She was standing between his chair and Ham’s. She wasn’t old and she wasn’t drowned. She was just as he had remembered her in his delirium during the hurricane; Amanda Cane at thirty or thirty-one, wearing a pair of cotton pants and a home-dyed cotton shirt. Her sleeves were rolled up to her elbows and her fingers were dusty with ground sage. She had looked this way before they lost the house, before the long years of bitter bad luck. Before the insulin ran out. She was smiling, and her eyes were full of love.
The smell of seaweed and cold sand was everywhere.
He wanted to die. He wanted to throw himself into her arms. He wanted her to tuck him into bed and read him a story. He wanted her to make baked chicken with rice wine like she did on his birthday. He wanted to get her a cup of mint tea which they would share on the porch, as they did every Sunday morning while his father slept. There was a wisp of hair curling at the side of her face, and he would never have dreamed of touching it.
She leaned forward, cotton rustling, her sleeves pulling up, and kissed him on the forehead, once, in the lingering way she had when she was checking for fever.
Time stopped.
“JACKS and nines!” Scarlet crowed, reaching greedily for the pot and dragging it toward herself.
Ham shook his head and scooped up his pair of kings in a busted flush. “Brung a knife to a gunfight again,” he growled. Sloane laughed at him.
“Can you see where you could have got one more bet off the sucker over there?” Ace asked, stacking Scarlet’s sand dollars for her.
“Fifth Street?”
“Exactly right.”
“Lock up your sons and husbands.” Sloane drawled. “Scarlet’s come to town!”
The kid arranged her pecans in groups of five.
Ham looked down at his bankroll, which had dwindled to a few grains of rice. “Josh, these women are wearing me out, and I recollect you wanted to make an early night of it. You ready to head home, or would you like to hang in for another few hands?” Ham prodded him in the arm. “Josh? Hey, Josh! In or out, pardner?”
“I think I need another beer,” Sloane said, rooting around in her refrigerator. “Anyone else want a beer?”
JOSHUA blinked. He felt liquefied in the middle, like a frozen thing that had thawed. Two tears slid from his eyes. He ducked to wipe them off. The room was warm again, blessedly warm, and rich with the smell of braised shrimp and rellenos and beer and Sloane’s perfume. He hadn’t realized before that she was wearing perfume. It was exquisite, a fragrance like green wood after rain, very faint. The flickering gaslight drew gleams from her dark hair. Beside him Ham coughed, covering his mouth with one meaty paw.
Joshua’s father was looking at him sharply. He could tell that something had happened. Josh never could hide his tells from his dad.
“God, yes,” Josh said. “God, yes, I’d like a beer.” Sloane brought him one. He fell in love with her.
Ham was giving him a funny look. “In or out, compadre?”
Josh drew a long breath and laughed unsteadily. The smell of sea and cold sand was gone. “Deal me in,” he said.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
To Christine and Philip, as always, I owe too much.
To Christopher Bullock, my stepfather, I owe a good deal more than I usually let on. I am deeply grateful for the sympathetic hearing he has given this book, and its author, over the last few years. He and Susan Allison, my editor, both liked and understood this novel before I did.
For a wealth of information on what must be the most interesting city in America, I am greatly indebted to Gary Cartwright’s excellent Galveston: A History of the Island, and to Mike Reynolds, the Islander who loaned it to me, richly embellished with his own invaluable stories. Sound information on guns, Texas, and Life in the Ruins of Industry I got from the estimable Bob Stahl. Sage Walker, bless her, fielded medical questions with her usual grace. And my deepest thanks go to Scott Baker, Sean Russell, Linda Nagata, Tom Phinney, and especially Maureen McHugh, who kept me honest when I was trying very hard to lie.
Lastly, without the love and support of my mother, Kay Stewart, I might never have finished this book. Nor, come to think of it, any of the others.
SEAN STEWART is the acclaimed author of the New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle Notable Book Mockingbird, The Night Watch, Clouds End, the New York Times Notable Book Resurrection Man, the Aurora Award winner Nobody’s Son, and the Aurora and Arthur Ellis Award-winning debut Passion Play.
He lives in Monterey, California, with his wife and two daughters.
Sean Stewart, Galveston
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