The Second Coming

don’t you?”
    â€œI suppose.”
    â€œVery well. Can you keep me from the foggy foggy dew?”
    â€œSure,” he said absently.
    This time when she jostled, she managed to sidle and give him a friendly kidding hip-bump such as you used to do in high school corridors or playing basketball.
    His body seemed to remember something and, turning toward her, confronted hers like a man moving in his sleep.
    The cloud had come over the cliff. As it came up the short steep yard it seemed to thin and turn into fog. Wisps of fog curled around the tree, which looked more and more like a common Mississippi scrub oak than a stylish Carolina scarlet oak.
    Before they came to the tree his father said: There are two singles. You take one and I’ll take the other.
    Then they went ahead until the tree came between them.
    One single got up, the one on the man’s side of the tree. He had hardly heard the furious wingbeat against the tiny drum of body before the first shot came blotting out everything in the shockroar which went racketing through the swamp. His father always shot on the rise.
    Before he could reach the door, his daughter stopped him. Her face was cross, the frowning U cut deep in her forehead.
    â€œYou’ve got to get that shaman off my back.”
    â€œWho?”
    â€œFather what’s-his-name.”
    â€œOh, Jack.”
    â€œYep. He’s getting on my nerves. Tell Jack he’s not marrying me and Jason. We’re marrying each other.”
    â€œOkay. Anything else?”
    â€œThe only reason we’re doing this here is that I promised Mother.”
    â€œOkay. I have to go.”
    â€œGo? Where?” Her glasses flashed. “You’re not pulling another fade-out.”
    â€œFade-out?” He tried to focus on her.
    â€œThat little number you do, now you see me now you don’t—though I’ll give you this much, sweet Poppy”—and she gave him an absentminded hug, still frowning—“you always turned up when I needed you.”
    â€œNot this time.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œNothing.”
    I’ll be damned, he thought. Nothing changes. Am I doing to her exactly what he did to me, leaving her? But there’s a difference. She doesn’t need me.
    And for a fact she had already turned away, her frowning crossed-up face thrust toward Jack Curl and the Cupps.
    â€œWait,” he said.
    â€œWhat?” she said, stopping but not turning toward him.
    â€œAh—well.”
    Ah well. Yes. That’s it. Maybe there had been a time when there was something to say and maybe the time would come again, but it was not now.
    â€œWhat?” said Leslie.
    â€œGoodbye,” he said.
    â€œWhat?” she asked vacantly and nodded. “Okay.” She nodded again, eyes fixed in a stare. “Okay.”
    â€œGive me—” He held out his hand.
    â€œOh, Poppy,” said Leslie, turning back and giving him a cheek hug but still frowning past him. She hadn’t heard him.
    Just before he turned away, he took a last look at her. Is it possible to see someone here and now? Her hair was perfectly straight, a long shining fan spread across her shoulders, as bright and clean as a happy child’s. She was a child, hardly more. But when she turned, her face was cross and thrusting, moving in a kind of tic against her hair. When he looked at her, the flashing granny glasses, the inverted U on her forehead, the chewed lip, she slid away from him back in time and he seemed to see her as a child when he passed her in the foyer on 76th Street on her way to Central Park with the nurse, she giving him the same quick fretful cheek hug, and then slid away again but forward in her own time, casting ahead of herself to the park, worrying about. . . Are women beside themselves from the beginning?
    3
    In the upstairs study, built with a widow’s walk above it like a Nantucket house, he found the Greener in a broom closet behind the Electrolux and the waxer. The straps and buckles of the old stiff scuffed case were hard to undo. He gazed at the gun. It was one of four things he had saved from Mississippi. The other three were the Luger, his grandfather’s Ivanhoe, and his father’s Lord Jim. It figured. Both his grandfather and his father had enemies. One, like Ivanhoe, had enemies he hated. The other had the guilts like Jim and an enemy he hated, himself. And one had the shotgun, the other the Luger. What do