Late in the Standoff

City Codes

“It doesn’t pencil out,” said the priest — the lawyer-developer-priest from the Dallas Archdiocese. Father Matt. “We knock one unit off our sixty-unit plan, we’ll lose our profit margin. Not that we’ll profit. We’re strictly nonprofit, of course. But in the next ten years we’ll have to recoup our building costs, our maintenance outlays … otherwise, it’s not feasible for us to proceed. In which case, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell — that’s what you’ll get next door instead of us.” By us he meant God-fearing Good Guys. Nice Neighbors.

I was thinking, Pizza Hut. Hmm. One squatty story instead of a seventy-five-foot apartment house packed with Catholic college boys leering into my stepdaughter’s bedroom window. I was raised Catholic. I know what those bastards are like.

I thought, Taco Bell. I could abide that.

“No, sorry.” Father Matt shook his graying head. As a concerned neighbor, living next to the lot where the Fellowship Commons would rise, I had joined other concerned neighbors in asking Father Matt to reconsider the project’s density. We were sitting around a table at City Hall, after work. The table smelled of coffee, though none appeared to be available. I was late; Haley was waiting for me at the Boys and Girls Club, where she went after school each day. “I can’t accommodate you. It just doesn’t, you know, pencil out.”

I had a pretty good idea what he could do with his pencil.

“Why are you sticky?” Haley sat up against her pillow. As I straightened her sheet, she reached to tap my collarbone. She pulled away quickly.

“My heart-scar isn’t healing so well,” I said. “You know the vitamins you take at breakfast? My doctor says if I cut one in half each night — a Vitamin E gel — and spread the juice on my chest, in six months or so, the scar might vanish.”

“Pill-guts?”

“Yep.”

“What was the matter with your heart?”

“It was all blocked up.”

She curled her blankie under her chin. She’d had it since she was two — before I came into her life — and now, six years later, its frayed edges looked like fettuccini. “My daddy?”

“Yeah, honey?”

“He says his heart is broken.”

Oh my. “How often does he tell you this?”

“Pretty much often.”

“Haley, you know, sometimes adults — ”

“You were friends with my daddy?”

“For a while, yes.”

“If you weren’t having mating with my mommy, you and my daddy would probably still be friends, right?”

Pizza! Tacos! Prayer! Any damn thing but this! “Maybe.”

“My favorite game is ‘Mercy,’” she said, and for ten minutes she told me about the fun she had twisting her daddy’s arm until he screamed, in mock pain, “Mercy!” Finally, a yawn. “Terry?”

“What is it, sweetie?”

“You got pill-guts all over Blankie.”

“Here, let me rub it off. Lights out now.”

Downstairs, I locked all the doors. Before heading to bed, I stopped at the bathroom mirror. Bumps and ridges right between my ribs, like a badly sown field of crops. Gone in six months? Well. In another six months, if Good Father Matt had his way, we’d never know that Sarah Levin’s historic home had been next door. I patted myself with a towel.

In bed, Jean was reading part of the Comalia Land Development Code, downloaded from the Internet: “Section 18A: Neighborhood Compatibility.” She looked up at me. “Are we still going to fight this thing?”

“Father Matt?”

“I think we can get him on scale, the solar maps — that baby’ll bury us in shade — and the fact that he’s asking for seventeen different exemptions from the code. Plus he’s got no parking or lighting plan. And the latest city stats show student enrollment dropping.” She waved a sheet of paper. “This building is just a money-maker for the church. It’s not a community service, no matter how they pitch it.” From the beginning of the process — meeting with the neighborhood association, writing testimony for our upcoming appearance before the city planning commission — she’d been galvanized not just by the potential destruction of the Levin place and our loss of privacy (Haley’s bedroom would be the most exposed to the new building) but by the fact that the couple who’d sold us our house, two years ago, knew this development was in the works, and hadn’t told us. We’d learned this from the neighbors. Some of them suggested we sue the Wards for lack of full disclosure, but we weren’t the suing types, nor could we afford a lawsuit. Besides, we just wanted to be done with the Wards.

When our real estate agent first showed us the house, Jean and I weren’t married yet. Mr. Ward, a retired Navy man, in his early seventies or thereabouts, followed us closely as we toured each room, asking who we were, what we did (our agent told us, later, he was way out of line). He was tall and fit with a belly mildly rounded, like the curve of an old computer screen. He towered over me but seemed entirely hapless. Days later, I learned from a colleague at the local college, a man who was active in the Catholic community, that Don Ward had been asking about Jean and me at mass. I imagined him shouting, “Living in sin? No sale!” and Jean and I got the jitters.

As it turned out, sin didn’t interest the state of Texas or Bright Realty, and the deal went through just fine. “God bless you,” Mrs. Ward, a frail, parchment-skinned woman, told us the day we moved in our boxes. Her stuff was already gone — all but the framed, glass-sealed paintings of the Virgin Mary, which hung in every room. The Virgin sleeping, blessing others, weeping, cradling her child. As we worked, Mrs. Ward gingerly removed these scenes from the walls, wrapped them in tissue, and placed them into U-Haul boxes. “God bless you,” she said, passing through the kitchen as I unpacked my margarita glasses with their green, cactus-shaped stems. “God bless you,” she whispered to Jean, slipping by the bathroom as Jean arranged her makeup and toiletries in the cabinet. “That woman creeps me out,” Jean said once Mrs. Ward had gone. I agreed, though the old altar boy in me was touched by her care of the Holy Mother. Jean was Jewish and would have none of it — though she softened when a neighbor told us the Wards had raised nine kids in this house. “Nine? It’s a wonder the woman can walk.”

This bit of bio, we figured, explained the pass-through between the kitchen and the dining room, a space with a shelf, cut among upper and lower cabinets, where plates could be set. The space had been boarded up — scarred, splintery plywood — blocking the kitchen from the dinner table. Removing the plywood, to open things up, was one of our first priorities. “Clearly, the woman was walling herself off from her children,” Jean said. “And from Sailor Boy, too,” I added. For a week or so we felt tenderness for poor Mrs. Ward, who, we surmised, had barely kept her sanity in this house. If the Virgin had helped her survive, then God bless the Virgin.

Then we discovered what the Wards hadn’t told us. Though Don had no financial interest in the Commons, he was a local Catholic leader and had helped persuade the archdiocese to invest in the real estate. Initially, the rest of the neighbors understood that the church would renovate the Levin place, one of the oldest homes in our town — we’re sixty miles south of Dallas — and one of the few nineteenth-century structures in central Texas designed by a woman (“And a Jew,” Jean noted). The house had been vacant for years but was listed on the Historic Register. The neighborhood was fond of it. “It could be rezoned and fixed up to make a nice coffee shop or cyber-café,” Don Ward told his friends.

Then Father Matt started waving his pencil.

I slid into bed next to Jean. “We’re sure the historic designation doesn’t protect the Levin house?”

She shuffled her papers. “Texas seems to consider property rights a kind of holy writ. If the owner — which, in this case, is the archdiocese now — doesn’t want the place protected, then not even a listing on the register can save it.”

I tugged the pages from her hands and pulled her close. “You’re sticky,” she said.

“Sorry. Haley was affectionate tonight. Well, not quite. A brief touch.”

“She’ll warm up eventually.”

“You think she thinks she’s betraying her dad if she’s cuddly with me?”

She didn’t answer. Instead, she licked two fingers and lightly stroked my nipples. “Still numb?” she asked softly.

The gesture, and the question, almost made me cry. Before my surgery, eight months ago, Jean had been delighted at how sensitive I was. “I’ve never met a man who got so aroused there!” Post-op, this pleasure had apparently been snatched from us.

She flattened her palm across my sticky ridges. Mercy! What had I become? “Is there some kind of list I can get my name on, to preserve what’s left of me?” I said.

“You think Haley’s asleep yet?”

“Yeah, she was beat.”

“Then I’ve got your list right here,” Jean said, rolling on top of me.

What were those people thinking?

A dozen times a day Jean and I floated this question as we erased the Wards from the house. We opened up the pass-through; pulled up the carpet in the living room, exposing a gorgeous oak floor; took down a gray, accordion-style divider in the entry between the foyer and the den; removed wallpaper, repainted.

In the front garden the Wards had created a small grotto. A three-foot plaster statue of Mary had been enshrined there; the Wards had taken her with them, leaving the structure empty. On a whim one Saturday morning in mid-February, as we were shopping for trellises at a nursery, Jean bought a stone chicken head, a novelty garden item, and we set it in the grotto. We referred to it as the Chicken Virgin and joked about scrambling eggs for the Last Supper. I felt little guilty stabs, participating in these wisecracks, but I knew it was part of our ritual of claiming ownership. We meant nothing personal against the Wards, I told myself. We held no ill will toward the Catholic church.

One afternoon, right before leaving to get Haley at the Boys and Girls Club, I was uprooting part of the old garden with a shovel, tilling the soil, when the Wards drove up. Though they’d informed the post office of their new address, a few letters still came for them each week. We’d called and told them this. Now, Don handed me a stack of mailing labels and asked if we’d forward the letters to him. He frowned at my handiwork. I thought Mrs. Ward might cry. “We loved this garden,” Don said.

I wiped the sweat from my forehead. A mild breeze gave me a chill, now that I’d stopped digging. My chest was numb. “We plan to enjoy it, too.” I wasn’t feeling charitable. That morning, in a meeting at City Hall, Father Matt had threatened the neighborhood again. “This is classic Nimbyism,” he said. “If you continue to protest our development plans, I might be forced, as I’ve said, to sell the lot to commercial interests, and you’ll be dealing with fast food chains.” Then he accused me (as a lost sheep) of acting out of anti-Catholic bias. “Absolutely not!” I exploded, aware that I was overreacting — probably because of my chicken jokes. “This is about neighborhood compatibility, pure and simple. Historic preservation. It’s about who owns our community’s future, about the people who actually live here, not some out-of-town developer who just so happens to have religious affiliations.”

Father Matt had glared at me. In my mind I heard him say, Your wife’s a Jew, isn’t that right? Like that Manischewitz-soaked old Levin woman? I inhaled slowly and tried to relax. “You talk about fast food as a bad neighbor, but I don’t think it’s neighborly of you, Father, to draw up a plan, not consulting any of the locals, then threatening us when we don’t go along with it.”

“All right,” he’d said, gathering his papers into a calfskin briefcase. “I’ll see you next week, in front of the planning commission.”

That morning, letters had appeared in our local paper, arguing both sides of the proposal. Among the project’s supporters, those who accused the neighbors of narrow self-interest, rejecting the Levin house’s historic importance — “it’s just a ratty old shack”—were the Wards. Their letter pointed out that Comalia was a growing college town, in need of more student housing, and that unlike most absentee landlords, the archdiocese would be a thoughtful and conscientious caretaker.

Now the couple stood beside me, shocked by the stone fowl and my methodical disembowelment of their landscaping. I stabbed the shovel into the dirt. “How’s the new place?” I asked, with a hostile inflection, I admit.

“Oh fine, just fine,” said Mrs. Ward. She wore a blue head scarf and thick tinted glasses. The flesh on her cheeks looked as thin as the petals of the Siberian iris Jean hoped to plant here someday. “We loved this house but, you know, it was just too much for us to take care of with the kids all gone. The new condo isn’t special or anything, but it’s manageable. Better for us now.”

Don cleared his throat and glanced next door at the Levin place. The shingles sagged. “Tell me the truth,” he said, straining for a jolly tone. “Won’t it be good to have that old eyesore gone?”

His wife placed her hand on his arm.

“Don, do you realize how amazing it is that that house, built in 1880, anticipates Frank Lloyd Wright and the Craftsman movement? What a visionary Sarah Levin was?” I said.

“Father Matt is really a very good man,” Don answered.

“I’m sure he is. But in his dealings with us, he’s been less than forthright and cooperative. He doesn’t care about this town,” I said, siphoning energy from this morning’s anger. “Student enrollment is backsliding here. We don’t need more housing.”

“That’s debatable,” Don said.

“Father Matt only cares about wheeling and dealing — and hiding his business affairs behind the facade of ‘good works.’”

Mrs. Ward flinched and tried, once more, to tug her husband’s arm.

“Well now, you’re quite the revolutionary, aren’t you?” Don said. The old Navy man, I guessed, suspicious of anyone younger than he was.

“Just putting together testimony, based on the city codes. I’m simply exercising my legal rights as a citizen, Don.” I reached for the shovel. “Like, for example, I had a legal right to know that developers were going to raze the house next door and slap up a four-story behemoth less than twenty yards from my stepdaughter’s bedroom. Don’t you think I had a right to know that?”

“Listen to me, now — ,” Don began.

“Come on, Don,” Mrs. Ward urged him.

“We didn’t know — ”

“That doesn’t wash,” I said.

“Well, all right, but we weren’t sure which plan — ”

“You just wanted your money and you wanted out. Not very saintly of you, Don.”

“Your realtor should have checked, she should have — ”

“No,” I said. “You should have.”

“Don, let’s go.” Somehow, his wife mustered the stamina to move him. He half-stumbled backward on the walk. “We’re old people,” he said weakly. “Our kids used to play in this garden — ”

“Don.” Mrs. Ward took him by the shoulders and nodded toward their car. From across the street she glanced at me. “God bless you,” she said.

“What’s Ziomism?” Haley asked me in the car, on our way back from Boys and Girls.

“Zionism? Where’d you hear that word?”

She showed me a pamphlet she’d picked up from the local synagogue. It was for Young Judea Summer Camp. “I want to go, but my daddy says they’ll turn me into a raving Ziomist.”

Bill, Jean’s ex, was raised Protestant, and it had always been an open sore in their marriage that he only half-assedly supported Jean’s efforts to introduce Haley to Judaism. Jean wasn’t devout, but she loved the holiday rituals, the culture, and wanted Haley to treasure them too.

I wasn’t sure how to answer Haley’s question. “Well, as I understand it — and I’m not an expert, okay, not by a long shot — it’s a movement among Israelis, and other Jews around the world, to expand Israel’s borders.”

“You mean, make it bigger?”

“Make it bigger, yes.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Have you heard of Palestinians?”

“Mm-hm.”

“They claim some of the same land Israel does.”

“I know that. I’ve learned that already.”

“Good. Well, lots of people, including many Jews, feel that Israel shouldn’t expand. It should just stay where it is — and the Palestinians should accept them, too — so everyone can live in peace.” I didn’t know how historically or politically accurate I was being. I’d probably just butchered all the facts and — who knows? — scarred her for life.

“My daddy says his heart will be brokender than it already is if I turn to Mom’s people and be a raving Ziomist.”

“I have to say, honey …” I’d never spoken against Bill, never criticized him or questioned his authority in front of Haley. “I don’t think your daddy should tell you things like that.”

“Why not?”

“It’s not fair to your mom. Plus it’s too much of a burden on you for him to ask you to carry his emotional weight.”

“Huh?”

“He needs to solve his own problems.” Was I saying the right thing? Or greedily claiming ownership?

I remembered, then, the day, two and a half years ago, when Jean and I told Haley we were going to live together. She’d giggled nervously and appeared not to register what we’d said. Later, at lunch in her favorite Mexican restaurant, she picked up a plastic fork. “This one’s for you,” she told me, and snapped the fork in half.

“Don’t use her like that!” Jean yelled into the kitchen phone. “She’s not your mother. Or your girlfriend.”

I had just come in from dumping the trash. I rubbed my hands, locked the door behind me. Whenever the air was chilly, I became aware of the dead spots in my chest and thigh, where the surgeon had “harvested” a vein for the bypass. He had told me I might never get feeling back in certain nerves, which had been disturbed by the procedure.

“She’s talking to my daddy,” Haley said casually, glancing up from the floor where she’d spread her multiplication problems. Her cat purred beside her. “She’s mad about the Ziomism thing.”

“Oh.”

“You shouldn’t have told her,” she said.

“Told her what, sweetie?”

“Told her what my daddy said about his heart.”

“Well, I’m her mother!” Jean said, lowering her voice and retreating into a corner away from us. “She’s not your private property!”

Haley aimed a purple pencil at me. “You really shouldn’t have.”

It’s not Haley who’s waiting for me to die. Jean’s fears for my health seized her in our earliest days together, before either of us knew I had heart problems. Her anxiety is related to her father’s death, of leukemia, when she was nineteen and he was fifty-eight. She was traveling when he died so she didn’t get to tell him goodbye. Her psychiatrist-brother in L.A. tells her she suffers from “lack of closure,” which has distilled into guilt, so now she feels responsible for her dad’s death — and fears our ultimate separation.

One afternoon, as we lay in bed together, sipping margaritas after making love, I touched my palm to her chest and she began to cry. “I think I’m grieving for my father,” she said, surprised.

I don’t understand how one intimacy ripples into others, but Jean admitted that day that love and grief are strongly twinned for her, bound up not only in memories of her father but in love’s structure: life’s irresistible attraction to other life, the urgency, the energy, then the surprisingly swift falling-off after life has done its work. Just as someone, knowing she’s about to leave a place, can feel homesick before she’s moved, Jean, after making love, feels wistful already for her body and mine. She’s mourning our losses in advance.

We fell in love when we were both in our early forties, and her melancholy is magnified, I suspect, by the fact that we middle-aged people — old enough to know better, at least — felt happier, sillier, more erotic than we ever had before. Time seemed pliable, warped — all the sweeter for being short. We felt we’d discovered our youth for the first time, just as it seemed we were on the brink of letting go of it, gracefully.

From the beginning, she worried about my slightest cough, skin blemish, or exhaustion at night. I’d kid her about her misplaced hypochondria. Once, she came right out and admitted she feared she’d lose me early. I joked about her romantic streak: her favorite movie was Truly, Madly, Deeply, the story of a young widow whose love for her husband is so intense that his ghost returns each night to schmooze with her. M. F. K. Fisher, Jean’s favorite writer, was an early widow.

When Jean and I bought the house from the Wards, Haley was six. We fixed her room up to look almost exactly like her room at her daddy’s house, ten blocks away. Our house was in a neighborhood of run-down student rentals, once-proud bungalows that had been trashed over five decades. The Wards had lived here for thirty-seven years — nine kids! — and though we hated their taste (what were those people thinking?), we were grateful they’d left intact the Craftsman-style wood trim and had maintained the place beautifully. Two blocks away was the campus, where Jean and I taught literature. Convenience, old-fashioned charm, plenty of room … we felt lucky, but still, Jean seemed to skulk around waiting for judgment to fall. I wondered if the pain she felt, dissolving her marriage — though she’d been miserable with Bill — had mixed with her father-guilt to crush her joy. We were two of our circle’s straightest arrows, not religious, but fair-minded, traditionally moral. Unlikely partners for an affair. Yet here we were. Transgressors, against society and all of society’s gods. Surely we wouldn’t — shouldn’t — get away with this.

When Jean first heard that the Levin place might be destroyed, she took it as a sign that her fears were on target. The Angel of Doom in the shape of a backhoe. Purely by coincidence, we learned the news on Passover. “That’s right, get the Jews,” she muttered, reading the city’s notice.

My attempts to laugh away her worries had ended about sixteen months after we’d moved into the house. One night, during love, I doubled over with chest pains. She drove me to the emergency room. Doctors told me I’d narrowly missed “keeling over, kaput.” Two days later, a cardiac surgeon opened me up, as we’d done to our kitchen pass-through, and performed a double bypass.

My primary-care doctor informed me I’d “exhibited no risk factors.” I was as unlikely to develop ticker trouble as I was to start an affair.

In any case, all my jokes about Jean borrowing trouble have stopped. We linger with each other now, squeezing as much as we can out of life. I’ve tried to reduce my daily stress, but our town is small, and I can’t help running into Bill.

One day, he and I arrived at the same time to pick up Haley at Boys and Girls. Jean had told me Haley was going to spend the night with us; Bill had the date wrong. Haley handled the moment better than we did. She looked at us, shrugged, then went on chasing her pals in the parking lot. “It’s my night,” Bill said, anguished. He scratched his sandy hair. “Okay,” I said, and told Haley goodbye.

I drove away, damp with sweat. I was shaken already: earlier that day, I’d shampooed the carpet at home (this was before we’d ripped it out); now, I was convinced Haley’s kitten had licked up the cleaning fluid. I should have locked her in a back room until the carpet dried. No doubt, I’d return to find her dead. Haley would be inconsolable.

I passed a restored apartment house. Increasingly anxious, I remembered a former student of mine who had lost her dog to a fire there, a year or two ago. Still thinking of Haley and Bill, I felt irrationally responsible for the dog, now, too. If I’d been a better teacher, more at ease in front of groups, not futzing around and keeping the class overtime, damn it, somehow that dog would still be alive. God forgive me.

At home, I found Haley’s kitten sitting happily on a windowsill, staring at the broken windows of the Levin place.

Haley had been pissy all week, upset about her homework, picky at dinner. One night, when we’d told her she’d watched enough TV, she paced the den. The heels of her sandals slapped the hardwood floor. “Bored bored bored,” she said.

“Why don’t you sit in the window,” I suggested, “and draw the old Levin place?”

“Why?”

“It might be gone pretty soon. If that happens, your drawing will be one of the few records the city will have left of it,” I said.

“I don’t want to.”

We went back and forth until I wore her down. She got out her gel pens and sullenly scratched a few lines on a sketchpad: the broken rain spout, unhinged doors, tilted window frames. “Done.”

“Terrific.”

“It’s stupid.”

“No no, sweetie, this is wonderful, this is — ”

“I mean the house.” She grabbed her blankie and started upstairs for her room. “It’s not even worth drawing.”

The day before show time in front of the planning commission, Haley was with her dad. Jean and I came home from classes, made love in the late afternoon. We were more in the mood with Haley out of the house. “I’m afraid she can sense it, from three rooms away, if we even kiss,” I’d told Jean one night. “She’s way beyond her years — ”

“No. She’s right at her years,” she said. “That’s the problem.”

She ran her hands along my chest. I tried and tried to feel something. Finally, I turned my wet eyes toward the wall. In the day’s wavering shadows, tinged by the last of the sun’s red light, I could make out a faint square in the plaster — though we’d painted — where one of the Virgins had hung. Jean’s brown hair splayed across my belly. She clung to my hips. “Neighborhood compatibility,” I whispered, and we laughed.

For a while we lay half-asleep, then, “Time to get ready,” Jean whispered. “Okay, I’m awake,” I said, feeling for my pulse. We showered, dressed, fed the cat, then drove downtown to Barton’s, a musty restaurant full of leaden foods and blue-haired organ music. Its claim to fame was that Hillary Clinton had stepped out of a limo here during her husband’s ’96 campaign. For ten minutes she shook diners’ hands. God knows what she was doing in Comalia. Maybe her publicist thought a photo op in a small-town eatery would wrap up Texas’s ag votes. For me, the restaurant was notorious because its former owner, just my age, had gone face down one day into a bowl of four-alarm chili. Dead of a heart attack.

Jean and I would never have set foot in the place, but our neighborhood association wanted to meet here tonight — it was quiet, rarely crowded. The students in town preferred Taco Bell, out by the interstate.

Rex Smithers, the association president, a retired car dealer, asked the six of us who showed to read our prepared testimonies. We’d have five minutes each in front of the planning commission, he said. We made revisions, cutting the fat, making sure our points didn’t overlap. Rex passed out a list of words. “Spice your speeches with these,” he said. “They’re positive, attention-getting — the kind of thing I’ve heard the commission really responds to.”

I glanced at the sheet:

Mentally, I added “chicken-head.”

“We don’t want to be negative,” Rex said, “overly emotional, or sacrilegious — ”

“You better believe that padre’ll have a crack legal team with him,” said Andy Nelson, a dentist who lived two doors east of us. “That is, if he’s stopped diddling little boys long enough to put together a team.”

“Andy,” Rex said, blushing. “That’s precisely the kind of talk we have to squelch.”

“I know, I know. A joke.”

“Please.”

“I know.”

“He doesn’t need a legal team,” Jean said. “He’s a lawyer himself and very articulate. Don’t underestimate him.”

She and I excused ourselves early and began discussing where we could get some healthy food when we spotted the Wards in a booth. They were sitting with a thin woman in a blue scarf, just like the one Mrs. Ward wore. In front of them were great platters of buttery mashed potatoes, chicken fried steaks, creamy, heart-clogging pies — what are those people thinking?

Are all locally owned places, with historic ties to the city, worth preserving?

We tried to slip past, but Don spied us, though he pretended he hadn’t. As we approached the table, determined not to hide — now that we’d been caught — the thin woman, facing away from us, removed her scarf and touched a large, grainy scar on the side of her head. It appeared to flake a little. “I’ll never get better,” she said mournfully. Then she noticed us and swiftly tied the scarf back into place. For a minute none of us moved. I remembered Don’s words: We’re old people. Finally, Jean touched Mrs. Ward’s wool sleeve. “I hope you’re enjoying your new home,” Jean said. “Thank you,” Mrs. Ward said and patted Jean’s hand.

The meeting took place in a conference room in the city’s new fire station, a two-story red brick building with automated doors for wheelchair access, banks of computer monitors behind the receptionists’ desks, and vintage photos of horse-drawn wagons on the walls. A list of fire-safety tips — “Hot Topics”—wilted in a wall-bin labeled TAKE ONE! The station sat catty-corner to a Hollywood Video. Frat boys squealed their tires, pulling out of the lot, sneaking soft-core DVDs back to their tents, no doubt, or to the underpasses they were forced to huddle under, since — according to Father Matt — cheap housing was so scarce in our mean little burg.

The commissioners looked well-fed: their shirt-buttons strained under too-small blazers, most of which were orange or black, the colors of the college’s athletic teams. Probably these guys all ate at Barton’s.

A dark spot smudged Father Matt’s forehead and the foreheads of all his supporters. “What happened to them?” Jean said, staring openly. It hit me: Ash Wednesday. The old words came rushing back. The faithful must do penance. Remember, unto dust shall ye return. Father Matt’s group sat stiffly, hands folded, staring intently at the commissioners, their pale flesh marked by the palms’ residue. We were sunk. The priestly robes, the solemn, graveyard air, the moral authority. We didn’t stand a chance against a display like this.

Haley squirmed in her seat. Bill had promised to babysit, but an hour ago he had canceled. “Hot date,” he’d said, grinning slyly at Jean as he stood with Haley under our dim yellow porch light. He’d come without calling.

“Bill, you promised,” Jean said. She fiddled with her earrings. I wrestled my necktie behind her. “We’re in a hurry. We can’t — ”

“You want me to date, don’t you?” he asked, I was happy for him. In any case, he knew Jean wouldn’t argue with him in front of Haley. “I’ll take her tomorrow night,” he said. He bent to kiss his daughter, and she looped her arms around his neck. I had to try again with my tie.

“All right, honey, it’s going to be a really long meeting,” Jean said once Bill had driven away. She held Haley’s chin so she’d listen. “You’ll need plenty to do so you can sit quietly. Bring some books and your gel pens and your Walkman, okay? Don’t forget your headphones …”

We scrambled to gather Haley’s stuff as well as our testimonies, which were paper-clipped inside manila folders. The cat leaped onto the table and rubbed my arm; I dropped the folders and a few loose pages from Haley’s sketchbook. Hastily, Jean and I pulled things together. “Come on, gals, let’s go, let’s go!” I said.

Now we sat in the firehouse trying to ignore the stares of our opponents. Unseasonably cool air assaulted us from a large open window. I felt for my pulse. Behind me, a man muttered, “Politics. It’s the wet bar of soap at the bottom of a bathtub.” Across the aisle from us, a local sandwich shop owner complained to a woman beside her, “Last year I had to sell thirty thousand turkey subs to raise the scratch to bring my building up to code.”

The meeting came to order. Haley sighed loudly, bobbing her head to Pink or Sting or Smashmouth. I touched her knee to try to settle her down. She moved her leg away. From across the room, Mrs. Ward gave us a tight smile. Nine kids? Any advice? I tried to signal back, nodding at her. Don wore his Navy uniform, which mostly still fit him. The sleeves were short. The elaborate gold buttons wobbled with each swift breath he took. “For God’s sakes,” Jean whispered. She rolled her eyes.

The commission’s chair reminded us that “this body’s judgment will be based solely on the Land Development Code and the city’s Comprehensive Plan. We all know there are high emotions on both sides of this issue; we’ve all seen the letters in the paper, but I caution each of you to restrict your testimony to the pertinent clauses of the CP and the LDC. No personal smears, no charges of bias, religious, political, or otherwise. Is that clear?”

Haley, slipping off her headphones, said, “Yep.” Jean shushed her.

City staffers presented their report, confirming that the archdiocese was requesting over a dozen exemptions from the code, including smaller parking accommodations, less restrictive lighting requirements, and freedom from providing open space on the lot. The Levin house was noted on the state’s Historic Register and was considered an important example of early Texas architecture. Nevertheless, staff recommended approval of the project, as it matched the CP’s vision for higher inner-core density to avoid outlying sprawl.

Next, Father Matt. He straightened his white clerical collar, smoothed a hank of loose gray hair so his forehead ashes would be prominent. From his briefcase he pulled a sheaf of notes. He spoke eloquently about the New Urbanism, the city’s need for affordable housing, the church’s desire to help the community. He fended off the commissioners’ questions with the air of someone swatting flies. This was a man used to getting what he wanted. Who could say no to a priest? I imagined twisting his arm until he yelled, “Mercy!” “We will not be asking our tenants’ sexual orientations. Under state law, we’re not allowed to discriminate.” Will you ask them not to ogle my wife’s daughter? “Yes, we’ll have on-site managers to make sure tenants respect the neighborhood …”

His supporters testified next, most of them emphasizing that church ownership of the property would benefit the area. “They make it sound like a bunch of heathens live there, in need of conversion,” Jean hissed to me. Some groused about a “small group of elite homeowners blocking progress.” A few insisted there was no issue here: property rights were property rights, and no one, including the government, should tell an owner what to do with his land. They complained about having to appear before a city board at all. “Isn’t democracy splendid?” Jean said. Her cheeks reddened. I’d never seen her so agitated.

Person after person rose to speak, marching up the center aisle to sit at an oak table in front of the commissioners’ dais. Haley slid off her chair and crawled beneath her mother’s feet. She fumbled with her Walkman. Jean told her to sit up, behave. Don and his wife moved slowly to the front; her tiny hand rested on his arm. “Oh great, now we’ll hear from the patriot,” Jean whispered. Don said only, “Father Matt is a good man. He has my support.” His voice shook. Mrs. Ward echoed her husband and gave the commissioners God’s blessing. As she returned to her seat, I had an urge to wash the ashes from the poor woman’s forehead.

Right before Jean stood, the chair apologized to the opposition. He was going to limit our testimony to three minutes each, not five, as the meeting was dragging on, and otherwise we’d be here till midnight. Groans of “Unfair!” but he rapped his gavel and silenced the room.

Haley stared beatifically at her mother as Jean assumed her seat up front. Jean’s earrings gleamed in the light of a video camera recording the proceedings. Her voice was firm, just a smidgen of reined-in anger (including, I figured, her fury at Bill). “Thank you for this opportunity to address you,” she began, her cheeks still flushed. “We all agree that inner-core density is desirable, but only when there is a demonstrated public need, which, I’ll argue, there isn’t in this case. The Comprehensive Plan also includes provisions for preserving the historical character of our neighborhoods and for insuring neighborhood compatibility.”

If poise and persuasion alone could do the trick, and if she’d had a shot at her father’s doctors, she might have preserved the old man, I thought. Absolutely, I wanted her there when my time came. “The applicant’s proposal flagrantly disregards these priorities,” she said. “Specifically, it skirts the codes enforcing compatible scale, step-down rules … and I have some solar maps here …”

“She’s good,” Haley said, entranced. “Really good, isn’t she?” Absently, her hand strayed onto my leg. A warm ripple moved through me. I glanced down at her fingers and noticed on my shirt, just to the left of my tie, a dark Vitamin E stain. I tried to cover it with my coat, jostling Haley. She took her hand away. I couldn’t hide the mark. Why on this night, I thought, recalling the Passover Seder …

“The city codes are clear,” Jean concluded.

I approached the oak table, quivering the way I did on the first day of classes each year as I faced a strange and questioning group. I tried maneuvering my tie with my elbow over the sticky place. No use. Oddly, the table smelled of peppermint tea. I stated my name and address. The city officiais stared down at me. What are they thinking?

I opened my manila folder. It occurred to me that I’d timed my testimony at exactly five minutes. I didn’t know how to cram it into three. I shuffled the pages. My hands trembled. Glaring video lights. “Thank you … for this …”

My skin went cold. My chest felt funny. Oh Lord, I thought. Unto dust —

But it wasn’t a pain or a flame or a squeeze. My nipples! Hell yes! My nipples had raised their little heads! Anxiety, chill … the old nerves stirring! God bless them!

I grinned, idiotically, at the portly commissioners. They studied my stain. “… this opportunity … to be with you … I mean, speak with you …”

I sneaked a peek back at Jean, smiling broadly. She looked stricken. Haley, gripping her headphones, glared at me: How could you embarrass me like this?

“My wife and I … have always wanted a home … in a historic …” I returned to my folder. The pages had fallen out of sequence now and my hands were too shaky to put them in order. In the earlier confusion and our haste to leave the house, had I locked the front door? Had I left our home open to intruders?

Tucked among my papers was Haley’s sketch of the Levin place. It must have slipped in when the cat brushed my arm. Ham-fisted, I held it high. The page rattled. My throat had gone dry. “My daughter,” I croaked. “My daughter loves this place. Please don’t tear it down.”

Snickering, behind me. Titters. I turned. The inside of my shirt snagged on a sticky ridge.

A sea of ashes. Father Matt stopped moving his pencil on a scratchpad. He glanced up and beamed triumphantly. The Wards bowed their heads, respectfully ignoring my distress.

Jean’s face shifted from dismay, like the day she’d grieved for her father, to pale confusion, settling finally into a sad, soft smile, as if to say, You did your best, it doesn’t matter, it’s okay.

It’s more than okay, I thought. Wait’ll we get home.

Haley wagged her head — not in disgust, I realized, but as if we’d shared a joke, then she grinned at me, at her sketch, and gave me a quick thumbs-up. I returned the gesture and waved her drawing so she, and all the room, could see. At least a couple of the commissioners nodded in a friendly way. I heard the chairperson rapping the end of my time, felt my nipples hard against my shirt, and smiled at my fresh-faced gals.