A Multitude of Sins by Richard Ford

and seemed embarrassed. He lookedaway, out over the crowd of moving heads and faces, as if he’d sensed someone coming.
    I looked toward where he seemed to be looking. But no one was approaching us. Not Beth, not a daughter. Not anyone. Perhaps, I thought, this was all a lie, or possibly even that I’d, for an instant, lost consciousness, and this was not Mack Bolger at all, and I was dreaming everything.
    “Do you think there could be someplace else you could go now?” Mack said. His big, tanned, handsome face looked imploring and exhausted. Once Beth had said Mack and I looked alike. But we didn’t. That had just been her fantasy. Without really looking at me again he said, “I’ll have a hard time introducing you to my daughter. I’m sure you can imagine that.”
    “Yes,” I said. I looked around again, and this time I saw a pretty blond girl standing in the crowd, watching us from several steps away. She was holding a red nylon backpack by its straps. Something was causing her to stay away. Possibly her father had signaled her not to come near us. “Of course,” I said. And by speaking I somehow made the girl’s face break into a wide smile, a smile I recognized.
    “Nothing’s happened here,” Mack said unexpectedly to me, though he was staring at his daughter. From the pocket of his overcoat he’d produced a tiny white box wrapped and tied with a red bow.
    “I’m sorry?” People were swirling noisily around us. The music seemed louder. I was leaving, but I thought perhaps I’d misunderstood him. “I didn’t hear you,” I said. I smiled in an involuntary way.
    “Nothing’s happened today,” Mack Bolger said. “Don’t go away thinking anything happened here. Between you and me, I mean. Nothing happened. I’m sorry I ever met you, that’s all. Sorry I ever had to touch you. You make me feel ashamed.” He still had the unfortunate dampness with his s ’s.
    “Well,” I said. “All right. I can understand that.”
    “Can you?” he said. “Well, that’s very good.” Then Mack simply stepped away from me, and began saying somethingto the blond girl standing in the crowd smiling. What he said was, “Wow-wee, boy, oh boy, do you look like a million bucks.”
    And I walked on toward Billy’s then, toward the new arrangement I’d made that would take me into the evening. I had, of course, been wrong about the linkage of moments, and about what was preliminary and what was primary. It was a mistake, one I would not make again. None of it was a good thing to have done. Though it is such a large city here, so much larger than say, St. Louis, I knew I would not see him again.

Puppy
    Early this past spring someone left a puppy inside the back gate of our house, and then never came back to get it. This happened at a time when I was traveling up and back to St. Louis each week, and my wife was intensely involved in the AIDS marathon, which occurs, ironically enough, around tax time in New Orleans and is usually the occasion for a lot of uncomfortable, conflicted spirits, which inevitably get resolved, of course, by good will and dedication.
    To begin in this way is only to say that our house is often empty much of the day, which allowed whoever left the puppy to do so. We live on a corner in the fashionable historical district. Our house is large and old and conspicuous— typical of the French Quarter—and the garden gate is a distance from the back door, blocked from it by thick ligustrums. So to set a puppy down over the iron grating and slip away unnoticed wouldn’t be hard, and I imagine was not.
    “It was those kids,” my wife said, folding her arms. She was standing with me inside the French doors, staring out at the puppy, who was seated on the brick pavements looking at us with what seemed like insolent curiosity. It was small and had slick, short coarse hair and was mostly white, with a fewtriangular black side patches. Its tail stuck alertly up when it was standing, making it look