“I need to think more seriously about the future. I’m getting married on Saturday.”
“Would that be to Ms. Bronwen Llewellyn?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Mr. Thomas, you have a rare opportunity for perfect bliss, and you would be ill advised to poison your life with either academia or drug dealing. I have a class this morning, followed by two student conferences. Then I’m having lunch and seeing a movie with my family, so I’m afraid tomorrow is the absolute earliest we can discuss this self-destructive impulse of yours.”
“Where are you having lunch, sir? At the Grille?”
“We’re allowing the children to choose. It’s their day.”
“What movie are you seeing?”
“That thing about the dog and the alien.”
“Don’t,” I said, though I hadn’t seen the film. “It stinks.”
“It’s a big hit.”
“It sucks.”
“The critics like it,” he said.
“Randall Jarrell said that art is long and critics are but the insects of a day.”
“Give my office a call, Mr. Thomas. We’ll talk tomorrow.”
He put up his window, backed out of the driveway, and drove off toward the university and, later in the day, an appointment with Death.
NICOLINA PEABODY, AGE FIVE, WORE PINK sneakers, pink shorts, and a pink T-shirt. Her wristwatch featured a pink plastic band and a pink pig’s face on the dial.
“When I’m old enough to buy my own clothes,” she told me, “I’ll wear nothing but pink, pink, pink, every day, all year, forever.”
Levanna Peabody, who would soon be seven, rolled her eyes and said, “Everybody’ll think you’re a whore.”
Entering the living room with a birthday cake on a plate under a clear-glass lid, Viola said, “Levanna! That’s an awful thing to say. That’s just half a step from trash talk and two weeks with no allowance.”
“What’s a whore?” Nicolina asked.
“Someone who wears pink and kisses men for money,” Levanna said in a tone of worldly sophistication.
When I took the cake from Viola, she said, “I’ll just grab their box of activity books, and we’ll be ready to go.”
I had taken a quick tour of the house. No bodachs lurked in any corner.
Nicolina said, “If I kiss men for free, then I can wear pink and not be a whore.”
“If you kiss lots of men for free, you’re a slut,” Levanna said.
“Levanna, enough!” Viola reprimanded.
“But Mom,” Levanna said, “she’s got to learn how the world works sooner or later.”
Noticing my amusement and interpreting it with uncanny skill, Nicolina confronted her older sister: “You don’t even know what a whore is, you only think you do.”
“I know, all right,” Levanna insisted smugly.
The girls preceded me down the front walk to Mrs. Sanchez’s car, which was parked at the curb.
After locking the house, Viola followed us. She put the box of activity books in the backseat with the girls, and then she sat up front. I handed the cake to her and closed her door.
The morning was pure Mojave, blazing and breathless. The sky, an inverted blue ceramic cauldron, poured out a hot dry brew.
With the sun still in the east, all shadows slanted westward, as if yearning for that horizon over which the night had preceded them. And along the windless street, only my shadow moved.
If supernatural entities were present, they were not evident.
As I got in the car and started the engine, Nicolina said, “I’m never going to kiss any men, anyway. Just Mommy, Levanna, and Aunt Sharlene.”
“You’ll want to kiss men when you’re older,” Levanna predicted.
“I won’t.”
“You will.”
“I won’t,” Nicolina firmly declared. “Just you, Mommy, Aunt Sharlene. Oh, and Cheevers.”
“Cheevers is a boy,” Levanna said as I pulled away from the curb and set out for Sharlene’s house.
Nicolina giggled. “Cheevers is a bear.”
“He’s a boy bear.”
“He’s stuffed.”
“But he’s still a boy,” Levanna contended. “See, it’s started already—you want to kiss men.”
“I’m not a slut,” Nicolina insisted. “I’m going to be a dog doctor.”
“They’re called veterinarians, and they don’t wear pink, pink, pink, every day, all year, forever.”
“I’ll be the first.”
“Well,” Levanna said, “if I had a sick dog and you were a pink veterinarian, I guess I’d still bring him to you ’cause I know you’d make him well.”
Following a circuitous route, checking the rearview mirror, I drove six blocks to wind up two blocks away on Maricopa Lane.
Using my cell phone en route, Viola called her sister to say that she was bringing the girls for a visit.
The tidy white clapboard house on Maricopa has periwinkle-blue shutters and blue porch posts. On the porch, a social center for the neighborhood, are four rocking chairs and a bench swing.
Sharlene rocked up from one of the chairs when we parked in her driveway. She is a large woman with a rapturous smile and a musical voice perfect for a gospel singer, which she is.
A golden retriever, Posey, rose from the porch floor to stand at her side, lashing a gorgeous plumed tail, excited by the sight of the girls, held in place not by a leash but by her master’s softly spoken command.
I carried the cake into the kitchen, where I politely declined Sharlene’s offer of ice-cold lemonade, an apple dumpling, three varieties of cookies, and homemade peanut brittle.
Lying on the floor with four legs in the air, forepaws bent in submission, Posey solicited a belly rub, which the girls were quick to provide.
I dropped to one knee and interrupted long enough to say happy birthday to Levanna. I gave each of the girls a hug.
They seemed terribly small and fragile. So little force would be required to shatter them, to rip them out of this world. Their vulnerability frightened me.
Viola accompanied me through the house to the front porch, where she said, “You were gonna bring me a picture of the man I’m supposed to be on the lookout for.”
“You don’t need it now. He’s ... out of the picture.”
Her huge eyes were full of trust that I didn’t deserve. “Odd, tell me honest-to-Jesus, do you still see death in me?”
I didn’t know what might be coming, but though the desert day made a bright impression on my eyes, it seemed storm-dark to my sixth sense, with great thunder pending. Changing their plans, canceling the movie and dinner at the Grille—that would surely be enough to change their fate. Surely. “You’re okay now. And the girls, too.”
Her