Rosa would have been angry with me for leaving our neighborhood without a good reason.

Dan pretends to zip his mouth.

“So go ahead and brag about your new case. I don’t mind. I think I took a vow of poverty somewhere along the way and nobody told me about it.”

I smile at the thought of Dan as St. Francis of Assisi. A monk he is not, even if he might be happier if he accepted his new solo status as permanent.

Over a piece of pecan pie and a cup of coffee I don’t need, I run through Lattice Bledsoe’s visit and admit, “I had forgotten how much anger I’ve carried all those years at the Taylors. I thought I had gotten over it.”

Dan burps into the fist of his right hand.

“We never get over anything,” he gasps, ever the philosopher.

I wonder if that is true. If I take this case because I think I can get back at the Taylors somehow, I will screw it up. Surely, I’ve got more sense than to pull a stunt like that. Though I have made more mistakes in the last five years than I care to remember, I have never betrayed a client or sacrificed his interest. Now is not the time to start. I look down at my watch. It’s time to get on the road.

I begin the dreary trek east on 1-40 toward Bear Creek thinking how monotonous it would be to make this drive every day. The cold gray winter afternoon and unrelieved flatness of the Delta soil give me plenty of time to think. I know I am having a severe case of buyer’s remorse, but it is hard not to second-guess my abrupt decision to move from a neighborhood I’ve lived in for the past twenty-five years. Yet, maybe I should have sold the house after Rosa’s death seven years ago.

It is only in the last few months that I’ve finally come to terms with the fact that my image of myself as an ex-sixties liberal no longer fits the facts. It was Rosa who had bonded with our neighbors, a mixture of mostly middle-class blacks and elderly whites who, for one reason or another, had decided they couldn’t afford to sell when blacks had begun to be steered into the neighborhood.