I had walked these streets enough now to know them. To know which corner had the uneven pavement, which garden bloomed in October, which house had a dog that barked at everything and a cat that observed from the porch with the specific contempt of a cat that had decided not to be manageable.
I knew the city the way you knew a place when you had stopped being a visitor to it.
"I remembered today," I said.
Dominic looked at me.
"My father," I said. "He called yesterday. He remembered that I used to do the crossword in pen. Wouldn't use pencil, said pencil was admitting you might be wrong before you'd tried." Ipaused. "He found one of them in a box. From 1998. Finished. Every answer in blue ink, no corrections."
Dominic was quiet for a moment. "Of course I did," he said.
I almost smiled. "My father thought it was arrogance."
"And?"
"And then he asked me and I said it wasn't arrogance, it was just that I saw no point in planning for my own uncertainty." Avery paused. "He said I was right. He didn't tell my that at the time."
"He's been retroactively agreeing with me for months," Dominic said.
"He has twenty-five years of disagreements to work through." I paused. "I find it, I find it good, actually. That he's talking to me this way. That I'm present enough to disagree with."
Dominic nodded. Not the agreement nod, the one that meant I understand what you're saying and it's true.
They turned onto their street. The apartment building ahead, the light in the lobby, the city behind them going on doing what it always did, old and layered and carrying its history openly, the way only certain cities carried their history, not hidden but present, not past but ongoing.
I thought about my mother finishing crosswords in blue ink in 1998.
I thought: I see no point in planning for my own uncertainty either.
I thought: I believe that. Now. In this city. In this life that I built instead of the one I planned.
I thought: That's enough. That's exactly enough.
Dominic opened the door.
For the first time, I didn't check for the exits. I went in.
* * *
Epilogue
One year.
I knew this because I had not been counting, which was its own kind of information.
November in New Orleans had a specific quality I had learned the way I learned most things about this city -- gradually, in accumulated evidence, the picture assembling itself from details rather than arriving whole. The heat left the stones but stayed in the air. The tourists thinned and the locals exhaled. The light went gold and stayed there for weeks, a long amber afternoon that made the whole city look like a photograph from a better decade.
I was at my desk when I realized what day it was.
The desk was still in the room next to Dominic's office. It had been my room, initially -- a guest room that had become her working space that had become, incrementally and without a formal decision, simply hers. Her books were on the shelf. Her handwriting was on the notepad beside the laptop. The plant on the windowsill was unreasonably still alive.
I looked at the date on my screen and sat with it for a moment.
One year since I had walked up to my father's apartment with groceries and found a door unlocked and a man in an armchair who had looked at me like I was a variable he had not accounted for.
I thought: what a strange thing to have happened. What a complete and particular thing.
* * *