THE ORANGE SKY in the west had faded to russet. It was after eight-thirty by the time I got back to the city and the north end of Lodi Street. Pinpoints of light, stars, planets, and airplanes winked overhead as I rolled down the dusty street with my windows open. People in broken porch chairs and others who slouched in rusty cars along the curb craned their necks for a better look at my gleaming car and its sparkling silver rims.

The homes were crammed together and in need of repair. Screens, bent and torn, hung loose from open windows. Roofs sagged. The leprosy of peeling paint and rotted gray wood had stricken every post, step, and shingle. The broken driveways and crumbling sidewalks were peppered with weeds, and the hush of dusk was disrupted by the thumping of boom boxes.

House numbers were a luxury and only a few had them. Celeste Oliver’s place was missing the first two, but I could still see the faded images of where the one and the eight had once been. I pulled up into the driveway behind a red Honda Civic with a crushed rear quarter panel and got out. The envelope was in my hand. In the fading light, I saw the curtain drop and a face disappear.

I climbed the steps and knocked.

The door opened almost immediately and she stood there, pouting. I had to take a breath. She was tall enough so that even in bare feet she was almost eye-level with me. She wore tight stonewashed jeans and an aqua blue halter top that showed off breasts that were neither too big nor too small. Her midriff was honey-colored and molded with curves. Her lipstick was pink. Delicate eyebrows matched her straight blonde hair. Her eyes were powder blue.

“I’m a friend of Roger’s,” I said, when I could speak.

She moved aside and I stepped in. When she turned and walked into the small living room, my eyes followed a perfect bottom. The hammering in my chest and the current running through my center triggered a pang of guilt.

“You can sit down,” she said, plopping down on the couch and picking up a pack of Newports off the glass coffee table. She slipped one into her mouth.

I laid the envelope down on the table in front of her.

“That’s from Roger,” I said, straightening. Unable to sit, but unable to get my feet moving toward the door.

“Did he tell you about me?” she asked, squinting up from the flame of her Bic.

“No.”

“I belonged to Roger,” she said, blowing smoke toward the curtained window. “Not for money. I’m not like that. I dance, but I never fucked a man for money. I loved being with Roger. Do you know he took me inside the White House? I met Reagan.”

I shook my head no.

“And now you’re going to have everything that he had…” she said, looking directly at me with a small smirk. “You’re the one who’ll get to vote on the Star Wars bill this fall. You’ll have the swing vote on the Appropriations Subcommittee on Highways. They want to redo the interstate bridges between here and Canada. Did you know that? The governor will be calling you on that one and you can get him to come do a fund-raiser for you. There’s a real nice bunch around here who’ll pay a thousand a head to have lunch with the governor…

“Anyway, you’ll have me too,” she said, sitting back on the couch and placing her arms along its back with her legs crossed and a little arch in her spine. “If you want that…”

I glanced at the envelope. The feeling in my legs was beginning to return. The smoke from the cigarette helped. I started to back toward the door.

“I kind of have someone,” I said.

“Yeah, that’s standard,” she said. “A wife?”

“Maybe.”

She dashed her cigarette into an ashtray and hopped up off the couch. She came toward me with a bubbling giggle and took hold of my hand, pressing it up against her breast before I could react.

“Yeah, well, this is politics,” she said, her voice dropping into a husky whisper, her fingers tracing up the inside of my thigh. “So she’ll get used to it. They all do…”

I pulled my hand back. Her other hand groped my crotch.

“You’ll need a release,” she said, her pink lips barely moving. “It’s a brutal job. I can keep your mind clear. We all need to clear our minds.”

I knocked her hand away and pushed her harder than I meant to. She tripped and fell to the floor, her head thudding up against the wall.

“I’m sorry,” I said, reaching out to help her up. “I didn’t mean to.”

“Asshole,” she said, swatting at me, then pushing a long strand of the blonde hair from her face.

I turned, yanked open the door, and jumped down off the porch, skipping the steps. I edged past the wreck of a Honda. My suit pants caught and tore on a wild metal shred protruding from the smashed bumper.

As I climbed into my Supra, I looked around. Halfway up the block was an unmarked police car. In the shadows of the front seat, a nickel-size ember-about the size of a cigar-glowed then faded out. That didn’t seem unusual to me. In a neighborhood like this, the police probably knew everybody by their first name.

I never thought much of it back then.

I NEVER HATED MY MOTHER for what she did. Maybe it was because my father refused to blame her. “I knew what your mother needed,” he once said, “and I knew I didn’t have it.”

My mother was a pretty woman who liked to laugh and read books. She was a Mohawk raised on the Onondaga Indian Reservation. That meant that even among the disenfranchised, she was disenfranchised.

As loving as she was to me and to my father, my mother had an insatiable desire for things. I can still remember the one trip we took to Florida over a winter school break. We stayed at a cheap motel across the street from the beach in St. Petersburg. One day, the three of us took a long walk and found ourselves in an exclusive neighborhood on the bay. I can still see the glimmer in my mother’s dark eyes and hear her delicate gasps at the size and intricate architectural detail of the homes. The shiny cars in their driveways. The yachts moored to the docks that jutted out from the swimming pools in their backyards.

When my mother wasn’t reading a book, she was studying magazines like Architectural Digest, Vogue, or Town amp; Country. Every cent my father let her have, she spent on things that were irrelevant to the Native American wife of a quarry man. Irrelevant, but fine. Lalique figurines. A Cartier bracelet. A Chanel evening gown she could never wear.

I was ten when she left to marry a man who drove a black Mercedes coupe. A man who owned a large paving company and who bought crushed stone from my father. A man who smelled like peppermint and wore a gold Rolex. He was for real, though. He even took her to Greece on their honeymoon.

My mother told me then that I was a man already. Ahead of my years and that I would be fine. I was like Running Deer, my namesake, the boy chief who led his people to victory over the Hurons when he was only eleven. I tried to make her words come true, to be a man.

I remember that Christmas, tramping off into the dark winter woods after school and sawing down a tree to surprise my father. Something he had always done for the three of us. I remember the quiver in my lip when I refused to give up my seat on the bus to the eighth grader who regularly taunted me. Him walking away. I remember my fingers going numb around a wrench and the smoke of my breath, lying on the cold concrete floor and looking up at the oil pan of my father’s truck as it bled a thick black ribbon into a cut-down Clorox bottle. My first oil change.

But I think I did more than try to be the man my mother said I already was. I think too that I tried to fill the void she left behind. I remember making my father’s breakfasts, breaking the yolks like her and peppering them so thick it looked like they fell in the road. Coffee in the tall gurgling percolator. The oily smell of sardines laid out over a bed of tuna salad, capped with a fat slice of onion, wrapped in tinfoil, and lowered carefully into his dented blue lunch pail. Breaking from the math homework spread out over the kitchen table and uncapping two longneck bottles of Budweiser for him and Black Turtle. Setting them down without being asked on the porch railing where the two of them sat rocking in the darkness-the way she had always done.