His things, everything he owned in the world, filled a small suitcase and a shopping
bag. He had almost enough room to give every garment its own dresser drawer.
Later, she had to go out, and wondered if he could stay downstairs where he could hear her father if he called out. He sleeps most of the time, she said, and when hes awake he doesnt do much but talk back to the television set. He can get to the bathroom by himself, and he doesnt like to be helped, but if he should fall down
He sat in the kitchen and read the paper, and when hed finished it he went upstairs for a book in the hall bookcase that had caught his eye earlier. It was a Loren Estleman western, about an itinerant hangman, and he sat in the kitchen reading it and drinking coffee until the old man called out.
He went in and found the man sitting up in bed, his pajama top unbuttoned, a cigarette smoldering between two fingers of his right hand. You could see the illness in his face. Keller wondered what kind of cancer the man had, and if it was smoking-related, and if he should be smoking now. Then he asked himself what difference it could possibly make at this stage.
Its liver cancer, the man said, reading his mind. Smokings got nothing to do with it. Well, next to nothing. You believe doctors, smokings to blame for every damn thing. Acid rain, global warming, you name it. My daughter around?
She stepped out.
Stepped out? You got a nice way of putting things. Not teaching her brats, is she? She usually gets this colored girl to look after me when she does.
I think she had some shopping to do.
Step over this way so I can get a better look at you. Man gets old and sick, he gets to order people around. I call that inadequate compensation, myself. You think much about dying?
Sometimes.
A man your age? I swear I never once gave it a moments thought, and now here I am doing it. Ill say this, I dont think much of it. You sleeping with her?
Sir?
Cant be the hardest question anybody ever asked you. My daughter. Are you sleeping with her?
No.
Youre not? Yall arent queer, are you?
No.
You dont look it, but in my experience you cant always tell. Theres people who swear they can, but I dont believe them. You like it here?
Its a beautiful city.
Well, its New Orleans, isnt it? We get used to it, you see. I meant this house. You like it?
Its very comfortable.
You be staying with us for a while?
I believe so, he said. Yes, I think I will.
Im tired. I think Ill get some sleep.
Ill let you be.
He was on his way out the door when the old mans voice stopped him in midstep.
You get the chance, he said, you sleep with her. Or one day youll be too old to do it anymore. And what youll do is hate yourself for every chance you let get away from you.
The following day they were at an optometrists shop on Rampart Street. Shed vetoed his plan to get reading glasses, insisting they wouldnt look right, and when he said he didnt need regular glasses, she told him hed be surprised. And if your vision is almost perfect, she said, hell give you lenses with almost no correction.
It turned out that he needed one prescription for distance and another for reading. Two birds with one stone, the optometrist said. In other words, bifocals.
Jesus, bifocals. He tried on frames, and the one he liked was of heavy black plastic. She looked at him, laughed, said something about Buddy Holly, and steered him to a less assertive metal frame, with rounded rectangular lens openings. He tried it on, and had to admit she was right.
There were shops where they made your glasses in an hour, but this wasnt one of them. About this time tomorrow, the fellow said, and they stopped at Café du Monde for café au lait and beignets, and paused on their way through Jackson Square to watch a woman feeding the pigeons as if her life depended on it.
She said, Did you see the paper? The DNA test came back. He was definitely the man who raped and killed that nurse in Audubon Park.
No surprise there.
No, but waitll you hear what they think happened. You know how the live oaks will have branches that come almost to the ground?
Theyre the only tree I know thats like that.
Well, see, it makes them real easy to climb. And thats what they believe he did, climbed up into one of the trees to wait for a victim to pass by.
I think I can see where this is going.
And then, because he had a something-point-something blood alcohol level, he lost his balance and fell, and he landed on his head and broke his neck and died.
The world is a dangerous place.
But a little less so, she said, now that hes not in it anymore.
Her name
was Julia Emilie Roussard. Shed written it on the fly-leaf of one of the books he picked up.
It took him two days to use it. For all the conversations they had, there was somehow never an occasion where he could fit her name into one of his sentences.
He took her out to lunch after they picked up his eyeglasses (with a complimentary leather case bearing the optometrists name and address, and an impregnated strip of cloth for cleaning the lenses). On the way home she reminded him that hed talked about two losses, his best friend and his most prized possession. Who was the friend, she wondered, and what was the possession?