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And Kelly stops again somewhere beyond Jackson Square, somewhere in the dimness between streetlamps, somewhere before some shuttered Creole cottage with a dog barking in the distance and Kelly is sitting in her Mercedes, sitting at the curb across the street from the Blanchard Judicial Building, the place where her husband becomes the man he most naturally is, the impressive man, and she is dialing her cell phone with trembling hands and she says into the phone, “It’s me. I’m outside. Outside the courthouse. Please come out here. Please come out here and see me.” But no more than this now. Kelly lets no more than her own desperate voice into her head before she moves on, quickly now, back toward the Olivier House and her room.

Michael goes up the hard-packed dirt and pea-gravel road toward the top of the levee and Laurie pushes his offered hand away as she mutters on about how this was a mistake but don’t let’s go back I don’t want to go back I want to do this and thanks but I need two hands to deal with this dress, and what plays in Michael’s head is the little scene that ends with Laurie going out the wide sliding doors and past Kelly and Drew and on toward the pool, and it is a scene as inconsequential and as incrementally crucial as the scene that concurrently plays just out of Michael’s sight between his wife and a lawyer whose own wife laughs with three men at the far side of the pool. As Michael looks out those glass doors and idly wonders which lies a current client is telling him are conscious lies and which are lies the client is also telling himself, Laurie appears at his side.

“So, if I can ask your advice,” she says, and she waits for him to turn to her, which he does now. He recognizes her at once, though he has not seen her since the brief first conversation at the earlier party. She is wearing a lime green chiffon mini-robe and her hair is rolled up and she has sunglasses wedged at the top of her forehead.

As soon as she has his attention, Laurie says, “If I was needing counsel, should I go with a lawyer who strips down to his Speedo and swims at a swim party or with a lawyer who stays dressed and just watches?”

“Hello,” Michael says.

“Hello,” Laurie says. “It’s me again.”

“It depends what you need him for,” he says.

“I’m not stalking you,” she says. “We just keep showing up together.”

“I believe you.”

“Good,” Laurie says. “So. Yes. You were saying it depends.”

“If you’ve got trouble with a man, go with the Speedo. If you’re in trouble with the law, you’d want him to be the clothed type.”

“Which are you?”

“There’s no Speedo under these chinos,” Michael says.

“Well,” Laurie says, “if you’re a watcher, I’ll be swimming soon. Just to let you know.” And she moves off at once through a clear space between chatting gaggles of other clothed types, and as she moves — even before she reaches the doors — she strips off the mini-robe. Michael’s breath snags at the sudden flesh of her. He is happy to be living in the era of backside cleavage and bared cheeks, but happy only in the way clothed-type lawyers with the lies of clients in the forefront of their minds are capable of being happy over a matter like that, particularly when prompted to it in public places by women young enough to be their daughters.

And now he finds himself standing in an antique tuxedo on the berm of an upriver levee with that very woman and she is muttering on about her nineteenth century gown and how did they live in these things you’d think life was hard enough in the nineteenth century without doing this to yourself, and she and Michael will sleep together tonight and he is thinking about the moments when she was at her worst. Her body was lovely but she was at her worst. Her reckless flirty worst, soliciting his eyes, implicitly daring him to act. Kelly has vanished before finishing off their marriage, has gone out somewhere, no doubt drinking, and maybe not alone, and Michael is selectively making some kind of case in his head against this beautiful young woman who seems to think he’s worth something. He doesn’t like what his mind is doing. He reboots.

And Laurie says, “Here we are in this awesome place, and listen to me. Are you sure you don’t think I’ve got a bad case of the chronic ditzes?”

He looks at her. Her face is bright from a gibbous moon rising over his shoulder. He’s a defense lawyer, not a prosecutor. And she’s a perfect client. Surprisingly smart and self-aware and honestly self-critical. “I’m sure,” he says.

“I want to make you happy,” she says. “I really do.”

“I get that.”

She lowers her face and is moved to gently plant her forehead in the center of his chest. She tries and more or less succeeds but is leaning awkwardly far forward over her hoop skirt. “This doesn’t work,” she says, and she straightens.

“I’ve been thinking about when we first met,” Michael says. “No, the second time, I guess it was. At the pool party.”

Laurie shudders inside and she lets it out, exaggerates it so he can see. “What you must have thought,” she says.

Michael smiles at her self-criticism. This sort of thing about Laurie Pruitt is what he should focus on. This is why he’s here.

“I thought you had a great ass,” he says.

She slaps him lightly on the shoulder.

“Wasn’t that your point?” he says.

“Of course it was. Why do I behave like that?”

“I have no idea.”

“Oh right,” Laurie says. “Lawyer, not therapist. I’m on the wrong floor.”

“Did you see something I didn’t?”

“For me to behave like that?”

“Yes.”

“Something about you?”

“No.”

“I knew who your wife was. I don’t know what I saw.”

He cuts off these thoughts. He wants simply to stand on this levee in the moonlight with this woman now.

Laurie angles her head to the side, studying him. “You’re coaching me into an alibi.”

He laughs.

“For my bad behavior,” she says.

“You’re good at this,” he says.

“Do I need a lawyer?”

“You’ve got one.”

She likes this answer. “What do you need?” she says. “Right now.”

Michael would be willing to answer this, but the question renders him instantly dumb. He knows she is sincere. He knows this young woman truly wants to give him whatever it is.

She waits.

The long-practiced rhetorical part of him takes over. “Not to have to answer that question,” he says.

The moon is bright enough for him to see her roll her eyes.

He does think of one thing. “To have the divorce over with,” he says.

“Of course,” Laurie says. “But how about something I can give … Okay. I can give you this: you don’t have to answer that question.”

“Thanks.”

“But if I didn’t have this fricking dress on,” she says, “I’d give you a blow job. Right here, right now.”

Michael realizes that outwardly he is showing nothing in response to this. Inside, he churns. But whatever gift Laurie has for figuring him out, she doesn’t pick up on this.

“Sorry,” she says. “Is it that codger lawyer in you?”

“No,” he says. “On the contrary. One of the things I’m finding about you is that you know what I need even when I don’t know it.”

She lifts her hand and touches his cheek. “Maybe,” she says. “But there’s something. Not the codger. It’s the old-school romantic in you. I shouldn’t be talking like that till we’ve made love. I know how you want the first time to be right. I admire you for that, Michael.”