You want my opinion, you should be making a documentary about how y’all talk a different language than we do down here. And I don’t mean English, neither. I never have run into a Yankee who don’t come down here with all kinds of crazy ideas about who we are and what we think and how we spend all our time figuring out how to make life hard for black people, but then never really listen when we try to say plain how things really are. You had best start large, if you really want to tell the story of Miss Zula’s life, because all of Ogilvie had a hand in bringing her up, as she has had a hand in each of our lives.

Your name: Walker Winfield. If you’re willing to listen to what I have got to say, stop by and see me anytime.

Sunday morning Angie was trying to make some order out of the mess in the reception area while John slept. She was folding his trousers when his cell phone fell out of the pocket and gave a soft beep.

She picked it up and looked at the display screen. It was the battery that was beeping, down to its last half bar of life. The reception bars, on the other hand, were all there: five of them. The ringer was off, but the tiny envelope that indicated waiting voice mail was glowing. The number next to it had a certain symmetry that Angie had to appreciate: eighty-eight. He had eighty-eight messages, from the woman he had left at the altar, her family, his own, curious neighbors, relatives, colleagues, most probably one or all of the people who wrote for the Bugle. Messages that would be distraught and angry and colorful in a variety of ways. If this were her phone, if these messages had been left for her, she would have deleted them all, without ever listening to a single one. But John would listen; that was one difference between them, and nothing she could be proud of.

John woke up when she kissed his cheek. He turned his head toward her, mumbling, “Where did you go?” His arm came up and pulled her in.

“Just tidying up,” Angie said. She held up his phone for him to see, and watched him wake up, fast. “This is a satellite phone. We could have got out of here yesterday, and you knew it.”

He didn’t avoid her gaze, made no apologies. “I suspected, but I didn’t look.”

“Ah. Plausible deniability?”

“That was my plan, pretty much. You mad?”

His eyes were very blue, and his expression only vaguely contrite.

“Nah. So, you want to get out of here?”

He stretched, yawned, stretched again. Peeked at her with one eye cracked open. “How many condoms left?”

She smacked him. “Are you going to call the police on Patty-Cake?”

“Do you want me to?”