Crescent City Connection

her to come join us. The second thing is, we’re gonna pop a six-foot blister on our hiney.”
    “Say what?”
    “Did I ever mention those run-ins I had with a fat, nasty bitch of a cop in this town?”
    “Oh, yeah. Once or twice. Also, it was in Time and Newsweek and everywhere else.”
    His father laughed. “Sometimes I can’t remember just how far our little movement’s come. You do me good, Danny. You know that, boy?”
    Daniel was nearly bowled over. His father had never even come close to suggesting such a thing. Maybe Rosemarie Owens was good for him. But he caught himself—good for his dad’s mood, bad for the movement.
    “Okay, here’s your assignment. Find your daughter, Lovelace. Devote twenty-four hours a day to that little job, and if I tell you to do anything else, tell me to go to hell. Now, we had to do those other jobs—they were priority one. But if anything else important comes up, we’re gon’ just let it go for a while. It’s time to regroup, and that’s exactly what we’re gon’ do.
    “Okay, got your assignment?”
    Daniel nodded, happy to be doing something he knew he could do and had no ambivalence about.
    “Now before you go, let me ask you a question. Who’s the best-looking young Christian African American we got in our flock?”
    “Why, Daddy?”
    “Just answer the question, goddammit.”
    “Well, I guess that’d be Dashan Johnson. Jericho, now. He changed his name to Dashan Jericho.”
    “Excellent choice. Excellent. Dashan’s a nice tall boy, isn’t he?”
    “Yessir.”
    “Good. Women like ’em tall. Get Dashan on over here. And one other thing—soon’s you get a chance, drive out to the country someplace and go to a hardware store. We’re gonna need some dynamite and blasting caps.”
    Daniel knew better than to ask why. He just made time and did it.

Seventeen
    LOVELACE WAS FALLING in love with Brenna Royce—not in a sexual way, of course—but she had taken her on as an idol. Brenna was beautiful, she was creative, she was a great mother, she had fabulous taste, she was wonderful to Lovelace … in fact, that could be her number-one good quality.
    She couldn’t say enough good things about Lovelace’s cooking, and that was damn good for the ego, but it wasn’t only that—she seemed to really like Lovelace. She was always making tea for the two of them and getting Lovelace to sit down and talk to her. Naturally, this had a down side, as Lovelace couldn’t tell anyone except Isaac a single true thing about herself.
    So she was evasive to untruthful. She said she lived alone, she’d had a couple of years of college at “a small midwestern school,” she’d come to New Orleans to pursue a relationship that hadn’t worked out, she was from Virginia, her mother was a schoolteacher, and her dad was dead.
    In turn, she learned Brenna and Charles were both from Atlanta, had known each other practically forever and were more or less expected to marry each other. However, they hadn’t. They’d each married someone else, and in each case it hadn’t worked out.
    And so they had remet and remarried.
    Lovelace was charmed. “How romantic.”
    “Oh, I wouldn’t say that.”
    Lovelace hardly knew how to answer. She could have said nothing, but it wasn’t in her nature to leave it alone. The question of what these two were doing together had occurred to her more than once. She’d thought all along that Brenna was a much more interesting, much better-looking person than Charles. She said, “You didn’t marry for love?”
    Brenna looked mischievous. “Both our families have a lot of money.”
    Lovelace was still trying to grasp it. “But if you had money, and he had money, why did you need to get married? If you weren’t in love, I mean.”
    She spread her open palms. “Our families wanted grandchildren, and we wanted to make them happy. That was one reason, anyhow.”
    Thinking she was getting the hang of it, Lovelace touched Brenna’s hand. “I’m so sorry. I wish there were something I could do.”
    “Do I look unhappy?”
    “No, but you deserve something special. You’re such a fantastic person, you deserve to be adored.”
    “Do you really think so?”
    “You’re so fabulous. You’ve got your life under control like nobody I’ve ever seen. You’re so creative and so beautiful….”
    Brenna leaned over to brush something off Lovelace’s shoulder, or so Lovelace imagined, and wondered what it could be.
    And then Brenna was kissing