Albert weaving, two weeks before his daughter's third birthday, three weeks before the Delancy wedding, on a wobbly barstool in the Quarter. Beside an old man, who's talking at him, Albert Fitzmorris half-listening, holding a third John Jameson at his chin. The old man's in a hat like Albert's da used to wear, only it not stinking of fish.

". . . then and only then, I like to add in some white pepper. Then and only then, after it has set a while, I lay in the cayenne."

The old man gulps at the whiskey, Albert gulps as well. Steadies himself with a hand to the bar edge, the old man seeming to drift away.

"You could add in a little ginger root," Albert says, trying to be polite-he'd been interested at first, at the mention of gumbo-to uphold his end of the conversation, to forget, through involvement, why he's come.

"Then I-ginger root!" The old man wipes at his mouth with a sleeve.

"What kind of new-wave new-age half-assed half-baked idea is that? Ginger root!"

The whiskey burns his stomach. Closing his eyes. Audrey there, a newborn baby. So small, and now she will be three. He'd make things right. Soon. Crimps his eyes tighter.

His daughter floats away, out into the blackness and the ripples of red. "I only meant-"

"Why not throw in a little chicory or a little horseradish while you're at it? Or maybe some sneezing powder or something?"

"I only-"

The old man slams the bar, whiskey jumping from Albert's glass.

"Cayenne pepper!"

"I-"

"PEPPER, PEPPER, PEPPER-" The old man buries his whiskey. "And only the PEPPER!" His voice softens, "Buy us a drink, will you, son?"

Albert nodding, at the bartender, at the old man, his arm feeling rubbery, the trumpeter in the corner of the French Quarter barroom emptying spit from his horn. He's had a double Jameson for each of her years, and somehow he thinks this is what his father might have done but it is not working for him. With the next whiskey, he'll have had as many drinks in the hour as he's had in the month.

"I'm only suggesting you might add in a little-" his whole body feeling rubbery, like a dead fish picked up by the tail.

"-A little ginger root?"

"Yes. A little . . . ginger-" discovering the whiskey in his hand, the whiskey hovering just above the bar. Raising it, tipping his head, "-root."

Tipping too far, tumbling off the barstool, his feet pedaling back until he is ten feet from it. The edge of the bar seeming liquid. Leaning against a post.

The old man leaping to his feet. "You're drunk, sir!"

And the barroom's slowly spinning.

Trying to stop it from doing so. Pressing his cheek to the post, focusing on the fans that whirl above his head. He spins his eyes clockwise with the fans. Bad. He spins his eyes counterclockwise against the fans. Worse.

Spinning. The Delancy wedding: he does not know Jimmy Delancy's granddaughter well, she being just twenty, but his ma and Father King and Jimmy Delancy-and he wished her well of course, Jimmy's Kara-and Audrey and why she would not be there.

The back of his head rolls along the post that props up the ceiling of the bar that had once stored munitions for Andrew Jackson. A screw in the post, and his eyes peel open. Rubbing the back of his head, his weight shifting, he turns his eyes to the barroom window.

Out the window, the French Quarter alley spreads before him, the New Orleans night, the damp stone streets, the spire of the St. Louis Cathedral, with its three small crosses, the blue-lit steps of the Blue Royale Hotel. Head rolling, bar receding, lights off the glasses, red, and the bottles blurring pink.

Lids pulling down. Head bobbing. Then up. Focusing. Focus: bar edge is solid; the fan's got a mini Ireland 32 flag stuck in it; a convertible Jaguar's pulling up to the steps of the Blue Royale Hotel. It was Terry's idea, to drink it out, his blues, Terry saying this morning at work that a drunken man will always find the sober truth. But the only truth Albert had found was the one he'd carried in, that soon his daughter would be three.

Streets blur, then fast, fast into focus again. His breath nearly taken. Out from the Jaguar steps a short businessman, no more than Albert's five feet seven inches, the lights catching off his neat, grey suit, and he's opening the passenger door for an angel, who's back-lit in sapphire, the rain in silver at her feet.

He's never seen anything like her. Running a hand through his hair, down across his damp face. Moving toward the window. Staring.

The man's got his hands at the woman's thin waist, on her shoulders, through her gold hair. She wears a white dress. The man tries to kiss her neck. Her shoulders are bare.

Hands pressed against the panes of the barroom window, face so close to the glass that his breathing fogs it, he thinks she may be an angel or a dream brought on by the drink and then, when he is sure that she is not, when he is sure that the light and the grace are real, he feels suddenly sober, realizes why he has come to this bar, a bar that he thought he'd chosen because Terry had said it was quiet and Irish and cheap.

She turns her face. She's heading up the hotel's steps, her long legs floating. The Jag man follows close, stuffing money into the hand of the guy who spins the door.

Staring after them.

The spin of the doors. The couple disappearing into the blur of the hotel's lobby. And then the street's going blurry, and the window itself, and Albert's eyes looking back at him and they are not like Audrey's, hers are brown like Eileen's and his own ma's, but Audrey's hair is his and Audrey's nose, and he sees his daughter's smile, a newborn in her crib behind the viewing glass, and someone laughs from the bar behind him and when his forehead cracks the windowpane, across from the now empty hotel steps, he can somehow still see the woman, bathed in blue, the crosses of the Cathedral behind her. Turning, he feels his skin cut, and the bar dips way down and Albert sees the red behind his eyes and then only black.

Siren lights spinning in the French Quarter alleyway, from an ambulance up on the sidewalk, its back door open wide. The bartender and the old man holding open the barroom door, Albert strapped in a stretcher, moaning, wheeled out by two unhappy firemen.

There's a cut on his head where it hit the floor and his nose is packed with cotton. But he is just drunk and it's his knee that hurts and he will not go through those ambulance doors.

All for whiskey.

A small crowd has gathered. Two people take photos from a carriage behind a mule in a flowered hat. Trying to hide his face with his hands. The ambulance's opened back blinking. Shutting his eyes against the siren's swirl.

"I won't go in there." Fighting at the straps. "Sandy!"

He should not have mentioned to the old man that he'd had alligator chili, that he'd had it at of all places a fire station, that Engine Nine made it that way on the first of every month. Then they might have just thrown him in the alley. Then he might have just walked home alone.

The lights inside the ambulance make his stomach feel alternately too big and too small. The cover of a New Orleans Saints' thermos bottle unscrewed above him, the hands calmly pouring a capful.

"Sandy-"

The coffee wets the underside of the hovering mustache, the lips sipping, not a word spoken, and then Albert regains himself, in the silence behind the sealed door, in the familiarity of his brother's droopy face.

He tries to sit up.

"Get me out of this goddamned thing, Sandy." He almost smiles.

Sandy dabs at his mustache, clucks from his lips, sips a little more, then releases the stretcher straps.

"My own brother laid out on a barroom floor." Sandy chuckles. "Jesus, Albert, who'd you hit?"

He tries to sit up again, collapses backward.

"I think my leg's broken."

Sandy shakes his head. "Point your toes."

Albert's toes stick out from beneath the blanket.

"Now wiggle them-"

"Oh, come on, Sandy."

Sandy still shaking his head. "Well, if it's not broken, it will be when she's got through with you."

Albert's vision briefly clearing. "Oh, Jesus, Sandy, don't tell her."

"You won't be able to keep it from her, Al . . . " Sandy hands him a capful of coffee, drops into a voice reserved to speak about mystics and saints.

"Ma knows everything."

Both brothers briefly shut their eyes.

But his ma'll think he's been with Eileen. It's for the best that she does, with his father now gone and the Delancy wedding closing in. And maybe soon he will have something to tell Sandy and his ma, about a vision in the light of the spire, a miracle maybe-and their happiness when they meet her-and he's feeling better, despite the nosebleed and the drink.

He opens his eyes.

"Hey Sandy?"

When he gets home he'll take off his shoes so as not to wake her.

"Yeah?"

"Hit the siren will ya?"

And Sandy's laughing. The siren wails, and the lights from inside the ambulance meet in the windows those from the street, the lights dancing, the tops of telephone poles now soaring by, dark crosses and light, and he shuts his eyes and sees red and cool blue and they are the tops of riverwaves, balancing shipmasts and booms, and then Albert is laughing too, in the siren's wail; pressing back the darkness that is above him and below.

Sun not up. Albert sits across from his ma, in his father's old place at the long, wood table, in front of a cup of coffee, his chin cradled in his hands. No eyes meet. No words spoken. Only the sip at his coffee, and his ma slurping cereal from a spoon.

Sip-slurp, slurp, slurp-sip.

Yawn.

He seizes the opportunity. "Why don't you go back to bed, Ma? It's not even six."

"I'm not tired." A hint of County Clare in her voice, the hint that comes when she's something soon to say. Lately, she seems to have him on her mind.

"Can I make you some eggs?"

She shakes her head, straightens her plaid robe. The light from the Singer burning behind her. When he woke she was already working.

Albert frowns. He gets up, pours the remaining coffee into his thermos from the drip pot on the stove.

Runs a hand through his hair. "Ma, I-"

"You're thirty-five years old, Albert. You're a fine son. You don't have to explain yourself."

Frowning more so, head in the fridge, layering food up along his arm. His knee aches; he's a cut on his forehead that he'd tried to cover with hair.

"But I haven't seen Audrey or Eileen in the house since I can't remember when." She's up from the table. "And I'm starting to wonder if I ever will."

Moving faster than is even usual, Dori Fitzmorris, crossing to the old Singer that's pressed against the front room's far wall. The house is four rooms, the long skinny kitchen separated from the long skinny front room by the line between the linoleum and the worn wood floor, two bedrooms packed in the back. A shotgun house, not far from the river, the whole thing up on blocks.

She sits. "You've got a cut on your forehead. Coming in at I don't know what hour. If at your age, Albert, you're going to take to catting around, well, I don't know if I can stand it."

He shuts his eyes. "'Course not."

He's sawing slices from a loaf, a good loaf, he picked it up himself at the Roundelle Bakery. Opens his eyes again before he takes off his thumb.

Spreads the bread with brown mustard, layering on the provolone cheese, the rough cuts of andouille sausage. Cherry tomatoes, slicing them paper thin, despite his shaking hands, the way he likes them, so that they cover the meat without hanging out the edge. He wraps the sandwich into a brown-paper bag.

Through the kitchen window the sun rises up over the long row of houses, across the shoulders of the neighborhood stray who's beginning her rounds for scraps.

He leans unsteadily over his ma, kisses her cheek. "Don't worry about me, okay, Ma?

"You got mustard on your sleeve."

Above the Singer, a picture of John Paul II and a 1972 photo of Sandy and Albert on a trawler with their da who has his enormous arms across the shoulders of his sons. They'd always called him da, at his insistence-his Irish-born father was da, and his father's father. The cousins who sent Christmas cards from Wicklow did not call their fathers da, nevermind the kids of New Orleans. But his had, and so it was.

The robe beneath the mechanism, her hands flat on the shiny cloth. "You seeing her tomorrow then?"

He straightens up. "Eileen?" He turns from her. "'Course, Ma." For a while she hadn't mentioned Eileen much, accepted how Eileen was busy with her new job. But lately Eileen, too, seemed a part of what was on his mother's mind.

"It's Saturday, isn't it?"

He lifts his blue windbreaker from its peg beside the door-frame cross. He does not meet her eyes.

"And Audrey?"

Fooling with the jacket's zipper, his fingers feeling thick. The emerald in the crux of the cross.

She does not need his troubles. The shame of his failing that could wake him in the night. What his father would have said.

Eileen lived now on the edge of the Quarter, in a neighborhood that had never been good, in a building with a metal-grated door across its entrance, with the sunlight not even reaching where Audrey slept. Sometimes he'd bring Audrey by the house to see his ma. But with Hank, this had become more difficult.

Hank had moved in with Eileen, at Easter, as if they were married. He cannot look at her. "See ya, Ma."

Eileen was not married to Hank. Soon enough, Hank might be gone. Three steps to the door.

And he'll tell his ma, soon, about the woman that he saw on the blue steps beneath the three crosses. Soon enough, he'll have something good to say.

"Have I shown you the dress I'm making for little Audrey?"

And he's picturing that woman beside him and they're walking along the river with her arm through his, throwing bread to the gulls like he and Eileen had done one time, only now it would be different.

"Albert?"

Smiling. "About two dozen times."

"All right for you."

She lifts the half-finished dress from the sewing basket at her feet. He puts his hand around her shoulder, thin beneath his palm. Since his father's death, she'd become thin. "It's beautiful, Ma."

"I need to get it finished up, what with her birthday just two weeks away."

She tugs at the dress's left sleeve. "Maybe we'll have them over, Al. Eileen and you, and maybe Sandy and Colleen. For Audrey's birthday. Three years old already-" Her voice goes quiet.

The sun on the street, the ride on the streetcar, the fish that need cleaning for the weekend restaurant rush.

"We'll see, Ma."

Moving again for the door.

"Eileen's awful busy."

Reaching for the handle.

"It's not for two weeks." She pulls the stitch from the dress. "Give her a little notice." When the door opens he sees her face clearly with the daylight, the unfamiliar sadness in her eyes.

Nodding. And stepping out. Into the humid New Orleans dawn, leaving the sausage ends for the stray, who's two houses down, licking out a can.

Sun rising, up over St. Charles Avenue. Albert on a downtown streetcar, the sun catching the brass and polished wood of the restored deco train. Sitting alone, at 5 a.m., heading into the Quarter.

The streetcar. The conductor. Albert. A man asleep. A drunk who talks to no one in the corner.

The drunk yells. Albert glances over. The drunk nods off. As Albert turns back, his eyes catch one of the advertisements that line the streetcar's arched, tin ceiling: pink stone steps and an elegant couple heading up them, to the opened door of an exclusive French Quarter hotel, the hotel lit up so that its windows glow gold-"The Pinnacle House. Step into Luxury."

The streetcar stops. The businessman coughs, the conductor spits, the drunk gets off. The fare box clicks, the power lines hum, the stop is empty and the streetcar moves on.

Motionless, the sun on the back of his neck, staring into the ad; and seeing her beside him, bathed not in blue now but in that gold, on the pink stone steps, curled in his arm.

Bobby Kelly's fish market, a wood sign: Bobby's boyish face on the left side, announcing in letters across the right, "Shrimp, crawdad, grouper, red, monk, cat-You want fresher, catch it youself." The r never there, business steady for thirty years, Bobby not risking a change.

Fish beds spill out onto the French Quarter sidewalk, Albert inside, in black rubber waders, loading gutted fish onto big beds of ice, his bare hands deep inside their gills.

"But she was like a vision, I tell you, Terry. A vision. I was standing there and she appeared."

Terry, in gloves, the rubber as thick as the waders, wiping his brow on his arm. 6 a.m. and they're already sweating. Behind, in the back of the market, the early customers, the buyers for restaurants, tagging fish to be loaded and delivered.

"Jesus, Albert, you're not a drinker," Terry says. "You can't trust it."

Mrs. Bodin into the shop, up early as usual, her husband a sector manager at UPS, beating the morning rush.

"Hello, Missus." Ice-packing a halved grouper.

"Hello, Fitz." Mrs. B. blotting her forehead with a handkerchief. "Boy, it's hot."

Albert runs his hands under cold water, the water feeling like fire. Wipes them with a towel. "Ginger root."

"For the heat?"

With a bone knife, slicing the sixteen ounces of fish he knows she will order. "After the cayenne pepper, you might try a little ginger root this time. On the fish. You shred it."

Albert making like he's shredding with his hands.

Terry reemerges from the back with a bucket of ice. "You can get it right over at Alfieri's," Terry says. He looks Mrs. B. over as he does every time she comes in, though she never seems to give him much of a rise.

"Alfieri's has ginger?" she asks.

Albert ringing up her fish.

"Sure they do," he says, as Terry slides the ice into the last empty bed.

"They keep it in the back, in the Oriental food section. They-"

Bobby Kelly sticks his head in from the loading dock, trying to impress a new buyer, arm around her shoulder, his hair combed over, wet. "Come on you guys. Miss Deburque still hasn't got her order. Albert, step it up."

Albert keeping his eyes down, into the register drawer, making change. Mrs. B. taking her fish from the counter.

"Ginger?" she asks.

"Root," Albert whispers, "you shred it." Albert again making like he's shredding.

"ALBERT!"

Lowering his hands to the countertop.

"Fuck off, Bobby," Mrs. B. says, winking, at Albert, as the screen door slaps behind her.

Bobby smiling, "Hey!", but angry just the same, what with Miss Deburque on his arm.

"We'll be right on it, Bobby," Terry says, pulling the last grouper from the counter, slamming it onto the final bed of ice. Bobby recurls his arm around Miss Deburque, leads her back toward the loading dock.

"They're good boys," he's saying, "you just got to keep an eye on them."

Terry tosses parsley clumps across the fish and ice, "Just think, Fitz, in a hundred years this could all be yours."

Spraying fish guts from the steel counter into the sink. Not minding the fish, the smell he was raised with. But the boredom. About once every six months, Bobby would bring him into the office to talk about his future, about giving him more responsibility. Bobby did this, he knew, out of respect for his mother and his da, and for the same reason Albert listened each time, though he knew Bobby thought he wasn't much for figures, and the truth was he wasn't.

And still, it's a steady check, and he was never much good on the boats and there's nothing much else that he can do.

"What exactly were you drinking about, anyway?" Terry asks.

A fly's bouncing off the inside glass of the open display case. Albert trying to chase it out with a towel.

"Old problems."

Terry nods. "So, what are you going to do about, you know, your girl?" Terry flattens the fly dead against the glass with his hand.

"Eileen?"

"Yeah."

He cannot think of anything to immediately say.

"I mean how are you going to swing it with her and all? Not that you're married to her or nothing, but, you know, how you going to swing it?" Albert tries to smile in the way he'd seen his father's friends do when they talked about women that were other than their own, to smile in a way that seemed to suggest something, though Albert never knew exactly what. "Let's just leave her out of this," he says, and then smiling he feels stupid, and he turns from Terry and wipes the fly off the case, tossing the towel into a can that leaps with flies when it hits.

Wiping his forehead with his sleeve. Pressing his forearm, for a moment, into his eyes. "But, Terry, this girl . . . "

"Well," Terry says, "seeing a girl and meeting a girl are two different things, Fitz."

Terry peels off his rubber gloves. His knuckles are tattooed. The set-up fist reads L-O-V-E. The right hook reads H-A-T-E. "You should have followed her."

Lowering his arm. He steadies himself against the counter, takes a deep breath, and feels the blackness recede, as if drawing back inside him. He wishes it would go.

"I couldn't."

"Couldn't?"

Rearranging Terry's parsley around the grouper, pulling the clusters apart, carefully, fixing them so they look nice.

"What do you mean, you couldn't?" A grin creeping across Terry's face. "Jesus, Albert, how bad were you?"

"Well-" rolling his eyes down, down toward the mooning grouper.

And they're laughing, Terry with a cold arm around Albert's neck.

He would not stay long at Jimmy Delancy's, would say he'd another delivery to make, though Jimmy would know it wasn't so, what with Albert never making a delivery before, and only making this one because it was a last minute order on account of an error by Delancy's new chef and Bobby's regular driver having left for his daytime job of sealing the oak trees in the Quarter that of late had been imploding from mites. Hundreds of years old, and suddenly whole trees would come down, crumbling as if they'd suddenly lost whatever it was that made them stand upright and live. He hadn't seen it himself, thought in fact that the guy was joking, until he'd read about it in the paper and figured it must be so.

He had oysters, bushels, bagged and boxed in the back of the van. Delancy's new chef was meant to put in the order on Tuesdays, claimed that he had, but the oysters were special order and the chef hadn't put the call in until Wednesday, which meant he should not have had his oysters until Friday and Albert had to call special to Leeville, where they knew his father, and Bobby saying he was going to charge Delancy for the extra cost.

Driving up St. Charles, passing the streetcar he rides every morning and night, leaving the Quarter behind him. The old hotels and now the neon. He liked the older places, that seemed about to slide or topple into the street, patrons, bar tops, and all. Like those oak trees, and he eyes an oak as he comes to a red light, waiting for the tree to burst from within.

Pulling past St. Sebastian's, children at their desks. Two nuns up front, young nuns he does not recognize. It always surprises him to see nuns younger than he, though at thirty-five this was becoming more frequent.

He'd met Eileen, four years ago, at a St. Sebastian's reunion. He'd known her before, but only as a girl; she'd be in the choir when he'd be helping Father Tim, she'd been eleven when he was sixteen. At the reunion, she'd mainly hung around Sandy, but then Sandy'd introduced her to him, and he'd recognized her from the short bangs and the brown eyes that were auburn ringed. When they met, there at St. Sebastian's, four years ago, she'd just been left by the man she'd meant to marry.

Albert was her rebound. He knows that, she said as much to him. She had sloe gin in her purse and she'd been pouring it into ginger ales and behind the rectory she'd fixed him a drink and then she'd told him how the man she thought she'd loved was leaving her. Of how she did not want to drink like her mother, who drank alone, with her own man dead, and then she'd toasted his plastic cup of ginger ale and gin, and poured in more gin, toasting the cup again, and she was crying, tears from her eyes that in the light of the overcast night seemed even then quick to him, quick in a way that suggested she might show him things he did not already know.

She had, in a way. She'd shown him that the line between like and love was unclear; how she could love him but not be in love. She'd said that straight away, before Audrey was born, before Audrey even began to press out from her belly, that she could believe he'd be a good father, but that she and their child would still live alone. And now they no longer lived alone, with Hank.

And he knows now that it was the drinking and his eagerness and her hurt that brought her to him, but he cannot reason how Audrey could have been born from deception and sin. Or from anything but love.

Traffic slow, so he turns past St. Sebastian's, and down along Magazine, to roll through the neighborhood, although it's a little out of the way: driving past the antique shops with the heavy wood furniture and the bums out front; the new high-priced shops squeezing in beside the cigar stores and his da's VFW and the Treetop Grocery where he'd still get a meat-loaf po'boy some Wednesdays to take in for lunch. He'd swing by and surprise his ma, but she was out with Mrs. Neil. Past the RTA bus barn. The blue gantry cranes rising from the river wharves. The train that still runs along Tchoupitoulas. And Eileen's mother, just three blocks away.

He hasn't seen Eileen's mother for two years. Eileen had wanted her to move in with a sister in Lake Charles, where, Eileen said, she could drink and gamble her way to the grave for all she cared. That was not right. Although he understood that with the therapy and the AA, Eileen had come to see that her mother had not raised her well, with the drinking. But still, she had been to St. Sebastian's, and even if the board had paid for her, and even if Eileen had cooked for herself, there had to remain some connection with those who gave you life, even if life was not always as clear as the young nuns would make it out to the children to be.

And back up, across St. Charles, down along Kerry Street, to the green neon of Delancy's Chop House, the parking lot half-full with the early uptown crowd.

Inside and the kitchen is busy with lunch. Chops and the smell of fresh mint, the bubble of thick chowder in two deep pots, the scent of sweet onion and flames leaping around panfuls of fat shrimp, the marsala wine, black pepper and thyme. Stainless blades across house-smoked salmon, a sous chef with a box of black berries. Capers in a plastic drum. And the smoke that carries so many things: the garlic and the pepper seed, steak rubbed in red wine and salt, potatoes smashed with cream, whole scoops of butter rolling toward the pan edge, bacon, sour cream and chives. He can hear Delancy's voice from his office, on the telephone, carrying through this mesh, a mesh that Albert lets hold him until the weight of the oysters pulls him toward the sink.

"Delivery," he says to Delancy's new chef, whom he doesn't know well, who's stirring a marinara that Albert can tell from the color has been cooked at slightly too high a heat.

The chef slaps the wooden spoon hard against the marinara pot's edge, turns his back, bends over to check the lowest stove.

The sous chef takes Bobby's clipboard, initials beside Jimmy Delancy's name.

"There's an extra cost."

Albert's never seen the sous chef before, must be new also, Delancy having to hire the head chef less than a month ago when Gerry Connoly left with his new wife for Houston. The sous chef says nothing, glances nervously toward the stove, then toward Jimmy Delancy's office, and quickly nods.

"God damn to hell-" And the chef's holding his burnt hand and he's kicking the stove, really kicking it, and Delancy's door swings open and Albert grabs the clipboard and makes fast for the door.

"Albert!"

Delancy there, in the sweater his ma had given him the Christmas past, somehow filling the entire doorway with himself despite his being no taller than Albert, and certainly not as wide.

"Albert, I'm just off the phone." The chef's glaring at Delancy who ignores him, Albert holding the clipboard up across his chest. "I've got you and Eileen next to me at the head table," Delancy says, "with your ma." Delancy steps into the kitchen. "So for God's sake wear a clean shirt."

Albert smiles but does not meet Delancy's eyes.

"And Albert-"

Turning his body toward the loading dock, staring into the sunlight beyond the screen. "I've got to go Jimmy. I don't normally drive the van."

"As I say, I don't know if there'll be any food at the wedding. My chef might forget to cook it. But at least there'll be a band."

The chef storms past the oysters to his office.

Albert nods, smiles quickly, and steps toward the truck. "See you, Jimmy."

But Delancy is snatching up the invoice and throwing open the chef's closed door so that the knob swings out and slaps the wall, the door bouncing back, slamming shut, sealing Delancy inside.

Jackson Square at noontime, kids with skateboards, tourists, shoe-shine guys, painters who'll make your name into art, on a corner bench so that he can see up the alleyway, the Cathedral crosses above him. Finishing his sandwich, feeling better, a Dr. Pepper on the bench by his knee.

Glancing up the alley to the steps where she stood. He's got a right. His da always said that, that one man's got as much right as another to walk on God's earth.

He would have told his father that Eileen was with child, if his father had not been so ill. His father often spoke of grandchildren, "what's the matter with my two sons," he'd say. But Sandy didn't find Colleen until later, and Albert mostly working. His father would have been happy with the news, but this would have meant setting a date for the wedding before his father died.

Six months after his father's passing, Audrey had been born.

Crumpling the sandwich foil.

He'd tried to see Eileen, as their baby grew inside of her, with her Aunt moved in with her mother and her, but he'd felt unnecessary, not because of the women, but because Eileen seemed to need him less and less. He'd come over on a Saturday and then on the Sundays, too, as she'd stopped coming to Mass, with Father King suggesting it was because of the heat, but Albert knowing better. The pregnancy was changing her. Eileen did not want him, even as he felt a love he could not well express for the baby she carried.

She'd taken birthing classes and he thought he might help her with the breathing, offered to take the Tuesday mornings off from work. But she said she did not want him to interrupt his schedule, to take the cut in pay, though a few Tuesdays did not matter much to him, and so he'd see her on Saturday nights, mostly sitting with her Aunt and her mother, the four of them watching the television.

And then she had AA and new friends and her waitressing job, and he saw her less and less, and they never did once hold hands again after their night together. Then, two years later, a year ago, in City Park, when he'd lifted Audrey off the lime-green horse, when he'd bought Audrey her first lemon sno-ball, while he'd still held Audrey's small hand, she'd told him about Hank and he saw what it was for Eileen to love.

At the park fence, a woman is painting mirror frames. As he turns, he sees himself: the red hair creeping back from his forehead, thick as brushes; the pink skin, pink; round face, too round, like the rest of him. But he is strong, his neck and arms, and he hasn't missed a work day since his da's funeral three years before.

His eyebrows are too bushy. His fingers fat and short. There's a scab on his forehead. His cheeks make him look like a boy. He turns away. The church bells ringing, the clouds up above. Squeezing the foil into the tightest possible ball. Hurling it into the trash.

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