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It was evening, and Jenny had gone to bed, clutching her new rabbit Julia and Keller were at the kitchen table, drinking coffee with chicory

"I wasn’t sure it would work," he said

"But you came hooing to do about it? I didn’t have anything else to try" He thought for a moment "Besides, I was ready to come home I had you and Jenny to come home to"

"Otherwise you’d have stayed there"

"Probably But there wouldn’t have been any real point to it"

"More coffee?"

"No, I’ood Does it bother you that he was a priest?"

"No, why should it?"

"Well, it’s your church"

"Only in the most tenuous way I’m the child of lapsed Catholics I was baptized, that was their sole concession to their own upbringing, but it was pretty much the extent of my own involvement with the Church"

"I never asked you if you wanted Jenny baptized"

"Don’t you think I’d have said so? Do you even knohat baptism is for?"

"Isn’t it to uilt is what inal sin Do you suppose our daughter is greatly weighed down by the burden of original sin?"

"I don’t even kno you could go about finding an original sin these days"

"I suppose selling soht qualify And no, what do I care about soreatest boast was that all his sins were strictly heterosexual? You want to knohat’s exciting?"

"What?"

"That you can tellcoffee--"

"Daood coffee, too"

"--and either of us can tell the other anything about anything, and how h, I have to say I’lad you’re home"

"Me, too," Keller said

KELLER AT SEA

Twenty-Two

When Julia and Jenny got ho in the kitchen with a cup of coffee and a azine, The Aot off the phone, but couldn’t keep hisall over the place So he was hter what she’d learned in school that

It wasn’t a school, and the harried woeseach other and screa their little heads off But Jenny, Julia had reported, called it school, and took the whole enterprise very seriously As far as she was concerned, she went there to learn stuff, and it see her to read

So Julia had picked up a book on phonics, and Jenny was learning to sound words out You couldn’t always understand what she was saying, because there ords she couldn’t yet get her tongue around, but da

She had her lunch and went in for her nap, and Keller asked Julia if she’d like to go on a cruise

"A cruise," she said "You mean like on a ship? Yes, of course that’s what you mean A cruise You know, that sounds heavenly When were you thinking? In the winter?"

"Actually," he said, "it would be sooner than that"

"Late fall?"

"A lot sooner"

"Oh Can you get away?"

"There’s no work," he said "Getting away has never been less of a probleetic He’s hired on with a contractor based over in Slidell Says the pay’s notin front of the TV while he runs through his savings At least he’ll have so in"

"That part’s good But he iven Keller a job when he’d first moved in with Julia, and almost before Keller knew it he’d found hiht distressed homes, patched them up, and flipped them That worked well in the early post-Katrina days, but then the economy cratered and there was no money to be had for home renovation loans, no money to finance home sales And, just like that, no business

"He was concerned about us," Keller said "But I told him ere okay"

"Are we? I o on a cruise? You know, if we can it’s actually the perfect kind of vacation I bet Jenny’d love it, too There are plenty of cruises out of New Orleans, and you can literally walk from here to the cruise port Unless our ship uses the Poland Avenue terminal, and that’s what, a ten- from Fort Lauderdale," he said

"In Florida?" She looked at hiot a particular cruise in ? Besides Donny?"

He’d just got off the phone with Donny when it rang again He picked it up, and Dot said, "Keller, I can’t help thinking you need a vacation But before I go any further, there’s soet seasick?"

"Seasick?"

"You know, rushing to the rail, tossing your cookies, feeding the fish? Seasick, Keller What happens to you on the high seas?"

"I don’t know," he said

"You’ve never been on a boat? And the Staten Island Ferry doesn’t count"