39

In the burnt-orange radiance of the westering sun, the shadows of the tall palm trees reached eastward, from which the night would come, as if welcoming the dark by casting onto its path the images of their fronds.

In one of the rocking chairs on the porch of the sandstone bungalow, Michelle Coltrane sat with her guitar, playing a song she'd written many years earlier, when she entertained dreams of wealth and fame, before she had been mature enough to understand that money and celebrity were not guarantees of happiness. What mattered most in life couldn't be bought with a pot of gold. That wisdom had come at a terrible price.

She earned a living now by teaching guitar and piano, and she played three nights a week at Johnny's Beachside, a restaurant and bar. The place wasn't actually on the beach, but half a block back from it, with no water view, and it was owned by a guy named Norman, who had bought it from Johnny twenty years earlier. No stage was provided for her performance, only a corner between the bar and dining room. Her job wasn't to wow the crowd, but only to provide soft dinner music. She played mostly other songwriters' tunes that had made already-famous singers richer, though once or twice in each set, she slipped in one of her own. The gig gave her pleasure even when, at the end of the night, the tip jar contained only one-dollar bills, no fives or tens.

On this balmy April evening, she waited for a gentleman whom she'd invited to dinner. No romance was involved, only friendship. Anyway, by choice she hadn't shared her bed in more than seven years, for she intuitively knew that such intimacy wouldn't relieve her loneliness and sorrow, but only make them worse.

As the orange light purpled in the east and crimsoned in the west, he came along the oak-flanked lane, plump and rumpled, his back straight and his white-wreathed head high, with the confident yet jaunty stride of a wise and beloved headmaster of a boy's school from the era of Goodbye, Mr. Chips. The pattern of his bow tie did not match that of his shirt—in this case, polka dots over stripes—but he so routinely mismatched these items that the effect had to be intentional, a quiet assertion of eccentricity.

He came up the front walk and climbed three of the four porch steps and stopped and regarded her with a kind of amused solemnity. He stood listening to her song for maybe half a minute and then said, "Obviously a composition from your early days, full of verve and charm, but short on grace and lacking all substance." Although she couldn't sing for smiling, she continued with her guitar as he finished his critique. "If I were fourteen, I might stand here quite enthralled while you played it yet again. However, I'm sixty-four, and older than my years, so I beg of you to spare me from more of this celebration of young-adult angst while my admiration for your talent is still intact."

Rising to her feet and propping her guitar in the rocking chair, Michelle said, "You are quite a piece of work, Ed."

"I have always strived to be such," he assured her, as they hugged each other.

Although Ed Casper had been visiting for nearly a year and had become dear to her, sometimes—as now—she still wondered that she had, without much hesitation, developed a friendship with a guy who lived in rough circumstances, in a tent among the trees beyond the dead end of Shadow Canyon Lane, who walked into town each day to shower in a public facility.

Of course Ed wasn't one of the alkies or druggies made homeless by substance abuse, and he wasn't one with a mental illness that led to an addiction or ensued from it. Neither a hobo impoverished by laziness nor a pitiable vagrant condemned to poverty by a low IQ, he was an uncommon member of the society of the homeless. Some turn of events left him without ambition, robbed him of faith in the future, causing him to seek a life of few possessions, the solace of a clockless existence without appointments or driving purpose.

Ed wouldn't say what loss might have transformed him. He never seemed to be troubled by depression, and he certainly never indulged in self-pity. Michelle knew, however, that a loss of one kind or another had broken him; because in an instant she'd lost everything that mattered most and, in the losing, had for the first time truly understood the value of what had been taken from her. Whatever else she and Ed Casper might share, the condition of their isolate souls, more insistently haunted than any house could ever be, was what had brought them together in mutual mild melancholy.

"Play something new you've written," he said.

"Maybe later. Right now I need a glass of wine, and you're always more amusing after a martini."

They went into the house as the last light of the day bled away and the night rose out of the storied land, like spirits ascending from the graves of history.