought to have Ed join us.”

“Ed, his brother? The lawyer?”

“He’s a criminal attorney.” Jane shook her head. “Criminal. Can you believe this? It’s like some kind of nightmare. Poor Frannie. Oh, God. My poor little girl. I feel so awful for her. I wish it were happening to me. I wish I could step into her shoes.”

“We all feel that way,” Natalie soothed. “Mothers always feel like that when bad things happen to their kids.”

*

Jane rose early the next morning, before the rest of her family, as she did every day. She liked to have a little quiet time with her coffee and the paper and gain the use of herself before the day’s onslaught.

This particular day was one she was not looking forward to, and she was having difficulty focusing on the paper.

They’d decided, in their family pow wow the night before, that Frannie, Jane, and Max would go over to the Broadhursts’ house early that evening. Jane was to call them and make the appointment for the three of them to try to explain the inexplicable.

“What am I going to say?” Frannie had wailed.

“We’ll just tell them what happened, sweetie,” said Max. “We’ll lay out the facts. We’ll tell them the truth.”

“No matter what, they’re going to think I stole Lisa’s bracelet,” said Frannie. “What else could they think?”

“We’ll take them the bracelet. We’ll tell them our story. That’s all we can do.”

“Everyone at school’s going to be whispering about me.” Frannie had stopped moaning. Her tone had grown icy. Stoic. This attitude hurt Jane even more than her daughter’s distress.

Frannie had always had that capability, to shut down and ignore pain. It had served her well as a long-distance runner. When other girls fell by the wayside, their outer limits met, Frannie could simply shut the door on her fatigue, the screaming in her legs, her lungs, her gut, and soldier on. Jane had wondered from time to time what this toughness, this capacity for insensibility, said about Frannie. But she and Max had decided that Frannie actually felt not too little, but too much, that the thick walls she threw up were for protection. Frannie had a very tender heart.

“I think we’re within our rights to ask for the Broadhursts’ discretion,” said Max. “I remember meeting Pete Broadhurst when we were having that brouhaha with the zoning commission. He seemed like a reasonable man.”

“Everyone’ll know.” Frannie stared straight ahead, her mouth tight, her face stony with resignation. “All Lisa has to do is tell one person, and everyone will know.”

“Oh, honey,” Jane said, and tried to draw her daughter close, but Frannie could not be comforted. And Jane knew that she was probably right. People would know. People would talk. But maybe they’d be incredibly lucky…. Oh, God, she thought, if only she could do this for Frannie. If only she, with her years of perspective, the nonchalance that age and experience bring, could shoulder this burden.

Now Jane stood, poured herself another cup of coffee, then flipped the entertainment section of the paper over to the back page to take a look at Natalie’s column. She usually found something there that made her chuckle, and God knows, today she needed a little cheering up.

If Only I Could Step Into Her Shoes, the headlines read.

Jane blinked. Surely not…

“If only I could step into her shoes” was also the beginning of the first sentence of Natalie’s column. Then the piece laid out the particulars of the Millman family’s dilemma. The mysterious appearance of the skirt. The black pearl earrings. The silver bracelet from Tiffany’s.

Jane raised one hand to her mouth as she read on with growing horror. “No,” she cried through her fingers. “God, please, no.”

Natalie hadn’t named their names. She hadn’t said, “Jane and Max Millman and their two lovely daughters, Frannie, 17, and Hope, 16, of 1212 Pineapple Street, in the Rockridge neighborhood of Oakland…” But she might as well have, as far as anyone who knew them was concerned. Frannie’s schoolmates would definitely know. Their parents were reading these very words, this very moment, calling to their children, “Hey, guys, look at this.”

And she had quoted Jane, word for word. Jane could hear her own voice as she read, the words swimming there in black and white before her: I want to believe (her), of course. And I do. She’s always been such a grand kid. Then I find myself thinking. Why would she do this now? Why would she go crazy now?

Word for word.

How did Natalie do that? How could she remember?

It’s like some kind of nightmare. Poor (daughter). Oh, God. My poor little girl. I feel so awful for her. I wish it were happening to me. I wish I could step into her shoes.

Had Natalie tape-recorded their conversation? Had she worn a wire like that hideous Linda Tripp? Was Natalie the same kind of traitor as that despicable woman, the same brand of Judas, who would betray another woman, her girlfriend? Would she sell out Jane and her family, neighbors, people she’d known for years, whose kitchen table she’d put her feet under, for a goddamned column, to fill a space, for an easy day’s work? But here they were, Natalie’s neatly constructed sentences and paragraphs which went on to deduce—and this seemed to be the point of the column—that parents of “privileged children” often were blind to what their kids were up to.

Privileged? Yes, Frannie and Hope were, but no more than Natalie’s Megan. And they weren’t thieves.

Then Jane felt her gorge rise, and she thought it possible that she was going to be sick, that she was going to spew all over this vile piece of fish wrap.

Jane swallowed hard and forced herself to focus. There had to be some explanation. More important, there had to be some way to stop people from reading this. Some way to protect Frannie. Jane felt as if fires were raging all around her, but she was frozen in her chair. She didn’t know which way to turn, what to do.

Then the phone rang, and she lurched for it. “Yes?” she gasped.

“Jane? It’s Ed.” Max’s brother. The criminal attorney. The sweet man, the brother-in-law whom she’d always loved, who’d brought his wisdom, his considered advice, his sense of fair play to their kitchen table the night before.

The same kitchen where Natalie had sat and nibbled at her family’s very soul.

“Jane,” he managed again, then faltered.

“I’ve seen it.”

“Goddamnit!” She could see him, shaking his head. “What about Frannie?”

“No, not yet. I don’t think she’s up yet.”

“Listen, sweetheart, I’m on my way over. That bitch, Natalie. Why would she do this? You know, she makes it sound like Frannie really is a thief. I want you to know she’s not going to get away with this, Jane. We’re going after her, sweetie. Big time.”

“What difference does it make?” Jane heard herself say, her words sounding very far off. “The damage is done. My baby’s going to suffer, Ed. She’s going to bleed.”

“I know, darling. And I’m so sorry. So very sorry. Listen, put my brother on the phone for a minute, will you?”

Jane handed the phone off to Max, who was just then stepping into the kitchen for his coffee. He hadn’t seen the column, of course, and Jane stood and watched his face as Ed explained, watched the face she’d loved for so long register puzzlement, then disbelief, then twist with fury.

“I’m going to kill that woman,” he said to Jane as he hung up the phone, his words even more frightening for the softness of his voice. And then he reached for Jane and pulled her to his sweet chest.

“Kill who?” said Frannie, stumbling into the kitchen in the boxer shorts and T-shirt she slept in.

Hope was right behind her. “It’s whom,” she said, in her best Little-Sister-Knows-It-All voice. “Kill whom?” And then, making a face at her parents’ embrace, “Do you guys have to do that?”

*

“Let me see it,” Frannie said when Jane and Max had finished trying to explain. (As if they could explain.) “Just let me see it.”

“Now, darling…,” Max said, but Frannie wouldn’t be put off. She wouldn’t be sidetracked. She was their straight-ahead girl. Give me the facts, and then I’ll deal with it.

They stood, frozen, as Frannie read Natalie’s column, slowly, from top to bottom, taking in every word. Hope read over her sister’s shoulder. “Jesus, Frannie,” she said.

But Frannie didn’t hear Hope. Frannie was already moving.

Frannie the swift, Frannie the fleet, Frannie who had placed first in state in AA girls’ long distance, was out the kitchen door.

Jane didn’t even pause to think. In her pajamas and the leopard-print driving shoes she wore as slippers, she was hot on her daughter’s trail. “Frannie!” she called as her long-limbed daughter sped down the sidewalk, past their neighbors’ houses, past white roses and late azaleas and pink rhododendron. “Frannie, wait!”

She’s headed for Natalie’s, Jane thought. She’s going to throttle Natalie.

But her firstborn daughter, as lightning-quick in her bare feet as any Ethiopian runner, her slender legs flashing beneath her red-and-green plaid shorts, ran on past Natalie’s house, on down the sidewalk and turned up, toward the hills.

Ah, thought Jane. Then probably she’d turn north toward Tilden Park, where she’d run her whole girlhood. Maybe Frannie would find some salve for her pain on those familiar paths.

That’s good, thought Jane. Frannie’ll go that way, and then I get to kill Natalie all by myself. With my bare hands. With my teeth. I’ll show her how bloody a mother’s rage can be. A mama grizzly defending her cubs will have nothing on me.

But still, she wanted Frannie to stop. She wanted to comfort her child, to hold her to her breast, to rock her to and fro. “Frannie!” she called, a half-block behind her daughter now. Jane was keeping up better than she’d have thought, her sweaty hours in the gym paying off. “Frannie, honey, stop!”

But Frannie took no heed. Maybe she didn’t hear her mother calling. Frannie ran and she ran, flew faster and faster up the hill toward Broadway.

“Frannie! Please!” Jane cried. Very soon she wouldn’t be able to speak. She was running out of breath. Her side hurt. She couldn’t keep up this pace.

Ahead, Frannie stretched way out. Even on these broken sidewalks, zigging around old trees, she ran with exquisite form. Her coach would have been proud of her as she ran from the hurt, ran from the pain, tried to escape the humiliation that she knew was barreling down on her. Frannie was in overdrive, full-out, nothing held back, burning gas. Brakes were out of the question. Brakes were a joke. Brakes weren’t even a possibility for Frannie Millman on this fine morning in May, two weeks before she was to step up on the stage and deliver her valedictory and leap into the bright and shiny future of the young and blessed.

On Frannie ran, a fresh bay wind at her back, wings on her heels, and fury in her heart. Frannie didn’t pull up, she didn’t slow, she didn’t even acknowledge Broadway, the busy thoroughfare, when she hit it. Frannie, the valedictorian, the golden girl, ran, ignoring that most primary lesson her mother had taught. That cardinal rule: Look both ways before you cross.

The driver of the silver Mercedes never even saw Jane’s darling daughter—fleet of feet, keen of mind, and sweet; Jesus, that child had been so loving in her ways—until she tumbled like a crazy gymnast over and up his windshield. He hadn’t even had time to register the ka-thunk before Frannie’s fatal somersault began. He never had the chance to see how beautiful Frannie was without the scarlet gushing from her mouth, without that terribly wrong angle of her slender neck.

*

Now, it was September, over a year later. Fifteen interminable months, to be exact. Jane and Max had just returned from getting Hope settled in at Stanford, only an hour south down the Peninsula.

Hope had applied for early admission and had snagged it. Jane and Max were thrilled for her, of course, but they were doubly glad that, in lieu of an East Coast school, she’d chosen to stay so close to home. “I want to, Mom,” she’d said, “for all of us.”

They’d had such a terrible time. People say that the death of a child is the fiercest loss, and Jane had certainly learned the truth of that. They also say that such a death frequently rips through a marriage like a tornado, that there’s so much pain that the center of a union, no matter how strong, simply cannot hold. Max and Jane were also testament to that view.

A psychiatrist friend of Max’s said that they should have another child, that a new life to nurture would be their salvation.

“Is she crazy?” Jane said. “I’m much too old. And I wouldn’t if I could.”

“We could adopt,” said Max, late one night when they’d been up, fighting. They hardly ever used to fight. “I want you to seriously consider it, Jane. If you won’t, then I’m going to think about leaving you once Hope’s off to school.”

Since that conversation, Jane had been thinking about it quite a lot. And she was almost there. Not a baby, of course, but a youngster who needed them as much as they needed her. Or him. “What do you think about a little boy?” she’d said to Max just this morning. “You still up for teaching somebody how to play catch?”

Max’s answering grin was the best thing Jane had seen since that awful morning, Frannie’s last morning.

It had been only hours after Frannie’s funeral that Bethany Marks had fessed up to the thefts. She was a strange girl, lovely enough to be a model, but badly troubled. Obsessed, it turned out. Bethany seemed incapable of doing anything but hurting herself and those around her. Bethany explained that she shoplifted the skirt and the pearls and then took the bracelet from Lisa Broadhurst and “gave” the things to Frannie, skipping classes and walking in the Millmans’ unlocked back door, because she wanted to be part of Frannie’s crowd. Actually, she said, she knew in her heart that Frannie was meant to be her best friend. She had thought that Frannie would figure out that the gifts were from her. She had just known that Frannie was going to call her, any day, and tell her that she loved her. She’d waited and waited for the call that never came.

What was there to say to that? You could no more blame Bethany than you could blame the rain.

Natalie, of course, was a different story. Natalie was not a troubled youngster. Natalie, Natalie, was the Judas, the traitor, the user, the murderer who, to Jane’s mind, had taken their beloved Frannie as surely as if she’d put a gun to Frannie’s head.

Not that Natalie had thought that Frannie would die, of course. But what exactly had she thought as she’d sat and typed that column, as she’d pushed the button to Send?

Jane didn’t know. No one knew. Natalie had packed up and vanished within hours after she heard about Frannie. She had never returned to the Bay Area, as far as they’d heard. An agent had sold Natalie’s house, completely furnished, to a nice man from Atlanta.

What Jane did know—what she counted on, what kept her going—was that one day, one day, dear God, Natalie would sit in her kitchen once more. Sooner or later, Jane was certain of it, down to the marrow of her bones, Natalie would come forward. The guilt which Natalie had been so talented at instilling in others would turn on her and chew her liver until she would have to seek forgiveness.

Her ego would demand forgiveness.

Ah, yes. Natalie would come to Jane on bended knee and pour out the sorrow of her heart. In carefully constructed sentences. In perfect paragraphs. It would be a masterpiece, Natalie’s plea for absolution. And Jane would somehow be transformed into a priest, a Father O’Leary, or better yet, an angel of mercy, who would give Natalie her penance, then perhaps lash her about the head and shoulders a few times so she would have the proof. “Look,” Natalie could say. “Look at my bruises.” Then Natalie could dine on her deliverance, feast on forgiveness, gorge on her pardon.

Yes, Jane knew, someday, one day, Natalie would appear, hungry for Jane’s mercy.

Then, this very morning, it had happened. In the fullness of time, Jane’s desire had borne fruit.

Jane had been in her office, at her desk, about to make a call, when, suddenly, she was seized by a shudder. Earthquake! she thought at first. Then, Someone’s walking on my grave. No, Frannie’s. She stared at her hand for a long moment, poised above the phone.

Then the phone pealed.

And Jane smiled, for then she knew—her blood sang, her very corpuscles shouted Hosannah!—what that frisson had meant.

Natalie.

“Jane, will you please talk with me? Please?”

“Oh, yes.” Jane didn’t miss a beat. “I will.”

They made the arrangement: Natalie, who said she was in town for only one day, was to arrive at the house about five-thirty, before Max got home. “Come to the back door,” Jane said. “I’ll be in the kitchen.”

Jane left the office early and went food shopping in Oakland’s Chinatown. She picked up long slender eggplant, ran her fingers through bean sprouts, marveled at the vitality of the fresh produce. What, she wondered, had she and Max and Hope survived on?

Ashes. Bitters. Rue.

She decided on the menu as she shopped. The tapioca pudding was a given; she’d long known what sweet she’d serve. She’d start with the hot and sour shrimp soup that Max so loved. A green curry with chicken. Steamed jasmine rice, of course.

Now the prep was done. Jane sat and waited, the pudding, which she’d made first, cooling on her counter. The water chestnuts, peanuts, taro chopped. The parade of custard cups, blue bowls, the one scarlet.

Here it came. The knock at the back door. Soft. Tentative.

“Come in,” Jane called.

And there stood Natalie, the white blaze in her dark curls wider, but otherwise much the same. Natalie was still plump, even chubbier than before. Jane hadn’t thought that crow would be so fattening.

“Come in,” she said, pulling the door closed behind Natalie, throwing the dead bolt. She seated her old friend at her accustomed stand at the counter. She poured her a cup of coffee.

Natalie’s coffee was still steaming when she began her chant of mea culpa. Her words tumbled and rolled. Sorry. What was I thinking? Seemed at the time. Never make it up to you. Forgiveness. Sleepless nights. Horrible. Wracked with guilt. Dear Frannie…

“Yes,” Jane said. “No.” She murmured, cooed, made the kind of sounds one might use to soothe a baby. “Go on. Yes, I know.”

Finally, it was her precious daughter’s name, obscene on this woman’s lips, that was Jane’s cue. “Yes, yes, well…,” she said, then with one hand offered forth the soothing sweet, the comfort of tapioca. Baby food.

“Oh, Jane,” Natalie cried. So touched, so grateful.

Jane pushed the tapioca closer, then followed with the four bowls of condiments. Three blue, one the scarlet of danger. “For texture,” she said. “Crunch. The raw taro—that’s the red bowl—is very hot.”

Natalie smiled. Jane remembered.

“Actually,” said Jane, “it’s probably too hot, now that I think of it.” She laid a cautionary hand on the bright bowl. “Here. Let me take it away.”

“No, no.” Natalie clutched at the raw taro.

“This is really hot,” Jane insisted. “You won’t like it. Just have the peanuts, the cooked taro, and the water chestnuts. They’ll be fine.”

Jane didn’t elaborate any further, though she could have. She’d done quite a bit of research on taro. The tuber, in its cooked form, is a popular starch in Asia, sometimes known as poi. Raw taro, however, is highly poisonous. Jane’s Thai cooking teacher had once pointed out the tuber in the market, on a field trip, and casually mentioned its danger. Jane hadn’t thought much about it at the time, but later, after Frannie’s death, all sorts of things, surprising things, dark things, had floated up.

How dangerous? Jane had wondered. Highly acrid, she’d learned from her library research. The milky juice is used on poison darts and for killing tigers. Almost insipid to the taste at first, the ingested root then produces an intense burning and itching to the mouth and throat. Severe gastroenteritis follows, and a massive inflammation of the mucous membranes, which, if not treated immediately, results in cramps, convulsions, and death.

Natalie grasped the scarlet bowl.

Okay. Jane shrugged as Natalie dumped half the raw taro into her pudding. She stirred twice, then spooned it all down, licking her lips. “Yummy,” she said. “And not hot at all. You never developed much tolerance for heat, Jane, but you’re still a wonderful cook.”

Jane smiled, then watched as a frown crossed Natalie’s face. Natalie lifted a hand to her mouth. She blinked rapidly, and the tears began to stream. Her mouth opened and closed convulsively. Before Natalie could manage more than a howl, the phone rang.

“Excuse me,” said Jane, picking up the cordless phone and turning toward the door to the dining room. “I won’t be but a moment.”

She’d asked Max to call her about quarter of six, before he left the office, to see if she needed him to pick up anything on the way home. A roasted chicken. Deli food. The sort of thing they’d been subsisting on since Before.

“Hey!” she said, raising her voice a bit over Natalie’s wheezing and thumping. It was time to leave the kitchen now, much as she hated to. “Just a sec,” she said to Max as she walked into the dining room, reaching with one hand behind her to shove a dining chair beneath the doorknob. The other door out of the kitchen, she’d secured when Natalie arrived. She patted the key in her pocket, the key to the kitchen door’s dead bolt.

Locking the barn door too late—she knew that’s what Max thought every time she did it. Too late to keep out Bethany, too late for Frannie, but not this time. No, not this time.

“Guess what?” she said to Max. “I’m making Thai food. Yes! I know! Shrimp soup. Green curry. Tapioca pudding. Yes! No, no wine. But pick up some beer, okay? Yes, that’d be great. And I have something to tell you. You won’t believe who called. Stopped by. In fact, she’s in the kitchen right this minute. No, that’s okay. I have a minute. Go ahead and tell me.”

Jane made her way with the phone into the living room, where she settled onto a sofa. Out the window she could see the house where Natalie, her friend, her bosom buddy, had once lived. The sidewalk down which Frannie had taken her last run.

“Unh-huh,” she said to Max as the minutes ticked by. The sounds from the kitchen were fainter now. And then they stopped. Finally, she said to Max, “I’ll tell you about it later. Let me get back now. Yes. I love you too, sweetheart.”

But Jane didn’t hurry into the kitchen. She picked up a magazine from her coffee table, a copy of Saveur, and flipped through the pages, noting with a smile an article on peppers, turning down the corners of an interesting recipe or two. Then, finally, with a sigh, Jane rose. It was time to go back in the kitchen, to put away a few things, to wash the scarlet bowl, and to see how her old girlfriend was getting along.

Real Life

If there were a space more deadly than Room 1517, 100 Centre Street, New York, New York, Clare Meacham didn’t want to know about it.

She’d been sitting in the dreadful room for two hours, and her bones were overdone linguine. Her neck could barely support her curly head. The room had sucked off what energy she’d packed in with her—which had been precious little, God knows, on this steamy rotten morning. A month into the heat wave of the century, Manhattan had all the appeal of an overripe dinosaur carcass.

Besides which, since David dumped her, Clare had been mightily depressed and hadn’t been sleeping worth a damn. She yawned now, and Room 1517 seemed to open its jaws in answer around her. The giant municipal maw filled with long rows of dark blue cushioned armchairs. Cream-colored walls, splotched as an adolescent’s complexion. Cheap particle-board wainscoting. White acoustic ceiling tile mushed whispers into a slow steady hiss. On the floor, patched beige linoleum squares cheated at hopscotch.

Dust motes floated in the refrigerated air, recycled, no doubt, thought Clare, through the dead dinosaur’s respiratory system. Yes, the very air itself was dank and dangerously gelatinous. Teeming, one felt, with tuberculosis, cholera, hantavirus, Ebola. (Good. Maybe she’d contract one of those and die a spectacular lingering death, and then David would be sorry.) God knows, the fluorescent lighting, which cast a greenish pallor over the room’s captives, gave them the look of disease.

The two hundred and seventy-five prospective jurors slumped and lumped in the blue armchairs.

Oh, God, could it be borne, their faces asked, that this was only the first, the number one, the maidenhead of their ten endless days of jury duty? Ten, that is, if an actual trial didn’t glue them even longer into some angry crouch of deliberation.

Clare shifted in her seat, careful not to upset the notebook computer perched on her lap. Thirty-nine, a tall, languorously attractive brunette despite the dark circles of despair beneath her eyes, Clare wore brown woven leather loafers, a short khaki skirt, a red-and-white striped shirt, and gold hoop earrings. Her long, dark, curly hair was pulled back off her face with a tortoise barrette. She was as presentable as she could bring herself to be under the circumstances.

The circumstances being (a) a broken heart and (b) the fact that this little trip down the lane of civic responsibility was most certainly going to cost her her livelihood. Her inevitable financial ruin and bankruptcy proceedings could later be traced back to this precise and fetid A.M. Not only was she not in the mood, but Clare could not, goddammit, afford to be on jury duty.

Try telling that to Norman O. Goodman, New York county clerk of court. Or any of his stiff-necked minions. Did they care? Ho ho. That was a good one.

The freshly blondined woman in the appalling gold-braided fuchsia suit behind the desk in Room 105 or 106 or whatever it was downstairs, where Clare had gone two weeks earlier to beg for just one more reprieve from her civic responsibility, had said, “Forget it, Ms. Meacham. No more excuses, no more deferments. We, the puffed-up jealous, self-righteous, civilly employed we, hereby sentence you to jury duty. Or else.”

That had been the peroxided bitch’s final word. On the exact same day that Arnie, Clare’s producer, had called her in and said, “The ratings go up, Clare. Or else.”

It was the O. J. trial that had set in motion the avalanche of the viewer share of Real Life, the soap opera on which Clare was head writer.

“Court TV is a fucking vampire,” Arnie had said. “We’ve got to jazz Real Life way up, Clare. Pick up the pace. Add some sizzle. Give those sofa tuberettes some blood and guts along with their romance. Real Life’s gotta be more like real life. Grittier. Sexier. Meaner. Hotter.”

Then his terrible last words. “The whole story line has to be in overdrive in the next three weeks—even if you have to write ninety-six hours a day.” That had been two weeks ago, and Clare, bleak and blue, hadn’t written a word. Now, with one week left to save her ass, here she was locked in Room 1517. Squashed cheek-by-jowl with almost three hundred of her fellow Gothamites of every race, nationality, and socioeconomic category.

Earlier this morning, in the long line behind the security check, the sticky crowd had made nervous jokes about knives and guns and bombs, all the while sussing one another out with the quick once-over that is second nature to every New Yorker: assessing caste, class, tailoring, and degree of homicidal impulse in a millisecond. Then, after they’d received their guides to restaurants in neighboring Chinatown and Little Italy and had watched the video on the ins and outs of jury duty, they’d filed into Room 1517 and the sea of dark blue chairs.

But inevitably, the stew of strangers had settled into the reality of their task.

It was theirs to wait.

And wait.

And wait.

They’d looked around, then, okay, damn it, with a collective sigh they’d opened their briefcases, backpacks, purses, and bags and unearthed newspapers, magazines, books they’d been meaning to read, find-a-word puzzles, needlework, the paperwork that had long been shoved aside. They’d clamped on Walkmen. Clare spotted two other people, both Wall Street types, bent over laptop computers. A young Hispanic woman in the last row, next to the windows, fiddled with the antenna of a tiny television. Here and there, a couple of people talked quietly. And fully a third of the room lurched and listed and snored and snuffled through mid-morning naps.

Clare stared accusingly at her computer’s blank screen. Her brain was frozen. It was totally quiet in there. Except for a constant interior refrain. Nobody loves you. Never will again. That was the main melody.

Then, winding in around it, a wailing glissando: Why is it my job to turn the tide of thirty-odd years of sappy story lines about soggy romance, all slow as molasses? Why do I have to make the shift from slow-rising yeast to Pop Tarts? Horse-and-buggy to the Concorde? Whalebone corsets to Madonna and her jet-nose tits?

Because they said so, that’s why. Because they paid her the big bucks to swallow what “art” she might have once fancied herself possessed of, zip her lip, and deliver whatever crap they demanded. On time and in the flavor of the moment. No matter what her personal problems. Who gave a shit about them?

The cursor on the small green screen before her blinked. Write, Clare. Suck it up. Get your ass in gear. Take a deep breath. Push some oxygen in and out. Get the old gray matter moving.

Could she do that? Maybe.

It wasn’t as if she didn’t know these characters. These silly people, most of whom she’d inherited from her predecessor, who had, incidentally, hanged herself in the bathroom of her East Hampton beach house one fine morning two summers earlier. Just down the lane from Martha Stewart’s house. Her death had made the six o’clock local news. Clare wondered, would her suicide play as well?

But she digressed. Well, Christ, who wouldn’t? What the hell else was there to do with Dirk and Carol and Josh and Trish and Richard and Paula, the three main couples of Real Life? They were such stupid people with such stupid problems. Slow stupid problems. Problems that moved at the pace of a banana slug (or a soap) and were about as fascinating.

No, actually, a banana slug was a hell of a lot more interesting than the ailing marriage of Trish, played by a busty brunette with the voice of a mosquito, and Josh, the simpering nephew of Arnie the producer, who couldn’t act his way out of a damp Kleenex.

Clare couldn’t even think about Richard and Paula, her whiny preppie couple.

So she’d have to start with Carol and Dirk—C for Clare and D for David, get it? Ms. Clare Meacham Herself and her erstwhile lover, Dr. David Teller. Yes, Carol and Dirk were loosely based on her own pathetic life.

“Excuse me.”

Clare jumped. It was the woman to her left. An attractive middle-aged black woman in a navy business suit, good pumps, substantial gold jewelry. “Do you have change for a dollar? I need to call my office.”

Clare checked her wallet, handed the woman three quarters and two dimes. “I’ll have to owe you a nickel.”

The woman’s smile was warm. “Nope, I owe you.” And she headed off to the phone room.

She’d be a while. Clare had already checked it out: three machines vending poisonous substances, a water fountain, and more of those damned blue chairs in which to wait for the four phones. Four phones for nearly three hundred New Yorkers, and no cellulars allowed? You might as well have cut off their oxygen.

Clare stared back at the blank screen. Okay. Dirk and Carol, step up, please, front and center. In Real Life, they’d weathered many problems, such as the time when Dirk, who was a plastic surgeon, had been called away to Wisconsin for two months to reconstruct the faces of an entire family of protected witnesses (as had David) and had strayed with a Scandinavian scrub nurse (which Clare had suspected). Then there’d been Carol’s automobile accident and the coma and the long while after she’d come out of it when she thought Dirk was an extraterrestrial.

Now, lagging about six weeks behind Clare’s real life, Dirk had just leaned over a table in an Italian restaurant and told Carol he was calling off their engagement. Because, well, he was marrying someone else. Carol had burst into tears and bolted out of the restaurant. (As had Clare.) “What are you writing?”

Again, Clare started. This time, her interrogator was to her left, a very short man sitting two chairs over. About her age, late thirties, he was nicely turned out in fine fawn-colored trousers, a T-shirt in chocolate, a handsome blue, brown, and beige jacket. Armani probably. His dark, clean profile reminded her of David.

David. Clare’s stomach flip-flopped.

Meanwhile, the gorgeous little babe was waiting.

What was she writing?

Nothing. Not a word. She was simply staring at her screen. Listening to the computer’s tiny hum, much quieter than the terror gnawing at her intestines. The hideous, bright yellow fear that she couldn’t do it. Couldn’t, couldn’t, couldn’t revamp Real Life. They’d fire her ass, she’d be a bag lady within a year. Reeking of urine. Scratching at herself. Begging for alms, from real people, with real jobs, like she used to be. And then, for sure, no one would ever love her again. She’d die all alone, her grave in a potter’s field dug by inmates from Rikers Island.

“A script,” she finally said.

“A screenplay?” The dapper little man slipped one chair closer.

“No.” She shook her head.

What did this guy want? This was New York, for Christ’s sake, where strangers might ask you where you bought your shoes—and how much you paid for them. But your business? They stayed out of it.

He smiled brightly and extended a hand. “I’m Vinnie. I’m in the restaurant business, but I’m starting to write screenplays on the side. I figure, hey, everybody else is.”

“I write for a soap.”

Usually, when she said that, eyebrows rose. Wasn’t she prostituting herself? Why didn’t she write novels? Publish arty stories in little magazines? She’d done both. She wasn’t cut out for the life of the starving artist.

But Vinnie said, “Cool.” Then he said, “Could I borrow a quarter till after lunch? I don’t have any change, and I need to make a phone call.”

What did she look like, a bank? “I think I gave all my change to somebody else a few minutes ago,” she said. But then she dug in her purse and came up with a shiny new quarter that had been hiding in a corner.

But before Vinnie could make his call, an officer of the court sauntered from behind the tall wide desk at the front of the room and began calling names from the summons slips he pulled at random from a bingolike contraption. They were to answer to their names, then follow him to a courtroom where they would be judged on their worthiness to judge another.

Juan Reyes. Kashonda Smallwood. Gillian Holch. Duncan McKenzie III. Ellen Bradley. Yolanda Ramirez. Estelle Krim. Angela Wong. Jacqi Albano. Rita Sitnick. Vincent Gallo.

“That’s me.” Vinnie waved at the clerk.

Clare Meacham.

Clare groaned and raised a hand. She couldn’t get stuck on a jury. Not now. Please, God.

The woman Clare had given change to reentered the room just as the last of the forty names was being called. Wilma Paris. “Oh, Lord,” she cried. “Wouldn’t you know? And my boss just said he’s going to kill me if I don’t get my butt back to the office.”

*

Behind the judge, huge letters spelled out “IN GOD WE TRUST.”

Vinnie pointed at the words, whispered to Clare, “What about the atheists? They in deep do?” They were two of the twelve seated in the juror’s box, the remainder of their panel of forty spread across the spectators’ seats.

Frowsy-haired Judge Rabinowitz frowned over her horn rims at Vinnie. Their instructions had been to listen up, no eating, no sleeping, no talking. The judge had just finished introducing the prosecution, the defense, and the defendant, and outlining the bare bones of the case.

The defendant—a big handsome black kid, about twenty—was charged with attempting to hold up a Korean grocer. He’d purportedly used a gun: the plaintiff, a short but muscular man, had answered with a whirling baseball bat.

This was the stuff of real life, thought Clare. This was material. How would it work? Dirk follows Carol out of the restaurant. She runs into the Korean store. They’re caught smack in the middle of the holdup. Carol grabs up a tray of hot sweet-and-sour pork from the steam table, heaves it at the robber…

The judge had chosen to conduct the voir dire herself, questioning the twelve citizens in the box:

Do any of you know me, the defendant, the plaintiff, either of the prosecution or the defense attorneys, or any of the witnesses I’ve just named?

How?

Do you know the area, Broadway between Bleecker and Third, where the incident took place?

What is your knowledge of that site?

Are you related to any law enforcement officers, and, if so, how?

What is the nature of your employment?

What magazines do you subscribe to?

Have you ever been the victim of a street crime?

Have you ever been the victim of a crime involving a gun?

Wilma Paris, the advertising account exec to whom Clare had given change, had a brother who was a cop, and she said it was her belief that cops lied as much as anybody else.

Vinnie Gallo said he himself, as a customer, had been held up at gunpoint in a Korean store. By a kid. With a gun. (Clare wasn’t sure she believed him.)

Clare declared that she herself didn’t know anyone in the courtroom. She lived in the Village and had walked by the crime scene many times but wasn’t certain if she’d ever stopped in. She was not related to any police officers, nor did she know any personally. She was the head writer on Real Life. She subscribed to The New Yorker, New York, Saveur, Soap Digest, and Conde Nast Traveler. She had lived in Manhattan eighteen years and had never been the victim of any crime whatsoever.

(Unless you counted having her heart run over and squashed flat by one Dr. David Teller, who was not a defendant here today.)

At the end of the questioning, Clare was excused with no explanation, along with Vinnie and Wilma. Thank you. Good-bye.

*

Back in Room 1517, the chairs where Clare, Vinnie, and Wilma were sitting had been taken. Clare scanned the room. There was an empty bloc of seats back toward the windows, near the young Hispanic woman watching TV. She headed for them. She had to get to work.

But Vinnie and Wilma were close on her heels.

“I can’t believe they didn’t take you,” said Vinnie. “Me, that’s one thing, but you? You’re perfect, except for that part about living in Manhattan for years and never even having your purse snatched. That made you sound like a liar.”

Wilma leaned across him, interrupting. “I want to ask you about Real Life. My mom is a huge fan. She’ll be so excited when I tell her I met you. You really make up all those stories?”

“I’m afraid so.” Clare grimaced. When I can. When I don’t have writer’s block. When I’m not scared to death. Depressed. Sleep-deprived. On jury duty.

“She’s writing right here.” Vinnie pointed at the computer in Clare’s hand.

“I don’t know how you do it,” said Wilma. “I’m an account exec. Not a creative bone in my body.”

“Mine, either,” said Clare.

“Come on.” Vinnie laughed. “You’re just being modest.”

“No, I’m not.” And then it just spilled out, the whole nine yards of her pathetic tale. How she was upset about her personal life and hadn’t been sleeping well. How she had only a week left to revamp Real Life, to make it hotter than O. J., bigger than real life. How she didn’t have a clue.

“You can do it,” said Vinnie. “I know you can.”

“I don’t think so.” Clare shook her head.

Just then, an officer stood from behind the long desk. “Lunch break,” he announced. “Be back at two-thirty. Did anyone not get a list of restaurants in Chinatown and Little Italy?”

The whole room stampeded for the door.

Except Julia, the young Hispanic woman in the row behind them, who was plugged into the earphones of her little TV. “Jesus!” she screamed. “I can’t believe it! Shoot the fucker!”

Mid-flight, people stopped and stared.

“Shoot him! Don’t let him get away with that!”

The officer started toward her.

“Kill the son of a bitch!” Julia shouted.

“Miss?” The clerk tapped her arm. “You’re going to have to quiet down. And you can’t use that kind of language in here.”

“What?” Julia jumped and jerked out her earphones. “Was I loud? I’m sorry. But I get so excited at my program. That Dirk! He’s such a…” She caught herself. “…bad person. I can’t believe Carol lets him get away with that…stuff!”

“Oh, Christ!” Clare slapped a hand to her mouth. “She’s talking about Real Life.”

Vinnie grabbed both Clare and Wilma, then leaned over Julia. “Miss? You wanna go to lunch with us? My treat.”

*

Vinnie took them to a restaurant where he was obviously known, Luigi’s on Mulberry Street. Restaurants were the only thing that remained Italian about Little Italy. The old families had long since moved to Staten Island, and the real estate was being swallowed up by the Chinese. But that didn’t stop the tourists, especially the ones who imagined gangland hits over every plate of meatballs and spaghetti.

The food at Luigi’s, old-fashioned red-sauce Italian, was good enough to please the most demanding mobster. Vinnie had ordered a giant antipasto platter for the table. “Have some more coppa,” he urged, pouring the Chianti. “And peppers. These mushrooms Luigi said he smuggled in from Italy last week. Finish them up. Then we’ll get down to work.”

“Work?” asked Julia, her eyes big as she looked up from her plate. It was clear this meal was a special treat for her. She was very impressed by Luigi’s. Not to mention Vinnie.

“Sure,” said Vinnie. “We’re going to write Clare’s story. Real Life is getting itself fixed right here. Right now. At this table.”

Clare almost choked. Just as the food and the wine and the company were beginning to make her feel a little human, Vinnie had to bring that up.

“You think we can’t?” Vinnie reared back in his chair. “’Cause we ain’t professional writers? I’m telling you, we can, and we will. We are the people. The people who know about real life. We are your friggin’ audience you don’t ever give no respect.”

Clare raised her glass. “Hear, hear.”

*

“I don’t like the idea of using the stickup in the Korean store,” said Julia, sipping her coffee.

“Why not?” Wilma asked.

“The stickup is real,” insisted Clare.

“It’d be more real if somebody got killed. In my neighborhood, every time there’s a stickup, somebody gets killed.”

“So who do you pick to die?” Vinnie signaled for more grappa. “You got the black kid. You got the Korean. You got Carol and Dirk.”

“Carol,” said Julia.

Clare put down her glass. “Why Carol?”

“’Cause she’s a wimp,” Julia said. “Take today’s show. Dirk tells her he’s marrying another woman, what does she do? She just leaves the table. Carol makes me sick.”

“Oh, really?” said Clare, a little defensive. “What do you want her to do? Kill him, like you were saying back upstairs?” Clare pointed a thumb in the direction of 100 Centre Street and the courthouse. At least she thought it was in that direction. She was getting pretty loaded.

“Yeah,” said Julia. “Kill him.”

“How? When? Where?” asked Wilma.

“How? Pick up a knife from the table and stab the sucker. When? As soon as he said he was dumping her for another chick. Where? In the gut.”

Clare thought about that. How would that have gone down, the two of them in Bar Pitti having dinner when David had made his announcement? He had ordered the veal. There was a sharp knife at his place. It certainly would have been possible. Of course, she’d be in Rikers now. Or wherever it was they locked up female murderers. The Tombs, maybe, right next door to 100 Centre.

“If she’d killed him in the restaurant,” said Wilma, “then they wouldn’t be in the Korean store together.”

“Screw the Korean store,” said Julia.

Clare said, “Look, folks, we can’t go back to the scene in the restaurant and do it differently. It aired today, remember? Then there are three more weeks of shows already in the can. That’s where we have to pick up.”

“Okay, so what happened after Carol ran out of the restaurant?” asked Julia.

Clare could tell from Julia’s tone that she was thinking, I bet not much. And she was right. “But it’s not my fault,” Clare insisted. “This was before they wanted the show to pick up speed. To be more like real life.”

“Let’s hear it,” said Wilma.

“Dirk’s ex-wife, Molly, who has always hoped that Dirk would come back to her, is shattered when she hears that Dirk is marrying yet another woman. She flips out and has to be institutionalized. She ends up in the hospital where David does most of his cosmetic surgery, and she rages in while he’s in the middle of doing somebody’s face. The patient, who is Richard of Richard and Paula, has been in a terrible skiing accident and ended up with no nose.”

“Now, that’s interesting,” said Vinnie.

“Who’s David?” asked Wilma. “You said David was performing the surgery.”

Clare blushed. “I meant Dirk. David’s my real ex-boyfriend. The real plastic surgeon.”

“And did David dump you like Dirk dumped Carol?” Wilma asked.

Clare nodded.

“Then forget what I said,” said Julia. “Let’s get him back in that Korean store and shoot that sucker full of holes.”

“I like the Korean store, too,” said Vinnie, knocking back the last of his grappa. “But now it’s two-fifteen, and we’ve got to scoot back over to Centre Street.”

*

Back in Room 1517, the four of them clustered in a corner. They were picking up speed. Dirk lay dead in the grocery store, and they were arguing over whether or not the Korean grocer or Carol subdued the shooter, when the court officer stepped from behind the desk and called their names once more and they had to file into another courtroom.

This time, the defendant, as Judge O’Banion explained, was a twenty-two-year-old man who, when his girlfriend jilted him, had thrown her in front of a subway train which cut her to ribbons.

The four cowriters stared at one another. Dirk, mouthed Julia. It’s even better. It’s perfect.

They couldn’t wait to get out of that courtroom and back to Real Life.

Vinnie had said that he thought the jiltee was justified. Wilma had said that her eighty-six-year-old mother was once dragged by a train and she just couldn’t listen to the testimony. Julia’s lie was that she had gone to high school with the victim. Clare said that she was obsessed with this case, had followed every smidgen of news about it, and thought the defendant should be strung up. They were all excused.

“Okay,” said Vinnie, back in Room 1517, “I take it that you like running David, I mean Dirk, over with a subway train?”

“I love it,” said Wilma. “Carol pushes him, and the train runs over his gorgeous face.”

“Oh, yeah,” said Julia.

“Absolutely,” said Clare. “It’s perfect. It’s poetic justice.”

“And does Clare, I mean Carol, get caught?” asked Vinnie.

“No way,” said Julia. “She doesn’t do it herself. Somebody else does it.”

“Somebody she paid?” asked Vinnie.

“Probably,” said Wilma.

“How much?” asked Vinnie. Then he reached in a pocket of his lovely fawn slacks and pulled out the quarter Clare had loaned him for the phone earlier that morning. He flipped it a couple of times and gave her a wink.

“Not in real life.” Clare laughed. “Not nearly enough.”

*

But it was.

Shortly after that conversation, the prospective jurors of Room 1517 were dismissed for the day. Clare, energized for the first time in weeks, went straight home and wrote like a crazy person. As the four of them had plotted, Dirk died, his pretty face mangled beyond recognition, and Carol got away with it. Then Dirk’s long-lost twin brother, Dylan, a pediatrician, comes to New York, and the two of them fall madly in love. But then a child in his care dies mysteriously, and an autopsy discovers that the child’s heart is missing. It turns out that Dylan, whose only child drowned ten years ago, has snapped. He’s become a kind of Frankenstein, and there’s a terrible trial…

Involved in the narrative, Clare had lost track of time. Even though she hadn’t slept in weeks, she was alive with energy. It was almost eleven when her phone rang.

“Turn on the TV,” said a familiar voice. One she’d heard recently but couldn’t quite place. “The news.”

“Who is this?”

“Vinnie.”

“What…?”

“Just turn on the TV, okay?”

Clare did as he said, and there was blond Chuck Scarborough looking deadly serious as he reported a horrible accident that evening at the 79th Street station of the IRT. “The victim, Dr. David Teller, a prominent plastic surgeon, was waiting for a train about 8 P.M. this evening when he seemed to fall onto the tracks and was dragged by the head and killed. There were no immediate witnesses to the accident. No one noticed him standing at the far end of the platform. At this point, there’s no indication of foul play…”

“Vinnie!” Clare shrieked. “You killed him.”

“What makes you say that?”

“I didn’t mean for you to really kill him! He was a son of a bitch, but I didn’t mean…we can’t be judge and jury…”

“What makes you think you had anything to do with this little incident? How do you know Dr. Teller wasn’t just an accident waiting to happen?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Let’s just pretend….” And then Vinnie chuckled softly. “You know, pretend, like we were writing a story, that Dr. Teller had really pissed off some important people by giving new faces to some reprehensible characters in the feds’ witness protection program. Like on Real Life, but in real life, too.”

“Oh, my God,” Clare breathed.

“And let’s say that these very important people wanted to deliver a very strong message to Dr. Teller. Well, more than a message. They wanted to make damned sure that he cease and desist these practices. Immediately. And permanently.”

“Oh, Vinnie,” said Clare. She could feel something rising in her chest. Something like relief. Could that be? Something like joy? Delight? Something that tasted like sweet revenge?

“And let’s say that a friend of these very important people was asked to take care of this Dr. Teller who was causing them so much grief. And this friend had set out to do that very thing when he, by a piece of great coincidence, ran into the former girlfriend of said Dr. Teller in a jury room. And she was having a problem with Real Life. And so he and some other people helped her with her problem.”

“With Real Life?”

“Yeah,” said Vinnie. “And this guy, he liked their story so much he rolled it over into little r, little l real life.”

The feeling in Clare’s chest bubbled over into laughter. And once she started, she couldn’t stop.

“Good night, Clare,” said Vinnie. She could hear his grin. “Sweet dreams. And good luck with Real Life. If I was you, I’d use this, babe. Use this material. We like this poetic justice business out in the real world.”

Clare did. She used it all. And when Real Life became number one in its time slot, and the Emmys and the money started pouring in, Arnie, Clare’s producer, raised a glass of champagne to her. “How sweet,” he said, “real life is.”

Love Thy Neighbor

“I’m going to shoot him.” Julie glared at the digital dock on her bedside table. Six a.m. She hadn’t gotten to sleep until three: left the restaurant at one, a couple of hours to unwind, study a script, fool around with Patrick. Then, as usual, she’d had trouble nodding off. And now…

“Hunh?” Patrick rolled toward her but didn’t open his eyes. He was only a millimeter into consciousness.

“That bastard!” If the hand Julie flung had been a knife, it would have pierced the heart of the man in the apartment upstairs. “He’s killing me. Tromp, tromp, tromp ever since the day he moved in.”

It didn’t take much to awaken Julie. Sleep—or the lack of it—was her bête noire, her cross to bear. Her insomnia had begun when she was a child back in North Carolina, no napper she, and now her sleep deficit was nearly thirty years deep. Some nights she couldn’t drift off. Others, she awoke in the wee hours, and that was it. She had to learn to deal with stress, her present shrink said. The one before that had given up, opining that some people are simply hard-wired to toss and turn. Julie had all the insomniac’s paraphernalia: blackout shades, earplugs, a white-noise machine. She exercised regularly, took no caffeine after noon, ate lightly before bedtime. Her apartment building had, thank God, installed double-paned windows a couple of years earlier. Still, neighbors were the one thing over which she had no control.

Patrick flopped over, giving her his bare back, and began snoring immediately, tangled in the hot sheets of summer.

Julie gritted her teeth. Bad enough that Patrick was in her bed anyway. It wasn’t as if she loved him. Most of the time she didn’t even like Patrick, with whom she worked at Lippi’s, where they, both actor-waiters, served up exorbitantly expensive pasta to those who had already hit the big time. But Patrick had good connections. He was up for a role with a hot young independent director. Besides, Julie’s most recent doctor at the sleep clinic had said, “I want you to use your bed for nothing but sleep and sex.” She was getting precious little of the former, so…

Now the upstairs neighbor began his morning march. How could anyone walk so much, simply getting dressed? He circled and recircled, doglike.

“Damn you!” Julie cried. “Sit!” Then she jumped up, grabbed her red-handled broom, and jabbed at the ceiling. Already there was a rash of scarlet pockmarks in the plaster.

The man above answered with an angry stomp, his hard-soled shoes resounding on his hardwood floors. Wall Street shoes, Julie called them, though she had no idea where he worked, what he did, even what his real name was. There were only initials on the building’s directory. JL. Nothing on his mailbox but the apartment number. John Lennon was what her crazy super had told her when she asked. John Lennon.

What a sick joke. Everyone knew John Lennon was long dead, struck down by an assassin’s bullets about two miles north and west of her building on the fringes of Murray Hill. Lennon had lived in grandeur at West Seventy-second Street and Central Park West, in the Dakota. He’d died out in front of that fabulous old building, the setting for the movie Rosemary’s Baby. The Dakota was spooky and dark with Gothic arches and gargoyles, a nineteenth-century castle with thick, thick walls and floors through which no one could hear your screams.

Julie’s building was nothing like that. Red brick, square, with no adornment, it had been cheaply constructed in the 1950s. A friend of Julie’s once told her that she’d grown up in a housing project in Rhinebeck that was its twin. The building’s main drawback, other than its proximity to the traffic of the Midtown Tunnel, was the fact that its plaster ceilings were separated from the hardwood floors of the next apartment by nothing more than two inches of air.

“Visualize yourself somewhere else,” her shrink had suggested. She’d come up with a dandy: a magical chamber, floating out of time and space. The room was lined with cork and eiderdown, a pillowed and perfumed bower for the Princess and the Pea.

But, in reality, Julie had no magical chamber, no famously thick walls and floors, as she lay wide awake chewing on her curdled thoughts. For example, it occurred to her that despite the dissimilarities between her building and the Dakota, if someone were shot out front, the crime scenes would look the same on the eleven o’clock news. The crumpled figure on the sidewalk, the pool of blood, the yellow tape, the cops holding back the curious crowd.

John Lennon, indeed.

*

“I’m going to shoot him,” Julie said to Lisa. The two friends were eating hot dogs from a pushcart. Water sheeting down a brick wall to one side of the vest-pocket park provided a modicum of relief from the sticky summer heat.

Lisa said, “Doesn’t your air conditioner block out some of his noise?”

“Not nearly enough. He’s up at dawn every morning. Even weekends. Tromp, tromp, tromp. And sometimes he gets home later than I do. Tromp, tromp.”

“You said you tried a note?”

“Three or four. They started out sweet and rapidly progressed to ballistic.”

“He has no carpeting?”

Julie shrugged. “Some. But nowhere near what he ought to. What is it the city requires, seventy percent?” Julie herself had lots of thick carpets. Even so, she never ever wore her shoes in her apartment. She was a considerate neighbor.

“You complained to the landlord?”

“Of course.”

“And?”

“He’d love it if I moved.”

“Oh, right. You have that great rent.”

“How else could I afford to live in the city? I don’t see my star rising anytime soon.”

“No callbacks?”

“Callbacks? I’m lucky if I ever get through an audition without blowing the lines. I’m telling you, Lisa, the man is ruining my life. I can barely remember my own name. And check out these circles under my eyes. I look like a hag.”

“You do not.” Then Lisa, afraid that Julie would see the lie in her eyes, changed the subject. “How’s Patrick? Have you two kissed and made up?”

“Are you kidding? We’re civil to one another at work, but it’s definitely over.”

“Have you tried talking things out?”

“What’s there to say to someone who thinks you’re crazy? He says I’m obsessed with the man upstairs. That if I weren’t such a wacko, good sex would make me sleep like a baby. I said, ‘Yeah, good sex might…’”

“You didn’t!”

“Of course I did. What am I supposed to do, protect his delicate feelings?” Julie was getting a migraine. She pushed her damp bangs back from her forehead. “He certainly doesn’t care about mine. Patrick’s a beast, not even worth shooting.”

Just then, around the corner on the Avenue of the Americas, a car backfired.

Lisa jumped.

Julie smiled.

*

“I’m going to shoot him.”

“Julie, darling, I wish you wouldn’t talk like that.”

Julie stared out her dirty windows at the Thursday afternoon traffic. All the rich rats were heading for the Midtown Tunnel to the Long Island Expressway, then on to the Hamptons for the long weekend. “Ma, I’m almost thirty. I’m not a child.”

“I know, dear. I’m sorry. It’s just that I worry about you in that city.”

Julie sighed.

“Wouldn’t you like to come home for a week or so? I’d love to see you. We could go swimming every day. It’s been a while.”

“It’s even hotter there than here.” Summertime in North Carolina was always brutal. But at least there were no sidewalks lined with rotting garbage, no subway platforms reeking of hot piss.

“We could go up to the lake. Or to the beach, if you want.” Julie’s mom wasn’t giving up easily. She wanted to get her daughter home, fatten her up a bit. The last time she’d seen Julie, she’d been drawn and peaked.

“I have to work.”

“All right, dear. But let’s put our heads together about this hideous neighbor of yours. Have you offered to buy him house slippers? Wouldn’t that help?”

Have you tried earplugs? Have you considered acoustical tile? How about splitting the cost with him, at least in his bedroom, of wall-to-wall? How many suggestions had Julie heard from well-meaning friends? Suggestions that drove her wild. Considered giving up coffee? Tried meditation? Acupuncture? What about melatonin? Chamomile tea? Getting out of bed when you can’t sleep? As if she were a fool. As if she hadn’t tried everything on God’s green earth to solve her sleep problems. “I left slippers outside his door, Ma. Ages ago. He won’t wear them.”

“Well, dear, maybe they weren’t his size.”

Julie had to bite her lip to keep from screaming. “Bigfoot’s shoe size? Huge. That’s what I bought. Huge! Hell, Ma, I’ve never even seen him!”

Not that Julie hadn’t tried to confront her neighbor. Many’s the dawn Julie had grabbed her robe and raced up the stairs hoping to catch him. But she’d never been successful. She could feel him skulking behind his peephole. He knew what she looked like, while he remained Mr. Mystery Man.

Once or twice, she’d lost it and pounded on his door. “I know you’re in there, you son of a bitch!”

Another time, she’d crept up and crouched against his door so he couldn’t see her through the peephole. She’d waited for a long time, but still he didn’t show. He could smell her out there, she was sure of it. A Wall Street wolf, he had a predator’s keenly developed sense of danger.

“Or how about the mountains, dear?” Mom was still on the line, still pitching. “Remember how much you used to love the mountains when Daddy was alive?”

Oh, yes. They’d had lots of sweet times back then. Hot dogs on the grill. Toasted marshmallows. Ghost stories round the campfire. Her father, a loving, patient man, had spent many an hour teaching her how to cast into fish-rich streams. And how to shoot a rifle. Julie had never been afraid of guns. She’d loved the smell of the oiled blue steel, the snick of the cartridges’ slide. Julie was a natural, a good shot. She’d punched many a tin can right out of the blue sky. She wasn’t bad with a handgun either.

“I could fly down, take the train back,” Julie heard herself saying, that reptilian part of her brain knowing, before she was conscious of it, why.

*

“I’m going to shoot him,” Julie said to her friend Cassandra, the two of them waiting to pick up orders at Lippi’s service window.

“I thought your little trip chilled you out.”

“I wish. Bigfoot never takes a vacation. He’s right there, every morning, six on the dot.” Julie picked up her two dishes, one scallop, one sea bass. Who could stomach anything heavier? Heat Wave Grips Northeast for Seventh Week! It had actually been cooler in North Carolina.

“I’ve got a friend back home who can put a curse on your neighbor. Want me to call?”

“No, thanks. A couple of slugs ought to do the trick.”

Cassandra’s eyebrows took a hike halfway up her forehead.

“Whoa, girl. You feeling all right?”

“No, Cassandra. Actually, I feel like shit.”

Sleep deprivation will do that. A night or two causes that feeling like a hangover or the flu, headachy, a kind of all-over malaise with which most people are familiar. Weeks, months, years can wreak much more serious havoc. Julie constantly wobbled on the edge of tears. Some days, she couldn’t speak at all. Her chest thrummed with exhaustion, and a deep breath was impossible. Her dulled brain ached constantly and felt as if it were bouncing off craggy places inside her skull. Perhaps, she thought, her intracranial fluid had evaporated. She could feel her bones too, within her skin.

She said, “It’s bad, Cassandra. Really bad. I really do think I’m going to have to kill him if he doesn’t stop walking on my head.”

But Cassandra was no longer paying attention to Julie. “Wouldn’t mind having him walking wherever he wanted to.”

Julie turned to see a tall lanky man she’d noticed in the restaurant a couple of times before. He had the kind of looks that grabbed you, even in Lippi’s, where movie stars were thick on the ground—a thatch of dark hair shot with silver, a wide sexy mouth, dangerous brown eyes.

“He’s probably an ax murderer,” Julie said. “Those gorgeous ones usually are.”

“Whatever. He’s still got to eat. And he’s in your station. Now you go, girl. Sell him some expensive wine. Earn yourself a big tip.”

The handsome man had a heartbreaking smile. “Good evening yourself,” he replied to her greeting. Then he and his dinner companion, an older man, proceeded to order a lovely meal: quail eggs with caviar, a frisée salad, lobster ravioli, a hundred-dollar bottle of Champagne. They were fun to serve, savvy diners without pretension. They both flirted with her, mildly.

It was the older man, on his way to the men’s room at the end of the night, who stopped Julie and pressed a card into her hand. Too bad, he was much too old and not the one she would have chosen. “I’m sorry,” she was about to say, “but my boyfriend….”

“Please call my son.” He smiled. “He’s too shy to ask you himself. I swear he’s a great guy, though probably I’m prejudiced.”

Julie stared at the business card for a long time. Jonathan Lemmon. He was with one of the big Wall Street brokerage houses. Jon Lemmon.

*

“I’m going to shoot him,” Julie whispered to herself the next morning at six a.m.

She lay in bed staring up at the ceiling. She thought that she could see the footprints there.

It was just a coincidence, right? John Lennon. Jon Lemmon. It didn’t mean a thing.

Her upstairs neighbor was not the man whose card was tucked in her purse.

(Was he?)

She jumped up, found the card, and dialed the office number printed there, Jon Lemmon’s private extension. He wouldn’t be in, of course. It was way too early.

(And perhaps he was still upstairs.)

(And perhaps she was losing her mind.)

“Hi, this is Jonathan Lemmon. Sorry I’m not in to take your call, but leave your name and number and I’ll get back to you soon.”

It was the voice of the man she’d met the night before. Julie had never heard the voice of the man upstairs, not even the baffled tones of an answering machine. Only his footfall.

Julie hung up without leaving a message.

Then she fell back on her bed, clenching and unclenching her fists. Tears ran from the corners of her eyes and onto her pillow. She was going crazy. She had stepped way over the line. She no longer knew what was real and what was imaginary. Her sleeplessness was killing her.

*

“I’m going to shoot him.”

The actress up on the stage delivering that line was young and thin like Julie, but blond, whereas the sleek curtain of hair Julie pulled back to gaze at Jon’s profile in the theater was inky dark.

Jon caught her look and aimed his wonderful smile at her. She felt the electricity down her thighs. She’d been tingling with excitement since he’d answered the message she’d left at his office the second time she’d called. He’d seemed so pleased. Dinner and the theater? He just happened to have house seats for the biggest hit on Broadway. Cassandra, what an angel, had agreed to work her shift for her.

Julie found Jon easy to talk with. So sweet. Funny. With lovely manners.

“Feel like a nightcap?” he said as the actors took their final bows. “How about the bar at the Rainbow Room?”

Oh, yes, indeed. For she was Cinderella at the ball, dreading not the pumpkin but Jon’s turning into Bigfoot, fearful of hearing his step overhead moments after arriving home. It was an insane notion, she knew that, but she couldn’t help herself. She wanted to stay here forever, at the top of Rockefeller Center, gazing out across the dazzle that was Manhattan, the center of the universe, her adopted home. She had a Cosmopolitan, a drink first created at this very bar, then another. She didn’t want to go, didn’t want to know. But she couldn’t drink all night.

“Ready?” Jon was smiling at her.

She slipped from the barstool, and his hand grazed the small of her back. Oh, God, how long had it been since she’d felt like this? Had she ever, really? Exactly this way?

Jon saw her home. The very most a woman expected in this city was that a date would put her in a cab and hand the driver a twenty.

But maybe Jon wasn’t just seeing her home. Maybe he was going home too. Maybe all he had to do was take the elevator one floor up.

Yet he didn’t release the taxi. “I’ll just be a minute,” he said to the cabbie. He kissed her hand at her lobby door. “I’ll call you tomorrow,” he promised, then watched until she was safely inside.

She couldn’t very well wait to see if he paid off the cab and sent it on its way. She blew a kiss to him as the elevator doors closed.

But once in her apartment, she waited. And waited. And waited. She counted to one hundred, but there wasn’t a peep from above. She strained and strained, but all she heard was the ringing of her own ears, then a fire engine outside.

Finally Julie undressed, climbed into bed, and slipped between her smooth cool sheets. She stretched languorously, happier than she’d ever known she could be, and nodded off.

It was after two a.m. when Julie awoke to the familiar echo of hard-soled shoes. “I’m going to shoot you,” she whispered into her pillow, then plummeted effortlessly back into the void.

*

“I’m going to shoot him.”

“Who?” Jon said lazily, drugged by their lovemaking.

“The bastard who lives upstairs. Wait and see. He’ll wake us up at six.” She paused. “You are staying over, aren’t you?”

“Unless you kick me out.”

“No way.”

“Good. Tell you what. If he wakes us, I’ll go upstairs and blow his brains out. But right now…” He reached for Julie’s warm flesh, held her tight.

“You would never torment your neighbor like that?” She couldn’t help herself. She had to ask.

“Never. I’m only interested in tormenting you.” He nuzzled that little indentation at the top of her breastbone, then tickled her ribs.

She fell happily into his heat, a delicious contrast to the icy air from the AC. Jon Lemmon was so wonderful. He was the best thing that had ever happened to her.

“What are you giggling about, you sexy wench?”

“I was just thinking. When I first heard your name, I thought you said John Lennon.”

“I get that sometimes.” His tongue was lazy and oh so sweet as it traced a route south. “But somebody shot John Lennon dead a long time ago.”

“I know. In 1980. Shot him stone dead.”

*

“I’m going to shoot him.”

“Correct me if I’m wrong, Julie, but I thought you said your neighbor had laid off. Or, we agreed, perhaps it’s that you don’t hear him as much anymore since Jon’s come into your life. Since you’re happier, more relaxed.”

Julie stared across the room into her shrink’s kindly face. He was such a nice man. He truly did care about her, she’d always felt that. He wanted to help her. But what was he going to say when she told him that the apartment upstairs was silent only on the mornings that Jon was in her bed? He was going to think she was really crazy. He might even want her to check into a hospital for observation.

“Let’s go to your place,” she’d said to Jon more than once. He’d told her he lived in a loft in TriBeCa, on North Moore. The night before, she’d really pushed.

Jon said, “Sure, hon. We will. But, like I told you, I’m in the middle of renovations. It’s such a mess. I don’t want you to see it like this.”

“But I’d love to. The before and after, you know?”

“Okay. But wait until there’s a floor in the kitchen. A couple more weeks.”

*

“I’m going to shoot him,” Julie moaned into her pillow. “When he gets back, I’m going to shoot him.”

Jon had been gone for a week, on business to Hong Kong, he said.

He’d called her a couple of times. He was awfully sweet on the phone. But after each call, she’d been more miserable than before. She couldn’t shut off the questions in her head. How did she know where he was calling from? He could be anywhere. Though for sure he wasn’t upstairs. There hadn’t been a single sound from there since the moment Jon had left for wherever he was. Was Jon really John? Julie couldn’t stop weeping. She hadn’t slept a wink.

*

She’d figured out how to prove it once and for all. Julie had a plan. She knew exactly what to do. All she had to do was wait.

Jon’s plane had arrived at JFK two hours earlier. One hour to claim his bags, go through customs. Another for the ride in from the airport. And now, right on schedule, came the first footfall.

“No!” Julie screamed in anguish. “No, please God!” Her heart was broken, her worst fears realized.

For a moment, she forgot her plan. Instead, she grabbed for her broom and pounded and pounded as if, with the force of her pain, her fury at the unfairness of it all, she could change the reality of the man upstairs. She pounded so hard, the handle broke through the plaster ceiling, and dust and debris drifted down around her.

But the sound didn’t stop. Instead, the footsteps grew louder and faster. The man, Jon, oh Jon, stepped and stomped and kicked. He tangoed. Do-si-doed. Riverdanced. She pounded again and again, and he clogged. His Wall Street shoes smacked the hardwood in a fusillade of blows. Then, finally, he bellowed. His voice was muffled, but she could understand the words. “You bitch!” he cried. “You crazy bitch!”

His words snapped Julie back to her plan. It was now or never, do or die. Julie snatched up the phone and dialed Jon’s number, the number he’d given her for his loft in TriBeCa. “Please, God,” she prayed, but there it was, the incontrovertible evidence. The phone rang once in her ear, as it rang upstairs, and then it stopped. Julie doubled over at the anguish in her gut.

“Hello? Hello?”

“Jon?” she gasped.

“Julie? Sweetie? Are you all right?”

“Where are you?”

He laughed. “You called me. I’m home. I got in only a few minutes ago. I had my hand on the phone to call you, darling. Are you okay? You sound terrible.”

“I heard your footsteps. I heard you answer the phone. I know it’s you up there.”

There was a long silence on the other end of the line. Then Jon said, “Julie, sweetie, dear heart. We’ve got to do something about this.”

“I know what to do. I know exactly what to do.”

*

“I’m going to kill him,” Julie said to herself with each step as she climbed to the floor above. To Jon, to her tormentor, her sweetheart, the love of her life. Waves of grief washed over her. Her brain pounded. Why? That was all she could think. Julie couldn’t get past the first word of the question. Why? She was so tired. The torture had gone on so long. Far too long. So many years.

She unlocked the door at the top of the stairs.

She stepped into the hallway and made her way slowly to the door of the apartment directly above hers. She pounded once, twice.

The door flew wide.

The man standing there in the doorway, the man with fury inscribed across his face, was no one Julie had ever seen before.

“You’re crazy, you know that?” he shouted, then he pushed out past her, slamming and double-locking his door.

He headed down the stairs. Julie followed. She was right on his tail.

“You’ve made me crazy!” she screamed. “You wake me up every single morning. This is all your fault.”

“Ha! That’s a good one.”

Down, down, they went, the man in his Wall Street shoes, clattering on the stairs, Julie silent and swift in her bare feet.

They whirled through the bottom door, through the lobby, past the fake palm trees, the low benches, and out onto the sidewalk.

“I have to talk with you!” she shouted. “You have to stop this!”

But the man didn’t slow. So she grabbed the back of his suit jacket and whirled him around. They froze, an odd couple, one fully dressed, one in her nightclothes, out in front of their building, just outside the lobby door.

“Outta my face!” the man who was not Jon Lemmon shouted. “Get a life, why don’t you?”

People, smelling of shampoo and aftershave, slowed in their rush toward the subway station, staring at what looked to be an al fresco marital dispute.

“I have a life,” Julie cried. “Had.” The sadness in Jon’s last words to her echoed in her heart. Then from a pocket of her pj’s she pulled the sleek Glock 19 revolver she’d brought back from North Carolina on the train. No metal detectors on the choo-choo. “But you’ve ruined it. Destroyed it. And now I’m going to have to shoot you.”

But Julie was hesitant, derailed by the toll her sleeplessness had taken. By confusion. By tears.

Then John Linden, Julie’s upstairs neighbor and a junior-high math teacher whose summer-school students daily terrified the bejeezus out of him, pulled a .38 from the shoulder holster he wore, illegally, beneath his jacket. “Not if I shoot you first,” he said.

And then he did.

Crossing Elysian Fields on a Hot, Hot Day

“I’m so hot I could die,” said Lily Cheri Boisson Davidson standing at the bus stop at the corner of Royal and Elysian Fields. Eight-thirty in the morning, the temperature 90, humidity the same. It didn’t even help to take a shower in New Orleans in July. You couldn’t towel off fast enough to keep ahead of the sweat.

Lily wouldn’t be doing either of these things if she were still married to Clark Davidson. No sweating, no waiting for the Royal Street bus to take her from her hot, hot little shotgun house in the shabby but outlaw chic Faubourg Marigny neighborhood to her job at the Levee Bookstore in the French Quarter near Canal.

“If you hadn’t run off and left Clark you’d be summering in Pass Christian,” Lily said in an exaggerated falsetto, imitating her mother’s voice for the amusement of her friend Bernard standing beside her.

Yet as she spoke, Lily could see the lovely rambling beach house, hers and Clark’s, but Clark’s really. Wide, low-hipped with porches all around, live oaks dripping with Spanish moss, St. Augustine lawn right up to where Bayou Mallini began. The very thought of it made her heart ache.

“Don’t I sound just like Daisy?” she said, making the effort to grin.

Bernard laughed and nodded. Lily did a dead-on impression, though she didn’t look a thing like her mother. Daisy Boisson was every inch the Uptown lady, her hair tinted blue to match her blood, and she was built like a three-cushion sofa. Outfitted in white from Memorial Day to Labor Day, Daisy fought the heat with Jean Naté and baby powder. All summer long she smelled like lemon cake.

Lily, at 35, was long and lean with flashing black eyes and a mop of dark curls she twisted up and pinioned with a trio of tortoise hairpins she’d received in trade for her diamond-encircled gold wedding ring in the ladies’ room of Tipitina’s juke joint.

That exchange had taken place the night after she’d come home early from a Nuke the Duke fundraiser—back when the former, according to him, Klansman David Duke was running for governor—and found her husband Clark in bed with the wife of his law partner/best friend.

Since then Lily had worn nothing but black, and her mother Daisy told her bridge friends that her daughter was in mourning for the demise of her marriage.

“Pure horse twaddle,” said Lily, referring to the mourning as she dammed a rivulet of sweat pouring down her neck. “Black simplifies things and just means clothes are one less thing I have to worry about since Clark made off with all our money.”

“Uh-huh,” said Bernard, thinking that Lily could wear an old tablecloth and be the height of chic, whereas here he was in head-to-toe vanilla Armani feeling like something the cats dragged in.

“Also, black, I don’t have to wear underwear, never could understand how women can do that in this heat anyway.”

Bernard rolled his pale blue eyes behind his horn rims. Ladies’ undies were nothing he’d given a lot of thought to, though there had been that one girl back in college before he’d figured out….

“Besides, I ask you, how can I mourn Clark if he’s not dead?”

Bernard made a cross with two carefully manicured forefingers and held them in front of Lily’s face.

“Don’t you start that witchy business again with me,” she said.

But Bernard had known Lily since their mother’s maids had wheeled their prams down the crumbling sidewalks of St. Charles Avenue, around the roots of the live oaks, and even then it had seemed as though all Lily had to do was imagine something and…Poof!

She’d phone somebody, and he was already on the line. Picture someone, and there he stood at her door.

Bernard called it witchcraft. Lily called it coincidence.

“Well, if I’m so good,” she said now, one hand on a hip in the same pose she’d struck when she was four, “how come I can’t make this damned bus come on and get here before we melt into the banquette? Do you think New Orleans buses even have a schedule, Bernard? Or do they just run whenever the drivers manage to sober up and pull themselves out of bed?”

*

Charles Robinson, an even six feet of bus driver, was mad enough to spit nails. As he was racing out the door, already late for work, his girlfriend Sharleen’s momma Dorothy had announced that, thank you very much, she’d love to stay another few days.

Sharleen had already been cranky for weeks, ever since the arrival of the email announcing Dorothy’s impending visit from Alaska. A photo of Dorothy’s plaque from the Fairbanks Chamber of Commerce as Minority Entrepreneur of the Year had been attached.

“For being the only black woman crazy enough to move up there within shouting distance of the Arctic Circle, to open a 24-hour washateria and tanning salon complete with blues, chicory coffee, and beignets.” That’s what Sharleen had said.

Followed by Charles’s offering that Dorothy was so weird she ought to audition for one of those reality shows while she was in the Lower 48.

Whereupon Sharleen had shot him a dirty look.

Because no matter what she said, Charles was not allowed to express an opinion about any woman, not one word about the entire gender, not since Sharleen had seen Representative Todd Aiken on TV opining that rape rarely leads to pregnancy because, “if it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to shut the whole thing down.” With that, Sharleen had shouted “Legitimate my ass!” and reached over the sofa and slapped Charles upside the head.

As far as Charles could tell, it was now the opinion of Sharleen and all her girlfriends, that most men these days were stupid and evil—and while he wasn’t denying that there was a lot of that going around, he wouldn’t say most—while on the other hand every woman in the whole United States had been dubbed a saint. He wasn’t talking about any football team either. And black women, they were Saints with Attitude.

He said as much to Sharleen this morning when she and her momma both started in yelling at him.

Didn’t pick up the dry cleaning or the laundry from Mr. Lee. You’d think he could do some little something to help out around here.

Well, he did plenty. Lots of the shopping, all the heavy cleaning, most of the cooking, but he didn’t have time right now, working a four-to-midnight, then turning around and picking up an eight-to-four. Trying to put aside a little bit so they could go someplace cool for a couple of weeks in August. Sharleen didn’t make beans at that bookstore where she worked days, and she went to school at night.

“You want to see attitude? I’ll show you attitude!” With that Sharleen had picked up a handful of books, hard cover, and started chunking them at his head.

Wasn’t that something? Popped him in the ear with a copy of Are Men Necessary?, and he bled all over his Regional Transit Authority uniform shirt. Then Sharleen and Dorothy both stared at his bloody collar like he was Jack the Ripper instead of the victim of a book-throwing crazy woman.

After that they’d been neither time nor appetite for breakfast, and he was the last man in, his supervisor yelling at him, he’d drawn one of the buses with the on-again off-again air conditioning. Plus his least favorite route.

Elysian Fields starting out at the lake, that part wasn’t bad. But hang a right on Royal, straight through the Quarter jammed with tourists clogging up the streets, don’t know where they’re going, don’t have the right change, horse carriages with old uncle drivers dressed up like fools yelling “Cornstalk Fence Hotel,” it was enough to make a man pay a brother driver to run over his foot, file for his disability.

Today, even the good part had gone bad. Out in Gentilly between Mirabeau and Brutus, three kids got on with a boom box screaming dirty rap.

Charles said, “You turn that thing off before I rap you upside your heads.”

Then an old black lady hobbled up, smelling pretty ripe, talking to herself, not a penny in her purse. Could be his grandma.

“Come on, darlin’,” he said, “you ride anyway.”

“Who you calling darlin’, you mother-raper?”

That was it. Enough. Bottom of his shift, Charles was heading for that bookstore, grab up Sharleen, slap those women silly been feeding her all this women-this, women-that bull, especially the one she’s always talking about, that Lily.

Charles was a peaceful man, but the time had come to knock some heads.

*

Lily’s friend Bernard walked away for two minutes to buy a Times-Picayune at the liquor store. A good-looking man in a blue-and-white seersucker suit, carrying a briefcase, joined Lily at the bus stop. He nodded Morning, then stared down at her black sandals with the grosgrain ribbon ties and said, “You have the most beautiful ankles I’ve ever seen.”

“Buzz off,” Lily said.

*

Between Pleasure and Humanity a fat lady got on the bus. She weighed 300 pounds easy, maybe 350, was carrying another 25 of groceries in wet bags.

Of course, one broke, and there’s Doritos and Cheez-its and guacamole and chocolate chip cookies going every which way on Charles’s bus. One of the rap kids grabbed up a bag of chips with green onion and sour cream, ripped it open, and dug in.

The fat lady put all her weight behind a pretty good backhand, knocked him forward three seats.

“I’ve had me just about enough of you young hellions,” she hollered. “Don’t have a lick of home training.”

Charles didn’t even slow down. He was thinking about the look on Sharleen’s face when Dorothy was talking about young white boys growing on trees up there in Alaska.

“I like ’em,” Dorothy had said. “Not set in their ways. Not housebroke either, but who cares, I can train ’em. And one starts getting the least bit sassy, I just toss him out, go get me a fresh one.”

Sharleen had looked like that was the best idea she’d heard all week. Like she didn’t know a relationship took work, had highs and lows, good times and bad. Like life.

“Before my friend Lily cut and ran from her rotten two-timing husband she chopped his two-hundred-dollar shirts into little bitty pieces and threw them out the window like Carnival confetti,” was what she said.

That Lily again.

When Bernard came back with his paper and Lily started talking loud, the man in the seersucker suit hailed a passing cab.

What Lily said was, “I enjoy being pretty and have as much vanity as the next woman. But couldn’t a man just for once get past the how-do-you-do before he starts in commenting on whatever part of my anatomy grabs his squinty little attention?”

“As opposed to your brilliant mind?” said Bernard. “Well, I’m here to tell you it’s your understanding of the future perfect tense that I’ve always been in love with. And your opinions on the balance of trade. I swear, Lily, if you weren’t a woman, I’d marry you myself.”

“Oh, shut up, Bernard. It’s too hot to tease. But really, it’s infuriating, men talking about us like we were cows they were thinking about bidding on at a livestock auction. Why, the first thing Clark ever said to me at that party where we met was, ‘My God, you have the tiniest waist. Makes me want to put my hands around it.’ And like a silly little fool, I giggled and let him.”

Then Lily stared off into space remembering how Clark could and did encircle her with his hands. Strong arms. Long lean muscular legs.

All of which she missed. Oh, the anguish of long hot summer evenings with no company but Jack Daniel’s. The agony of being a single lady when you knew that most men weren’t worth killing with a stick, and you missed them anyway.

*

It was between North Rampart and Burgundy, just before they got to the Royal Street turn, that the odiferous old lady who’d called him a mother-raper came up to the front of the bus and stood swaying in Charles’s face.

“Ma’am,” he said as patiently as a man could whose air-conditioning had shut off again five minutes earlier, “you’re gonna have to sit down. I can’t let you stand up here while the bus is moving.”

“Don’t tell me what to do,” she snapped. Her face looked like a storm brewing out over Lake Pontchartrain.

“Ma’am,” he tried again, but didn’t get any further as the old lady’s shaky brown hand reached into a bag full of bags and pulled out shiny revolver that she poked into his right ear.

“Turn this bus around,” she said. “It’s too hot to go shopping, and I want to go back home right now.”

“Ma’am, I really don’t think you want to be doing this,” said Charles.

She cocked the revolver with a very loud click. “I cain’t hardly tell you how sick and tired I am of mens telling me what I want to do. So don’t be doing that no more, okay?”

*

Bernard said to Lily, “Why don’t you just bite the bullet and go see Clark? You know you’re bound to run into him eventually anyway. Call him up and have a drink at the Absinthe. I bet you’d feel one hell of a lot better, you got it over with.”

“I feel just fine as I am, thank you very kindly.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Okay, except for a little sleepwalking. The doctor said that’s not unusual. Stress. You know. Nothing worse than a case of the mean reds.”

“Except that they found you out in the middle of St. Roch at four in the morning carrying a quart of milk. Sound asleep as if you were in your own bed.”

“Just that once.”

“Honey,” said Bernard. “Fess up. I know he broke your heart. And I know what that feels like. I’ve been there, all alone, night after night, chewing on the good times like you were a starving man. Waking up in a puddle of sweat, terrified of you don’t know what, worse than the boogie man when you were a little kid. Then you remember that you’re all, all alone, he’s gone, and you wish you were dead.”

He tried to look in Lily’s face to see how she was taking all this, but she had turned away.

“But you know what? What you’re mourning is what was, not what is. What Clark may have been back in the sweet days ain’t been the reality for a long time now. You see him again, you’ll remember what a jerk he really is. Besides, I hear he’s not nearly as cute. Hear he’s put on beaucoup weight.”

“Bernard.” Lily turned, her voice as cold as an Abita Springs beer straight out of the cooler. “What I’m afraid of is no boogie man in the night. I’m afraid that if I ever lay eyes on Clark Davidson again, I’ll kill him stone dead.”

*

“Turn right here,” the crazy old lady yelled. “Here, boy!”

Charles turned that wheel hard and did exactly what she said, even if he was headed up the boulevard of Elysian Fields instead of down, and definitely in the wrong lane.

*

“Just close your eyes and imagine Clark fat,” said Bernard, who himself was blond and small and elegant with fine bones and lovely breeding that showed in his every corpuscle. “Sweat soaking through the pits of his white linen suit, leaving dark stains. His gut straining against his shirt, buttons gaping. Collar too tight, his fat neck hanging over.”

“Yuk,” said Lily. But she did what Bernard said. She imagined Clark.

And then, as had happened so many times before that she’d stopped counting, the figment of her imagination appeared in the flesh. Lots of flesh, all of it hot and sweaty, exactly as Bernard had pictured.

Yes, right there, right across from them on Elysian Fields stood Clark Davidson, her ex. The man to whom she had given her virginity, given her love, her trust, to whom she’d whispered her deepest longings, her darkest secrets. The man who’d tossed all that away as if it were a bunch of milkweed he’d admired and cut, brought into the house and stuck in a ruby red vase before he’d thought, Oh well, they’re just weeds, after all, and dumped into the trash.

He was wearing a white linen suit, already darkened with sweat at not yet nine o’clock in the morning.

Lily waved, and Clark startled, then lit up.

He looked truly thrilled to see her. Now there was his grin, the one that used to make her heart jump up and down like a puppy.

He gave her a big wave in return.

“Hey!” he called. “Hey, Lily!”

Then he glanced to his left, checking for oncoming traffic, and stepped out onto the melting pavement of Elysian Fields.

*

“Lady, look what you did! What you made me do!” Charles screamed at the old woman who’d pulled herself up off the floor after all his swerving and braking and doing the best he could to avoid hitting the big white man in the big white suit who lay surely dead now, his crumpled bleeding body half on the sidewalk, half in the street.

The old woman had resumed her stance beside him, poking the gun in his ear even as sirens screamed in the distance.

“Fool should have looked both ways,” she snorted. “Now come on. Giddy-up. It’s hot in here and an old woman like me don’t have no time to waste.”

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Copyright

Say You’re Sorry

All You Need Is Love

Some You Win

Just in Case

Say You’re Sorry

Wish You Were Here

Naked to the World

No Neutral Ground

You Run

If You Can’t Take the Heat

Real Life

Love Thy Neighbor

Crossing Elysian Fields on a Hot, Hot Day