"Feed ducks?"
"Yes."
"Feed ducks now?"
"That's right."
"Dave viene al parque?"
"Sure, he's
coming," Annie said.
Alafair grinned at me and went out the back screen to the pond. The sunlight through the trees made patterns on her brown legs.
"I'll tell you one thing, Dave. No matter what those people from Immigration do, they're not going to take her away. She's ours, just as if we had conceived her."
"I didn't tell you the rest of the story about Dock Stratton. After he finished blowing out his wiring with synthetic wine and wasn't any good to anybody, they shipped him off to the asylum at Mandeville."
"So what does this mean? Are you going to become the knight-errant, tilting with the U.S. government?"
"No."
"Do you still want to go to the park?"
"That's the reason I came home, kiddo."
"I wonder. I really do," she said.
"I'd appreciate it if you'd explain that."
"Don't you see it, Dave? It's like you want to taint every moment in our lives with this conspiratorial vision of yours. It's become an obsession. We don't talk about anything else. Either that or you stare into space. How do you think I feel?"
"I'll try to be different."
"I know."
"I really will."
Her eyes were wet. She sat down across the table from me.
"We haven't been able to have our own child. Now one's been given to us," she said. "That should make us the happiest people in the world. Instead, we fight and worry about what hasn't happened yet. Our conversation at home is filled with the names of people who shouldn't have anything to do with our lives. It's like deliberately inviting an obscene presence into your home. Dave, you say at AA they teach you to give it all up to your Higher Power. Can't you try that? Just give it up, cut it out of your life? There's not a problem in the world that time can't help in some way."
"That's like saying a black tumor on your brain will get better if you don't think about it."
The kitchen was silent. I could hear the blue jays in the mimosa tree and the wings of the ducks beating across the pond as Alafair showered bread crumbs down on their heads. Annie turned away, finished wrapping the fried chicken, closed the picnic hamper, and walked out to the pond. The screen door banged on the jamb after her.
That evening there was a big crowd in the park for the baseball game, and the firemen were having a crawfish boil in the open-air pavilion. The twilight sky was streaked with lilac and pink, and the wind was cool out of the south with the promise of rain. We ate our picnic supper on a wooden table under the oak trees and watched the American Legion game and the groups of high school and college kids who drifted back and forth between the bleachers and the tailgates of pickup trucks where they kept beer in washtubs of ice. Out on the bayou the paddle-wheel pleasure boat with its lighted decks slid by against the dark outline of cypress and the antebellum homes on the far bank. The trees were full of barbecue smoke, and you could smell the crawfish from the pavilion and the hot boudin that a Negro sold from a handcart. Then I heard a French string band play "Jolie Blonde" in the pavilion, and I felt as though once again I were looking through a hole in the dimension at the south Louisiana in which I had grown up.
Jolie blonde, gardez done e'est t'as fait.
Ta m'as quit-té pour t'en aller,
Pour t'en aller avec un autre que moi.
Jolie blonde, pretty girl,
Flower of my heart,