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her right, her coat wrapped tightly around her. A copy of the
Sentinel
rested in her lap, two hands placed on top, her fingers delicately wrapped around a pair of gold-rimmed glasses.
    It struck me that had my brother glimpsed Dora in such a pose, he would have felt an instant allure. Even seen briefly, Dora would have made an impression on him.
    “She sort of drew back when I came toward her,” Claire said. “Like a cat that don’t know you. So I just says, ‘Looks like it’s going to be a pretty day.’ She didn’t look like she knew how to answer me. She says, ‘I’m looking for work.’ Just like that. Real fast.”
    Claire had immediately supposed that Dora was the sort of woman who’d always been supported. And yet, she did not appear so much sheltered as deserted, so that Claire had suddenly entertained the idea that Dora had been recently abandoned, perhaps widowed. In any event, abruptly left to fend for herself.
    “So I told her, well, you could just go around town introducing yourself. But I could see that idea didn’t appeal to her. So I told her she should just go over to the
Sentinel
and put in a notice. That was the last thing I said to her.”
    “The times you talked to her, did she ever mention anybody else? A friend or acquaintance?”
    Claire shook her head. “Not that I recall. She wasn’t much of a talker.” She smiled. “Like you.” She plucked the cigarette from her lips, drained the last of the coffee. “I wish she’d just kept on going.” She crushed the cigarette in the bottom of the cup. “Of course, I wish that for everybody that ever come to this town. God knows Port Alma’s fit for nothing.”
    She gazed into the cup a few seconds, rolling itbetween her rough factory-worker’s hands. Then she looked up, stared at me quite blatantly. “You got a nice face,” she said.
    I glimpsed my ravaged features in the window glass, how well they mirrored my wolfish core.
    “Nice eyes too.”
    The better to see you with
, I thought.

Chapter Four
    O n the drive back into town, I thought of my brother, of how different we’d always been, two answers to the same riddle, as my father had once said, I the heir to all my father’s ways, Billy the golden scion of our mother.
    And so it hadn’t in the least surprised me when it was decided that I would be sent to Columbia Law, while Billy would inherit the
Sentinel.
    “Your mother believes that William is best suited to run the paper,” my father told me the night I was informed of their decision. “As you know, he’s always enjoyed being around the office. The printing machines. And your mother tells me that recently he’s taken to composing little essays.”
    We were in my father’s study, a room hung with faded engravings of classic scenes, Cincinnatus behind the plow and Cicero in the Senate. It was the room in which we’d read the ancients together while Billy tumbled playfully in the snow beyond the window or went flying past with a baseball bat or a fishing pole. My fathersat in a high-back leather chair, his gray hair shimmering in the firelight, my mother a few feet away, tucked into a floral window seat, a book in her lap.
    “As for your own future, Cal,” he added, “I’ve often thought that you might be quite well suited for the law.”
    “The law?” I asked.
    “Everything is cut-and-dried in a legal practice,” he explained. “There’s no need for …” He searched for the word. “Sentiment.”
    “Unless there’s something else, Cal,” my mother said abruptly, her eyes upon me searchingly. “Some other direction you’d prefer. Or something you have a particular feeling for.” She waited for me to point out such a direction, then suggested it herself when I remained silent. “Your drawing, for example.”
    She meant the sketches I’d made over the years, mostly local scenes, stone walls, wooden fences.
    “There are schools where you could study drawing,” she added.
    I’d never considered such a