"Don't be a snob," Kitty admonished. "Besides, I can't remember the last time I saw a book of any stripe in your hands."
"Hey, I'm almost finished Don Quixote," Tess pointed out. Just five hundred pages to go. She had actually read a little bit here at the Health Camp. It was surprising how much of the famous stuff-the wind-mills, the muleteers, the barber-came at the beginning of the book. Or maybe not so surprising. Probably a lot of people lied about reading the damn thing.
"I'll call Keith as soon as I hang up," Kitty said.
"But let me give you the directions to his store first."
"You've been there?"
"Oh, yes. My last vacation."
"You said you went to Atlanta for a bookseller's convention."
"Did I?"
Tess left the highway and drove west along Sixth Street, which appeared to be home to a good portion of Austin's club scene. Wouldn't it be nice, Tess thought, if she could just see Crow striding along here, guitar case in hand? So easy and simple. But things had never worked that way for her. The long way around was the route she always ended up traveling.
About two miles west of the downtown district, Quadling Country sat on a small hill above Sixth Street. The two-story purple house didn't have the spick-and-span quality of Kitty's Women and Children First, but it was large and enticing, Tess supposed. As was the young man bounding down the crumbling concrete steps.
He was young, of course. Tess had expected that much, although this one was something of a record, even for Kitty. He looked to be nineteen, a strapping but very dewy nineteen. He must have needed instruction in all aspects of life, from bed to bath and beyond. But he didn't seem as hangdog as most of Kitty's castoff lovers. Maybe the distance, the whole gestalt of the convention fling, had inoculated him against the inevitable disappointment.
"Are you Tess? And this must be Esskay. Cool dog." Esskay, ever the sucker for a compliment, promptly attached her face to his leg and began whimpering for attention. "Kitty called to say you'd be here this afternoon. But you must drive kinda slow. That was almost two hours ago. I can make it from Waco to here in less than ninety minutes."
"Well, I drive pretty fast, too, when I know a place," Tess said, and instantly felt as if she were all of two years old. "But the traffic was horrible, and I was worried about speed traps."
"Speed traps? Like, only if you're going above a hundred. Let me get that for you." He tried to lift the duffel bag of new clothes from Tess's shoulder.
"I can carry it," she said, wrestling it back from him.
"Of course you can. But you're a guest here. You're just gonna have to take our courtesy even if it kills you." He grinned at Tess, a little wickedly, and she sensed that his idea of Southern hospitality might include late-night visits to lady guests, if they were so inclined. Of all Kitty's young louts, this one was the youngest and most loutish by far.
"How did you come to have your own bookstore, anyway?"
"Well, I only run the comics section, but it's the best one in the city. I won the readers' poll in the Chronicle, even."
"And you are…"
"I don't know," he said. "What am I?"
Tess blushed. "I mean, how old are you?"
"I'll be eighteen in April."
Jesus. This one wasn't even legal.
"And you met Kitty…"
He put his hands on his hips and stared her down. "So, do you like ever ask a direct question, or do you just play this fill-in-the-blanks game? 'Cause I gotta tell you, it's annoying."
"Look, Keith, I'm just trying to figure out how my aunt ended up in what is probably an illegal relationship even under the statutes of this backwards state."
"Keith? I'm not Keith, I'm Maury, his son. And who are you calling backward? As I recall, Maryland was all over the news not long ago because a thirteen-year-old married her twenty-nine-year-old boyfriend." He stopped, then allowed himself a sly smile. "So you thought I was getting it on with Kitty? Crazy. Not that I would mind scrounging my dad's leftovers. He's got pretty good taste."
"Keith is your dad?"
"Right. He's at Whole Foods, picking up some stuff for vegetarian lasagne." Maury suddenly looked the way Esskay did when some off-limits food was simmering on the stove. "We're death on red meat around here."
"Texas vegetarians? Isn't that an oxymoron?" Great, she had come all this distance to a place famous for barbecue and fajitas, only to end up in a household where meat was banned.
A sputtering bright yellow Triumph pulled up on the side street.
"There's my dad now. Guess I'll go help him with the groceries." He was back to smiling, bouncy Maury now. "He's not threatened a bit, if I lend him a hand."
The man who got out of the car was short and stocky, pot-bellied in truth, with thinning hair. Maybe he had fallen apart after Kitty had thrown him over. The Kitty that Tess knew took up with young men like Maury, not pudgy guys of her own age, and ran through them as quickly as Esskay devoured rawhide bones. Keith's face was round, pleasant but ordinary. Maury's genes obviously came from some long-legged, long-ago stunner of a leftover, to use his parlance.
"Tesser," Keith said, balancing his canvas grocery sack in one arm, pulling her to him with the other and kissing her on the cheek. "Not to be overly familiar, but I was almost your uncle, you know."
"Oh, sure." She had never heard of him and he knew her family nickname. That seemed fair.
"A magnificent woman, your aunt. I just couldn't see moving to Baltimore, leaving my life here. And she felt the same way about Texas."
"Uh-huh."
"I'm glad we could finally be friends, although it wasn't always easy. When she called today and asked me to put you up, I couldn't have been happier. I look forward to us getting to know each other."
"Absolutely."
Tess grabbed Esskay's leash and followed Keith and Maury into Quadling Country, wondering if anyone ever really knew anyone.
Texas was hot in October, with no promise of the autumn weather that had settled over the mid-Atlantic. Tess-traveling with Maury at Keith's insistence-drove to Crow's old neighborhood on the city's north side, a place called Hyde Park, beyond the University of Texas. She tried not to complain, but the Toyota 's air conditioner had given up just last month. Back in Baltimore, this had not seemed particularly urgent.
"I don't see how you stand it," she said for the fifth or sixth time, shrugging out of her leather jacket, then the denim shirt she had worn over her T-shirt.
"Stand what?" Maury asked. "Wait, turn here, this is the block you're looking for."
The address to which Crow's parents had sent checks through the month of August was an old Victorian, cut up into at least six apartments by the count of the mailboxes. Names had been affixed randomly-one with an old-fashioned label-maker, others with scraps of paper held in place by layers and layers of Scotch tape. Groves, Perelman, Lane, Gundell, Linthicum. None of the names meant anything to Tess. She rang the bell for number 5, which had been Crow's apartment.
"No answer," she told Maury.
"Would you answer if you were an illegal sublettor? Like Dad told you over dinner last night, there's no way an apartment is sitting vacant in this market. The question is whether the landlord kicked Crow out to up the rates, or if he found someone to take his place. Let's try the door." He started up the steps ahead of Tess, but she passed him on the landing and reached the door marked No. 5 before he did.
"I'm looking for Crow Ransome," she called through the door, after knocking and getting no reply. She heard footsteps creeping toward the door and away again, as if someone had peered through the fisheye and decided not to answer. "Look, this door is so thin I can practically hear you breathing through it."
"You got the wrong place," a voice called from the inside. "Never heard of anyone by that name."