Then while she watched he stopped. He didn’t turn back to look at the house but walked up to the dry sand and bent to set down his shoes and spread his jacket and then he sat on the jacket, facing the ocean, his knees drawn up before him, his arms wrapped around his knees and his chin down atop them to gaze out onto the breaking water. If anything she’d expected to see him arrest himself and turn back with intent purpose. He looked small. She could not watch him. She reached up behind her and took the ribbon binding from her hair and shook her head and then worked her fingers through her hair. It needed washing. She would never know what he was thinking sitting there but she recognized the configuration of him; it had been hers the first week she’d spent here. She pulled the quilt tight around her and went across to the daybed and sat down on it, drawing her feet up under her with her knees angled and then draped the quilt around herself. With her hands inside it, laced over her belly. The sun low enough now so it came broken through the screening into her eyes. Waiting for him.

The world had gone amber when he came back through the screen door of the porch, still barefoot, his jacket again over his arm. He opened the door and looked at her and stepped in. She saw he’d left his shoes somewhere and wondered if he even knew that. He laid the jacket on a porch rocker and said, “What I was thinking was, maybe one of those beers wouldn’t taste so bad.”

“Is your head all right?” There were streaks of dried blood on his cheek and she could see where the hair was clotted.

He grinned at her. “No, my head’s all fucked up.”

“Beer’s in a crate on the floor in that little pantry off the kitchen.”

“You want one?”

“No,” she said. “I don’t believe I do.”

He came back in with the opened bottle of beer and a saucer to use as an ashtray and sat crosslegged on the floor before the daybed and sat looking at her waiting and she watched him and decided the spleen was out of him and that he was curious and now she was frightened, not of him but of herself; the central fact was out between them and fail or not everything else was up to her. So she sat and told him how it had been, that it had not been what she’d hoped but neither what he’d predicted. That Edgar Sloane had taken her from the Providence station not to a rooming house as she’d expected nor to an existent apartment as she’d feared but to a narrow three-story brick row house with a slate roof and a brass knocker in the shape of a swallow and delivered her into the hands of Virginia Reeves, a woman of Sloane’s age, well-kept and formal, simply and expensively dressed in white and black, her straight black hair unstreaked and pulled back to a tight French braid, who spoke briefly with Sloane before leading Joey into a parlor with a fine grand piano where the woman played a series of scales before nodding to Joey and together they went through a couple of music hall numbers and then the woman paused to ask Joey what song she’d sing if her life depended on it and Joey replied “If I Could Tell You” and the woman played it in a slow tempo, softly, with her head tilted away from the keys to watch a point across the room as Joey sang. When the song ended the woman trailed a few final notes into the room as if wanting them to linger there and then ignored Joey but turned to Sloane and said, “Where did you find her, Eddie?”