City of Refuge by Tom Piazza Page A

contact—they had something to build on, there was a way forward.
    Early sunlight came into the kitchen through the backyard trees. He turned on the morning television automatically—traffic reports, headlines, weather. The storm they had been watching had moved into the Gulf; there would be a couple of school closings, nothing big. They’d monitor it during the day and if it looked like a potential problem they could leave the next day or Sunday, go to Oxford, Mississippi, as they had in years past, make a little vacation out of it. Outside, the morning was bright and rich with color.
    He counted out spoonfuls of coffee into the filter basket, looking out the kitchen window onto the brick patio, which was ruptured in places by the knuckles of roots from the grizzled oak tree that shaded their cookouts and cocktail parties. Some days he couldn’t get over the faint smell the oaks gave off as they dried in the morning sun when he walked out the front door to pick up the Times-Picayune in its plastic sheath, or the feeling of warmth he got coming back inside and greeting the Big Ugly Lamp that sat on the mail table in the front hall like some decadent Statue of Liberty, welcoming visitors.
    The Big Ugly Lamp was the first thing they had bought for the house after moving to New Orleans, at the Jefferson Flea Market. Its saddle-stitched shade hovered obscenely over a massive base, a kind of bloated cement cruller that looked as if it had been finished in blue stucco then dotted with gold highlights on its wimpled surface, a twisted pastiche of Jean Arp and LeRoy Neiman. They had seen it and had both started giggling at it simultaneously. “That poor lamp,” Alice said. They examined it, and Craig said, gravely, “It’ll never survive on its own.” Buying it was a vote for generosity of spirit, a talismanic embrace of the limits of taste. “Here we are in New Orleans,” the lamp had said for them both. Everything is part of the parade; everything gets to dance.
    In the past few months the Big Ugly Lamp had served mainly to remind Craig how rarely he and Alice found themselves on the same page anymore about gestures like that. But on this morning it seemed a harbinger of possible rebirth. Everything Craig saw made him happy—the primitive and “outsider” art on the living room and dining room walls, the children’s toys in their boxes at the ends of the room, the huge redwood picnic table that served as their dining room set, the laundry stacked up behind the partly open louvered doors to the laundry alcove, Annie’s and Malcolm’s watercolors on the refrigerator door, in this, the first house he had owned. Instead of feeling like an unprepared extra in someone else’s television show, he felt himself right in the center of where he wanted to be.
    To his surprise, he heard little bare feet approaching, quickly, around the corner of the kitchen wall, and then Annie herself followed the sound in, running, in her pajamas, breathlessly saying, “ Daddy …Daddy…when are we…”
    With an air of mock seriousness, Craig held up his hand and said, “I’m sorry…I think we’re forgetting something?”
    Annie stopped short, squeezed her lips together trying not to laugh.
    “Can we say, ‘Good morning, Daddy’?” Craig said, a caricature of officiousness.
    “Good morning, Daddy,” Annie repeated, dutifully.
    “‘How are you this morning, Daddy?’”
    “Daddy, stop it!” Annie said. “Do I have to wrap my present for Malcolm now?”
    “Shhh,” Craig said, “not too loud, okay? Let’s have breakfast and get dressed first. If you don’t get it wrapped now you’ll have time after school. How come you’re up so early?”
    “I heard you brush your teeth and I’m excited about Malcolm’s birthday.”
    She climbed up on the maple veneer bar stools they had around the counter island and he set out her cereal bowl. His heart was flattened with joy and love, as it always was, seeing her sitting there