The rape charge was dismissed for lack of evidence; on the courthouse steps, the alleged victim, a squatter version of Augusta, looked at Junior and emitted a shriek of equine laughter. “You still think he ought to be whipped down the street?” Walter asked Annie. “I never said that,” she protested hopelessly.

Not long after Junior’s courtroom appearance, Annie came home from work and found yellow hairpins in the bed and a torn silk stocking. She sat for a long time with these things in her hands. When Walter arrived, his face and hands dirty with grease, she remained unmoving, the hairpins clutched in her fingers, the torn stocking falling across her lap. He washed at the sink. He sang to himself, “I got the blues—and I can’t be satisfied…”

He looked down at her. He picked up the stocking. He smiled his old smile. “It was nothing,” he said.

She was silent.

“Somebody who said she knew you. How did you meet her? A girl named Karin. She came here this morning, said she’d been trying to reach you for months.”

Annie opened her mouth and screamed.

Walter threw himself at her clapping his hand over her mouth. She bit down on the soft flesh of his thumb pad.

He jerked his hand away. She gasped for air.

“Stop it! Stop it!” he cried.

“You’re trying to kill me!” Her head fell back against the chair. She wept with open mouth—she was deranged. He stood silently, sucking his thumb, his eyes half shut. She slipped to the floor and lay on her stomach, her face pressed into the dusty carpet. He sat down beside her.

“I won’t see her again,” he promised.

A week later, on a Saturday afternoon when they were drinking coffee together at the table near the window, a large white envelope was poked beneath the door. She went over to pick it up. Inside was a sidewalk snapshot of Walter. Just behind him, wearing a silver-fox jacket, was the girl Karin. She put it on the table. He looked down at it.

She took the old suitcase from the closet and began to pack. As she bent over, her mind on the sidewalk beyond this room, this life with Walter, a coffee cup hit her on the back of her head. She turned. He was standing there, his hands on his hips. She picked up a chair and ran toward him. He began to laugh. She broke the chair in front of him. They stood there with the jagged pieces of wood between them.

When she got to the door, he called, “Wait!” She turned.

“Why can’t we live like normal people?” he cried.

She laughed all the way to the sidewalk, aware that she was attracting attention but, for once, indifferent to it. There were coffee grounds on her shoulders. She found a phone booth.

“Hello?” asked a woman’s voice.

“Is this Mrs. Shore?”

“This is Eva.”

“Is Mr. Shore—”

His voice came on.