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on a steamy Brooklyn afternoon.
    “Don’t be silly.”
    Emma, dressed only in a diaper against the August heat, gurgled in his arms.
    “You listen to me, Jake. It’s been eight months now. You know I love Emma and if you’d let me I’d keep her forever.”
    Yes, he did know that, and it was beginning to worry him. Shirley was growing too attached.
    “But there are plenty of widows here, nice women whose husbands aren’t coming home from the war, and you ought to start thinking about settling down with one.”
    How was he going to do that? He worked five and a half days a week stocking and sweeping a grocery store nearby. He picked up Emma Saturday noon and kept her all day Sunday. He couldn’t court someone with his baby in his arms.
    “Well, if you don’t want to remarry, there are lots of women who would love to have this precious little girl. Why, just the other day Mrs. Rosenberg asked me—she and her husband can’t have any—”
    “No!”
    “Shhhh! You’re shouting. Here, I’ll hold her while you go in and get the egg creams. Watch out for those little boys. They’ll mow you down.”
    They walked with their sodas toward Prospect Park, where it was cooler. “But you know what I’m saying, Jake. You need to find a wife.”
    He knew Shirley was right. And that had been part of the promise to Helen, too, hadn’t it? Never give her away. But find her a mother.
    Helen, it took me thirty-six years to find you, he said to her before he went to sleep that night. How am I ever going to find another?
    “Well,” said Herb, spreading the paper out in front of him. “I don’t think it’s a bad idea at all.”
    Jake shook his head.
    “Wait, Jake, before you say no. Mrs. Rodolitz in our neighborhood found a new husband this way, and she’s not half as good-looking as you. You both have the same nose, and I guess she’s got more hair than you.”
    Jake laughed. Herb had always been able to make him laugh.
    “Look at all these ads—women who are looking for husbands. You just pick one, or more, hell, play the field, write them letters, and see what you get. Or, if you want to, you place a listing, and they’ll write you. It’s all by mail, Jake. And it doesn’t cost much.”
    “I’ll see. I’ll see.” Who knew, Jake thought, what such a thing might cost?
    * * *
    “Cypress,” the bus driver called again, and Jake started. The bus pulled into the terminal and the door opened. His journey was over.
    Jake let all the other passengers go by before he rose stiffly from his seat, bundled up the sleeping Emma, his coat and hat, and gingerly picked his way down the aisle, then down the bus’s steps. He didn’t want to fall on his face before the waiting Rosalie, his mail-order bride.

3
    Nothing moves very fast in West Cypress. And nothing ever changes—not even the inferiority complex the town, situated across the Coupitaw River from its richer and larger twin city, Cypress, has suffered from its very beginnings.
    In 1792, when Cypress was a fort established by the French and continued by the Spanish, a pair of wild and boisterous soldiering brothers, the Laplante boys, were told by the Fort Cypress commandant that he’d just as soon they moved out of the compound and made other arrangements.
    In a huff, the Laplantes took the few shreds of blankets they owned and their horses and forded the river to the uninhabited side. Within a few hot months—for their resettlement occurred in the trough of a Louisiana mosquito-plagued summer—they had built six huts along a dirt path and had established themselves as entrepreneurs of a particular kind, filling the lean-tos with liquor and women and gambling, the likes of which had not been seen before within the boundaries of what was to be the Louisiana Purchase.
    Now, about one hundred and fifty years after the Laplante boys had been run off by the proper citizens of Cypress, the only emporium for sin in West Cypress was the Ritz Bar located on one end of the