He waited in the kitchen while Julia checked on her father. He couldn’t sit still and walked around, opening doors, peering into cupboards. Everything’s close to perfect, he thought, and now you’re about to screw it up.
It seemed to him that she was taking forever, but then she came up behind him and stood looking over his shoulder. “All these sets of dishes,” she said. “Things accumulate when a family lives in the same place forever. There’ll be some yard sale here one of these days.”
“It’s nice, living in a place with a history.”
“I suppose.”
He turned toward her and smelled her perfume. She hadn’t been wearing scent earlier.
He drew her close, kissed her.
25
“You know what I was worried about? I was afraid I wouldn’t remember how to do it.”
“I guess it all came back to you,” he said. “Been a while, has it?”
“Ages.”
“Same for me.”
“Oh, come on,” she said. “You, running around the country, having adventures everywhere?”
“The running around I’ve been doing lately, the only women who spoke to me were asking me did I want to supersize that order of fries. Imagine if they asked you that at a good restaurant. ‘Sir, would you care to supersize that coq au vin?’”
“But before Des Moines,” she said. “I’ll bet you had a girl in every port.”
“Hardly. I’m trying to remember the last time I was… with anybody. All I can tell you is it’s been a long time.”
“My daddy asked me if we were sleeping together.”
“Just now?”
“No, he never even stirred. I think Lucille let him get at the Maker’s Mark. The doctor doesn’t want him drinking, but he doesn’t want him smoking, either, and I say what difference can it possibly make? No, this was a couple of days ago. ‘You an’ that fine-looking young man sleeping together, chère?’ You’re still a young man to Daddy, even the way I got your hair fixed.”
“He asked me, too.”
“He didn’t!”
“That first time you left me alone with him. He came right out and asked me if I was sleeping with you.”
“I don’t know why I should be surprised. It’s just like him. What did you say?”
“That I wasn’t, of course. What’s so funny?”
“Well, that’s not what I told him.”
He propped himself up on an elbow, stared at her. “Why on earth would you—”
“Because I didn’t want to tell him one thing and then have to go back and tell him another. Oh, come on, don’t tell me you didn’t know this was going to happen.”
“Well, I had hopes.”
“‘Well, I had hopes.’ You must have known when you asked me out to dinner.”
“By that time,” he said, “they were high hopes.”
“I was afraid you’d make a move that first night. Inviting you to stay here, and after I did it struck me that you might think that was more of an invitation than I had in mind. And that would have been the last thing I wanted just then.”
“After what happened in the park? It was the last thing I would have suggested.”
“All I wanted,” she said, “was to do a favor for someone who had saved my life. Except—”
“Except what?”
“Well, I wasn’t thinking this consciously at the time. But looking back, I might not have dragged you home if you didn’t look real cute.”
“Cute?”
“With your full head of shaggy dark hair. Don’t worry, you’re even cuter now.” She reached to stroke his hair. “There’s only one thing. I don’t know what to call you.”
“Oh.”
“I know your name, or at least the names they put in the paper. But I haven’t called you by name, or asked what to call you, because I don’t want to say the wrong thing sometime with other people around. And you were talking about getting a new set of ID.”
“Yes, I want to get started on that.”
“Well, you don’t know what name it’ll be, do you? So I want to wait until you do and start out calling you by your new name.”
“That makes sense.”
“But it would be nice to have something to call you at intimate moments,” she said. “There was a moment before when you said my name, and I have to say it gave me a little tingle.”
“Julia,” he said.
“It works better in context. Anyway, I don’t know what to call you at moments like that. I could try cher, I suppose, but it seems sort of generic.”
“Keller,” he said. “You could call me Keller.”
In the morning he backed his car out of the garage and visited cemeteries until a tombstone inscription provided him with the name of a male child who’d died in infancy forty-five years ago. He copied down the name and date of birth, and the next day he headed downtown and asked around until he found the Bureau of Records.
“Got to replace everything,” he told the clerk. “I had this little house in St. Bernard’s Parish, so do I have to tell you what happened?”
“I’d say you lost everything,” the woman said.
“I went to Galveston first,” he said, “and then I headed up north and stayed with my sister in Altoona. That’s in Pennsylvania.”
“Seems to me I’ve heard of Altoona. Is it nice?”
“Well, I guess it’s okay,” he said, “but it’s good to be home.”
“Always good to be home,” she agreed. “Now if you could just let me have your name and date of birth — oh, you’ve got it all written down, haven’t you? That saves asking you how to spell it, not that Nicholas Edwards presents all that much of a challenge.”
He went home with a copy of Nicholas Edwards’s birth certificate, and by the end of the week he had passed a driving test and been rewarded with a Louisiana driver’s license. He counted up his cash and used half of what he had left to open a bank account, showing his new driver’s license as ID. A clerk at the main post office had passport application forms, and he filled one out and sent it, along with a money order and the requisite pair of photos, to the office in Washington.
“Nick,” Julia said, looking from his face to the photo on his license, then back at him again. “Or do you prefer Nicholas?”
“My friends call me Mr. Edwards.”
“I think I’ll introduce you as Nick,” she said, “because that’s what people are going to call you anyway. But I’ll be the one person that calls you Nicholas.”
“If you say so.”
“I say so,” she said, and took hold of his arm. “But when we’re upstairs,” she said, “I’ll go right on calling you Keller.”
She came upstairs with him every evening, then returned to her bed in the first-floor den in case her father needed her during the night. Both professed regret at the enforced separation, but on reflection Keller realized he was just as happy to wake up alone. He had a hunch Julia probably felt the same way.
One night, after they’d finished their lovemaking but before she slipped out of his bed, he mentioned something that had been on his mind a while. “I’m running out of money,” he said. “I’m not spending much, but there’s none coming in, and what’s left won’t last too much longer.”
She said she had a little money, and he said that wasn’t really the point. He’d always paid his own way, and wasn’t comfortable otherwise. She asked if that was why he’d mowed the front lawn the day before.
“No, I was getting something from the car” — the gun, still in the glove compartment, which he’d finally gotten around to relocating to his dresser drawer — “and I saw the mower, and earlier I’d noticed the grass needed cutting, so I went and did it. An old man with one of those aluminum walkers watched me for a few minutes and asked me what kind of money I got for a job like that. I told him they didn’t pay me a dime, but I got to sleep with the lady of the house.”