“In fact,” Raf said.

“You stayed with my dad and didn’t say anything?”

Raf shrugged his bony shoulders. His face had a stillness that seemed almost shy. I figured that over the years I’d heard plenty of stories, without his being named, of Raymond Hollander.

Houston wasn’t desert and cacti. Houston was magnolia and swamp, jungle heat and jungle humid, and Raymond’s ice house was in a neighborhood of shotgun shacks.

I had left my rental car—a low, quick, red Firecat—at my hotel and cabbed here.

The place, called the Cielito Lindo, was a stucco garage converted to an outdoor bar.

There was a slab of patio in front where people ordered drinks from a counter, as from a Yankee Dairy Queen, and then the idea was to stand around in the green shade of the corrugated fiberglass roof’s overhang.

This was Raf’s type of territory—of the spirit and mind—and I was heartened on first view. But the heat ticked like a windup clock; dangerous heat. The patio section emptied.

I moved inside and sat in the attached lounge. It was a wine-smelling cinderblock box with plywood boards banged over its windows. My glasses kept fogging and the frames slid down my wet nose.

I was sinking from the six-hour plane ride, the heat, my second Chihuahua beer.

I thought about the Gauguin show—240 pieces on exhibit at the National in Washington. I could’ve flown there instead, could’ve been standing in a cool quiet gallery wing right now, studying “Yellow Christ.”

I was afraid Raymond Hollander was like Raf; that he would mean to show, but . . .

Mexican music blew from a radio: fast roiling music so that when I closed my eyes I saw dizzying orange skirts swirling off brown legs. When I opened my eyes I saw boxing posters and tangled strings of Christmas bulbs. I saw I was the only woman left in the dark bar and that there were ten or twelve men. None was talking. All were pounding away at drink.

The door made its noise and shapes of light crossed the near wall. Somebody said, “Ray.”

He was early-forties, tanned, dressed in rough clothes, their colors worked and washed out by salt, soap, sun bleach. He looked like a desert item, part mirage through my fogged lenses. He looked exactly the sort who might run with Raf.

He came straight over and climbed into the booth seat opposite. He planted a hand on the table deck for a hello.

“Thanks for coming,” I said. “He’s not out in your car is he?”

Raymond said no, four times, four ways. He called me Mrs. Deveaux.

“I’m just Paige.”

“Well, you’re not just anything,” he said and smiled. His smile was good—white, genuine, a smile you had to repay with one of your own.