“I’m a criminal. He used to be chief of police.”
“But he liked you then. He even pointed you out to me once when I was still in high school and said, ‘That’s the mayor of Ybor. He keeps the peace.’ ”
“He said that, huh?”
“He did.”
Joe drank some more coffee. “Those were more innocent days, I guess.”
She sipped her own coffee. “So what did you do to deserve his rancor?”
Joe shook his head.
Now it was her turn to study him for a long, uncomfortable minute. He held her eyes as she searched his. Searched until the realization dawned.
“You were how he knew where to find me.”
Joe said nothing, his jaw clenching and unclenching.
“It was you.” She nodded and looked down at the table. “What did you have?”
She stared at him for another uncomfortable period of time before he answered.
“Photographs.”
“And you showed them to him.”
“I showed him two.”
“How many did you have?”
“Dozens.”
She looked down at the table again, turned her cup on its saucer. “We’re all going to hell.”
“I don’t think so.”
“No?” She twirled the coffee cup again. “Do you know what truth I’ve learned these last two years of preaching and fainting and thrusting my soul out to God?”
He shook his head.
“That this is heaven.” She indicated the street, the roof above their heads. “We’re in it now.”
“How come it feels so much like hell?”
“Because we fucked it all up.” Her sweet and serene smile returned. “This is paradise. And it’s lost.”
Joe was surprised by the depths of his own mourning for her loss of belief. For reasons he couldn’t explain, he had hoped that if anyone did have a direct line to the Almighty, it was Loretta.
“When you started,” he asked her, “you did believe, though, didn’t you?”
She stared back at him with clear eyes. “With such a certainty, it just had to be divinely inspired. It felt like my blood had been replaced with fire. Not burning fire, just a constant warmth that never ebbed. I’d felt that way as a child, I think. I felt safe and loved and so sure this is how life would always be. I would always have my daddy and my mommy and the world would look just like Tampa and everyone would know my name and wish good things for me. But I grew up, and I went west. And when all those beliefs turned out to be lies? When I realized I wasn’t special, I wasn’t safe?” She turned her arms to show him the track marks. “I took the news poorly.”
“But after you came back here, after your…”
“Trials?” she said.
“Yes.”
“I came back and my father chased my mother from the house and beat the devil from me and taught me to pray again on my knees and without wishing for personal gain. To pray as a supplicant. To pray as a sinner. And the flame returned. On my knees, by the bed I’d slept in as a child. I’d been on my knees all day. I’d been awake most of the week. And the flame found my blood, found my heart, and I felt certain again. Do you know how much I’d missed it? I’d missed it more than any drug, any love, any food, maybe more even than the God who supposedly bequeathed it to me. Certainty, Mr. Coughlin. Certainty. It’s the most gorgeous lie of them all.”
Neither said anything for a bit, long enough for Carmen to return with fresh cups of coffee to replace the ones they’d emptied.
“My mother passed away last week. Did you know that?”
“I hadn’t heard, Loretta, I’m sorry.”
She waved off his apology and drank some coffee. “My father’s beliefs and my beliefs drove her from our home. She would say at him, ‘You don’t love God. You love the idea of being special to him. You want to believe he sees you.’ When I learned of her passing, I understood what she meant. I took no comfort in God. I don’t know God. I just wanted my mommy back.” She nodded several times to herself.
A couple walked into the shop, the bell tinkling over the door as Carmen came out from behind the counter to seat them.
“I don’t know if there’s a God.” She fingered her coffee cup handle. “I certainly hope there is. And I hope he is kind. Wouldn’t that be swell, Mr. Coughlin?”
“It would,” Joe said.
“I don’t believe he casts people into eternal flame for fornication, as you pointed out. Or for believing in a version of him that is a little off the mark. I believe—or, I want to believe—he considers the worst sins to be those we commit in his name.”
He looked at her very carefully. “Or those we commit against ourselves in despair.”
“Oh,” she said brightly, “I’m not in despair. Are you?”
He shook his head. “Not even close.”
“What’s your secret?”
He chuckled. “This is a little intimate for coffee shop chat.”
“I want to know. You seem…” She looked around the café, and for a fleeting moment a wild abandonment slid through her eyes. “You seem whole.”
He smiled and shook his head repeatedly.
“You do,” she said.
“No.”
“You do. What’s the secret?”
He fingered his saucer for a moment, said nothing.
“Come now, Mr. Cough—”
“Her.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Her,” Joe said. “Graciela. My wife.” He looked across the table at her. “I hope there’s a God too. I so deeply hope that. But if there isn’t? Then Graciela is enough.”
“But what if you lose her?”
“I don’t intend to lose her.”
“But what if you do?” She leaned into the table.
“Then I would be all head, no heart.”
They sat in silence. Carmen came over and warmed their cups and Joe added a bit more sugar to his and looked at Loretta and felt the most powerful and inexplicable urge to hug her to him and tell her it would be okay.
“What are you going to do now?” he asked.
“How do you mean?”
“You’re a pillar of this city. Hell, you came up against me at the height of my power and you won. The Klan couldn’t do that. The law couldn’t. But you did.”
“I didn’t get rid of alcohol.”
“But you killed gambling. And until you came along? It was a lock.”
She smiled, then covered the smile with her hands. “I did do that, didn’t I?”
Joe smiled with her. “Yes, you did. You’ve got thousands of people who will follow you right off a cliff, Loretta.”
She laughed a wet laugh and looked up at the tin ceiling. “I don’t want anyone to follow me anywhere.”
“Have you told them that?”
“He doesn’t listen.”
“Irv?”
She nodded.
“Give him time.”
“He used to love my mother so much I remember him trembling sometimes when he got too close to her. Because he wanted to touch her so badly? But he couldn’t because we children were around and it wasn’t proper. Now she’s died, and he didn’t even go to her funeral. Because the God he imagines would have disapproved. The God he imagines doesn’t share. My father sits in his chair every night, reading his Bible, blind with rage because men were allowed to touch his daughter the way he used to touch his wife. And worse.” She leaned into the table and rubbed at a stray grain of sugar with her index finger. “He walks around the house in the dark whispering one word over and over.”
“What word?”
“Repent.” She looked up at him. “Repent, repent, repent.”
“Give him time,” Joe said again, because he couldn’t think of anything else to say.