“What he want to mess with Cal for?”

“You know anything about gambling?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I can play poker, craps, twenty-one, just about anything.”

“Uh-uh.” Aggie lit a cigarette, wiped a piece of loose tobacco from her lip with the tip of her finger, and crossed her legs. “These guys who gamble, most of them, aren’t about games, or even making money. What they’re all about is controlling things. It makes them feel big. They’ll spend two, maybe three thousand dollars to pull back one thousand. Then they can call a few of their flunkies and say the fix is in, and everybody thinks they’ve done something big. They take a woman out they have to show their money off, spend a few hundred dollars, hoping that you’ll be impressed. If you are, they’re on top of the world; if you’re not, their show doesn’t work at all.

“This guy, whoever he is, who’s trying to deal the bad end of the stick to Cal doesn’t care about the money as much as he does about getting to be a big man by controlling, or looking like he was controlling, people. And if Cal crosses him, he’s going to be mad because he’s going to have to look in the mirror and see himself for what he is—nothing trying to buy into something. Now let me ask you something, you going to sit there and drink up all my beer, or you want to go with me and look around to see if we can get a line on Cal?”

“You know,” I said, “this guy Tyrone from the after-hours joint is from Chicago. He’s always going back there, too. You don’t think he could be this Jack, do you?”

“I’m better at looking than at thinking,” Aggie said, smiling.

We went out, and Aggie took me to some places where she thought Cal might be, but it didn’t take long to see that she didn’t really think he would be at any of them. When I mentioned that to her, she asked me if I thought sitting in the house would be better. I said I didn’t know.

“I don’t know where you men pick up the myth that a woman’s place is always home waiting,” she said. “We don’t wait at home, ever; it just seems that way. But what you come back to, if you find us there, ain’t never what you left. The sooner you get next to that, the sooner you’ll make some woman happy.”

I nodded and just went on following her around. She seemed more like Mary-Ann than I thought. At first I was thinking it was cool the way Cal and I had picked the same kind of woman, but then it came to me that maybe all women were like them in some way.

Going around with Aggie to the places that she and Cal had been was like seeing a movie of his life. When Aggie talked about the places, telling me little things like what seats they had sat in at the rib joint or how Cal had fallen asleep in a movie, it was like she was remembering something really special to her. All you needed was a drum and maybe a little funky piano in the background, and you could have played what she was saying on the radio, it sounded that good.