Bobby understood that he had not pleased her. He kissed her cheek. "Sleep well," he said. With his hand on the door k.n.o.b, he paused, looking at her, but she was already turning toward the stairs. He let himself out.

She went straight up to the shower. She let the water beat first on her face then on her back. She slicked a fragrant bath oil over her arms, her legs, over and around her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, up her neck, sliding across her shoulders. But she was still anxious-jittery, she now realized. Spooked. She wrapped herself up in a big terry-cloth robe and left wet footprints down the hallway to her room.

It was the same room Aunt Althea had given her when she came to live there, a large room furnished with the same heavy, dark mahogany furniture, a high four-poster bed, a dresser and dressing table. Over the dressing table was a large mirror. Thea sat in front of it and began to comb out her hair. Behind her, reflected in the mirror, was a large round curio cabinet displaying a collection of porcelain and bisque dolls.

Thea had never liked the dolls. The collection was Aunt Althea's idea; she thought all young girls should have a collection of some kind. Thea had said she wanted to collect books, but Aunt Althea said, no, she meant a real collection, and decided upon the dolls. It was obviously a collection she herself had always wanted.

For a while, with annoying regularity, Aunt Althea had given Thea a doll, the Daughter of the American Revolution doll, the Pierrot doll, the Scarlett O'Hara doll, Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz. And there was the Rapunzel doll with her hair to its tiny white-shoed feet.

Thea did not like any of the dolls very much. They weren't dolls she could play with; their cold hard faces were too fragile, their complicated clothes were made for show, not for dressing and undressing. She was not attracted to any of them, but she had no idea why the Rapunzel doll in particular was so creepy to her.

When she came to live with Aunt Althea she took the Rapunzel doll off the mantelpiece in the room designated as hers and hid it in a dresser drawer, covered by soft, powder-puff sweaters with pearl b.u.t.tons and other sweet schoolgirl clothes she never would have picked for herself, clothes picked for her by her aunt. Aunt Althea found the doll within days, and that's when Thea realized she would have no privacy in the house whatsoever. Yet she didn't protest her lack of privacy, just as she didn't protest when the round curio cabinet was filled with the dolls and placed next to her bed. To have protested would have let her in for one of Aunt Althea's freezes: no direct communication, no direct looks, an intense and thorough displeasure, disapproval, and disliking.

Thea stopped combing her hair when she caught the reflection of the Rapunzel doll's lifeless yet curiously alert blue eyes in the mirror. They were aimed straight at her, too bright in that white death-mask vitreous face. Thea stared at the eerily white face. It wasn't staring at the face that scared her, but staring at it jelled the inchoate jittery feeling that had begun at the Hindermanns'. And fear of being alone in the house set in.

She lay in bed in the dark, wide awake for a long time. She tried to talk herself out of being afraid by telling herself it was time to get rid of things in the house she didn't like and didn't want. She would give the dolls away, and when Burgess' men were finished in the parlor, she would have them start in Aunt Althea's bedroom, with its window-seat alcove, huge closet, and a bathroom right off a large dressing room. She would make the room over for herself and put in a tub with a Jacuzzi. But thoughts of a Jacuzzi and modern decor and charitable donations couldn't shake her fear or drown out the creaks and groans of the old house. She knew Bobby had wanted to spend the night with her, and she almost wished she had let him. She thought of him driving home with all that bourbon in him and began to worry. Her worry was a relief from the fear for a while and was easier to deal with, since, after all, Bobby had only a few blocks of familiar lamp-lit empty streets to negotiate to get home. Where he would have been for some time now.

Bobby stayed at Thea's front door, his cheek pressed against the tiny squares of beveled gla.s.s, watching through one as Thea floated up the wide staircase, her fingers dragging lightly along the varnished wood banister. For a moment he felt those long, short-nailed fingers glide over the small of his back. The hair on his nape rose slightly, his dying erection revived briefly, until she pulled her foot up the last visible step.

He knew he'd turned her off, and he knew it was because he'd had too much to drink. Christ, he hoped it was only because he'd had too much to drink. He wanted to ring the doorbell, make her come back so he could ask her was that it, too much bourbon? He'd admit he'd had too much; he'd tell her he'd stop.

But even in his booze-befuddled state he knew it was better not to push it tonight. She was upset: that d.a.m.n Lyle and his guns. Bobby was beginning to wonder if Lyle was ever going to talk about anything else, anything besides crime and people getting robbed and n.i.g.g.e.rs in his backyard and shooting to kill. Thea had said she was sick of the cold weather up north; he didn't want her to start thinking that it might be cold but at least it was safe.

He stumbled on the steps, his own shadow blocking the soft light from the gas lamps on either side of the leaded-gla.s.s doors, the large oak tree in front of the house making a pattern of dark lace on the brick walk. He went through the low iron gateway and closed the gate carefully behind him. He walked to his car, patting his pockets, getting out his keys, thinking he'd come to see her tomorrow, tell her he wasn't going to drink so much any more, make her believe him. He tripped on the sidewalk where it was cracked from the roots of the old oak pushing up, persistent, impervious, then he tripped again on the thick, gnarled roots themselves, like small tree trunks half buried in the earth. He fumbled with first one key then another at the door of the old Lincoln. Fantasies about the time he would stay with Thea all night rolled pleasantly before his mind's eye, and he could feel her straight smooth hair like inky silk in his hands, he could see her b.r.e.a.s.t.s flatten as she reclined, her back arch as he touched her, her small foot on his thigh, and he was starting to get hard again when he thought he heard something, not quite behind him, on the other side of the oak, but before he could turn around to see, Bobby felt a crushing weight on his head, his fantasies went black, and he went down.

Thea slept for a while, then woke from a dream she forgot instantly. She lay rigid, the way people do when they wake in the middle of the night, listening. Had that been a whisper outside her door, was that thud a footstep on the stairway? No, no, it was only her own blood rushing in her ears, the thud of her own heartbeat.

Their fear had spread like wildfire to her stale dread of being alone. One night with them and her fear was like theirs, no longer a fear of being alone in the world, a fear whose character had changed over the years, melting down into sadness; now her aloneness was compounded by a fear of what was outside and what might get inside. And how could she control that? How could Bobby control that if he were here with her? Ah, yes, well, that was where Lyle's guns came in.

Thea tossed back the covers and moved her feet up and down on Delzora's starched sheets, making noise, daring whatever was there, if it was there, to show itself.

Gradually the fear subsided. She tried to imagine Bobby asleep in this room with her, this little girl's room with the cabinet full of dolls, spending the night with him, how s.e.x with him would be. She wondered if he would start making demands on her, after all these years. Maybe that's what had been the matter, no demands, he'd been too easy. She wanted someone to make demands, but she couldn't make Bobby into that someone. She thought about the letter she'd written to Michael a few days ago with a list of the belongings she wanted him to send her. He would have gotten it by now, but he had not called. She wondered if she was wanting him to call and ask her to come back. She tried to imagine him on the phone, begging her, but she couldn't make that fantasy work either.

She sat up in bed, turning to hang her legs over the side, dangling them reluctantly at first, then swinging them, another dare, finally dropping the few inches to the floor. Old childhood fears- silly, but she couldn't help it. She put the terry robe on in the dark, the fragrance of the bath oil still so strong on it that someone could find her by smell alone. She went out into the hallway, heading for the bathroom, but at the last minute she pa.s.sed it by to go to the second-story front porch, a small curved screened porch just under the third-floor gable. She unlocked the door to it. The door was swollen with dampness and she had to tug on it to get it open. She pulled at it in something of a panic, hating having her back turned to the hallway, wanting out of the house yet knowing it was absurd to think she would feel safer on the porch.

The door grated open. Thea rushed out onto the porch, dragging the door closed behind her, the porch floor gritty beneath her bare feet. The limbs of the oak almost touched the house. She looked through the dirty screen, the dense leafy tree limbs, and she started. Why was Bobby's car still here? She dropped to her knees, her hands and forehead and the bridge of her nose pressed against the screen, and she saw him on the ground at the base of the tree, his body inert, twisted, uncomfortable, and she jumped up, struggled with the door, cursing it, crying, then running, almost slipping on the stairs, almost tripping herself on the robe but never slowing down, never thinking what might be behind her or what might be lurking outside, waiting. She flung open the front door and sped down the walk.

His face was turned toward her, his right cheek pressed into the rough tree roots. She sc.r.a.ped her ankle trying to get around him and saw the blood on the crown of his head. But she could see also that his chest was rising and falling.

Once she saw that Bobby was alive, Thea ran back into the house. Maybe it was because the number was written on a pad next to the telephone, maybe it was because calling the police emergency number seemed so impersonal, maybe because he was Bobby's best friend-whatever the reason, like a preprogrammed automaton, Thea called Lyle Hindermann.

13.

The first time Bobby's father said he wanted to be cremated, he and Bobby were sitting in a duck blind out in the Louisiana marshland about eighty miles south of New Orleans.

It was before dawn, freezing cold, and Bobby had the worst hangover of his life. On the way out to the blind he had thrown up over the side of the pirogue, and now he was huddling sick and weak within the camouflaging brown roseaux surrounding the blind. He felt nauseated from the miasma created by a kerosene-soaked roll of toilet paper slowly burning in an old coffee can. He'd rather be cold than smell it, but he knew that when the toilet paper burned out, the kerosene fumes would be replaced by the stink of the decaying marsh, a swampy brew that made the mud a reeking, gooey mess. His and his father's clothes were already smeared with it. He was telling himself that he was never going to drink again and he was never going duck hunting again, when his father handed him what was left of the bourbon from the night before and told Bobby he wanted to be cremated. After that, the ducks were flying and Bobby was on his feet, taking aim, backing up his father's missed shots, forgetting about everything except the sight of those ducks falling out of the sky.

The next time, they were out in the Gulf of Mexico fishing for snapper. The sun was so bright it was a blinding b.u.t.tery smear on a baby-blue ceiling. The heat had Bobby pinned to his swivel chair in a state of pleasurable lethargy that he broke every now and then to take a cooling sip of beer or to reach over into the ice chest and grab a couple more for himself and his dad. They sat together in silence, neither of them having much to say, both of them comfortable with that. Nothing on their minds anyway, or so Bobby thought, except knocking back a case of beer and catching a few fish.

When his father spoke, he picked the conversation up where he'd left it in the duck blind. "After they cremate me, put my ashes in a paper bag and bring them out here, to the blue water."

Until that moment, Bobby had forgotten his father's talking about cremation in the duck blind. "Imagine Mother's reaction when she sees me putting your ashes in a paper bag," he said. His father dismissed that by shrugging one shoulder then tilting his head back and draining off the end of a beer. "Have you told her?" His father shook his head. "No, of course not. She'd have every Jesuit at Holy Name praying for you and trying to talk you out of it."

His father tossed the can overboard. "The h.e.l.l with that. I don't want any wake gawkers or graveyard visitors. Gives me the creeps. They can say their prayers and sing their ma.s.ses and then you bring me out to the fishes."

"All right, but whatever you want, Daddy, you better write it down."

"Just promise me, Bobby."

There were several such conversations, always out in the marsh or on the water, but a few years later Bobby could find no excuse for himself in his father's failure to either write down his wishes or tell his wife he preferred cremation to burial. Surely his father must have known that Bobby would never be able to override his mother.

Millie McKenzie Buchanan planned the funeral services for Robert Buchanan, Sr., with the same attention to detail that she had applied to parties for their group of uptown New Orleans socialites. She wrote a carefully worded newspaper story and included a picture taken ten years previously. She decided the casket should be closed and ordered nearly a thousand dollars worth of flowers to drape it. She arranged for the opening of the Buchanan family tomb in Metairie Cemetery and called the caterer. All the while Bobby protested that none of it was what his father wanted, that he wanted his ashes carried in a paper bag to the blue water.

"Oh, Bobby," his mother said, "you know your father just said morbid things like that when he was sick." When he was sick meant when he was drinking. Millie burst into tears.

"But he made me promise," Bobby said.

Millie didn't answer because she was psychosomatically hard of hearing. There were some things Bobby never could stand up to; one was Millie's tears, another was her deafness. This, however, was a situation worthy of raising one's voice.

"I said, he made me promise."

Millie sniffled and remained deaf.

"Mother, you know good and well you hear exactly what you want to hear." It felt good, accusing her.

She said pitifully, "Bobby, I just can't talk about this anymore."

"Mother, don't you understand, he made me promise. I want to do this for him."

He was quite familiar with the hard look she turned on him, a look of cold determination, something else in her trove of southern matriarchal responses, but he was a bit taken aback by her viciousness. "If you wanted to do something for your father, Bobby, you should have refused to help him drink himself into the grave, which is where he is going to go. I doubt seriously that you could find your way out to the blue water with him in a paper bag anyway."

Two days later, in a drizzle, Bobby stood under a canopy in the Metairie Cemetery, supporting his mother on his arm while his father's body was slid into the tomb, an ornate above-ground room with stained-gla.s.s windows on the east and west walls. He went back home and drank his way through six hours of friends and relatives comforting the family, eating tiny sandwiches, drinking, remembering, and suffering.

The following morning Bobby went out to the cemetery alone. He stood in front of the granite and marble vault and said, "Daddy, I told you to write it down."

Besides some guilt, Bobby's father left him with a piece of property, a once-beautiful Greek Revival house that was now cut up into five apartments. It was several blocks off Convent Street in a neighborhood that had been described at the time of purchase as marginal but had since gone all black. When Bobby's father bought it in the early eighties, at the tail end of the real-estate boom in New Orleans, he thought young professionals would move into the neighborhood eventually, fix up the houses, and triple the property values. At the time, renovation was the name of the game in up-town New Orleans, and Bobby's father wanted to cash in so he could replenish the family fortune, which was drying up along with the oil leases held by the Buchanans for three or four generations. What he hadn't counted on was the oil crunch. Property values stabilized, then they fell; nothing was moving. Tenants came and went. Later they came and stayed, bringing so many others with them that Robert Buchanan could never be sure how many people were living in one apartment at one time. Things began to happen to the building. All the outside shutters, the gutters, and a whole section of weatherboards were stolen. A toilet fell through the floor. Two plaster walls were demolished by machine-gun fire in one of the back apartments. Instead of replenishing the family fortune, the apartment house slowly drained more of it.

Late Sunday morning after being mugged outside Thea's house and spending the rest of the night in the hospital, Bobby drove up in front of the apartment house. The For Sale sign was face down in the square of muddy yard between the porch and the sidewalk. It didn't make any difference; the house wasn't salable anyway, too dilapidated, badly in need of a paint job, the wood rotting, but he got out of the car and went over to pick up the sign. When he bent down, the inside of his head pounded against his skull. He stood up, palm to forehead. He didn't know if his head was splitting because of the enormous hangover he had or because it had literally been split open by some blunt instrument, the b.u.t.t of a gun maybe. He thought he remembered Lyle counting twelve st.i.tches.

The door to the downstairs front apartment was ajar. Bobby pushed it open slowly. As he suspected, the apartment was empty- that is, if you didn't count all the rubble left in the middle of the living room floor. Once again he was out at least two months' rent. It occurred to him that he ought to take the For Sale sign down and put one up that said Free Apartments. And just let the place fall down. If he had the money, that's exactly what he'd do. Then when the city came after him, he'd hire a demolition company.

He stepped inside cautiously. You never could tell what you might find: bodies-starving, sleeping, murdered; rats hiding under the greasy chicken take-out bags; c.o.c.kroaches, always, everywhere the roaches.

It was dark inside. Someone had tacked pieces of heavy card-board over the windows. Bobby flicked the light switch but nothing happened. He looked up. The light fixture was gone. Wires twisted like worms out of the cracked plaster medallion of fruit and flowers at the center of the ceiling.

He skirted the trash and went into what had once been the dining room. s.h.i.t-the crystal chandelier, a nice piece with long prism crystals, was gone too. His mother had told him to take it down and store it. He'd told her he would. And once he'd told her he would, in his mind he had. He'd catch h.e.l.l now. No. No he wouldn't. His mother would never have to know. One thing about her illness, her reign of terror-most of his life-when she kept tabs on everything he did or didn't do was over. Problem was, he kept catching himself trying to shirk blame for something or another. Maybe one day he'd get used to his new freedom.

In the dining room, against the inside wall, was a sleeping mat made from newspaper and an old blanket. Some poor b.u.g.g.e.r had made himself right at home. Too bad. No more freebies. He went into the kitchen, crossing some seriously spongy floorboards, doing his best to ignore the disgusting mess in it, to see if the back door was bolted. A couple of boards gave and he nearly fell through the floor. Cursing, he went to the front room and ripped a piece of cardboard away from one of the windows to lay across the hole. On his way out through the dining room, he picked up the blanket and newspapers, his nose twitching at the stale human smell they released once he disturbed them, and threw them out on the front porch. He locked the front door.

As Bobby was coming down the front steps, Lyle pulled up across the street from the apartment house. He was in uniform, and as he got out of his car, the sun glinted off his badge and off the gold-rimmed aviator sungla.s.ses he always wore on the beat. Bobby could hear the belt and holster leather creak as Lyle crossed the street. There was something tough about the way that sounded. There was something tough about the way Lyle walked when he was in uniform, different from the way he walked in a three-piece suit.

"Had a hunch I might find you here," he said. He talked tough too.

Bobby sat down on the front steps. "Yeah, another tenant vamoosed in the night. Bilked me out of two months' rent."

"Lousy break." Lyle stretched one leg out to the steps and leaned on his knee. "How's the head?"

"It must be all right. I can still eat and go to the bathroom."

Lyle nodded; no laughing matter this. "Mess inside?" In uniform he talked in truncated sentences. Muy macho.

"No worse than usual. I'm putting up a few roaches and other life forms till I can get over here and get the place ready for the Cosbys."

Lyle's sense of humor had taken a fast car out of town. "Doing it yourself?"

"Got to, my man. No dinero, must trabajo. Comprendo?" Lyle's sungla.s.ses showed no sign of enlightenment. "That means," Bobby said, "I can't hire anyone. I'm broke."

"I know what that means. That means you're going to be all by yourself in a G.o.dd.a.m.n war zone." Lyle straightened up, reached behind him, and pulled a gun from his waistband. He presented it to Bobby.

Bobby pushed it away. "Jesus, Lyle, pull out a gun in a neighborhood like this and you're likely to start the war."

"What do you mean? They already started it," Lyle said. "You're lucky to be alive today; don't push it. Here." He put the gun in Bobby's hand. "I'll start the paper work tomorrow."

"But I don't want it. You're talking about my luck, I'll probably shoot myself in the foot. Or worse-I'll never have children."

Lyle's answer to that was to tell Bobby he'd pick him up at six o'clock the following evening for target practice.

They both went to their cars, Bobby self-consciously holding the gun upside down by its barrel. Lyle started to drive off as Bobby reached over to put the gun in his glove compartment. Lyle slammed on his brakes and backed up level with Bobby's car. "And don't leave it in the car," he said. "You'll just end up arming another n.i.g.g.e.r."

14.

An oxidized-red pickup truck with a bad m.u.f.fler clattered to a stop in front of the brick walkway, and Dexter sprang from the driver's seat. Today he was wearing a pair of jeans with bra.s.s studs in a line down the side of each leg. Sometimes he wore black velour trousers, though his favorites were still the blue leather, but whatever pants he wore, tucked inside them was a fresh starched white shirt. In this way Dexter emulated Burgess, but with his own dandified, high-profile signature.

He rushed to the other side of the truck to help Delzora from the high seat. If he didn't hurry, the old woman would open the door herself and make motions as if she were going to try to climb out backwards, since her stubby bowed legs were too short to reach the street. But he always got to her before she actually started; she timed it so he would. She muttered under her breath as he helped her down. The way she talked under her breath like that so he couldn't hear her made Dexter nervous. The next minute she might be giving him the business about his clothes or about wasting time, or going on about honest jobs, talking as if he and Burgess didn't work at all. He watched her start up the walkway to the big house. Then he drove off with a sense of relief, a feeling that he'd gotten away unscathed.

Delzora's early morning routine varied a bit these days. She still went straight back to the utility room, where she took her wig off and set it on the shelf next to the laundry detergent. She changed into her white uniform, then put the wig back on, adjusting it in the small mirror above the toilet. There were too many people in the house now, too many visitors. It was one thing for Althea to see her nearly bald and what hair was left almost all white, but not these younger people who might think she was old as the hills, too old to do good work.

She barely got her tea on before the workers arrived. She wished they would hurry and get finished, they disturbed her quiet mornings when she read the newspaper, but just when she thought they were finally coming to the end, Thea found something else for them to do. What they did was create a lot of white dust for her to clean up. As far as she was concerned, the house was fine the way it was, just needed a little fixing up here and there, nothing like taking down all that beautiful gold wallpaper, those perfectly good velvet curtains, putting up shutters on the inside that looked as though they should go on the outside, painting the walls dull grays and bleak whites, barren colors. Delzora shook her head as she scrubbed out the kitchen sink. There was simply no accounting for people's taste.

Upstairs, Thea could hear the workers' soft talk and low laughter in counterpoint to the rhythm and blues coming from their cheap, tinny-sounding radio. Distant, their words had a hushed, mumbo-jumboish quality. Once she was downstairs it was pure New Orleans jive. One of them, Jared, liked to sing. He let out a long soul-suffering wail followed by some jazzy vocal acrobatics followed by Zora yelling at him to hush up, he was going to wake the dead. It made Thea smile. She liked all their sounds, they made the house feel alive. It had been deathly quiet when she'd lived here with Aunt Althea.

She went down to the kitchen, where Zora was putting on a pot of red beans. The morning with its slight chill, the smell of cooking, the male voices-Thea was suddenly thrust into the middle of her dream that she lived here with her family, her mother at the stove cooking, her father singing Italian arias in another part of the house. She was overcome with a feeling of warmth, of safety, tinged with the slightest bit of melancholy. The feeling stayed with her as she and Zora started their project for the day, packing boxes of romance novels and bric-a-brac from the den.

Before long Bobby stopped by, procrastinating on his way to the apartment house. He walked in without ringing the bell, since once the workers arrived the front door was kept unlocked because of so much coming and going. Bobby followed his nose, heading straight for the pot of beans, calling out to Thea. Thea came into the kitchen, Bobby kissed her, then he lifted the pot top and began stirring. Bobby loved Zora's cooking, and after a short morning at the apartment house, he always came back to Thea's for lunch.

Delzora came into the kitchen just as Bobby put the spoon to his mouth. "You get away from my beans this instant, Bobby Buchanan, do you hear?"

Bobby paid no attention to her but went on tasting the beans for a second time. "Dee-licious, Zora. What time should I be back for lunch?"

"You be here 'bout one o'clock, they be ready, but there ain't no sense tastin them now, they ain't been on long enough." She took the spoon out of his hand and put the top on the pot with a bang.

"What a tyrant," Bobby said.

"d.a.m.n nuisance," Delzora countered.

The two of them sometimes went at each other like the worst enemies, but Thea knew that Zora had always been quite fond of Bobby. She didn't laugh or smile much normally, but she did around Bobby.

Much more than she did around her own son.

Burgess came in, stopping first to talk to the men, joking with them. They were glad to see him. From the kitchen, Thea could hear them telling him what they needed, what problems they'd encountered, what was finished or nearly finished. Already Delzora seemed separated, sullen as she turned her back to them to clean some figurines from the den, though moments before she had been laughing and telling Bobby he was going to break his neck as he described himself working in the apartment, teetering on a high ladder to reach the ceiling and hang a new light fixture, hanging on to a piece of plaster fruit on the medallion to keep from falling.

Once Burgess came into the kitchen, Delzora was silent. Thea watched her. She was angry with Burgess, that much was clear. Thea tried to imagine what Burgess could have done to make her so angry for so long, for she had been angry with him ever since Thea had come back to town. She spoke to him only when necessary. She didn't try to avoid his eyes; on the contrary, she met them defiantly. Yet once Thea invited Burgess to sit at the table with her and Bobby, Delzora placed a cup of tea in front of him, along with cut lemons and a bowl of sugar. He thanked her politely, and just as politely she said, "You welcome," and lapsed again into her detached silence. She was cleaning the figurines quite meticulously even though Thea was going to pack them and put them up in the attic.

Bobby returned to complaining about the apartment house. He told Burgess how he almost fell through the floor, about the toilet that did. "But nothing," he said, "annoys me more than having a new paint job marred by machine-gun fire."

"d.a.m.n annoyin," Burgess agreed. "Where's your house?" Bobby told him and he said, "Where I come from, we call that a good neighborhood."

Bobby said, "Well, it's true I haven't been mugged there yet," and then with his characteristic flipness sprung the line he'd tried out on Lyle, about the Cosbys moving in as soon as he could get the place ready.

Thea's stomach went into a clench. Bobby's joke seemed out of place, even cruel. But Burgess slapped the tabletop and let go with his great baritone laugh.

Bobby was pleased. "A man with a sense of humor," he said and asked Burgess where he came from. When Burgess told him the Convent, Bobby said, "Well, h.e.l.l, man, the Convent's looking better these days than that old rat-infested neighborhood where my house is."

Burgess looked behind him at Delzora. She didn't live very far from Bobby's apartment house. "You hear that, Mama?" But Delzora didn't answer him and didn't turn around to look at him either. So Burgess said to Bobby, "How 'bout I come over and look at your apartment house. I give you a good price on the work, save you a lot of trouble."

Bobby shook his head. "You come on over any time," he told Burgess. "I'd enjoy the company. But the only good price you could give me right now is free. And I'm the only person I know who works free." He got up and put his hand on Thea's neck, under her hair, as he pa.s.sed behind her. "I'm off, Tee, but I'll be back. One o'clock, right, Zora?"

"That's right," Zora said, but later, when Burgess was leaving, she didn't tell him to come back for the beans. Maybe she didn't feel it was her place to do so, so Thea made the invitation herself.

But Burgess didn't come back for lunch. Instead, Lyle stopped by just before noon. He rang the bell, then opened the door, waiting on the threshold until Delzora came. Thea heard him ask for her and followed Zora into the foyer. She knew that Zora didn't like Lyle. When he was in the same room with her, her body posture changed. She became bent, meek, shrinking into invisibility. She wouldn't meet his eyes, wouldn't speak to him if he didn't speak first, which he didn't always, and then she only mumbled in answer.

Lyle was on his way to a business lunch. He'd been dropping in daily in the week since the attack on Bobby, sometimes on his lunch break, wearing his banker's suit, sometimes after hours, in his police uniform, checking on Thea and her house. He eyed the workmen warily. He wanted Thea to have a burglar-alarm system installed. He still wanted her to think about getting a gun. He wanted her to keep her doors locked at all times, monitor the coming and going of these untrustworthy black men. Every time he came over and found she had not heeded his advice, the lines of seriousness on his face were carved deeper by disapproval. Yet he doggedly and patiently repeated himself, telling her again today in his by-the-book monotone that she should have an alarm system put in as soon as possible.

"But with all this work going on . . ." she began her excuse for not complying.

"All the more reason," Lyle said.