“I feel selfish coming here, ’cause it wasn’t just to give you a Dr Pepper and the iPod,” she said. “I came here to ax you somet’ing, but I ain’t gonna do it now.”

“You can say anything you want, Tee Jolie, because I’m not even sure you’re here. I dream in both the day and the night about people who have been dead many years. In my dreams, they’re alive, right outside the window, Confederate soldiers and the like.”

“They had to come a long way, huh?”

“That’s safe to say,” I replied. “My wife and daughter were here earlier, and I know they were real. I’m not sure about you. No offense meant. That’s just the way it is these days.”

“I know something I ain’t suppose to know, and it makes me scared, Mr. Dave,” she said.

She was sitting in the chair, her ankles close together, her hands folded on her knees. I had always thought of her as a tall girl, particularly when she was onstage at the zydeco club where she sang, an arterial-red electric guitar hanging from her neck. Now she looked smaller than she had a few moments ago. She lifted her face up into mine. There was a mole by the corner of her mouth. I didn’t know what she wanted me to say.

“Did you get involved with some bad guys?” I said.

“I wouldn’t call them that. How come you to ax me that?”

“Because you’re a good person, and sometimes you trust people you shouldn’t. Good women tend to do that. That’s why a lot of us men don’t deserve them.”

“Your father was killed in a oil-well blowout, wasn’t he? Out on the Gulf when you was in Vietnam. That’s right, ain’t it?”