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"I can i to tell Donny? ‘Thanks all the saot a ton of money in an offshore account’"

"No"

"‘And now and then I get a phone call and…’ Well, obviously I can’t tell him that part, either"

They talked about it, and the following afternoon Julia followed Jenny into the den while he orking with his sta a "

"Oh?"

"You need a business"

"I do?"

"So that you do, so it’lla hammer"

"That’d be nice," he allowed "And it’s not just Donny There must be a lot of people onder just what it is I do"

"Not so much in this town New Orleans is full of people who don’t see But it wouldn’t hurt if you had sohtI know all that much about"

"You know a lot about stao into the business?" He thought about it, frowned "The dealers I know," he said, "work all the ti orders and doing all this detail work I don’t think I’d be good at it I enjoy buying sta to make a business out of it, the part you have to enjoy is selling the part’s what you like, couldn’t you make a business out of that?"

He extended a hand, indicating first the album on the desk in front of him, then the double row of albu that part," he said, "and it keeps me busy, but it’s hard to call it a business"

"Did you ever meet my friend Celia Cutrone? She was a year behind me at Ursuline Skinny little creature then, but she filled out Yes, you did meet her, she was at Donny and Claudia’s cookout"

"If you say so"

"She brought her big old dog, and the two of you were talking about dogs"

He remembered now, an owlish woman with a wonderfully well-behaved Great Pyrenees, and he’d found hi he’d had for a while, until the dog walker walked off with him

"We didn’t talk about stamps," he said "Did we?"

"Probably not She’s not a stamp collector"

"Oh"

"She’s in the antiques business, but she doesn’t have a shop or list things on eBay She’s what they call a picker"

He’d heard the tere sales and junk shops and wholesaled theuess the way to get started is run standing ads in all the neighborhood papers The ones they give away"

"Shoppers, they call theslist"

"Craigslist is free, isn’t it? Running ads in it, I mean And ads in the shoppers can’t cost the earth"

"And then there’d be word of mouth," she said "‘You know those old sta man came over and paid me decent money for theirl, and he’s surprisingly polite for a Yankee’"

"Word of mouth," she said, "New Orleans–style You can run all the ads you want, but once you get theht about it Low start-up costs, nothing like opening a store Even so…

"I don’t know," he said

"Whether you’d enjoy it?"

"Oh, I’d like it well enough What I don’t know is if there’s any way to do it and come out ahead I wouldn’t want to cheat anybody, and I wouldn’t get big prices fro in a lot of hours and barely breaking even"

"Hours doing what?"

"Well, driving around and looking at people’s sta at theht and what it’s worth and who’s the best buyer for it"

"And you e for your troubles"

"Chue," he said

"Isn’t that the expression?"