'Aren't there something like twelve million people in Texas?' she said, hoping she sounded nonchalant, even as she held her hands behind her back, staring warily at the envelope.
'Closer to nineteen million. You know exactly one of them, however. Right?'
'That I know of.'
She took the envelope from him. The address had been typed, the stamp was generic, a waving flag. She would have expected something more whimsical. The series with the old bluesmen, or perhaps a cartoon character. She turned it over, held it up to the light. Whatever was inside was feather-light. The postal system suddenly seemed miraculous to her. Imagine moving something so delicate across thousands of miles, for less than the cost of a candy bar.
'Why did it come here, instead of my office?' she asked, in no hurry to open it, although she wasn't sure why.
'You've been in Butchers Hill less than six months,' Tyner said. 'You weren't there before…well, before.'
'Bo-erne, Texas,' she said, looking at the postmark. 'Never heard of it.'
'It's pronounced Burn-e,' Tyner corrected. 'Don't you read newspapers since you stopped working for them? It was all over the papers a few years ago. The Catholic church and the Boerne government went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court in a battle over zoning laws. The church claimed that separation of church and state meant it was exempt from zoning.'
'Gee, I don't know how I ever missed a fascinating story like that,' Tess said. 'You know how I love a good zoning yarn.' She still hadn't opened the envelope. It was fun, torturing Tyner. He bossed her so about everything-work, rowing, life. If he was insistent on playing Daddy, he deserved a little teenage petulance in return.
'I guess you want to read it in private,' Tyner said, even as he held his letter opener out to her.
'No!' The harshness in her voice surprised her. She hadn't thought about Crow for days, weeks, months. She had her share of exes, enough to field a football team if she went all the way back to junior high, and was allowed to resurrect the one dead one in the bunch. It didn't seem a particularly scarlet past to her, not for someone who had just turned thirty. More like coral, or a faded salmon color.
'I mean, this is no big deal,' she added. 'For all we know, he's probably just writing about some CD or book he had left in my apartment.' But the only thing he had left behind was a ratty sweater the color of sauteed mushrooms. Her greyhound, Esskay, had unearthed it from beneath the bed and used it as part of her nest.
'Just open it.'
She ignored Tyner's letter opener and unsealed the flap with her index finger, cutting herself on the cheap envelope. Her finger in her mouth, she upended the envelope. A newspaper clipping that had been glued to an index card slid out onto Tyner's desk, and nothing more.
The clipping was a photograph, or a part of one, with a head-and-shoulders shot cut from a larger photograph, the fragment of a headline still attached over the head, like a halo.
IN BIG TROUBLE
The hair was different. Shorter, neater. The face was unmistakably Crow's, although it looked a little different, too. Surely she was imagining that-how much could a face change in six months? There was a gauntness she didn't remember, a sharpness to his cheekbones that made him look a little cruel. And his mouth was tight, lips pressed together as if he had never smiled in his life. Yet when she thought of Crow-which was really almost never, well maybe once a month-he was always smiling. Happy-go-lucky, blithe as a puppy. 'The perfect postmodern boyfriend,' one of her friends had called him. A compliment, yet also a dig.
In the end, it was the gap in temperament, not the six-year age difference so much, that had split them up. Or so her current theory held; she had revised their history several times over the past six months. He had been so endearingly boyish. Tess had been in the market for a man. Now here was a man, frowning at her. A man In Big Trouble.
That was his problem.
'There's no sign which newspaper it came from,' Tyner said, picking up the card and holding it to the light, trying to read the type on the side that had been glued down. 'The back looks like a Midas Muffler ad, and that could be anywhere in the country. Didn't Crow head off to Austin last spring?'
'Uh-huh.'
'So what are you going to do about it?'
'Do about what?'
'Crow, and this trouble he's in.'
'I'm not going to do anything. He's a big boy, too big to be playing cut-and-paste. In fact, I bet his mommy lets him use the real scissors now, instead of the little ones with the rounded-off blades.'
Tyner rolled his wheelchair a few feet and grabbed the wastebasket. 'So throw it away,' he dared her. 'Three-pointer.'
Tess tucked the photo and envelope into her notebook-sized datebook, the closest thing she had to a constant companion these days. 'My Aunt Kitty will want to see his photo, just for old time's sake, take in the spectacle of Crow without his purple dreadlocks. She was his friend, too, you know.'
Tyner smiled knowingly. But then Tyner always smiled knowingly at Tess. He was one smug, insufferable prick, and proud of it.
'Sometimes,' she said, 'I think it's your personality that qualifies you for the Americans with Disabilities Act.'
'
Tess left Tyner's office, intending to head straight to the bank, then back to her office, where Esskay waited, probably snoozing through the gray October day. She reminded herself that she was a businesswoman, a grown- up, with checks to write, calls to return, and a dog to walk. She didn't have time for little-boy-rock-star-gonnabes and their games.
As she crossed Charles Street, the open door of the Washington Monument caught her eye. Like many things in Baltimore, it needed a compound modifier to achieve true distinction: first permanent monument to the first President to be built by a city or government jurisidiction. A tiny George was plopped on top, his profile as familiar to Tess as her own. More so, really, for how often do you see your own profile? She saw George almost every day, staring moodily down Charles Street. Soon enough, he'd be dressed up with strings of lights for the Christmas season. Spring would come, and the parks around him would fill with daffodils and tulips. Summer, and he would seem to droop a bit, like all of Baltimore did in the July humidity. Fall, the current season, was Baltimore's best, its one unqualified success. George must have a fine view from where he stood. Yet here Tess was at his feet, a Baltimore native, and she couldn't remember ever climbing his tower and seeing the world as he saw it.
Suddenly, it seemed urgent to do so. She walked inside, stuffed a dollar into the wooden donations box, and skipping the historical plaques and displays at the base, began to make the climb, counting each step as she went.
The circular staircase was cooler than the world outside, its air thick with some recently applied disinfectant or cleanser. As Tess began sucking wind about a third of the way up-even someone who exercised as much as she did was ill-prepared to climb so many steps so quickly-she felt a little woozy from the fumes. Still, she climbed, her knapsack and long braid bouncing on her back. Up, up and up-220, 221, 222, 223-until she saw the ceiling flattening out above her head, a sign that she had come to the end, step 228.
Plexiglass shields and metal gates kept one from venturing out on the tiny parapet that circled Washington's feet, but the view was still extraordinary. Funny, she had never realized what a squat city Baltimore was, how it hugged the ground. The effect was of a low, paranoid place, peering anxiously over one shoulder. She looked east, to where she lived and worked. Then to the north, a scarlet and gold haze of trees at this time of year. Closer in, she could pick out the roof of the Brass Elephant, her home away from home. She turned to the west, to that ruined part of the city between downtown and Ten Hills, the neighborhood where she had grown up, where her parents still lived.
