“Yeah?” he said, the cigarette bobbing up and then back down. He didn’t look over.

“Harry?” Emily said, because he had never allowed them to call him Mr. Sebastian. “Do you have a second?”

“Oh, shoot.” Harry dropped his feet and set the cards on the small table by the couch. “Mike, Emmy! How are you? I thought you were David. He’s the king of sneaking up on me while I’m working. Just between the three of us, I’m thinking about making him wear a bell when he’s in the house.”

“That’s a great idea. You know how much he loves accessories.”

Harry Sebastian threw back his head and laughed, his fedora almost tipping off. “Ha! That’s great. He’s in his room, I think, if you guys want to go on up…”

“Actually…” Emily said, looking quickly over her shoulder at Michael, who nodded at her, “we’re here to see you.”

“Oh! Well, come in, come in.” Harry gathered up the files and looked around for a place to stack them, finally placing them on the side table, under the deck of cards. “We’ll make it official, then: you guys sit over here, I’ll take my place behind the desk like a real lawyer.”

Michael and Emily came into the office and he shut the door behind them. The rest of the house was carefully designed by Valerie and her swarm of interior decorators to function as a backdrop for Surroundings’ photoshoots, but Harry’s office was the chaotic heart of the home. It belonged to him and him alone: every flat surface held precarious stacks of law journals and old notebooks and manila  folders. Unframed movie posters (Animal House, Caddyshack, The Big Lebowski) and all-but-unused calendars from the last few years were scattered along the walls. The desk was a little too big for the room, but it held piles of opened mail, dirty coffee mugs, handheld video games, a broad assortment of paper scraps, and photos of David and Valerie. An Ole Miss bumper sticker and two receipts were taped to the wall beside his chair. Harry swore he knew where everything was, that he had a system.

When she sprinted through the neighborhoods of her city, the world became sculpture, and the people just statues, and she alone was alive and moving. She wasn’t Josephine when she ran…no, wait: she was Josephine. She was the real Josephine, the one she was scared to be the rest of the day, the one who could speak up, the one who looked at the world and what she faced and responded not with a blush or a stammer but with a shrug and a “Fuck it.”

Still driving, she began sobbing once more, this time much harder. Josephine didn’t stop driving, she didn’t pull over, she just drove on through the back streets towards her home. She was weeping so hard her chest hurt…she had failed again. There was another, more perfect Josephine buried inside of her, and she had failed again to help her find a way out. How much longer could she stay in there, how many more times could Josephine fail her, before she turned her back and retreated into nothing?

Detective Ron Maglione stood up against the windows. Directly across the street from the Citadel Center was the Superdome, and from this angle the sheer size of the thing was tremendous: the white canopy of the dome swelled up just beneath his feet and took up almost a quarter of the view.

Beyond the Dome was the huge Crescent City Connection bridge, as tall as many of the downtown buildings, high enough to let ocean-going ships pass under its span on the way up to Baton Rouge. It was three o’clock on a Thursday, and the Mississippi River was busy with freighters and tugboats and ferries, and it glowed bright gold in the afternoon sun despite the filth underneath.

Traffic was just starting to pick up down below him. Maglione watched the cars poke around, stopping and starting, and he saw how modern and clean New Orleans looked from up here, just another 21st century American city. From up here it looked like a real city…from up here you’d never guess that it belonged to neither this century nor this country: built in a swamp on the banks of the most dangerous river in America; susceptible to hurricanes, tropical storms, tornadoes, floods, and fires; infested with rats, thumb-sized cockroaches, toxic caterpillars, alligators, and nutria; surrounded by noveau riche hillbillies and God-fearing shitkickers who would push the city into the Gulf Of Mexico if they thought Louisiana could survive without the tax revenue; and ran by genuinely evil mofos who’d gladly burn the whole thing down themselves if they thought they could get either votes or profit out of it.

Maglione closed his eyes but resisted the temptation to put his forehead against the cool glass. He didn’t mean it, he didn’t mean any of it. He loved New Orleans, he was just in a bad mood because of what he was about to do. And he was tired. He was always tired.

Detective Ron Maglione had no idea where Harry found these girls or where they went after they left his law firm, because he never saw women like this anywhere else in New Orleans. He tried to picture them away from that desk and he never could. He decided they were part of a secret sisterhood, selected at birth according to arcane methods then raised in the dark secrets of the Receptionist Arts. They spent ten years traveling from front desk to front desk of whatever elite businessman could afford their cabal’s pricey services, then retired back to the shadowy nunneries of their Order to spend the rest of their lives training the next generation of receptionists…

Damn, I should write this stuff down.

He’d been off on a Sunday night, driving home from the video store, when he passed a Domestic Disturbance on the sidewalk near the Stop ‘n’ Shop on Claiborne, right out in the open. A guy—dark but not too dark: maybe mixed race, maybe Latino—was slapping the everliving shit out of a black girl, and she was barely defending herself.

“Unbelievable,” Maglione said out loud, more exasperated than incredulous, and pulled the unmarked Caprice Classic over beside them. (God, how Maglione missed those old boxy Caprices, the last truly great American car.)

He got out of his car calmly and patted his pocket to make sure the extra key was there, then locked and closed the door with the engine still running, a habit his father had taught him.

“Mind your own business, pardner,” the man said, but Ron Maglione didn’t answer him. Everything in the world felt right, like he was following a script only he knew. The man didn’t flinch at all, too busy cussing him to see the beautifully delivered roundhouse Ron Maglione deployed against his face.

Maglione had been a semi-professional boxer before joining the police force, but few of the punches he’d ever thrown in his career had felt as good, as solid, as that one. He felt the jaw break under his knuckles, knew the man was out cold even before his head had finished snapping back. Even back then, Ron Maglione’s job required so few duties that could be described as purely good and useful, but surely this was one of them.

He turned back to the girl. He knew his lines: he’d put her in the back of his car, call in the arrest, then take her statement and offer to get her a ride to her family or a shelter. He expected—like a chump, like a damn rookie—her gratitude. “Blimp,” she said, just as she pushed a distressingly long fingernail file into his abdomen.

Maglione staggered back. The black plastic handle, all that was visible of the file, became covered in thick blood. His blood. He stopped himself from pulling the blade out. It hurt on the inside.

“Why’d you do that?” he asked in shocked surprise.

“Fat.”

He stumbled his way back to the driver’s side, tried the door and found it locked,  then dug into his pocket for the key. There was blood on the door handle, blood on the jeans he wore only on his days off. This pair was new, he’d only worn them twice before, and now they were ruined. Number one rule of dealing with Domestics: separate them first. Separate them first.

Ron Maglione pulled out onto the deserted street and, picking up the suddenly slick microphone, called in to the overnight uptown dispatch.

“Hey, Ronnie Sweater,” Charlie said back. “I thought it was your night off.”

“Charlie, it’s a 10-8, a 10-8.”

Charlie sucked in his breath, and when he spoke again all emotion was left behind. “All right, everyone clear the air. This is a 10-8. Repeat, clear the air immediately. Come back, Ronnie.”

Maglione nudged the Caprice back into his lane. He remembered the times a 10-8 had come in while he was at the station, how everyone froze, staring to their radios to hear what had happened to the injured officer, then flew madly towards him. “Delachaise and Claiborne, proceeding…west, I guess. I got a 36-something…I can’t remember the codes. I been stabbed, Charlie. This girl, she stabbed me.”

“Oh, Ron…you got stabbed? Pull over, I got units all around you. Jesus Christ. Is it still in you? You didn’t pull it out, did you?”

“It’s okay, Charlie. I’m six blocks from the Baptist Hospital. Call the emergency room, let ‘em know I’m coming. I’ll be there in a minute.”

All around him, in the distance, he could hear sirens firing up. Every member of the New Orleans Police Department within a five mile radius was screaming towards the Baptist. What a pain in the ass, Maglione thought with half-closed eyes. Charlie mumbled something urgent to an operator, then came back. “You with me, Ronnie? Where you at now?”

The steering wheel was hard to hold on to, and blood was pooling under his lap on the seat, making it feel like he’d wet himself. “Claiborne and Milan. I’m almost there.”

“You’re slurring your words, Ron. Look, just put it in park, right in the middle of the street. I’ll have someone there in seconds.”

Maglione doesn’t remember the rest of the trip, but he somehow made it to the Baptist Hospital and up the emergency ramp, bouncing like a pinball off the sides twice before coming to a stop. When the paramedics got him out of the car, he’d asked the ER doctors “Can I pass out now?” and, after getting their permission, drifted off.

He woke up a day and a half later. The fingernail file had nicked an artery and then, when he sat down in the car, pierced his bladder. The dirt from under her fingernails had caused an infection that they were still fighting. “Nobody give this girl a real weapon,” was the most common joke.

They never found the girl or the guy, hadn’t even known what to look for or where  to look. And Ron Maglione was in trouble again, of course, back then he was always in trouble: for not calling it in beforehand, for not following Domestic Disturbance procedures, for not calling for back-up, for excessive force (even though the only proof they had of this was his own story), for driving on a public street in his condition, for damaging his patrol car and the hospital. He even had to pay to have the blood in his car cleaned out.

But Ron Maglione didn’t care that much. All he knew was that he got to sleep for  36 hours, and then spent a week in the hospital dozing off and on with no beeper, no phone calls, and no alarm clock.

And that had been fifteen years ago now.

Okay, we have to go, we’re like an hour late,” she said at last, and he rose from the bed with only two more kisses. She fetched the spray starch from her bathroom, and returned just as he was tucking his shirt in. She sat on the bed, right behind him, and straightened out the back of his shirt. She didn’t need to, his tucks were always flawless. She misted the spray starch across his back.

This had become their ritual over the last few weeks…after their time together, she would lovingly tug and smooth the wrinkles from his clothes, “making him decent again,” they would joke.

When she was done, she stood in front of him in the full-length mirror and met his eyes. “How do we look?”

“Not guilty, your honor.”

She caught his eye in the mirror. “And with you around, I’d have to.”

He leaned forward and kissed the back of her head. “I don’t tend to be the one doing the ravishing.”

“Oh, you do a pretty good job.” But it was true: when they tumbled together, he was rarely the aggressor. He was an enthusiastic, passionate, and inventive participant, but she always set the pace and he never tried to take more than she offered him.

It would be easy to just say he was a Proper gentleman, but even though that was part of it, there was something more. It was as if he had never learned the boy vs girl dance of Two-Steps-Forward, One-Step-Back.

It was sweet and sorta gallant, the way he respected her even as he undressed her and brought his hands and mouth to her skin, but it could be frustrating, too: despite ending many of their evenings damp and out of breath, their physical relationship was pretty much still rated PG-13. She didn’t really mind–him moving this slow with her was charming and romantic and, she had to admit, exciting as hell–but still…what was the point of a summer fling if you never got flung?

Her mother’s daughter in many ways, one of Elizabeth’s outstanding traits is a stunning capacity for adaptability. Once Elizabeth discovered what kind of girl became popular at her school, she recreated herself as the most perfect example of the species.

Soon enough, she was the alpha-female of the seventh grade, but she found herself growing lonely. It turned out that most of the girls Elizabeth had assumed were just pretending to be superficial and frivolous weren’t pretending so much after all.

After a while, she realized that their parents, Vietnamese immigrants who had worked so hard to establish themselves in the new country, considered it a luxury to let their kids relax a little and be normal teenagers. Elizabeth thought this was the new American Dream, something that should be inscribed on the Statue Of Liberty: “Give us one generation, and your kids will be just as shallow and vapid as ours.”

“There you are.”

“Hey,” she mumbled. Why did her diction and posture always desert her the second she saw her mother?

Belinda nodded at the finger sandwiches. “I made us a snack before we go over to Grandma and Grandpa’s.”

“I just had a picnic, remember?. And we’re going to Grandma and Grandpa’s to eat dinner.” Sitting down at the small table, Emily picked up one of the small triangles of bread and inspected it. Cucumber sandwiches, her favorite.

“Somehow I don’t think that’s gonna stop you.”

Emily took a bite. “You mustn’t say things like that to a 17-year-old girl. You could give me an eating disorder.”

“This is America, Emily. Everyone has an eating disorder.”