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“Sure,” she said, looking at him through a swim of faintly tipsy tears. “I guess so. Sam … those scars on your hands. Were they … were you …?”

“Naw. I wasn’t even home. I was off in the next town in a black juke joint down by the river saying shit and fuck. The fire was almost out by the time I got home. No, I got these working in the mill. The good old Tennessee Coal and Iron, back in Birmingham, where I started out. It got me after all.”

“You went back and worked in the mill?”

“Yep. I couldn’t have stayed in Mississippi after that. If the Klan hadn’t gotten me, my own congregation would have. And I couldn’t preach anymore; I was still too much of a romantic for that, if a failed one. God is not a romantic. And I wasn’t fit to do anything else. So I went back home and moved in with my sister and her family, and spent the next ten years puddling steel and drinking everything wet in north Alabama and fighting and whoring, and when I was sober and not working, I’d hole up in my room and read. I never lost the itch to read that those rich, liberal white kids lit in me that year. And I never forgot that other world that they showed me. I think, even if Jackie hadn’t—died—I would have soon outgrown her, Mike. God help me, I was already on that road. I don’t know what I’d have ever done about it. Eventually I just got tired of sulking in a tenement room in Birmingham, and I came over to Atlanta and went to Georgia State at night and on to Oglethorpe Law, and … here I am.”

“Is it better for you?” Mike said. “Is it different, the law? Are you different?”

“I don’t know.” He frowned into his glass. “I thought it would be. I thought I was. But maybe not. I’m still carrying on like a romantic, and I really do know better than that.”

“The law is hardly romantic,” Mike said.

“This case is. It’s Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Or maybe not. He can’t win, but maybe we can help him win something else.”

“What? After he loses his house he’s going to die. What’s there left to win?”

“Haven’t we been over this already?” Sam Canaday said. “Come on, Mike, use your imagination, like a good and true romantic.”

“That’s one thing you can’t accuse me of,” Mike said. “There’s no such thing as a romantic journalist.”

“Are you kidding?” Sam Canaday jeered at her, holding his half-full glass of Canadian Club aloft in a toast and squinting at her through it. The past half hour might never have happened; the searing, intimate words might never have been said. “You’re as hopeless as Walt Disney and Norman Rockwell put together. Take your daughter, Rachel, the would-be nymphet, she of the prepubescent sensuousness. I quote: ‘I’ve always tried to be a mentor to her, a sister or a friend.’ Romantic bullshit, Mike. It’s dangerous, remember that. You’re her mother. Stop being her friend and
be
her mother. And be a mad mother.”

He laughed, and some of the whiskey slopped over the glass onto the tabletop. “Be one mad muthuh, sister. God, this is disgraceful. I think I’m drunk. I haven’t been drunk since I left Birmingham. We’d better get out of here, before I revert completely and put the move on you. Do you think you can drive the Toyota?”

“Of course I can,” she said stiffly. His remark about Rachel stung.

Outside on the wet pavement, he put his arm heavily around her shoulder and peered into her face.

“I’m sorry about tonight,” he said, and his voice was clearer. “I didn’t mean to dump on you
or
jump on you. I’m not a good drinker, and it was a great night until I got started. Don’t let this ruin it.”

“I won’t,” she said. “It didn’t. I … like knowing about you. It changes things.”

“Not too much, I hope,” he said.

“No. Not too much.”

He walked quite steadily beside her through the cool dampness of the deserted streets to the parking lot and fished the Toyota’s keys out of his pocket and paid the somnolent attendant, but when his head touched the back of the front seat his eyes closed, and he leaned against the door on his side and slept. Mike did not know how to get home on the freeway, so she pointed the car home the old way, straight down the old Roosevelt Highway beside the Atlanta and West Point Rail Road track. It was like driving through the demilitarized zone in West Berlin: the wet, oil-slicked, barren streets and the row after row of deserted and padlocked warehouses. It occurred to Mike that they might be in real danger if she were forced to stop the car, but somehow the thought did not bother her. An occasional unbroken streetlight cast a halo of sodium orange over broken railroad tracks and weed-buried cement blocks, but she saw no living thing, not even a cat or a rat. The green glow from the dashboard showed the time to be past midnight.

After half an hour she was out of the city and on the road home, passing through one after another of the shabby, quiet little industrial towns that lined the highway toward Lytton. Traffic thinned, and soon only an occasional set of headlights swept through the Toyota, and then none at all. She switched on the radio, and Nat King Cole’s voice swam out of the green-lit darkness: “‘She wore blue velvet, and bluer than velvet were her eyes …’ “

Sam Canaday muttered something in his sleep and shifted his weight so that he slumped over toward her. His head rolled against her shoulder, his cheek loose and vulnerable against her upper arm. She flinched and started to shrug away, and then, feeling suddenly shy, did not. He murmured again, louder, and she put her head closer to hear him, and her lips brushed his hair. It
felt cool and silken, and looked very pale in the dashboard light. She did not flinch away this time. “What?” she said.

“Said you looked awfully pretty tonight,” he mumbled, not opening his eyes. “I’ve never seen you look so pretty.”

“Thank you,” Mike said.

“Welcome.”

He was silent again for the rest of the ride, breathing deeply and regularly. He did not move his head from her shoulder. Mike drove steadily and quietly through the late-summer dark. Once she looked over at him.

“Who are you?” she whispered.

When she turned into the driveway of the Pomeroy Street house, he was still fast asleep. She started to wake him, and then, looking at him stretched across the front seat in heavy sleep, went into the house and got the afghan and covered him and shut the Toyota’s door quietly.

The car was still there, a lighter bulk in the dark pool of shadow under the water oak, when she looked out before going to bed, but when she got up in the morning it was gone.

S
HE DID NOT, AFTER ALL, CALL
B
AY
S
EWELL IN
B
OSTON
. When she came into the Pomeroy Street house, walking softly in her stocking feet and carrying her shoes in one hand, she found her father in his wheelchair in the kitchen, drinking bourbon and watching David Letterman with J.W. Cromie. His face was pallid and pinched in the fluorescent overhead light, but his eyes were bright with their accustomed malice.

“Well, Micah, have you taken to sneaking in my house after midnight again? Thought we got done with that a long time ago.”

A sharp reply died on Mike’s lips as she looked more closely at his face. It looked as if the flesh had shrunk and fallen in against the brittle old bone, so drawn and desiccated was it. His nose stood out more beaklike than ever, and she saw that the pallor was not white, but the dreaded pale yellow of advancing cancer. She had not seen that promissory jaundice before. The faint flush that had crept back during the past few days was gone.

“You two are a fine pair yourselves,” she said mildly, searching J.W.’s face. “Drinking in the kitchen in the
middle of the night while I’m gone, like a couple of teenagers. Is something the matter?”

“Nothing’s the goddamned matter,” her father said pettishly. There seemed to be no breath behind his words.

“Mr. John been havin’ some pain,” J.W. said laconically, setting his glass down on the kitchen table and rising to go. “Them pills didn’t do no good, so we thought we’d try us some whiskey. Worked fine.”

Mike looked at her father. He stared back at her with a sick old hawk’s belligerence. His brow was smooth and dry, though, without the terrible great oily drops of sweat that the worst pain brought. She turned to J.W.

“You should have called Dr. Gaddis,” she said. “He said to call him if the pain came back. He could have given him a shot or something. Really, J.W., whiskey in the middle of the night …”

“It worked, Mike,” J.W. said curtly, dropping the slow, thick speech and accent. “He don’t like the doctor and the doctor’s medicine don’t help him. He likes the whiskey and it does. What difference does it make?”

She stared at him for a moment and then shrugged. She was very tired. She wanted only to be in bed in the heavy, total darkness of her room, drowned in the glottal underwater song of the air conditioner. What difference did it make, indeed? She’d call the doctor herself in the morning. Meanwhile, sleep.

“If you don’t mind putting him to bed, then, I think I’ll go on up,” she said. “Thanks for staying. And by the way, Mr. Canaday’s asleep in his car out in the driveway, so be quiet going out. Though I doubt if you’ll wake him.”

J.W. grinned at her and her father gave a startling eldritch cackle of laughter.

“You and Sam really did get into it tonight, didn’t you?” he said gleefully. “What’d you do, drink him under
the table and then drive him home and leave him to sleep it off in the car?”

“Something like that,” Mike said, smiling back at them tiredly. She wondered fleetingly if her father and J.W. Cromie knew about Sam, about the time in Mississippi and his wife and daughter.

“Wait’ll I see him tomorrow,” her father crowed as J.W. wheeled him out of the kitchen and toward his room. Despite the ravages of the pain, Mike had seldom seen him as cheerful. By the time she had peeled out of her clothes and turned back the bed, it was nearly 2:00
A.M
., and she wanted to sleep more than she wanted to call Bayard Sewell or anything else in the world. Bay and his cold anger had waited this long. They would wait a while longer.

Her father was cheerful and energetic the next morning, waiting impatiently with a cassette of correspondence for her to transcribe and joking clumsily with Lavinia Lester, who was putting a pot roast into the oven. He must really be better, she thought. He usually treated Lavinia as if she were not in the room, although when he was forced to address her he always did so, elaborately, as Mrs. Lester. Lavinia treated him with the same remote and gracious courtesy that she did everyone else in the household, and Mike knew that her father’s heavy-booted sarcasm bothered Lavinia not at all. They seemed, in fact, to rather enjoy each other’s company; or, at least, to tolerate it well.

“You look better,” Mike said to her father. “Have you had any more pain?”

“Not since J.W. poured me that shot of whiskey,” he said. “And I had another one just now. Lavinia gave it to me herself. I’m through with Gaddis’s damned medicine. Doesn’t do a bit of good. Whiskey’s the only thing that helps. Stops the son of bitch cold.”

Mike was surprised. He usually denied any pain at all, no matter how evident it was that he was hurting.
She looked at Lavinia Lester, who gave her back a composed, small smile. If a nurse sanctioned whiskey, it must be harmless at least. She sighed.

“It must have been pretty bad, then,” she said.

“Right bad,” he said. “Right bad. Okay, Micah, let’s start the TV stations today. What do you think, those fellows on the six o’clock news, or the noon ones? Or are you too hung over to do any work today?”

“The station managers, I think, or the news directors,” she said. “And I’m not hung over at all, thank you very much. Though I can’t say the same for your friend Sam Canaday.”

And surprised and annoyed herself profoundly by blushing to the roots of her hair when she said his name.

Her father saw the flush and cackled his old eggshell cackle. “Look at you, Micah, redder’n a beet,” he chortled. “What else did you all get up to besides drinkin’ in some Atlanta juke joint? Not neckin’ in the car, I hope. Or worse. I’m gon’ have to get on him, I can see that much right now. Can’t have him messin’ around with my daughter and her a big-shot city journalist. Not fit-tin’ for an ol’ country boy like Sam.”

“Oh, God, Daddy, lay off it, will you?” Mike snapped, aflame with embarrassment and something else … What? Guilt? Bayard Sewell’s dark, carved face swam before her, and she wanted to grab for it as a drowning man might a ring buoy in an empty sea. But over it drifted the image of Sam Canaday’s sleep-loosened face in the green light of the dashboard radio the night before, soft against her shoulder. She could feel again his cheek against the flesh of her upper arm, his breath warm through the thin stuff of her shirt, and smell the fleeting, musty silk of his hair. The heat in her face and chest deepened. Bayard Sewell’s face faded and was gone.

For the rest of the afternoon they worked in near
silence, John Winship sipping occasionally at the glass of whiskey beside him. Mike did not look often at her father, but from time to time she felt rather than saw his gaze on her, felt the full weight of it, probing. But he said nothing further about Sam Canaday or the night before. Mike fled upstairs to her room when Sam came by that evening after dinner, and then sat on her bed stiff with annoyance at herself. You’d think we’d gotten drunk and had an orgy or something, she thought disgustedly. I’m acting like a sixteen-year-old the morning after losing her virginity, and he didn’t even touch me. Not that he meant to, anyway. God, I don’t even
like
this man very much, and he probably wouldn’t have me on a platter with a kiwi in my mouth. Enough of this shit. I’m going back downstairs where it’s cool and have my coffee like I always do.

But she did not. Instead, she called Bayard Sewell at the Ritz Carlton in Boston, and was disappointed out of all proportion when the hotel operator said that he was out and had left no messages. After all, it was eight o’clock, and the middle of the dinner hour.

“No, no message,” she said to the hotel operator. “I’ll try again later.”