Shame

minute.”
    “You said the attack was interrupted. How?”
    “Someone deliberately set a fire and then set off the sorority’s alarm.”
    Lola offered a word, a hope: “Caleb.”
    “How would he have known?”
    “He’s intuitive. He wouldn’t agree, of course, but he is. He probably saw or heard something that prompted some association. I know he’s been listening to your book. I also know how bothered he was by it. He played some parts over and over again.”
    “What parts?”
    “I don’t know. This morning he was all involved in listening to your book, and I think what he heard upset him. He could hardly sit still while I was dyeing his hair.”
    “You dyed his hair?”
    “He looks like a natural blond now.”
    “You must be a good friend.”
    Lola smiled, as if enjoying a joke. “I must be.”
    “How long have you known one another?”
    “A little over a day.”
    Elizabeth shook her head. “You barely know this man, and yet you sheltered him, disguised him, bound him, and claim to know the workings of his psyche?”
    “I forgot to tell you about our Las Vegas wedding.”
    Elizabeth tried not to laugh, but she couldn’t help herself.
    “Not that it was love at first sight,” said Lola. “The first thing I had to do was get over how much he looks like his daddy. I knew Shame’s face from studying his pictures in your book. I read your book over and over when I was growing up. It was like a rite of passage for me. It taught me how I couldn’t let shame rule my life.”
    “I’m glad.”
    “’Course, knowing Gray Parker from pictures isn’t the same thing as knowing him in the flesh and blood. Maybe to you he and Caleb don’t look all that much alike.”
    “No. They do.”
    “Did you have a problem with that?”
    Elizabeth nodded. “It brought up a lot of old feelings. I couldn’t look at Caleb. It gave me vertigo.”
    “I think I had the opposite problem. I couldn’t keep my eyes off of him. And it wasn’t his good looks that kept me looking but this sadness I sensed in him. I know my helping him must seem crazy, but I didn’t have it in me to turn my back on him. From the moment he walked into my club, it was like I knew we were meant to connect.”
    “What club?”
    “Randy Randi’s. It’s where I perform.”
    “What do you do?”
    “I like to call it cabaret, but the public seems to prefer the term
female impersonation
.”
    Elizabeth did a double take. The sudden appearance of their food allowed her a chance to pick up her chin from the table.
    “Who got chicken?”
    “Here,” Lola said.
    Their server hurriedly placed their food in front of them, put down a pot of steamed rice, and then left the bill on a plate beneath two fortune cookies. Lola breathed in appreciatively, then looked up and smiled. Elizabeth averted her glance. She hoped she wasn’t blushing but knew she was. With her fair skin and red hair it always showed. She could never tell a lie without her body giving her away. “Pinocchio syndrome,” she called it. Being honest hadn’t been an option in life but a necessity.
    Her tone terse, Elizabeth said, “I thought you were a woman.”
    “It’s a mistake I often make myself.”
    “I don’t know who I’m angrier at, you or me. You should have told me.”
    “I’m sorry that I didn’t, but if we get to know each other better, and I hope we will, you’ll see that this wasn’t some guest appearance by my feminine anima. What you see is who I am.”
    Elizabeth said nothing.
    “I can understand your being angry with me,” said Lola. “But why be mad at yourself?”
    “For not noticing. I pride myself on my powers of observation.”
    “Sometimes pride gets in the way of seeing. You think you already know the answers. Maybe you needed to encounter a heyoka.”
    “A what?”
    “It’s a Lakota word and sensibility. In my culture, a heyoka was someone who often did things backward or the opposite of what was expected. A heyoka makes people think.”
    “Is that why you dress like a woman?”
    “No. I do it because it’s right for me. ‘I yam what I yam.’”
    “I didn’t expect it,” said Elizabeth. There was less frost in her voice.
    “Without the unexpected, we wouldn’t have nearly as many insights. At my home I have this map of the world. Everything is reversed in it, or at least the opposite as we’re used to seeing it. South America is on top of the world, North America on the bottom, and so forth. It’s all geographically