I stood up, introducing Lillian to San Antonio's eldest city councilman. As if she didn't know who he was. As if anybody in town who read the Express-News tabloid section didn't know.

" 'Course," Asante said. "I remember Miss Cambridge. Fiesta Week. The Travis Center opening, with Dan Sheff."

Asante had a gift for names, and that one fell onto the table like another brick. Lillian winced a little. The councilman just smiled. I smiled back. An Anglo man had come up behind Asante and was waiting patiently with that distracted, brooding expression most bodyguards develop. About six feet, curly black hair, boots and jeans, T-shirt and linen jacket. Lots of muscles. He didn't smile.

"Councilman. You made it into the San Francisco paper a while back."

He did his best modest look. "The Travis Center opening. Millions in new revenue to the city. Friends called me up from all over the country, said they saw the coverage."

"Actually it was that piece about the secretary and you in Brackenridge Park."

Lillian suppressed a laugh by choking on her margarita. Asante's smile wavered momentarily, then came back different-more of a snarl. We were all quiet for a few seconds. I'd seen him give that look plenty to my dad in the years they had been at each other's throats. I was downright proud to see it turned on me. I figured wherever my father was he would probably be biting the end off a new cigar and laughing his ass off about then.

Asante's large friend felt the change of mood, I guess. He moved around to the side of the table.

"Love to have you join us for dinner," I offered. "Double date?"

"No thanks, Jack," the councilman said. That was the second time today someone had called me by my father's name. It sounded strange.

"I hear you're in town for good." He didn't seem to like the sound of that. "It can be tough finding jobs down here. You have any trouble, let me know."

"Thanks."

"Least I can do." A politician's grin smoothed over his face again. "Not every day a Bexar County sheriff gets shot down. Your dad ... that was a bad way to go."

Asante kept smiling. I was counting the gold caps on his teeth, wondering how hard they would be to break off.

"I always wished I could do something more for your family, Jack, but, well, you left town so fast. Like a jackrabbit, heard that shot and boom, you were in California."

A young orange-haired woman in a glittery dress came up behind Asante and waited at a respectful distance. Asante glanced back at her and nodded.

"Well," he said, patting his belly. "Dinnertime now. Like I said, you need anything, Jack, let me know. Nice to see you again, Miss Cambridge."

Asante's fan club followed him to a table nearby. My enchilada dinner was probably very good. I don't remember.

Around midnight Lillian and I drove back to her house with the VW top down. The stars were out and the air was as warm and clean as fresh laundry.

"I'm sorry about Asante," she said after a while.

I shrugged. "Don't be. Coming home is like that-you have to face the assholes too."

She had taken my hand by the time we pulled into her driveway. We sat there listening to the conjunto music from the house next door. The windows were lit up orange. Beers were being opened, loud talking in Spanish, Santiago Jimenez's accordion wailing out "Ay Te Dejo En San Antonio."

"Tonight was hard anyway," Lillian said. "We're going to need time to figure things out, I guess."

She raised my hand to her lips. I was looking at her, remembering the first time I had kissed her in this car, how she looked. She had been wearing a white sundress, her hair cut like Dorothy Hamill's. We had been sixteen, I think.

I kissed her now.

"I've been figuring things out for ten years," I told her. "It's got to get easier from here."

She looked at me for a long time with an expression I couldn't read. She almost decided to say something. Then she kissed me back.

It was hard to talk for a while, but I finally said: "Robert Johnson will be mad if I don't bring him these leftovers for dinner."

"Enchiladas for breakfast?" Lillian suggested.

We went inside.

5.

Everything with Lillian was familiar, from her linen sheets to the citrus scent of her hair when I finally fell asleep buried in it. I was even hoping I might dream of her for a change, the way I used to. I didn't.

The dreams started out like a slide show-newspaper photos of my dad, Express-News headlines that had burned themselves into my memory that summer. Then it was a late spring evening in May of '85 and I was standing on the front porch of my father's house in Olmos Park. A battered gray Pontiac, probably a '76, tinted windows and no license plate, was pulling up by the curb as my father walked from the driveway to the front door, carrying two bags of groceries. Carl Kelley, his deputy and best friend, was a few steps behind him. For some reason I remember exactly what Carl was holding-a twelve-pack of Budweiser in one hand and a watermelon in the other. I was opening the front door for them, my eyes red from studying for my last round of freshman final exams at A & M.

My dad was at his very heaviest-nearly three hundred pounds of muscle and fat stuffed into oversized jeans and a checkered shirt. Sweat lines running down his temples from the rim of his brown Stetson, he lumbered up the steps with a cigar drooping off the corner of his mouth. He looked up and gave me one of his sly grins, started to say something, probably a wisecrack at my expense. Then a small hole blew open in the grocery bag in Dad's right arm. A perfect white stream of milk sprouted out. Dad looked momentarily puzzled. The second shot came out the front of his Stetson.

Fumbling for his gun, Carl hit the ground for cover about the same time my dad hit the ground dead. Dad was three months away from retirement. The watermelon made a bright red starburst as it exploded on the sidewalk. The gray Pontiac pulled away and was gone.

When I woke up alone in Lillian's bed the conjunto music from next door had stopped. The cranberry glass night lamp was on, making the squares of moonlight pink against the hardwood floor. Through the open bedroom door I could see Lillian standing naked in the living room, her arms hugging her body, staring at one of her photos on the wall.

She didn't seem to hear me when I called. When I came up behind her and put my arms around her shoulders, she stiffened. Her eyes never left the photo.

It was one of her early college pieces-a black and white photo-collage of animals, human faces, insects, buildings, all of it hand-tinted and merged into one surrealistic mass. I remembered the December weekend when she'd been putting it together for her end-of-term project. I'd done my best to distract her. We'd ended up with photo scraps scattered all over the bed and clinging to our sweaters.

"Naive," she said, absently. "Beau used to take me out into the country-we'd be shivering all night in sleeping bags on some godforsaken hilltop in Blanco for one shot of a meteor shower, or we'd trudge through twenty acres of pasture outside Uvalde so we'd be in just the right position at dawn to catch the light behind a windmill. He used to say that every picture had to be taken at the greatest possible expense. Then I'd look back at my old collages like this one and think how easy they'd been."

"Maybe naive gets a bad rap," I said.

We stood there together and looked at it for a minute.

"It just feels strange," she said. "You being here."

"I know."

She leaned her head against me. The tension in her shoulders didn't go away.

"What else is it?" I said.

She hesitated. "There are complications."

I kissed her ear. "You asked for me to be here. I'm here. There's no complication."

Until Lillian looked around at me I didn't realize her eyes were wet.

"When you left San Antonio, Tres, what were you running from?"

"I told you. The rest of my life stuck in Texas, the idea of marriage, the careers everybody else wanted me to take-"

She shook her head. "That's not what I meant. Why did you go when you did, right after your father's death?"

I hugged her from behind and held on tight, trying to get lost in the citrus smell of her hair. But when I closed my eyes against her cheek, I still saw the old newspaper photo of my father, the caption that I knew by heart. "Sheriff Jackson Navarre, gunned down brutally on Thursday evening in front of his Olmos Park home. Deputy Sheriff Kelley and Navarre's son watched helplessly as the assassins sped away." My father's face in the photo just smiled at me dryly, as if that caption was some private joke he was sharing.

"Maybe because when I looked around town," I told Lillian, "all I saw was him dying. It was like a stain."

She nodded, looking back at her photo-collage. "The stain doesn't go away, Tres. Not even after all these years."

Her tone was bitter, not like Lillian. I held her a little tighter. After a while she turned around and folded herself into my arms.

"It doesn't have to be a complication for us now," I whispered.

"Maybe not," she murmured. But I didn't need to see her face to see that she didn't believe me.

She didn't let me say anything else, though. She kissed me once, lightly, then more. Soon we were back in the linen sheets. I wasn't sleeping again until almost dawn, this time with no dreams.

6.

I was back at 90 Queen Anne at nine the next morning to meet the movers. Robert Johnson gave me an evil look as I walked in the door, but decided to call a truce when he heard the sound of aluminum foil being peeled away from my leftovers.

He has a system with enchiladas. He bats them with his paw until the tortillas unroll. He eats the filling first, then the tortillas. He saves the cheese for last. This kept him occupied while I did the first hour of my tai chi set, at which point the moving truck gunned up the driveway and scared him into the closet.

Three guys wearing baseball caps and leather weight belts were trying to figure out which way to fold my futon frame to get it through the door when the phone rang. I pulled down the ironing board and picked up the receiver.

Maia Lee said: "Hey, Tex. Ridden any good bulls lately?"

The background noise placed her immediately. It was Sunday morning at the Buena Vista.

"No," I said, "but me and the boys are hog-tying a futon even as we speak. It's an uppity little filly."

"You cowpokes sure know how to party."

I could picture her standing in the dark green entry hall of the bar, the receiver balanced between her shoulder and chin. She'd be wearing her business clothes-blazer and skirt, silk blouse, always in light colors to show off her flawless coffee-colored skin. Her hair, chocolate-brown and curly, would be tied back. Behind her I could hear Irish coffee glasses rattling, the unmistakable clanging of cable car bells.

"Listen," Maia said, "I wasn't really calling for a reason, if you're busy."

"That's okay."

In my doorway the futon seemed to be holding its own. One mover was wedged against the wall and another was trying to extract his leg from between two of its slats. The third guy had just figured out that the bolts could be loosened. An ice cream truck drove by, providing us with a momentary soundtrack: a very warped recording of "Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin'."

"It's a whole 'nother world down here, Maia," I said.

She laughed. "I remember telling you something like that, Tex. But everything's going all right? I mean ..."

"It's okay," I told her. "Being home after so long is like-I don't know."

"Coming out of amnesia?"

"I was thinking more along the lines of infectious skin diseases."

"Hmph. You don't pick your home, Tres. It just is."

Maia knew about that. Take away the Mercedes and the law practice and the Potrero Hill loft, and Maia's most important possession was still a photograph of an unpainted Sheetrock shack in Zhejiang Province. Logic had nothing to do with it.

"Some things you don't choose," I said.

"Isn't that the truth."

I'm not sure either of us bought it. On the other hand, I figured it was as close to an understanding about what had happened between us as we would ever get.

She told me she was on her way to interview a client whose teenage son had been charged with setting part of the Presidio on fire. It was going to be a long morning. I promised to call in a few days.

"Drink one of those frozen strawberry margaritas for me," she said.

"Infidel," I said.

By noon the movers had everything out of the truck and into the living room without any major accidents. I gave them directions back to Loop 410. Then I headed down Broadway toward downtown.

Ten minutes later I turned up Commerce and started looking for street parking. Fortunately I was used to San Francisco traffic. I U-turned across three lanes and beat a Hilton valet to a nice meter spot without so much as a fistfight, then walked south into La Villita.

The place hadn't changed over the last few hundred years. Except for being cleaner and having higher rents, the restored four square blocks of original settlement were not much different than they'd been back in the days of the Alamo. Tourists wandered in and out of the white limestone buildings. A family of large Germans, severely overdressed for the heat, sat at a green metal table in the sun outside one of the cantinas. They were trying to look like they were having fun on their vacation, mouths open, fanning themselves with menus.

I wandered down the narrow brick lanes for almost twenty minutes before I found the Hecho a Mano Gallery, a tiny building in the shade of a huge live oak behind the La Villita Chapel. The gallery didn't seem to be getting much business at the moment. I came in the door just as a glass paperweight flew past, banging into the wall and rattling a few framed pictures of Guatemalan peasants.

A male voice around the corner of the entryway said: "God damn it!"

A loud disagreement followed.

"Lillian?" I called, loudly.

I looked around the corner, cautious for more flying objects. Lillian was standing up at a small wooden desk near the opposite wall. She was pressing her fingertips against her temples and glaring at a man who looked nothing at all like the Beau Karnau I remembered.

What I remembered from the few times Beau had condescended to shake my hand a decade ago was a short, burly brunette with a crew cut, black clothes, and a face smoothed over with acne scar tissue and smugness. Now in his late fifties, Karnau looked more like one of the Seven Dwarfs. He sported a potbelly, a scraggly gray beard, a receding hairline, and a braided ponytail. He'd traded in the black clothes for a gaudy silk shirt, boots, and jeans. His forehead was almost purple with anger.