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the credit history on their application.
    “Mostly I try to stay sober,” he replied, and Chance glared at him from the other side of the room.
    A nervous little laugh from the agent, and then she coughed and smiled at him expectantly, suspiciously, waiting for the real answer, and he wanted to take Chance and drive back to the big white house on the other side of town. Wanted to tell this woman she could go straight to hell and take her “historic loft district” with her. And who cared if the pipes leaked or there was no heat in the winter, so long as they didn’t have to answer questions from the likes of her.
    “Deke’s thinking of going back to school soon,” Chance said before he could make things worse, and the woman’s face seemed to brighten a little at the news.
    “Is that so?” she asked him, and he nodded, even though it wasn’t.
    “Deke was at Emory for two years,” Chance said, looking back down at the application, filling in another empty space with the ballpoint pen the real-estate agent had given her.
    “Emory,” the woman repeated approvingly. “Were you studying medicine, Mr. Silvey, or law?”
    “Philosophy,” Deacon answered, which was true, a life he’d lived and lost what seemed like a hundred years ago, before the booze had become the only thing that got him from one day to the next, before he’d come to Birmingham looking for nothing in particular but a change of scenery.
    “Well, that must be very interesting,” the woman said, but the doubt was creeping back into her voice.
    “I used to think so,” Deacon said. “But I used to think a whole lot of silly things,” and then he excused himself and waited downstairs behind the wheel of Chance’s rusty old Impala while she finished. He smoked and listened to an ’80s station on the radio, Big Country and Oingo Boingo, trying to decide whether he should just cut to the chase and take the bus home, instead. When Chance came downstairs with the real-estate agent, she was smiling, wearing her cheerful mask until the woman drove away in a shiny black Beemer, and then the mask slipped, and he could see the anger waiting for him underneath. Chance didn’t get into the car, stood at the driver’s-side door and stared down Morris towards the train tracks that divided the city neatly in half.
    “Go ahead,” he said. “Unload on me. Tell me what an asshole I am for queering the deal.”
    “Deke, if you don’t want to do this, why the fuck don’t you just say so and then we can stop wasting our time?”
    Deacon turned off the radio and leaned forward, resting his forehead against the steering wheel.
    “All right. I don’t want to do this.”
    “Shit,” she hissed, and he shut his eyes, trying not to think about how much easier all of this would be if he were only a little bit drunk. “Why the hell didn’t you say so before ?”
    “I didn’t want to piss you off.”
    Chance laughed, a hard, sour sort of laugh, and kicked the car door hard enough that Deacon jumped.
    “I don’t want to live in that house anymore, Deke. There are way too many bad memories there. I need to start over. I need to start clean.”
    “I just wish you’d slow down, that’s all. I feel like we’re rushing into this.”
    “Well, after the way you behaved up there, I expect you’ll be getting your wish.”
    And Deacon didn’t say anything else, slid over to the passenger’s side, and neither of them said another word while Chance drove them back to the house, and, as it turned out, he didn’t get his wish. Their application was approved three days later, and Chance put the house that her great-grandfather had built up for sale. A month later the house sold, the house and its acre and a half of land, and the week after that they found out she was pregnant.
     
    Through the library doors and past the winding marble stairs that lead up to the mezzanine, past the marble statue balanced on its marble column, headless angel, armless angel, and