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“Why?”
    “Why what, Angel?”
    “Why does he let me come around?”
    “Welch? Because’a kindness.”
    “The coffee and doughnuts?”
    Tempest shook his head. “No,” he said. “It’s the fact that you bring’em. The men act better and he feels like he’s part’a somethin’ rather than some kinda outcast chained to criminals. They all like it that you like them.”
    “And you?” I asked.
    “In the whole world there’s only me and you on the same page, Angel. Just me and you. I’m a dead man walkin’ and you ain’t even a man at all.”
    “What about Karpis?”
    “What about him?”
    “Does he care?” I asked.
    “Is he goin’ to heaven?”
    “Maybe.”
    Tempest considered my weak promise, hesitated, and then said, “Maybe the powers that be could take pity and just let him die. Let him just go to sleep and not wake up…ever.”
    “But what if he’s reunited with his daughter?”
    “The pain he feel is greater than the love he felt. He ain’t nevah gonna get bettah from what Lathan did to his girl.”
    —
    Half an hour later the men came back carrying Mortimer Tencrow’s body. My angelic sight had miraculously returned and I could
see
that he’d died of a massive coronary.
    When the ambulance had come Tempest stood beside me.
    “Your voice and that prayer freed him,” he said.
    I turned to him but had no words to say.
    “Do you wish you could do that to me, Angel?” Tempest added, a touch of fear in the timbre of his rebellious voice.
    “Never,” I replied.

Escape
    I returned home at seven that evening. Branwyn and I had moved to a new elevator building on the Upper West Side but I still used the stairs to walk up the eight flights to our ninth-floor apartment. The walk brought on a feeling of nostalgia for our old walk-up in Staten Island, when we barely had enough money to pay the rent and our daughter, Tethamalanianti, had just been born.
    When I was an angel in heaven there was no such thing as physical exertion. We moved solely by thought and through the eyes of men; though, because of our arrogance, we never truly understood the thoughts behind those mortal orbs.
    In my brief tenure between the clay of humanity and the light of the divine I used my time to feel physical exertion, the miracle of time passing, and love for the beautiful Branwyn and our children.
    I could hear Titi laughing on the other side of the door as I eased the key into the lock. I had found that she loved it when I just appeared out of nowhere and was suddenly in her life again.
    I swung the door open but I was just as surprised as my three-year-old daughter.
    “Daddy!” she cried as she ran toward me.
    Behind my leaping daughter, on the ochre-and-blue sofa, sat Branwyn. Alongside her was Tempest Landry (aka Ezzard Walcott).
    Tempest was wearing blue jeans and a purple tie-dyed T-shirt—not the orange jumpsuit he was required to wear according to his prison work release agreement. He wasn’t supposed to be away from the barracks—that housed him and his four fellow inmates—after 6:00 p.m. either.
    But none of this bothered me as much as the proximity of Branwyn and Tempest. They were sitting so close on that broad couch. He had saved her life before she and I had ever met. They had once been lovers and though she cared deeply for him she finally decided that it was I who held dominion over her heart.
    Little Tempest, my newborn son, lay sleeping on Branwyn’s lap. Seeing him there, with my daughter’s arms wrapped around my legs and jealousy in my heart, my spirit quailed and again I was reminded of the complexity of the human spirit.
    “Joshua,” Branwyn said and the jumble of thoughts blended together into a smooth feeling of unity among the various provinces of my mind. This feeling I had come to know as love. This love had a face and a voice and a personal history all combined in the personage of Branwyn Weeks.
    “Love,” I said.
    “Hey, Angel,” Tempest called, sounding like the horn a