13 1/2

Charlie Starkweather. Bunch of folks killed. 1958. This one’s ancient history. I don’t know why I have to do Charlie. But he’s easy. He lived in Nebraska. If that’s not a good reason to start shooting, what is? It was probably winter, and he just went nuts. Back then, they were all into this bad-boy thing. I mean like Billy the Kid, but modern day. There were those movies and stuff about bad boys and how cool they were; women wanted to sleep with them. They just did what they wanted. Took what they wanted. Then died in a blaze of glory. That looks pretty good from where I sit. Instead of rotting in some little Nebraska berg, you grab a great car and go around the country with your girlfriend, and you live high on the hog, and if anybody tries to stop you, you just shoot them and drive off. I bet Charlie was seeing himself as a Jesse James, Bonnie and Clyde kind of guy, just having a high old time. Putting the baby down the outhouse hole. I couldn’t do that. She’s crying and all, but there’s nobody around for a million miles, so why not let her cry? She was too little to identify them.

8

Booze had never had much of a hold on Marshall. In his teens, he’d smoked a lot of dope. Everybody did. They had to, to get by. Or so they told themselves and each other. He’d never married or fathered a child. In his twenty-odd years as a partner in Stokes, Knight, and Marchand Restoration Architects, he had never taken more than a month or two of vacation all put together.

But lately, he’d sensed a change touching as lightly as an autumn leaf drifting onto the sleeve of his coat, the fringe of a woman’s shawl brushing the back of his hand in a crowded restaurant.

An awakening?

Marshall pushed the thought aside. He had no patience with self-analysis. It was just that in recent months, after work, he’d stand beneath the wrought iron balcony that shaded his offices on Jackson Square and allow himself a couple of minutes and, in careful measured sips, he’d enjoy himself.

He was enjoying himself now, though this would not be evident to even a careful observer. Standing perfectly still Marshall simply breathed. With the breathing came an unfolding, a blossoming which, either by choice or habit, he’d not experienced since he was a child. Perhaps not even then. Or maybe always then. This was how he imagined children feeling all the time: connected, plugged in, the world forming and reforming around them as they moved.

His pulse rate slowed, and a feeling as near to peace as he ever knew ironed the years from his face. The sense of being one of Jackson Square ’s living statues settled over him.

On the square’s southwest corner, where the horse carriages lay in wait for tourists, a silver man, shining from his cropped kinky hair to his tattered running shoes, was frozen in mid stride, an upturned, silver baseball cap by his side to collect coins and dollars. On the northwest corner, where St. Peter’s Street elbowed into Chartres, lace skirts cascading artfully down shallow, cement steps, was the golden lady-immobile, beneficent, the Good Witch of the East caught in amber. In front of St. Louis Cathedral, shouldering space between fortune-tellers, a lineman was caught halfway up a pole cleverly self-supported by a camouflaged, steel I beam.

Then there was the Man in a Suit, hair white at the temples, dark blond, and thick where it fell over a heavily lined forehead, suit immaculate, leather briefcase in hand-Marshall Marchand, architect. Becoming one of Jackson Square ’s living statues suited him. At one with inanimate, yet living, things he indulged in a rare and delicious sense of belonging-to what, Marshall didn’t choose to pursue. The sense of connecting was enough.

Maybe he had outlived the demons.

Then again, maybe the demons were immortal.

The thought jarred him from his fragile peace and, as his eyes cleared, he saw her.

Framed by ornate arches of ironwork, she was seated on a bench, her head bowed over a book, the spine resting on her neatly trousered knee. Golden and clear as water, spring light poured through the blacksmith arms of a live oak, dripped green-gold off resurrection ferns to warm her cheek and fire the champagne-blonde hair across her forehead. Liquid luminescence curved around the swell of her breasts and set the left half of the book she was reading aglow. Form, function, color, light, and line came together flawlessly.

An inrush of breath kick-started the Man in a Suit to life, heart lurching like the first turnings of a cold engine. Blood pumped noisily past his ears. All at once he was aware of the ten thousand sensations of a new-made being: the pressure of the soles of his feet against the concrete, the pull of the briefcase handle on his fingers, a cinnamon-sugar scent from a nearby bakery, faint skritching of scaled toes on brick as a pigeon strutted by, the balm of the sun’s warmth against the back of his hand.

He stepped off the curb-off the edge of the known world-and moved toward her. His brother Danny could have stopped him-would have stopped him-but Danny wasn’t there. Watching himself, an awestruck spectator of his own destruction, he crossed the brick lane, drifted up the steps into the garden, and approached the bench where she sat.

A moment passed. Then she looked up to see who had intruded upon her solitude. Her eyes were of moss and lichen, vines over old wood, slow streams in autumn, rich with tannin and fallen leaves.

“Would you join me for tea?” he heard himself say in a level voice. “It’s a little past time, I know.” He spoke as if he’d been born in the century in which he worked every day-the eighteen hundreds when people had an elevated sense of the importance of human intercourse. It should have struck him as absurd, but it didn’t.

In the cool, running depths of her eyes, thoughts flickered near the surface, then retreated again to the shadows. “My name is Polly,” she said with a smile and a lilting drawl that could put mint in juleps. “I am a woman of a certain age, divorced, and with two daughters, seven and nine; I am in the middle of a good book, so, if you’re a shallow fiddling kind of a fellah, I have no time for you.”

“I’m not that kind of fellow,” Marshall said gravely.

She laughed, and in his mind, the sound built playgrounds for children, church steeples for bells, and walls with clear, cold, cascading fountains.

“In that case I would simply love to have a cup of tea with you.”

9

Polly told Marshall Marchand the story of her life-the G-rated version. With the sex and violence edited out, it was a charming fairytale: how a lost child of fifteen had come to Jackson Square, how a gypsy had foreseen a glittering future for her, and how that future had come to pass.

Marshall was captivated as she’d meant him to be. She smiled and leaned in, her head tilted slightly, bangs brushing the thick, dark lashes. “Now tell me,” she said sweetly, “how is it that you have come to be a man old enough to have silver at his temples, hold a partnership in a well-regarded firm, and yet are not married?”

Marshall started visibly.

“You don’t beat around the bush do you?” He laughed and set his cup back in its saucer.

“Well, I do,” Polly drawled, “but only when I have no interest regarding what is in that bush.” She was flirting; she could feel the magnetism between them as easily as she could see the sparkle of the candlelight on the wine. It had been a while since she enjoyed such a physical awareness of a man.

“Am I to have no secrets?”

“No, darlin’, not a one. If a man wants to keep secrets, he must never let a woman close. We are as curious cats with secrets. We simply cannot leave them alone.”

He hid the shape of his mouth with his cup. For an unsettling moment, she couldn’t tell if he hid a smile or a grimace of fear.

“No secrets,” he said, and the warmth of his voice reassured her she was not losing her touch. “Gad, why haven’t I ever married? I don’t think about it much. My work, maybe? I haven’t had a lot of time to find Ms. Right. I like my solitude. I live with my brother. Danny and I were orphaned as kids and have pretty much just each other for family.”

He shook his head in confusion, and Polly almost believed he actually hadn’t given matrimony a good deal of thought. That, or he was making up the story as he went along and hadn’t decided how it was going to end. “Obviously, I’m not the introspective type.”

“You live with your brother?”

A smile deepened one corner of his well-cut lips. “We don’t exactly live together. We live in the same building: condos, one on top of the other. Separate beds and everything.”

“And you never married?” She touched the back of his hand and whispered reassuringly, “First dates are for deciding if we wish to bother with a second.”

“Fair enough. I never married. Now you know the worst: I’m an old maid. I didn’t have a date to the prom; never went steady with a cheer-leader. I almost got married once-can I get credit for that?”

“All the credit in the world, my dear. I almost stayed married once so we are even.”

“Why didn’t you? Stay married, I mean?”

Polly eyed him narrowly. “Surely, you do not want to hear about all my husbands?” she said.

“I thought we were clearing the decks for our second date. How many were there?”

Since he sounded more concerned than amused, Polly chose the truth: “I was married once. He was a kind man, but not a good man; and, in the end that comes to be an oxymoron, doesn’t it? One cannot be kind in any meaningful way over any length of time without also being good. We were married for fifteen months.”

She picked up her tea and took a slow sip to let any unasked questions pass unanswered. In the brief time between the lowering of her eyes and the lifting of her cup, the last night of her brief marriage played through her mind:

Ten o’clock, and Gracie was standing in her crib, holding onto the bars. Soon, she would be walking. Polly kissed her round face and marveled that such perfection could be built out of such mundane things as milk and pureed carrots.

“It’s the love, sweetheart. That’s what makes babies grow big and strong,” she whispered. “Sleep tight.”

Turning out the light, she left the nursery. On her way to bed, she stopped by the small room-a closet really-that Carver called his office. The only light was the glow of the computer screen. Over his shoulder, she could read the words on the screen. Transfixed, she watched, as he exchanged sexually explicit notes simultaneously with three different women, one via e-mail and two through instant messaging. Backing out quietly, Polly went to the bedroom they’d shared for over a year.

She sat on top of the bedcovers in her pajamas and stared at the familiar walls. So little of Carver was represented. Had his clothes not hung in the closet, it would have been as if he’d never existed.

The house was hers; she’d bought it the first year she’d been tenured by the college. The bed was a sleigh bed she had found secondhand and refurbished. Framed photographs she had taken of her favorite places in New Orleans hung to either side of an antique dresser she’d bought on Magazine Street. All of it was from her mind, or from her heart, or from her work.

All of it was clean, and decent, and honestly come by. Sordidness was anathema to her. Lies and foul language, violence-the gods of her mother-nauseated her. To have Carver spinning webs of petty filth in the darkness ten feet from Gracie’s nursery gave her that same sense of sickness.

The next morning, she asked him to leave and to give her a divorce. He had refused until she offered him thirty thousand dollars, all of her savings. Three weeks later, she found out she was pregnant with Emma and knew she had gotten everything she wanted from marriage.

“The marriage ended, dear heart, because I did not love him,” Polly said truthfully. For a while they sat in comfortable silence, sipping their tea. Like a schoolgirl on a date, Polly laid her hand on the tablecloth and was thrilled when, after rearranging his spoon, Marshall ’s lingered near it.

What Polly left unsaid was that, except for Emma and Gracie, she had never fallen in love with anyone. She enjoyed the company of men, but she didn’t fall in love. Like orgasm or the smell of lilacs, the sensation of falling could not be described, only experienced. She wondered if she were not sensing its first tingles.

The sweet of the evening poured through the open windows on a gentle breeze. Lights in the square were coming on. The glow of the candles warmed Mr. Marchand’s liquid-brown eyes, until she felt she might immerse herself in them. Polly sensed she was being set up by some-possibly malevolent-spirit, the muse of Barbara Cartland or Danielle Steele.

As an English professor and a lover of the classics, a part of her noted with interest how this frisson of emotions flowing through her with the subtlety of velvet-wrapped electricity informed the sonnets she had taught, the romances of Shakespeare and Molière. She reminded herself that the life she had built with her daughters was perfect and precious. A man would scatter dirty undershorts and oversized shoes throughout their orderly universe. The thought of Mr. Marchand’s undershorts sent a thrill through her, and she knew she was undoubtedly going to make a fool of herself in the not-too-distant future.

Two teenagers in high-heeled mules, both on cell phones, clattered by the open window. One had the smallest Chihuahua Polly had ever seen. It was pure white, the ghost of dogness, and was being towed on a leash. The little creature stumbled on its two-inch legs, fell, then was dragged up again, as its oblivious mistress chattered on.

“They buy them as accessories, like a purse or a scarf,” Marshall said disgustedly. “Miss,” he called through the window. “Miss.”

The girl turned a blank look in their direction.

“Your dog,” Marshall said to her. “Would it like a drink of water? The poor little guy looks pretty tired.”

The girl shook her head and, still talking on the phone, picked the Chihuahua up and tucked it under her arm.

Polly hadn’t been raised to respect life or practice kindness. When she’d escaped Prentiss, all she’d known was she hated cruelty. In the intervening years she’d been both cruel and kind and, like Sidney Poitier in A Patch of Blue, come to believe tolerance was the greatest human virtue.

“You are a good man,” she said.

“A virtual god to dogs,” Marshall mocked himself. “An old girlfriend of mine-the one I get credit for almost marrying-used to have a white Chihuahua, Tippity.” His lips closed tightly on the dog’s name as if he wished he’d never mentioned it.

“Did it die?” Polly asked impulsively.

For a minute, she didn’t think he was going to answer. Before the ease of their camaraderie could leak away, he began to speak. “I was renovating a shotgun near Magazine. The place was more or less just a shell. Danny and I had a falling out, and I was camping there. Occasionally, Elaine and her dog would stay over. One Friday Danny brought us a bottle of champagne as a peace offering. Our argument had been over Elaine. It wasn’t that he didn’t like her, so much as he didn’t like the fact of her, if you know what I mean.”

Polly hadn’t the foggiest idea what he meant, but she nodded. She hadn’t wanted to know this much about somebody else’s dog, but Marshall seemed to need to tell the story. Though she’d dragged it out of him, he now spoke as if he had to tell it beginning to end, all the words in the proper order.

“So, anyway, the champagne. When we woke up in the morning Tippity was missing. Elaine flipped out; I flipped out. She finally went to work. To make a long story shorter, I found the dog in the freezer. Evidently, Elaine had gotten up during the night for ice cream, or whatever, and opened it. The freezer was the drawer kind at the bottom of the refrigerator, and Tippity had jumped in. When I got to her, she’d about run out of time.”

“Time! Oh, my Lord!” Polly exclaimed. “The time! I forgot my children!” Caught up in Marshall, she had put all thought of Emma and Gracie from her mind. Maternal guilt had her reaching for purse and cell phone before she’d removed the napkin from her lap.

Immediately, Marshall was out of his chair signaling the waitress.

“It’s okay,” Polly said, as she held the phone to her ear. “I didn’t leave them wandering around the Ninth Ward or anything of the kind. A friend is watching them for me. But that dear friend is eighty years old and would probably like to go to bed soon.”

“Let me walk you to your car,” Marshall said, as he threw enough money on the table to cover the bill and the tip twice over.

Polly had been so absorbed by the company of a handsome man that she had forgotten the children. For a mother, that was terrible; for a woman, it was marvelous.

10

Idly, Red shuffled the oversized deck and watched Mr. Marchand talking with the blonde. She knew him-maybe better than anybody but his brother, Danny. Mr. Marchand was why she’d become the Woman in Red: to be near him. And to make a few bucks. Tarot reading on Jackson Square paid pretty well, or had until Katrina. Posthurricane, tourists didn’t seem as interested in getting their cards read. Maybe they figured if there was anything to it, of the thirty or so fortune-tellers on the square, at least one might have mentioned that the levees were going to break. Nobody’d seen it coming. Red hadn’t seen it coming. Though, afterward, she did remember the cards had been running dark most of that August.

Red knew the blonde, too. Not by name and not to talk to. But she knew her by sight. Blondie was a regular. Came about once a month. After getting her cards read, she’d sit in the park with a book, or sometimes just watch the people going by. This wasn’t the first time a man had come up to her, but this was the first time she’d ever given anybody the time of day.

Jason had done the blonde’s reading today. With his phony English accent and swarthy pirate looks, he grabbed up a lot of the business. “Hey Jason,” she hissed across the space separating their setups. “What was in the cards for blondie tonight?”

“Her name’s Polly. Pollyanna. Good name. Old-fashioned and sweet.”

“Yeah, yeah. Anything interesting in the cards?”

Jason cocked an eyebrow as thick and mobile as a caterpillar. Red believed in the tarot. Jason didn’t believe in anything. She wondered if he was going to rag her about it. He chose not to, and she was relieved.

“Let’s see.” He fingered a chin so dark with stubble Red half-imagined she could hear the rasp of his fingernails being filed down. “I did the Celtic Cross. The Knight of Swords was in the sixth.”

Daring, brave, handsome, unstable man, Mr. Marchand.

“What else?”

“I don’t memorize this crap,” Jason said amiably.

“What else? Come on, don’t be an asshole.”

“The Devil card was in the top of the ninth.” Even in the dusky light she could see the twinkle in his eyes. She wondered if he was bullshitting her.

The ninth card represented things that came out of nowhere. The Devil coming out of nowhere was no joke. Not with Mr. Marchand in the mix. “No kidding?” She sounded plaintive, like a beggar. She said it again, better. “No kidding?”

Jason waved a dismissal. “Would I kid about the Devil?” he asked, as he turned to smile on a couple of rubes down from Mississippi or Montana.

Mr. Marchand’s blonde, Polly, stood up, and they walked away together. Red whistled softly through her teeth. Ninety-nine point nine percent of the time, watching Mr. Marchand was a major snooze. He didn’t do much of anything that she could tell. Just worked, and worked, and went home, and worked some more.

At the gate on the garden’s east side, the two of them turned right. Mr. Marchand’s head was bent to catch what Polly was saying, a smile-a rare thing with him-playing around his mouth.

Red pushed down on the table to heave herself from her chair. Her hands were pressed flat, fingers, fat at the base, pointed where the acrylic nails had been filed too sharp, splayed out like starfish arms. For an instant, she didn’t recognize them. Her hands were slender, the skin smooth and white. These fat, spotty, wrinkled things revolted her.

Mostly, she never thought of who she used to be, but the alien hands made her remember. A wave of self-pity washed over her; if she’d had a cyanide tooth, she’d’ve bitten down on it. Second best, she thought, and fished a silver flask from one of the plastic Wal-Mart bags that served as purse and office.

Bag lady, she thought as she took a swig. Two steps from being a fucking bag lady. The silver flask made her feel a little better, not just the hit of Jack Daniels, but the flask itself. It probably wasn’t real silver or even an antique-she’d gotten it for four dollars at the French Market, and there was a dent in it. But if she didn’t think about that, she could pretend it was like she was taking a tipple, like an English lady on a foxhunt maybe, a little snort to keep off the chill.

“Hey, Em. Emily,” she called, as she delicately wiped the mouth of the flask on her sleeve and screwed the cap back on. “Will you watch my setup for a few minutes? I got to pee.”

Emily wasn’t a friend exactly, but they’d set up next to each other in the same place for years and got along okay. Maybe that was friendship. Who could tell anymore?

“Go ahead. We’re here for the late shift.” “We” meant Emily and her best friend, Bony, an old wiener dog so crippled it had a little cart like a person’s wheelchair that carried its rear end around. Bony spent his days on Em’s lap. Em lifted Bony ’s paw and waved bye-bye.

Red took the zippered makeup bag she kept her money in from the sack beneath her chair and stuffed it down the front of her shift until it wedged against the band of her bra. If somebody made off with the rest of the stuff, it was mostly crap anyway.

For a big woman, she moved gracefully. She was proud of that. One time, when she was a lot younger, she’d gotten the bug to take ballet. She’d done real good until she’d run out of money.

Well, what had happened was she’d had a few too many before she went to class, and the bitch who taught it got huffy, and that was that. She’d been going to quit anyway. Too expensive.

Dusk had slid a couple more notches toward night. Hurrying across the garden, she wasn’t worried that Mr. Marchand or his lady friend would turn and see her. Most people didn’t see her anymore. Sometimes it made her feel bad. More often than not, it came in handy.

They hadn’t gone far, just into the River’s Edge Restaurant on the corner. They were seated at a candlelit table by one of the windows.

Red settled herself on an iron bench on the brick walkway. It was like she was in a dark theater, and they were the movie on screen, except she couldn’t hear what they were saying. She pulled out the silver flask. That never went into the bags unless she was right there with them; it lived in a pocket, and if her gown didn’t have a pocket for it, she got that iron-on stuff and made one. A girl needed the essentials.

Red had never seen Mr. Marchand like he was tonight. Narrowing her eyes against the booze, she tried to figure out if it was the candlelight or what. He looked like he’d lost a couple decades. Red took another little snort to help her concentrate and cocked her head to one side.

Not just younger. “Fuck,” she whispered. She’d hit on it. Once the thought came to her there was no doubt about it.

Mr. Marchand looked happy. It had taken her so long because she’d never seen him happy before. Not like she’d ever thought about it; she had better things to do than sit around wondering if he was happy or not. But seeing it she knew he hadn’t been like that until now. He didn’t yuk it up like some guys might, or grin, or anything. It was in his strange, quiet way. He sort of glowed happy, like babies when they’re asleep and fed.

Miss Pollyanna was doing it. He glowed at her. Or maybe reflected the light coming off of her because she was a natural glow-er. Red didn’t know quite what she meant by that but it was true. The Polly woman had that inner thing going that can’t be painted on or faked.

Ms. Polly-the-blonde-charmer didn’t know what she was getting into.

Man, was she going to have something to talk about tonight. This was big! Red laughed and tipped the flask again.

“Fuck.” It was empty. She tossed it toward the garbage can on the corner, remembered it wasn’t a beer can, and hurried to retrieve it before some junky or drunk got it.

Sydney ’s was down North Peters a couple of blocks. The store carried booze, and chips, and cigarettes. It’d take her probably five minutes, ten at the outside, to go and resupply. For a minute, she stood wondering if she dared. If they got away, it could go bad for her.

Polly laughed, and Mr. Marchand reached out as if he was going to touch her hand. They weren’t going anywhere for a while, not unless it was to somebody’s room, and Red doubted blondie was the type. She knew for a fact Mr. Marchand wasn’t.

Comforted by that thought, she deserted her post in search of refreshments. She wasn’t away long, she was sure of that, but when she got back they were gone. A waitress was wiping down the table.

“Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me,” she whispered as she turned around in a full circle peering through the gathering darkness, the glittering lights, and the gabbling tourists. A teenager laughed. With instinct born of experience, Red knew it was at her. Once it would have hurt her feelings; now she barely registered it.

“Shit, shit, shit,” she murmured. A mule-drawn carriage pulled away from the curb where they lined up waiting for fares and she saw them on the far side of the North Peters: Polly’s hair, the color of the moon under the streetlights; Mr. Marchand’s dark suit, a shadow between her and the traffic.

Red trotted to catch up. Years and pounds had built up around her middle, and before she’d made it fifty feet she was gasping for breath, sweat running between her breasts, but she didn’t give up. They walked for what seemed like miles but was only five blocks before they finally stopped on Decatur.

There weren’t as many tourists here as on the square. Red fought to quiet her breathing. If she kept on huffing like a hyperventilating rhino, everybody was going to look at her. Mr. Marchand took the blonde’s keys, opened the driver’s door of a silver Volvo, held it as she got in, then handed her keys back. Polly was laughing, and he looked like he didn’t know what to do.

He didn’t know what to do-that’s why he was acting like some asshole out of a Fred Astaire movie. He didn’t know people didn’t do that crap anymore; they just hooked up, and screwed, and moved on. Mr. Marchand was so stupid he was still doing the whole gentlemen-prefer-blondes routine.

And poor stupid Miss Polly was lapping it up.

Man, was there ever going to be a shitload of stuff to talk about.

11

A week passed, and the lovely Mr. Marchand did not call. Polly might have called him but, though the rules in the new millennium had changed, Polly’s had not. She was not averse to making the first move; it was the second. A second date set the tone for a relationship. In a man’s world, it was necessary that he desire a woman a shade more than she desired him.

Since her marriage to Carver had imploded, Polly had not invested much of herself in the society of men. With the advent of the lovely Mr. Marchand, this was changing. Stifling a sigh, she looked out over the bent heads of her English literature class: Barbara scribbling madly, Tyrell gazing out the window, Bethany staring at the paper the way a bird might stare at a cobra.

After Katrina, New Orleans was a city without children. Schools had been shut down, the students evacuated, enrolled in schools miles-and sometimes states-away. During the last months of 2005, the adults who came back would meet in the rubble-filled streets, mops and shovels in hand, cheering one another with the phrase, “Come January.” January was the date the schools were to reopen and, like those left bereft by the Pied Piper, they waited for the children to return and save New Orleans.

Where children were, parents were: living, working, buying, selling, renovating, recreating the cycle of supply and demand the city needed to recover. Images of New Orleanians rebuilding morphed into images of Marshall Marchand re-creating the city’s historic homes, then to his sudden rare smile. Surreptitiously and undoubtedly with the same sneaky look her students wore when they pulled a similar stunt, Polly eased her cell phone out of her purse and checked to see if she had any calls. Four: one from Marshall Marchand.

Feeling like an idiot, she slipped out of the classroom. In the faculty lounge she checked her messages.

“What are you giggling about?” Mr. Andrews, the eternally sour teacher of American history, had come into the lounge.

“Hot date,” Polly drawled and batted her eyes.

He grunted.

“I wanted to show you my neighborhood,” Marshall said as they parked on a side street beneath three tall pine trees. “If you’d be more comfortable in a public place, I’d be glad to take you out for dinner.”

Polly enjoyed Marshall ’s old-world manners. She reached across the console and touched his hand lightly. “I’ll just keep my cell phone on 911.”

A look akin to pain flashed in his eyes. It was gone so quickly she scarcely noticed the spark of alarm it triggered in her.

He walked around the car to open her door. It was rather grand to sit quietly and compose one’s self while a man did manly things.

Because he was a restoration architect Polly assumed he would live in a monument to old money on St. Charles or in a classic home in an undamaged area of Metairie. But his house was in a pioneer neighborhood. The front yard of the duplex where Marshall and his brother lived contrasted starkly with the weed-filled yard of their neighbor. In the Marchands’ yard was a mosaic of brick and moss framed by elephant ears and surrounded by a wrought iron fence, the bottom brown with rust from the floodwaters.

They stopped on the sidewalk outside the garden gate as if Marshall was reticent about taking her inside. “I’ve got the top two floors; Danny lives downstairs. Below him is an aboveground basement. When the levees broke, we got twenty-six inches of water but cleaning out the cellar is a whole lot easier than gutting the front room,” Marshall told her.

A man, Danny of course, came out the front door of the lower unit and leaned on the porch rail at the top of the stairs. There was a strong family resemblance. Danny looked younger and had a less somber cast to his face; the lines of strain that fanned out from the corners of Marshall ’s eyes were missing from his brother’s and, when Danny smiled, there was a playfulness Marshall lacked.

“Who’s the lady, Marsh?” he called.

Marshall had not mentioned her to his brother. Not a good sign, Polly thought and was annoyed that she was looking for signs.

Marshall made the introductions from where they stood, outside the fence. Only when Danny invited them in for a drink before dinner did he reach for the gate. Because this was New Orleans, and Anne Rice had educated the world on the habits and manners of the undead, it crossed Polly’s mind that vampires cannot enter unless invited. A B-movie shiver passed down her spine. It wasn’t altogether unpleasant.

Danny’s home was beautifully appointed in stark, modern blacks and whites and impeccably kept. A framed magazine cover picturing him cutting a ribbon at the opening of the first Le Cure explained his wealth. He owned a chain of high-end boutique drugstores.

“I keep Marsh out of trouble,” Danny said, as he handed Polly a glass of white wine without asking what she preferred. He winked, “And you look like trouble to me.”

“I have never given anyone a moment’s difficulty,” she drawled. “Not even as a very small child.”

Danny poured a meager whiskey for himself, neat, and sat on the end of the sofa. The leather was soft and matte black, stark to look at, but luxurious to sit on. “So, how did my brother lure you into his clutches?” he said.

“He invited me to tea,” Polly said and smiled at Marshall.

“Ah, the old tea gambit,” Danny said. “ Marshall lives on the edge.”

The brothers shared an inner communion Polly had occasionally noted in the twins she had taught. Having no family-or, as she said in her archer moments, none to speak of-she held familial ties in high regard. Whoever married one brother would have to be aware that there was sacred ground between them and tread lightly.

Whoever married. She was doing it again.

Dinner was as much a surprise as Marshall ’s home had been. While she leaned on the counter in a kitchen better furnished than her own and sipped wine, Marshall made iced asparagus and seasoned sautéed goat cheese on toast. He felt her eyes on him and looked up from his work. “I cook,” he said. Apparently he’d read her mind. “I’ve also mastered the art of free-range grazing. In this town, a guy can pretty much live on the spread at special events. Kind of like a dog knocking over garbage cans but with a tux and a caterer.”

After dinner they walked. Knowledge that another hurricane season was soon to begin lent a sense of preciousness to those who had survived the last. People sat on their front porches or stoops drinking beer and talking with neighbors.

“I came here to invest,” Marshall said. “I had a notion of gentrifying, pocketing the money, and moving to a good neighborhood. Turns out this is a good neighborhood.”

He took Polly’s hand. His was warm, and dry, and callused like a working man’s. Most of the men she’d dated had hands as manicured as her own.

The neighbors were mostly black or Hispanic, and Polly remembered Ma Danko. She hadn’t thought of the old woman in years. Ma had been kind to her. To remember something good about the trailer park startled her, and anger she’d not known she harbored eased, loosening the muscles across her back.

Marshall pointed out schools, showed her homes being renovated, told her which businesses were up and running north, south, east, and west and how this ephemeral box of progress would bring the neighborhood up. The talk was dry and serious, and Polly wondered what he was afraid he would say if he didn’t talk about urban renewal.

“Did you lure me all the way out here to sell me a house?” she asked to upset whatever applecart he was pushing.

He stopped walking and looked at her. The setting sun dyed his hair red and limned the strong line of his jaw. “In a way,” he said quietly.

12

Marshall handed Polly out of his vintage truck, highly cognizant of the pressure of her hand, the way she swung her legs, ankles neatly together. He walked with her to the door but did not kiss her goodnight.

She shook his hand-just the ends of her fingers in his-not the hard pumping as of a well handle that women had adopted from their male counterparts. “I had a splendid evening, Mr. Marchand. You are a darling man.” With a glance up at him through her lashes, she turned and disappeared inside.

For a moment, long enough to savor the last whisper of her perfume but not so long as to seem a stalker, Marshall remained on the steps. He could not remember when he’d wanted to kiss a woman as much as he did Polly. Never, he expected. The strength of his desire was why he hadn’t. He’d been afraid he’d step over the line-or swoon and make a fool of himself.

Next time, he promised, and returned to his truck. Thirty years ago when he’d bought it, it was a beat-up, old workhorse, and he’d used it as such. He still had a toolbox in the back full of carpenters’ tools, but the truck was no longer a beast of burden. It was mint: a refurbished, spit-shined, cherry-red, 1949 pickup. He didn’t take it out as much as he once had but something about Ms. Deschamps had decided him to bring her home in it. She’d loved it.

And I love her. The thought sent a stab of terror through him. “Where in the hell did that come from?” he asked aloud. It reminded him of the selling-her-a-house comment he’d made. There wasn’t a whole lot of ways a woman could take that. It was a wonder she didn’t run screaming down the street.

Marshall buckled his seat belt and resisted the urge to sit in the truck in front of her house just to be near her. He felt as if the day he’d seen her in the square he’d woken up, like Rip Van Winkle; that, until then, he’d been sleepwalking for twenty-five years. This rush of life was heady. With a cold fear that threatened to turn into panic he knew, if Polly were to vanish, he’d fall back into that self-induced coma. Or worse.

Marshall stomped the starter button so hard the old truck virtually leapt to attention. Did he think if he swept her off her feet and up the aisle quickly enough, by the time she found out what membership in the Marchand family entailed, it would be too late?

And how long could he keep lying to her? He found lying to Polly almost physically painful, even when done by omission.

Telling the tragic tale of Elaine’s dog and the freezer, he had omitted little things, like the dog hadn’t actually jumped into the freezer; its paws were taped together and its little muzzle taped shut so it couldn’t bark.

Details like that.

Like how he wrenched the freezer drawer off its runners and saw the little creature, jaws rimed with frost, shivering on a bag of frozen peas, eyes big, paws together, silently begging not to be killed.

That was a long time ago, Marshall thought. Things changed.

In a sudden rage he pounded the steering wheel. “Damn it, things change!” he shouted.