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couldn’t bear to lose you, Victor.”
    He opened his mouth to say the same to her, then feeling silly, he swallowed the words. “You won’t,” he said instead, covering her fingers with his own, squeezing them. “You’re stuck with me.”
    She smiled and motioned with her head toward the front door. “I’ve got to go. You know how Milton is if I’m late.”
    Santos nodded and followed her to the front door, watching as she walked down the hall. When she reached the top of the stairs, she looked back at him, smiled and waved. A lump in his throat, he returned her smile, then closed the door. He reached for the safety chain, then stopped, taken by the urge to run after her and give her the hug and kiss she had asked for earlier, taken by the sudden and overwhelming need to hold on to her, the way he hadn’t allowed himself to in a long time, to hold on to her and tell her he loved her.
    What would he do if he lost her?
    He opened the door and started into the hall, but caught himself short, feeling more than a little bit silly. He was too old to cling to his mother the way a baby would, too old to need her coddling and reassurance. He laughed to himself. All her talk of losing him, all her worries and warnings, had momentarily unnerved him. He laughed again. Next, she would have him believing in the bogeyman and the kid-eating monster in the closet.
    With a snort of amusement at his own imagination, Santos fastened the chain, and made a beeline for his room. He dug his shoes out from under the bed, put them on, then sat to wait.
    He checked his watch. He would give his mother a ten-minute head start before he left to meet his buddies. He met them every night at the abandoned elementary school on Esplanade and Burgundy, at the northern edge of the Quarter.
    His mother’s words filtered through his head, the ones about Social Services, about her fear of losing him, and he pushed them away. His mother worried too much; she treated him like a baby. He had been meeting his friends this way for the entire summer and weekend nights during the previous school year. He always made sure he beat his mother home; he, like all the kids, steered cleared of both the cops and trouble. And as he had promised his mother, he was always careful. He had never even come close to getting caught.
    Exactly ten minutes later, Santos unlocked the door again and headed out into the hallway. Moments later, the hot New Orleans night enveloped him. He muttered an oath. Nine-thirty at night and it was still hot.
    Santos brought a hand to the back of his already damp neck. That was the thing people didn’t get about New Orleans summers, the thing that made those long months nearly unbearable—it never cooled down. Sure, other places got hot during the summer, some got hotter. But those places got some relief when the sun set.
    New Orleans remained at the boiling point, May through September. In August, they were all nothing more than human crawdaddies. The tourists he talked to acted so surprised by the heat. Invariably, they asked how he stood it. New Orleanians didn’t “stand” the heat, they just got used to it. To his mind, there was a difference.
    Santos lifted his face to the black sky, and breathed deeply through his nose. The air may not have cooled, but in the last few hours it had changed, the Quarter with it. He found the difference both subtle and glaring—like the difference between natural light and neon, between the scent of flowers and perfume. Like the difference between saints and sinners.
    Indeed, the shoppers and businesspeople had disappeared with the day, making way for the night people. Night people came in two varieties, those who lived on the fringe, and those who lived on the edge. Fringe people were people like his mother, ones who didn’t quite fit into the standard, all-American, Norman Rockwell mold, though they wished they did. Those who lived on