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"To ot out of there I wanted to make sure they showed up before he could come to his senses and head for the hills"

"Hills would be hard to find," she said, "in that part of the country Look, don’t worry about it You had no way of knowing he was the client, or that he’d canceled the contract One way to look at it, he’s a lucky man"

"Lucky?"

"You wanted the double bonus, right? That’s why you left him with the knife in his hand"

"So?"

"So otherwise you’d have killed them both This way at least he’s alive"

"What a lucky guy"

"Well, yes and no See, he’s consuuilt"

"Because he didn’t call it off soon enough?"

"Because he got drunk and killed his wife He doesn’t actually re after the third drink, and what’s a man supposed to think when he comes out of a blackout with a knife in his hand and a dead woures he uilty, and that’s the end of it"

"And now he’s got to live with the guilt"

"Keller," she said, "everybody’s got to live with so"

KELLER’S HOMECOMING

Nine

Keller, his suitcase unpacked, found himself curiously reluctant to leave his hotel roo anything that held his attention, threw himself down on the bed, picked himself up, test-drove every chair in the rooet over it He wasn’t sure what it was that he had to get over, but he wasn’t going to find it sitting in his roo the floor

One explanation occurred to him in the elevator Keller, who’d lived all his life in and around New York, had never had occasion to stay at a New York hotel before Why would he? For years he’d had a wonderfully comfortable apartment on First Avenue in the 40s, and unless he was out of town, or had been invited to spend the night in the bed of soenial female companion, that here he slept

Nowadays the only feenial or otherwise, was his wife, Julia, and he lived in her house in New Orleans’s Garden District His name in New Orleans--and, for that matter, everywhere he went--was Edwards, Nicholas Edwards He was a partner in a construction business, doing post-Katrina residential rehabilitation, and his partner called him Nick, as did the men they worked with Julia called him Nicholas, except in intimate moments, when she sometimes called him Keller

But she didn’t do that so often anymore Oh, the intimate moments were no less frequent, but she was apt to call hiht, why not? That was his name Nicholas Edwards That’s what it said on his driver’s license, issued to him by the state of Louisiana, and on his passport, issued to him by the United States of America And that was the name on every credit card and piece of ID in his wallet, so how could you say that wasn’t who he was? And why shouldn’t his wife call hihter, Jenny, called him Daddy

He realized that he missed them both, Jenny and Julia, and it struck him that this was ridiculous They’d driven hi, so it had been only a er than that without seeing them on any busy workday Of course there’d been fewer busy workdays lately, the econo what it was, and that in fact had a little to do with this visit to New York, but even so…

How you do go on, he told hih the lobby and out onto the street

His hotel, the Savoyard, stood at the corner of Sixth Avenue and West 53rd Street He took a s, then headed uptown There was a Starbucks two blocks fro woman with a snake coiled around her upper arm--well, the inked representation of a snake, not an actual living reptile--made sure the barista understood exactly what she did and didn’t want in her latte Keller couldn’t i quite that much about the coetting tattooed, so he let it go When it was finally his turn, he asked for a small black coffee

"That would be a ‘Tall,’" said the barista, herself sporting a tattoo and a few piercings She drew the coffee without waiting for his reply, which was just as well, because Keller didn’t have one The tables were all taken, but there was a high counter where you could stand while your coffee cooled He did, and when it was cool enough to drink he drank it, and when he was done he left