82 Desire

philanderer in her life.
    He had an eye for the ladies, he was married, and he liked to go out with a woman till she was hooked and then dump her—ask about half the female population of the newsroom.
    He made damn sure they got hooked. He sent flowers, made dinners, planned romantic weekends. A seducer, Walter would have called him. Did call him, but had Jane listened?
    Yes, for a while. Sure. She’d seen it herself. She couldn’t have cared less for the likes of David Bacardi—until one night, with a bottle of champagne, celebrating her return to the Picayune .
    He had rehired her. Maybe she was just grateful at the time. Now she was supremely pissed off—mostly at herself.

Three
    TALBA PLANNED TO spend the day shopping for exotic scarves to drape over the tattered furniture in the little cottage she shared with her mother. They lived in the Upper Ninth Ward between Desire and Piety, a metaphor she couldn’t figure out how to use. It was the house she’d grown up in. Using the proceeds from the job she’d just done at United Oil, she was gradually transforming it into an exotic den.
    She was sitting at the old black-painted table in the kitchen having coffee and toast, letting her mama sleep, and reading the Times-Picayune , when her eye lit on two words that froze her solid. Russell Fortier.
    Russell Fortier had disappeared.
    Just fallen off the Earth, if you believed the newspaper story.
    What the hell was this? She knew Russell Fortier, and she wasn’t the kind of person who knew people who made news (though she expected to make some herself pretty soon).
    The paper said Russell was married to Bebe Fortier, the city councilwoman. Talba hadn’t known that—some detective she was. It occurred to her that she hadn’t asked enough questions before she took the job.
    Maybe she should postpone her shopping trip.
    She heard her mama coming down the hall, wearing those ancient blue slippers of hers, sounding like an old lady, though she was only forty-seven. It was her day off.
    “Mama? You want some coffee?”
    “Ummmm-hmmmm. I got up ‘cause it smell so good.”
    “You sit down now—let me make you some toast.”
    Her mother wasn’t wearing a wig today. Her hair was cut short, close to her head, so it wouldn’t get all dusty when she went to work. She looked better today. She’d been looking so tired lately.
    “What you doin’ today, girl? “
    “I got some business to take care of.”
    “Bi’ness! Hmmph. You sound like my sister Carrie boy, Jonathan. Spend half his life in jail. Only bi’ness he up to, monkey bi’ness.”
    “Now, Mama. You know I don’t deal drugs, I don’t stick up stores, I don’t steal cars.” Steal some things, though. “You don’t need to worry about me.” Maybe not, anyway.
    “You so secretive, Sandra. Can’t help but worry. I didn’t send you to college so you could lounge aroun’ the house smokin’ cigarettes and readin’ the paper.”
    “I’m having a day off just like you. I just got a little somethin’ to take care of.”
    “You ain’t in trouble, are you?”
    God, I hope not . “ ‘Course not, Mama. I’m gon’ go out, see a man about somethin’, then I’m gon’ go by Schwegmann’s and get a chicken for supper. Then I’m gon’ come home and do some work.”
    “You got a freelance job?”
    “My own work.”
    “Pshaw! Your own work. You better get yourself a steady job, girl. Miz Clara didn’t send you to college so you could sit home in that room of yours.”
    Her mother, who referred to herself grandly as “Miz Clara,” had a list a mile long of things she didn’t send her daughter to college to do. It included everything Talba did. This, despite the fact that Talba had worked for five years at a good job and saved her money so she could quit it and make her fortune. “Now, Mama, we talked about this.”
    “That what you always say. I thought you meant a couple of months. Six at the most.”
    “You know what you always say—Rome wasn’t built in a day.” That was what Miz Clara had told her and her little brother year after year after year when they wanted to know how long it would be before they could move out of their dumpy little house and into something with a swimming pool in back. Her brother had finally done it himself—today he lived in New Orleans East in a nice big house with a pool. But Talba had ambitions to be something more than a computer programmer.
    She’d talked it over with her mother; asked if she