I could hear a whirring sound in my ears, like wind blowing in a conch shell, as I stacked my purchases on the conveyor belt at the checkout stand. Then the black teenage girl working behind the register, whom I had deliberately chosen, went on break, and the assistant manager, a man my age, took her place. "Fixing to have a party at your house, Dave?" he said.

"Yeah, I thought I might," I said.

"Good weather for a cookout, huh?" he said, scanning the beer and whiskey and wine on the belt, his face empty of expression.

"It's supposed to rain, but who knows?" I said.

"Could be. Everyt'ing all right with you, Dave?" he said.

"Just great," I said.

"That's good. That's real good," he said. For the first time, he looked directly at me, his feigned cheerfulness carefully held in place.

I rolled the basket through the parking lot to my truck and began loading my groceries in back, the sky overhead gray and crackling with dry thunder. Then Molly Boyle passed me in a rusted compact, looked back at me, and made a U-turn, almost running over a man on a bicycle. She stopped abreast of me, her windows down, the front windshield spotted with raindrops. "I want to talk to you," she said.

"Go ahead," I replied.

Her eyes lighted on the packages in the bed of my pickup. "Not here. I'll follow you to your house," she said.

"I'm kind of tied up right now," I said.

"No, you're not," she said.

I tried to lose her in the traffic and reach my house with enough time to unload the pickup and put everything away before I had to invite her inside. But Molly Boyle was a determined adversary. She stayed right behind my pickup, all the way down Main, past the antebellum and Victorian homes that lined the street, past the city library and the grotto dedicated to Jesus's mother, right into my porte cochere.

The rain was ticking on the trees and my tin roof as I hefted up two bags of groceries and started in the house, leaving the case of Corona and bottles of Black Jack and Beam and Burgundy in the truck.

She did not wait on an invitation. She picked up an armload of booze and followed me into the kitchen and set it down with a clunk on the drainboard, pushing a strand of hair out of her eye. "You wouldn't want to leave this in the rain, would you?" she said.

"I buy it for guests sometimes," I said.

She raised a finger at me before the words were hardly out of my mouth. "Lie to others or lie to God, and you're only human. Do it to yourself and you never wash out the stain," she said.

"How about taking it out of overdrive?" I said.

"I acted in a cowardly fashion this afternoon," she said.

"I don't under-"

"You were obviously in need of a friend, or you wouldn't have come to my office. I've been a hypocrite, Dave."

"No need for a confession here. Everything is copacetic," I said, my gaze drifting back to the booze on the drainboard.

"I led you on, then I sent you away. Please don't drink. You're a good man. Everyone seems to know that except you."

The light had gone out of the sky, and I could hear hailstones on the roof and see them bouncing in the backyard. Out on the bayou a willow tree turned white when lightning struck in the park. When I looked back at Molly, her face was close to mine, as though it had floated there, out of a dream. I put my mouth to hers, then felt her arms around my neck, her stomach against me. I could feel the smoothness and warmth in her skin and smell a fragrance in her hair, like night-blooming flowers. I squeezed her against me, hard, perhaps harder than I should have, but she had the firm, muscular body of a countrywoman and I realized that Molly Boyle was probably not daunted by anyone or anything.

She walked ahead of me into the bedroom and let down the blinds, a look of determination on her face, as though she had set aside the counsel of others for reasons she would probably never share with anyone. Then she did something I had never seen a woman do in my life – she made the sign of the cross on my person, as though I were incapable of doing it myself, touching my forehead, my breastbone, and each of my shoulders. Then she undressed with her back to me, lay down on the bed, and waited.

The hail clattered on the roof and in the trees, and the attic fan drew the breeze across the sheets and rattled the metal blinds. I heard the phone ring and lightning crash in City Park and someone blowing a car horn in the rain, but I could not think about anything except Molly Boyle's hair spread out like points of fire on the pillow, and the rise and fall of her breasts, and the grace and invitation of her thighs, and the heated whisper of my name, over and over, in my own ear.

Clete had not been doing well since the shooting death of Bob Cobb. He blamed himself and his own reckless attitudes for bringing Bad Texas Bob back to the fishing camp, putting both of us in harm's way and ultimately causing me to take on the burden of Bob Cobb's exit from the world.

But Clete was not at fault. Cobb was evil and long ago should have been rejected by the system for the pathological creature he was. I told Clete these things, but they seemed to do him no good. He tried to get out of his melancholy mood by smacking the heavy bag at Red Lorille's Gym in Lafayette, clanking iron, and staying in the steam room until he looked like a boiled crab.

Sometimes I believed an incident in the present acted as a catalyst that took him back to Vietnam. But I never could be sure. Clete seldom spoke of Vietnam, even with me, dismissing his experience there as an aberration not worth resurrecting. I knew better, though. Even when we were patrolmen together, he'd fall into the thousand-yard stare, then snap out of it and tell me he couldn't sleep because his wife was hooking up with an alcoholic Buddhist guru in Boulder, Colorado, and was probably going to dump him for love beads and Rocky Mountain weed.

Clete felt he had let me down. I tried to dissuade him by telling him his own attitude was arrogant, that he wasn't the controller and centerpiece of other people's lives. His reply was, "Leave the church-basement psychobabble at home, Streak." Clete had many faults, but a lack of devotion to his friends was not among them.

So on Saturday morning I took my troubles to my best friend at his cottage at the motor court and told him about everything that had happened in the last week – particularly my encounter at the television studio with Val Chalons and my experience with Molly Boyle the previous evening. The rain had stopped in the predawn hours, and the morning was bright and cool, the trees dripping behind the cottage. Clete sat outside in a metal chair, dressed in a strap undershirt and oversized scarlet boxing trunks, shining a bagful of shoes. I thought he would react histrionically to the story I told him, but he kept his attention fixed on the shoes he was softly brushing, his face never changing expression.

When I finished, he set down the shoes and looked at them. "You got it on with a nun?"

"I wouldn't put it in those terms," I replied.

His eyes lifted into mine. "But you were in the sack with a Catholic nun?"

"She never took vows."

"People don't make those kinds of distinctions, big mon."

"I was going to get loaded. She knew it. So she got in my way."

His eyes were unblinking, the scar through one eyebrow and across the top of his nose like a flattened pink worm. "You want advice?"

"I don't know. What is it?"

"Get a lot of gone between you and this situation."

"Maybe I don't want to."

"I'm stunned," he said. And for first time that morning he grinned.

He went into the cottage and showered and changed clothes. Out on the Teche a barge heaped with glistening piles of mud dredged from the middle of the bayou was being towed downstream, then a speedboat passed, towing water-skiers who sent waves up into the trees along the bank. Clete came back outside combing his hair, dressed in sharkskin slacks, oxblood loafers with tassels, and a starched sports shirt printed with flowers, the sleeves folded up in one neat turn on each of his huge biceps.