“Hello?”

I screamed and swung around and dropped the flashlight. A man picked it up and shined it in his face. It was shadowed and I stepped back, but then recognized the crooked mustache. Deputy Sheriff Burdon smiled, then handed me the flashlight, and I took a breath and let it out. “Shit, don’t do that.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“Well you did.” I put the pictures back in the trunk, then stepped out of the shed and padlocked it, squeezing the flashlight between my ribs and elbow. My heart was still beating fast, and it was completely dark now. Fog hovered in the lot and street. In the light from the security lamps over the sheds I could see Lester Burdon was wearing jeans and sneakers and a windbreaker.

“Did you get hold of Legal Aid?”

“Yeah, thanks.” I turned off the flashlight and began to walk across the lot. My bare legs felt cold, my nipples were hard against my shirt, I didn’t know how I felt about him being here. “You working under-cover or something?”

“Excuse me?” He looked down at his sneakers. “Oh, no, I’m off. I just—I drive by this way. I thought I’d check in on you, see how you’re holding up.”

He sounded like he meant it, and he seemed even softer than the day before when he’d led those men in kicking me out of my house. When we got to his car, a Toyota station wagon parked at the edge of the lot near the chain-link fence, I kind of hoped he’d keep talking; Connie Walsh was the first person I’d had a real conversation with in over eight months, and that was more of an interrogation than a talk. I wanted one, even with a sheriff’s deputy in the fog. He was looking across the street past the motel to all the tractor trailers parked behind the truck stop. I could hear the bass drum of the country band through the walls, cars moving over the freeway bridge down the block. He looked back at me, his face all somber. “Can I buy you a cup of coffee, or something?”

“That’d be all right.” I told him I had to put on something warmer first. He waited in his car in the motel lot and I changed into the same clothes I’d worn to Legal Aid. I rubbed deodorant under my arms and ran some eyeliner under my bottom lashes.

We both agreed the truck stop would be too loud, so we ended up at a Carl Jr.’s a mile past the freeway on the outskirts of San Bruno. The place was brightly lit and smelled like fried chicken and potatoes. I hadn’t eaten and my stomach felt hollow, but I didn’t want to order food and change the offer of drinking coffee together into something else. We sat at a table by the window. Deputy Burdon had taken off his jacket and was wearing a striped golf shirt. His arms were tan, and the gold of his wedding band stood out bright against his skin. His mustache was as crooked as it had been the day before, his dark eyes a little moist. I had to be looking at the most serious man I’d ever met.

Our coffee came. I added Sweet’n Low to mine but he sipped his black, his eyes on me. On the ride over he’d asked me if Legal Aid had a lawyer for me yet and I told him yeah, then Connie Walsh’s news about the county already auctioning off the house. Now he looked down at the tabletop and shook his head. “Boy, they don’t fool around, do they?”

“It’s not hard to rescind these things, though, is it? That’s my lawyer’s plan.” I felt shaky at his reaction. I lifted my coffee cup, but then put it back down; I felt a little sick to my stomach. I lit a cigarette and blew the smoke out the side of my mouth.

“I really don’t know much about that, Mrs. Lazaro.”

“Kathy. Nicolo’s my maiden name.”

“It suits you.” His eyes stayed on mine a second, then he glanced out the window. I wanted to ask if he had any kids; I wanted to know that, but I didn’t ask and took a drag of my cigarette.

“Anyway, we never should have been charged a tax at all, and I only own half the house in the first place. My lawyer’s confident, though, so I’m trying not to harp on the negative.”

“Your husband hold the rest?”

“My brother. He doesn’t know about any of this yet. No one does.”

The waitress came by and topped off our coffee. Lester Burdon smiled at her, but sadly, I thought, like he knew something about her that wasn’t good. His face changed when he saw me studying him and he sipped his coffee.

“Do you have any kids, Mr. Burdon?”

“Two.” He put his cup down and folded his elbows on the table. His eyes were on mine again, but this time he didn’t look away and neither did I. I wasn’t used to being looked at so closely, to being seen.

“My husband left me eight months ago. No one back home knows that either.”

“You always keep so many secrets?”

“Just when I have to.”

He kept his brown eyes on me, and I looked away to stub out my cigarette.

“I understand.”

“Do you?”

“I think so.” He nodded once, the way cops do.

IT WAS A short and strange ride back to the motel. Neither of us talked and the fog still moved slowly through the streets. The lights over the diesel pumps at the truck stop looked misted at the edges, so did the blue and red neon beer signs in the bar window, and across the lot the tall yellow letters of the El Rancho Motel over the office, all dulled and spread out a little.

He pulled into the lot and I put my hand on the door handle. “I want to go back to my house, but I’d have to break a window just to get in there.”

He touched four fingers to my knee, lifting them just as quick, but they left a warmth in my leg that loosened something in me all the way to my diaphragm.

“Do you mind if I give you some professional advice?”

“I guess not.”

“Keep your head and do it all through your lawyer, Kathy. If I were you, I wouldn’t even drive up there until the keys were back in my hand.”

He looked dark-eyed and somber again and I didn’t want to get out of his car, but I didn’t want to stay either. “Thanks for stopping by.”

He looked at me with his handsome face and crooked mustache and I got out and closed the door, watching his little station wagon turn up the foggy street, its taillights vanishing in no time.

SATURDAY AND SUNDAY all the coast towns were fogged in. I spent the weekend in my room smoking and reading magazines, watching my own color TV I’d pulled from the storage shed. When I got hungry I went out for fast food. Late Sunday night I drove under the freeway to go buy cigarettes and a Snickers Bar and when I got back, I couldn’t be sure, but I thought I saw Lester Burdon’s car pull away from the curb across the street, its small foreign engine straining to shift gears.

I LOOK AT MY NADI OVER THE PIZZA WE ARE EATING UPON THE FLOOR of our new home. She is dressed in a fashionable sweat suit the color of roses. She wears no cosmetics upon her face, and there are shadows beneath her eyes. Esmail has worked very hard all weekend, and he reaches for a fifth slice even before he has finished chewing his last. But Nadereh will not return my look. She has spoken to me very little, in Farsi or English, since I yelled and broke her cassette player by throwing it in the bedroom of our pooldar apartment. We complete our eating and I give my son permission to leave the sofreh for his room. Nadi rises to prepare the samovar.

The movers finished with their business by nightfall yesterday, my wife working until midnight bringing order to her new room, the largest, with two good windows overlooking the rear lawn. My room and Esmail’s are smaller and face the front grass and the street and woodland beyond, and we will share the bathroom as a family. Even though she would not speak to me, I enjoyed listening to Nadi talk with the large moving men in English, informing them please to be calculated, and please to work slowful and avoid to shatter very supreme furniture, thank you, sirs.