"Just to see how he's doing."

"Bobo, take Lily in, please." It might have been framed as a question, but it was clearly a demand.

"Lily," Bobo said, holding open the wide door to Joe C's room. As I went by him, he lay his hand on my shoulder briefly, but I kept right on walking and kept my eyes ahead.

Joe C looked like he was a thousand years old. With the liveliness knocked out of him, he seemed like a pitiful old man. Until he focused on me and snapped, "You could have moved a little faster, girl! I got my slippers scorched!"

I hadn't spelled it out to myself, but I suddenly realized that now that Joe C didn't have a house, I didn't work for him. I felt my lips curl up. I bent down to him. "Maybe I should have just walked on by," I said very softly, but he heard every word. His face told me.

Then I squirmed inwardly. Just as his trembling jaw had meant me to. No matter how mean he was, Joe C was very old and very frail, and he would not let me forget that, would trade on it as much as he could. But I could walk away, and that was what I chose to do.

I walked away from the old man, and from his great-nephew, and I closed my heart against them both.

Chapter Ten

I was sickened by the world and the people in it, most of all by myself. I did something I hadn't done in years. I went home and went to bed without bathing or eating. I just stripped, brushed my teeth, pulled on a nightgown, and slid between my clean sheets.

The next thing I knew, I was peering at the bright numbers on the digital clock next to the bed. It was seven minutes after three. I wondered why I was awake.

Then I knew there was someone in the room with me.

My heart began that terrible pounding, but through its rhythm I heard the sounds of clothing being removed, the zipper of a gym bag, and it came to me that I was not attacking the intruder because on some level I had already recognized who was in my bedroom.

"Jack?"

"Lily," he said, and slid under the covers with me. "I took an earlier flight."

My heart slowed down a little, to a rhythm that had more to do with another kind of excitement.

The smell of him, his skin and hair and deodorant and cologne and clothes, the combination of scents that said Jack filled my senses. I'd planned on making him wait to come down to Shakespeare, wait until I'd talked to him, told him I'd been unfaithful to him—sort of—so he could decide without seeing me whether or not to leave me for good. But in the private dark of my room, and because Jack was as necessary to me as water, I reached behind his head, my fingers clumsy with sleep, and worked the elastic band off his ponytail. I ran my fingers through his hair, dark and thick, separating it.

"Jack," I said, my voice sad to my own ears, "I have some things to tell you."

"Not now, okay?" he murmured in my ear. "Let me just... just let me... okay?"

His hands moved purposefully. I will say this for us; we put each other under a spell in bed together. Our troubled pasts and our uncertain future had no place in that bed.

Later, in the darkness, my fingers traced the muscles and skin and bones I knew so well. Jack is strong and scarred, like me, but his is visible all the time, a single thin puckered line running from the hairline by his right eye down to his jaw. Jack used to be a policeman; he used to be married; and he used to smoke and drink too much, too often.

I started to ask him how his case, the one that had taken him to California, was going; I thought of asking him how his friends Roy Costimiglia and Elizabeth Fry (also Little Rock private detectives) were doing. But all that really mattered was that Jack was here now.

I drifted off to sleep, Jack's breathing even and deep by my side. At eight, I woke up to the smell of coffee perking in the kitchen. Across the hall I could see the bathroom door opening, and Jack stepped out in his blue jeans and nothing else. His hair was wet and dragging over his shoulder. He'd just shaved.

I watched him, not thinking of anything, just feeling: glad to see him here in my house, comfortable with the warmth in my heart. His eyes met mine, and he smiled.

"I love you," I said, without ever meaning to, as if the sound of the words was as natural as breathing. It was something I'd held inside myself like a secret code, refusing to reveal it to anyone, even Jack, who'd devised it.

"We love each other," he said, not smiling now, but this look was better than a smile. "We have to be together more."

This was going to be the kind of conversation we needed to be dressed to have. Jack looked so clean and buff that I felt sleazy and crumpled in contrast.

"Let me get a shower. We'll talk," I said.

He nodded, and padded down the hall to the kitchen. "You want some pancakes?" he called, as though the earth had not just shifted to another axis entirely.

"I guess," I said doubtfully.

"Cut loose," he advised me as I stepped into the bathroom. "It's not every day we work up enough guts to talk about how we feel."

I smiled to myself in the bathroom mirror. It was still cloudy from Jack's shower. In it I saw a softer, gentler version of Lily; and since I'd hung it at just the right height, I couldn't see most of the scars. I avoided noticing them from long habit, avoided looking at them and thinking of what my body would look like without them. I did not remember exactly what my torso had been like with no white ridges, or my breasts without circles incised around them. As I did from time to time, I caught myself regretting I didn't have something more beautiful to offer Jack, and as I did every time, I reminded myself that he seemed to find me beautiful enough.

We eyed each other cautiously as we sat down to eat. Jack had opened the kitchen window, and the cool morning air came in with a gust of smells that meant spring. I heard a car start up and glanced at the clock. Carlton was going to the Singles Sunday-school class at First Methodist, and he'd be home at twelve-fifteen, right after church. He'd change and then drive over to his mother's house for midday Sunday dinner; it would be pot roast and carrots and mashed potatoes, or baked chicken and dressing and sweet potatoes. I knew all that. I'd spent over four years learning this town and these people, making a place for myself here.

Before Jack and I even began our conversation, I knew I wasn't ready to leave. True, I had no family here in Shakespeare; true, I could clean houses as well in Dubuque (or Little Rock) as I could in Shakespeare. And true, my business had suffered a lot in the past year. But I'd won some kind of battle here in Shakespeare, and I wanted to stay, at least for now. I began to tense in anticipation of a fight.

"I don't have to live in Little Rock," Jack said. I deflated as though he'd stuck a pin in me.

"I do a lot of my work by computer anyway," he continued, looking at me intently. "Of course, I'd still need to be in Little Rock part of the time. I can keep my apartment up there, or find a smaller, cheaper one. That'd be more to the point."

We were being so careful with each other.

"So you want to live with me here in Shakespeare," I said, to be absolutely sure I was hearing him right.

"Yes," he said. "What do you think?"

I thought of what I'd done yesterday. I closed my eyes and wished a lightning bolt would hit me now, to prevent me from ever telling Jack. But that didn't happen. We'd always been honest with each other.

"I kissed someone else," I said. "I won't let you hit me, but if it'll help you feel better, you can break something."

"You kissed someone," he said.

I couldn't look at his face. "It was an after-funeral thing."