“Since when is being well off a license to steal children?”
He winced, her words going in like pins. “I’m going to let Elsie know right now.”
She folded her arms. “Sam, you of all people.”
He looked away, stung to the heart.
“You had to hold your own child before you could understand what the Wellers were missing? I guess I can grant you some understanding there. But only some. Honey, what were you thinking when you walked away from that girl?”
He rolled his head back and stared at the ceiling. “Again, I thought she’d be better off.”
Linda began to speak with her hands. “Maybe you’d do what you did if Elsie and her boy were murderers or some other kind of terrible people. But they’re like us, for God’s sake, just struggling to get by.”
He turned his face toward her. “So what do I do?”
She shook her head. “I wouldn’t want to be you for all the chicory coffee in Orleans Parish.”
“I’ve got to come up with a good story.”
“Baby, you’re a fool if you think a lie will fix things between you and them.”
“I guess I’ll have to go up there and tell them face-to-face,” he said.
She narrowed her eyes. Her voice was low and matter-of-fact. “And how will you buy the train tickets, and how will you pay to feed yourself? And what about hotel bills? My family’s helped us out too much already.”
“Well, what can I do?”
“Write a letter.”
He tilted his head. “A letter.”
“A good one. If I was Mrs. Weller, I’d rather have it laid out in print than look at your bumbling face trying to gild the lily on this one.”
He pulled close to the table as she stood up and got a tablet and an envelope. “I know you’ve got her address.”
“Somewhere.”
She left the room, and he wrote one full page, then tore it up. He began another, and then a second page began to flow under a freshly filled fountain pen. He got up and drank a tumbler of water from the tap, sat down, and wrote three more pages.
The sunlight was slanting through the kitchen window when Linda returned holding the baby. “You have it all worked out?”
“I think so. I’ll need an extra stamp, though.”
THE NEXT DAY he started for the post office but stepped into a tavern on Magazine Street for a beer, sitting under the moth-eaten deer head at the end of the bar and watching the silver chains of bubbles rise in his mug like bad ideas. Though he wondered if he was condemning Lily to a hard, dumb life by sending his letter, he was ashamed to acknowledge the chief reason for his worry, that Elsie and August would hate him body and soul for not telling them at once when he’d located the girl. He had a second beer, then walked into the poker game in the back room, sat down, and won thirty dollars playing spit.
He never made it to the post office and hid the letter in his sock drawer. Another day to think things over might help. Maybe events had gone too far for a letter to do any good. In his little parlor he played piano for an hour, working on embellishments, on forgetting.
THE NEXT MORNING there was a rude rapping at the front door, and on the porch he found a ruddy, birdlike man, vaguely familiar, a blunt stuck in the corner of his mouth. He wore a seersucker coat but no tie, and his straw boater was sliding off the side of his head in the sunny breeze. He made a motion with a stubby finger. “You the excursion-boat man?”
“I was.”
“My brother called me up and said you lived about four blocks away from me. Damned if you don’t.”
“Who’s your brother?”
“Station agent in Greenville. He sent you a telegram up to Evansville and wanted to know did you get it.”
The notion that someone else was concerned about his search made him take a step backwards in the door frame. “Yeah. I should’ve sent one back to thank him.”
The little man eyed him harshly. “Morris wants to know did the message help you any? He don’t burn much daylight helping folks out, you know. It’s not his nature.”
“Yes,” he said. “It helped a lot.”
“You find the little girl, did you?”
Sam looked at the brother, who seemed a bit concerned himself over a lost child he’d never seen or heard of before getting a phone call from the wilds of Mississippi. “Yeah, sure. Let him know she’s been found safe.”
The man removed his cigar and shook Sam’s hand. “All right, then. I’ll tell him that. Nice to meetcher.”
“Tell him I’m sorry I didn’t write him back.”
“That’s all right. He’s used to sorry.” He threw his cigar into the street and headed up the sidewalk at a brisk walk, his bright seersucker flapping in the breeze.
Sam went out to the end of his walk and watched Morris Hightower’s brother striding under the oaks, his jacket winking white in the sun. He decided it was a scary visit-that he’d somehow been called to accounts.
THAT WAS A TUESDAY, and he mailed the letter about noon. As soon as it whispered into the brass slot at the post office, he began worrying about the response, when it would come and in what form. He dreaded it until Saturday, when his phone rang with a collect call from Cincinnati, Ohio.
“Mr. Sam Simoneaux?” The voice was Elsie’s, sounding as flat as a skillet against the head.
“It’s me, Elsie,” he muttered.
After a pause, she said something that sounded much rehearsed. “I read your letter several times with all your reasons, and I’ve got a question for you.”
“What’s that?”
“You told me once you had a child.”
“Yes. I’ve got a new one now. A new baby boy.”
There was no congratulation in what she said next. “And of course you’re rich as can be and can give him everything in the world?”
It was as though she’d read his insides from across the country, knew him better than he knew himself. “No.”
“And you’ve got this big job, making maybe five hundred dollars a month?”
“I don’t have any job right now.”
“So, you must have this grand inheritance, and with it you’re going to send this boy to Harvard and Paris, or at least a private school somewhere.”
“Elsie, all I can say is I’m sorry.”
“You are. You really are. If you’d just done your floorwalker job like you were supposed to, none of this would’ve ever happened.” She began to cry now, and accusation began to pile on accusation until he took the candlestick phone off the table and sat on the floor, his legs drawn up, his back against the wall. Linda came out of the bedroom holding the baby and looked at him with no particular expression. Elsie ended her long recital with “And if it weren’t for you, Ted wouldn’t have died.”
“How’s August?” he ventured, his mind reeling with shame.
“How do you think?” she cried. “He’s not the same person. He never will be.”
“What do you want me to do?”
The response was quick. “I’ll tell you. I have no idea how to handle this, so I want you to figure out how we
