82 Desire

fabulous dreads and looked something like Lenny Kravitz, whom he had once seen in the French Quarter, and whose style he greatly admired.
    He was outraged. “Are you kidding? Call Public Integrity! Call ’em now! Don’t even call the cop back. Just call and report him. Do a thing like that! Damn.”
    “Well, I just thought—”
    “I’m gonna do a painting. You know what, I’m gonna paint what happened. Give me that ski mask. He really put it over your head?”
    She didn’t have time to answer.
    “Maybe I’ll actually use the thing itself in the painting—make a collage with it. Yeah, all red and blue. How dare they do that to my baby? Can’t imagine a cop doing a thing like that.”
    “Oh, come on, Lamar.”
    “I mean, oh sure, I can imagine it. A good cop’s harder to find than a good artist in this town. Baby, you just lucky you got one. You want to go to bed? “ He nuzzled her.
    “Not with my mama—”
    “Oh, your mama. You got to grow up, Talba. Fuck this shit. I’m leavin’. Leavin’ right now.”
    He marched out the door, his dreads swinging in the breeze. It was something he did about once a week.
    “Pshaw,” Miz Clara said. “I come up with that boy’s mama. If she was alive, he wouldn’t be like that.”
    “Now, Mama. Lamar’s an artist.”
    “Lamar a sperled brat. That what Lamar is.”

Four
    IT WAS SATURDAY morning and Skip had been up since seven-thirty. Life was complicated. The whole place was in an uproar, not just her own space.
    Skip had the slave quarters—now called the garconnière—at her best friend Jimmy Dee Scoggin’s house. Jimmy Dee shared the Big House, as they’d taken to calling it, with his two adopted children, his late sister’s kids, Sheila and Kenny, and a black-and-white dog called Angel.
    Steve Steinman, who was staying with Skip, also had a dog—a German shepherd named Napoleon. Skip hated Napoleon and Napoleon hated her. In fact, Napoleon hated just about everybody except Kenny and Steve.
    Normally, all this made for a pretty lively household, but with the tension in the garconnière and one other little detail, it was currently chaos.
    The other detail was Jimmy Dee’s friend Layne. Jimmy Dee’s beloved, if the truth be told. Jimmy Dee was gay, a fact that had turned out to be easier for the kids to accept than anyone thought it would, and Layne was about to be a new addition to the family. Everyone was thrilled about it. The kids loved him. (“His main virtue,” Dee-Dee said wryly, “is that he isn’t Uncle Jimmy.”) And Steve was crazy about him, which was a great tension-reliever, since he wasn’t entirely insane for Dee-Dee himself.
    However, Layne’s moving in meant getting a room ready for him, which required more than the normal amount of effort, since Layne was a puzzle designer by trade. This meant any amount of paraphernalia, including games from just about every country in the world.
    And that translated to building cabinets and bookshelves, which necessitated a house full of workmen.
    That put everybody on edge, just about all the time. Skip was just as happy to be going over to Steve’s cottage to help him sand kitchen cabinets. “Can I help?” Kenny asked wistfully. “Anybody can sand.”
    “Okay, sure. Get Angel and come on.”
    From where they all stood in the courtyard, they could hear Dee-Dee and Layne arguing in the kitchen. “But I need to have things where I can see them.”
    “Well, I need to have them where I can’t.”
    Kenny looked forlorn. “They were so nice to each other before all this started.”
    Skip laughed. “So were we.”
    And now Steve looked hurt. “I’m still nice to you.”
    “I’m sorry. I’ve always been the difficult one. Everyone knows that.”
    Kenny said, “Oh, never mind, I guess I’ll stay there.” He went back into the house, elephant-legged shorts flopping about on skinny legs. His feet looked like Nike-clad boards attached to his ankles. His shoulders slumped.
    Steve said, “Now see what you’ve done.”
    “Damn!” She went after him. “Kenny! Kenny, I was just kidding. Come on—moving’s one of the five most stressful things you can ever do. Nobody means anything. We’re just discombobulated.”
    She could have bitten her tongue, knowing he was going to ask about the other stresses. His mother had died a few years ago. He knew firsthand about stress.
    But he said nothing, just kept walking, shoulders slumped.
    Dee-Dee stared at her. “What’d you do to