“You’re not married.”

“Not anymore. You?”

He shook his head. “Never.”

“Mine lasted a year and a half. No children. All I had was a job and an apartment, and they were nothing I couldn’t walk away from. Now I do substitute teaching a couple of days a week, and hire a woman to tend to Daddy when I’m working. What I make doesn’t do much more than cover what I have to pay her, but it makes a change.”

Chère, he thought. Like the singer? Or was it short for Sharon or Sherry or Cheryl, something like that?

Like it mattered.

“That’s my house on the next block. With the azaleas and rhododendrons in front, so overgrown they’re hiding the downstairs porch. They ought to be trimmed, but I wouldn’t know where to start.”

“It looks nice. A little lush and untamed, but nice all the same.”

“The ground-floor sitting room’s got his bed in it, so he doesn’t have to bother with the stairs, and I made up a bed for myself in the den for the same reason. The whole second floor’s empty, and I can’t remember the last time anyone had occasion to go up there.”

“Just the two of you in that big house?”

“There’ll be three tonight,” she said, “and you’ll have the entire second floor all to yourself.”

He waited in the hallway while she saw to her father. “I’ve brought a man home, Daddy,” he heard her say.

“Well, aren’t you the little hellion.”

“Not like that,” she said. “You’re an old man with a dirty mind. This gentleman’s a friend of Pearl O’Byrne’s, he needs a place to stay. He’ll be upstairs, and if it works out he might rent that front room.”

“Just be more work for you, chère. Not saying the money won’t come in handy.”

He felt like an eavesdropper, and walked out of earshot. He was looking at a framed print of a horse jumping a fence when she emerged and led him to the kitchen.

She made a pot of coffee, and when it had dripped through she filled two large mugs and set them on the kitchen table, along with a sugar bowl and a little pitcher of cream. He said he preferred his coffee black, and she said so did she, and returned the cream to the refrigerator. They talked while they drank their coffee, and then she said he must be hungry and insisted on making him a sandwich.

Once, years ago, starved for a sounding board, he’d bought a stuffed animal, a little plush dog, and carried it around with him for a week or two just so he’d have someone to talk to. The dog had been a good listener, never interrupting, just taking everything in, but he’d been no better in the role than this woman was now. He talked until they’d finished the pot of coffee, and didn’t object when she made a second pot, and talked some more.

“I was wondering what was in the bag,” she said, when he’d told about wanting to change his appearance. He showed her the clippers and the packet of hair dye. The clippers would probably work okay, she said, although it would be hard for a person to use them on his own head. As for the hair dye, she thought he’d be taking an awful chance. It might work to turn gray or white hair the promised shade of light brown, but apply it to hair as dark as his own and you might wind up with something more in the tangerine family.

And you couldn’t really dye dark hair gray, she told him. What you could do, say for a costume ball or a theatrical role, was spray what was essentially a gray paint onto your hair. It would wash out, though, so you would have to renew it after every shampoo, or even after getting caught in the rain, and a wig would be simpler and more effective.

He said he’d thought about a wig, and ruled it out, and she agreed, saying you could always spot a man wearing a hairpiece. But could you? If it fooled you, you’d never know you’d been fooled.

“I dye my hair,” she said suddenly. “Could you tell?”

“Are you serious?”

She nodded. “I started six, seven years ago, when the first gray hairs showed up. All the women in my family go gray early, they have this magnificent silver hair and everyone says how they look like queens. I said the hell with that, and I went looking for Miss Clairol. I’ve never let it grow out, so I don’t know how gray I’d be by now if I did, and with luck I’ll never find out. You really can’t tell?”

“No,” he said, “and I’m still having trouble believing you.”

She fluffed her hair. “Well, I just touched it up last week, so it shouldn’t show, but if you look closely maybe you can see the roots.”

She leaned toward him, and he looked down into her hair. Was there some gray showing at the roots? He couldn’t really tell, it was hard to put the image into focus at that range, but what he did notice was the smell of her hair, all fresh and clean.

She straightened up, and her face looked a little flushed. All that coffee, he thought. She said, “You want to keep from being recognized, right? I have some ideas. Let me think about it, and tomorrow we’ll see what we can do.”

“All right.”

“Do you want any more coffee? Because I’ve already had more than I should.”

“I feel the same way.”

“I’ll show you to your room,” she said. “It’s a nice room. I think you’ll like it.”

24

In the morning he showered in the upstairs bathroom, then put on the same clothes and went downstairs. She had breakfast on the table, grapefruit halves and French toast with syrup, and after a second cup of coffee she got her Ford Taurus out of the garage and gave him a ride to where he’d parked the Sentra. There was a ticket on it, as she’d said there might be, but what would they do if it went unpaid? Send a summons to a broken-down farm in eastern Tennessee?

He followed her back home, and parked in her garage as instructed, while she left the Taurus in the driveway. “You’re going to stay here for a while,” she’d told him over breakfast, and he said he bet she was good at getting little kids to mind what she said. She said if she was being bossy that was just too bad. “I didn’t object when you saved my life,” she said. “So don’t give me grief when I return the favor, you hear?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“That’s better,” she said. “It sounds funny, though. ‘Yes, ma’am.’”

“Whatever you say, chère. That better?”

“Now when did you turn into an Orleanean?”

“Huh?”

“Calling me chère.”

“That’s your name, isn’t it? It’s not? It’s what your father calls you.”

“It’s what everybody calls everybody,” she said. “In New Orleans. It’s French for dear. You order a po’boy for lunch, the old girl who brings it is apt to call you chère.”

“The waitress in the place I go in New York calls everybody hon.”

“Same idea,” she said.

But she didn’t say what her name was. Nor did he ask.

He sat at the round kitchen table in one of the oak captain’s chairs while she played barber. His shirt was off and she’d draped a bed-sheet over his shoulders. She was wearing faded jeans and a man’s white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and she looked a little like Rosie the Riveter in a patriotic World War II poster, only her rivet gun was the electric clippers from Walgreen’s.

Back in New York, Keller had gone to the same barber for almost fifteen years. The man’s name was Andy and he owned his own three-chair barbershop, and once a year he flew back to São Paulo to visit his relatives. That was all Keller knew about him, along with the fact that he was a heavy user of breath mints, and he didn’t suppose Andy knew very much about him, either, because his monthly visits were relatively silent affairs, and Keller almost always fell asleep in the chair and didn’t wake up until Andy cleared his throat and tapped the arm of the chair.

He didn’t expect to doze off now, but the next thing he knew she was telling him he could open his eyes. He did, and she steered him down the hall to the bathroom, where he looked long and hard at his reflection in the mirror. The face that gazed back at him was his face, that much was evident, but it looked very different from anything he’d ever seen in a mirror before.