“I insist,” she said as Carmen Arenas, the owner’s wife, came to the table.
Joe shrugged and removed his hat. “The usual, Carmen.”
“Yes, Mr. Coughlin. Miss Figgis?”
“I will have another, yes.”
Joe sat and placed his hat on his knee.
“Do those gentlemen not like you?” Loretta asked.
Joe noticed she wasn’t wearing white today. Her dress was more a light peach. In most people, you wouldn’t notice, but pure white had become so identified with Loretta Figgis that seeing her in anything else was a bit like seeing her naked.
“They aren’t going to invite me for Sunday dinner anytime soon,” Joe told her.
“Why?” She leaned into the table as Carmen brought their coffees.
“I lie down with mud people, work with mud people, fraternize with mud people.” He looked over his shoulder. “I leave anything out, Engals?”
“’Sides you killed four of our number?”
Joe nodded his thanks and turned back to Loretta. “Oh, and they think I killed four friends of theirs.”
“Did you?”
“You’re not wearing white,” he said.
“It’s almost white,” she said.
“How will that go over with your”—he searched for the word but couldn’t come up with anything better than—“followers?”
“I don’t know, Mr. Coughlin,” she said, and there was no false brightness in her voice, no desperate serenity in her eyes.
The Klavern boys got up from their tables and filed past, each of them managing either to bump Joe’s chair or hit his foot with his own.
“Be seeing you,” Dover said to him and then tipped his hat to Loretta. “Ma’am.”
They filed out and then it was just Joe and Loretta and the sound of last night’s rain ticking off the balcony gutter and down onto the boardwalk. Joe studied Loretta as he sipped his coffee. She’d lost the sharp light that had lived in her eyes since the day she walked back out of her father’s house two years ago, having traded the black mourning dress of her death for the white dress of her rebirth.
“Why does my father hate you so much?”
“I’m a criminal. He used to be chief of police.”
“But he liked you then. He even pointed you out to me once when I was still in high school and said, ‘That’s the mayor of Ybor. He keeps the peace.’ ”
“He said that, huh?”
“He did.”
Joe drank some more coffee. “Those were more innocent days, I guess.”
She sipped her own coffee. “So what did you do to deserve his rancor?”
Joe shook his head.
Now it was her turn to study him for a long, uncomfortable minute. He held her eyes as she searched his. Searched until the realization dawned.
“You were how he knew where to find me.”
Joe said nothing, his jaw clenching and unclenching.
“It was you.” She nodded and looked down at the table. “What did you have?”
She stared at him for another uncomfortable period of time before he answered.
“Photographs.”
“And you showed them to him.”
“I showed him two.”
“How many did you have?”
“Dozens.”
She looked down at the table again, turned her cup on its saucer. “We’re all going to hell.”
“I don’t think so.”
“No?” She twirled the coffee cup again. “Do you know what truth I’ve learned these last two years of preaching and fainting and thrusting my soul out to God?”
He shook his head.
“That this is heaven.” She indicated the street, the roof above their heads. “We’re in it now.”
“How come it feels so much like hell?”
“Because we fucked it all up.” Her sweet and serene smile returned. “This is paradise. And it’s lost.”
Joe was surprised by the depths of his own mourning for her loss of belief. For reasons he couldn’t explain, he had hoped that if anyone did have a direct line to the Almighty, it was Loretta.
“When you started,” he asked her, “you did believe, though, didn’t you?”
She stared back at him with clear eyes. “With such a certainty, it just had to be divinely inspired. It felt like my blood had been replaced with fire. Not burning fire, just a constant warmth that never ebbed. I’d felt that way as a child, I think. I felt safe and loved and so sure this is how life would always be. I would always have my daddy and my mommy and the world would look just like Tampa and everyone would know my name and wish good things for me. But I grew up, and I went west. And when all those beliefs turned out to be lies? When I realized I wasn’t special, I wasn’t safe?” She turned her arms to show him the track marks. “I took the news poorly.”
“But after you came back here, after your…”
“Trials?” she said.
“Yes.”
“I came back and my father chased my mother from the house and beat the devil from me and taught me to pray again on my knees and without wishing for personal gain. To pray as a supplicant. To pray as a sinner. And the flame returned. On my knees, by the bed I’d slept in as a child. I’d been on my knees all day. I’d been awake most of the week. And the flame found my blood, found my heart, and I felt certain again. Do you know how much I’d missed it? I’d missed it more than any drug, any love, any food, maybe more even than the God who supposedly bequeathed it to me. Certainty, Mr. Coughlin. Certainty. It’s the most gorgeous lie of them all.”
Neither said anything for a bit, long enough for Carmen to return with fresh cups of coffee to replace the ones they’d emptied.
“My mother passed away last week. Did you know that?”
“I hadn’t heard, Loretta, I’m sorry.”
She waved off his apology and drank some coffee. “My father’s beliefs and my beliefs drove her from our home. She would say at him, ‘You don’t love God. You love the idea of being special to him. You want to believe he sees you.’ When I learned of her passing, I understood what she meant. I took no comfort in God. I don’t know God. I just wanted my mommy back.” She nodded several times to herself.
A couple walked into the shop, the bell tinkling over the door as Carmen came out from behind the counter to seat them.
“I don’t know if there’s a God.” She fingered her coffee cup handle. “I certainly hope there is. And I hope he is kind. Wouldn’t that be swell, Mr. Coughlin?”