Man plans, God laughs, reads a framed cross-stitch on my wall, in both English and Yiddish. My first literary agent sent it to me. Placed around this proverb are framed advertisements from my mayoral campaign against Shadrach Johnson. If you want a mayor for black people, vote for the other fellow. If you want a mayor for white people, vote for the other fellow. If you want a mayor for all the people, vote Penn Cage. And this one: Historic Change for a Historic Town. Then my personal favorite: I don’t owe anybody in Natchez a favor. I owe everybody.

I wrote those slogans myself, but two years after being elected mayor of my hometown by a wide margin, I have inescapably failed to deliver the changes I promised. The reasons are legion, but at bottom I blame myself. Two months ago (after two years of beating my head against a wall of indifference), I decided to resign the office and return to writing novels. Then God laughed, and a series of shattering events suggested I might not have the moral right to abdicate the responsibility I’d so blithely taken on. My parents, my daughter, a good friend, and my fiancée reinforced fate’s suggestion, and my father’s heart attack finally crystallized my resolve to serve out my term.

In the weeks since, I have worked like a man possessed, dividing my time between cleaning up the fallout from the near sinking of a riverboat casino below the Natchez bluff and remaking our local government by forming improbable alliances, calling in favors, and raising money from the unlikeliest of sources. Working at my shoulder throughout this period has been my fiancée, Caitlin Masters, publisher of the Natchez Examiner. And pulsing beneath all this activity have been the preparations for our wedding, scheduled to take place twelve days from now, on Christmas Eve. Ever since the district attorney’s call, an itch of intuition has told me that whatever my father did last night is ultimately going to require the postponement of my wedding. I shudder to think of how my fiancée and my daughter would react to this eventuality.

“Mr. Mayor,” says Rose, “I’ve got your father on line one.”

Relief surges through me. “Thanks.” I press the button on the phone base. “Hello?”

“Penn?” In a single syllable, my father’s powerful baritone inspires calming confidence. “Peggy told me you were looking for me.”

“Dad, where are you?”

“Just running some errands.”