I MET LEWIS AIKEN when I was thirty-five and resigned to the fact that I would not marry for love, only, perhaps, for convenience, and he was fifty and had long been married, until fairly recently, for no reason other than love. For a long time after our relationship began, I thought we had turned ourselves about; that I was the one who loved, clumsily and foolishly, with the passion of one who has never really felt passion before, and Lewis was the one who found in me comfort and convenience. By that time I did not care. He could name the terms. I would be whatever he wanted and needed me to be.

We met on an afternoon in April, humid and punishing as spring can often be in the Carolina Low Country, when the air felt like thick, wet steam and the smell of the pluff mud from the marshes around Charleston stung in nostrils and permeated clothes and hair. I was bringing a frightened, clubfooted child to the free clinic Lewis operated on Saturdays, and we were running late. My old Toyota was coughing and gagging in the heat, and I had turned off the air conditioner to spare its strength, and was running sweat. In the backseat, buckled into her car seat, the child howled steadily and dismally.

I did not blame her. I wanted to howl myself. Her feckless mother had dropped her off in my office the afternoon before and faded away for the second time running, leaving me to scramble around for a place for her daughter to spend Friday night and then pick her up the next day and take her to the clinic myself. Back in my office the paperwork that was the effluvia of desperate need mounted steadily.

"Sweetie, please stop crying," I said desperately, over my shoulder. "We're going to see the nice man who's going to help get your foot fixed, and then you can run around and jump and... oh, play soccer." I had no idea what movement would tempt a five-year-old, but it obviously was not soccer. The howls mounted.

I pulled into the lot next to the beautiful old house on Rutledge Avenue that housed Dr. Lewis Aiken's Low Country Pediatric Orthopedic Clinic. I knew that Dr. Aiken had long done free diagnostic and referral work with handicapped -- physically challenged, I could not keep up -- children from all around the region. He was regarded in my agency as one of the city's greatest child resources, one of our constant angels. The agency I managed was a part federally, part privately funded sort of clearinghouse for services for needy children and adolescents, and by that time I knew where all the angels were located.

I had come to work at the agency just out of the College of Charleston when I was twenty-two, when my duties consisted of manning telephones and running out for emergency meals and diapers for our clients, and somehow had never left. I was head now, and my duties were more often those of an administrator and fund-raiser and public relations director, but I had not lost my primary passion for the children we served; indeed, I had come to think that that was where all my scant supply of passion went. I had not yet met Dr. Aiken or many of our other care providers, though I knew all their office people on the phone. My small staff of cynically idealistic young men and women did most of the hands-on work now. But it was Saturday, and when the child's silly mother did not appear at the foster home that had taken in her daughter, the foster parents called me and I had no recourse but to go. Oh, well, I had no plans except the stack of books that had been piling up beside my bed and maybe a Sunday-afternoon movie with Marcy, my deputy.

Marcy and I spent some time together on weekends, not so much out of deep friendship, but more out of simple expediency. We liked each other, and it was nice to have someone else to go places with, but we came nowhere near being best friends, and certainly not the settled lesbian couple that I knew some of the junior staff thought us to be. Marcy had a sometimes-boyfriend in Columbia who came over every third weekend, whom she assumed, rather lackadaisically, I thought, that she would eventually marry. I had some men friends, all from the ranks of the vast medical complex that bloomed like kudzu in the center of Charleston, though none were doctors. I seemed to attract the administrator type. My mother could have told me so, and had: I could hear her voice as I struggled with the straps of the wriggling child's car seat: "If you don't fix yourself up some and get your nose out of those books, no interesting kind of man will have you. You don't know anything about anything but wiping noses and doing wash. How sexy do you think that is?"

And whose fault is that? I would think, but it would have been futile to say it aloud. She was usually drunk when she started in on me -- she was usually drunk, period -- and would not have remembered. I could never quite fathom what kind of man my mother thought was interesting; it seemed to me that all of them filled the bill. She'd certainly had a diverse stable. By the time alcohol became her constant lover, I was regularly taking care of my two younger sisters and brother, and overseeing housework and meals, too. Oddly enough, I rather liked it. It made me feel important, needed, and I had a talent for nurturing that was perhaps my strongest gift. And I did and do love my sisters and brother. My mother has been dead for many years now.

"Okay, toots, here we go," I said to little white-blond Shawna Sperry, who was mucus streaked and fretful but had stopped crying. I picked her up in my arms -- with the steel brace she was heavy, but I could not bear to see her lurching walk -- and carried her into the lobby of the center. There was no one about. The receptionist's desk was empty and tidy in a way that meant no one had been working there, and there was a stillness and silence in which ambient sounds rang. An air conditioner thumped fretfully in the window. Dust motes stood in the slant of sickly light from the windows. It was a greenish, thin light that I knew meant a storm. You didn't have to live long in the Low Country to be able to read the skies and seas and marshes. Perfect. I would have the inestimable joy of trying to get a steel-ballasted child through a rainstorm and into my moribund car. The windshield wiper on the driver's side had died a couple of weeks before, and I had not gotten around to having it fixed.

We sat down in the lobby and I smoothed Shawna's wispy hair and dabbed at her nose with a tissue. I ran my hands over my own hair; curly at its best, humidity and heat sent it into an aboriginal tangle of near-black frizz. With my dark eyes and olive skin, I often thought I looked at least partly African American. This had not pleased my mother either; in high school she had tried to get me to have my mop straightened and lightened, but by that time my unadorned appearance had become my one rebellion, and I was halfway through college before I even bought a lipstick. I chewed at my lower lip. It felt grainy and papery; I knew that the color I had swiped on that morning was long gone, leaving only a ragged outline on my mouth. Sticky underarms and sweat-dampened legs completed the effect. I hoped that Dr. Lewis Aiken was seventy-five and uncompromisingly unattractive.

The silence spun out. Shawna leaned against my arm and napped. The air-conditioned air began to chill me in my sweaty clothes. Finally I called out, "Hello? Is there anybody here? I'm Anny Butler from Outreach. I'm here with the little girl who was to get an evaluation this afternoon?"

There was more silence, and then a man's voice from somewhere beyond the reception area said, "Oh, shit. Excuse me. What time is it? I'm sorry. How did it get so late? I'm Lewis Aiken."

He came into the reception area and we looked at each other, and I laughed, helplessly. He was short and compact and, somehow, red all over, and his ginger hair was so wildly disheveled that it looked as if he had had his finger in a light socket. His steel-rimmed eyeglasses were mended with tape. He had a heavy growth of orange beard through which his white teeth flashed piratically, and he wore the most scurrilous scrubs I have ever seen. He was barefoot. If I had not known who he was, I would have picked up Shawna and run. As it was, she stared at him and began to wail again.

He shuffled over and picked her up and slung her expertly on one hip, and looked into her face.

"I don't blame you," he said solemnly. "If I had just met me, I'd yell, too. I bet I look like Ronald McDonald, don't I? All my lady patients say that."

And miraculously, Shawna stopped howling and looked at him and smiled, an enchanting, three-cornered kitten's smile. I had never seen it before. She put her finger on his nose and pushed.

"Not Ronald," she said, and giggled.

"Right," he said. "I don't have my big red nose, do I? Well, I forgot I was having company. Come on back and I'll see if I can find it."

He scooped up a folder from the desk on his way back, and looked at it, still holding Shawna on his hip. She was pulling his hair and laughing. He looked up from the file. "Mmm-hmm. Clubfoot referral. Shawna Sperry. And you would be Mrs. Sperry?" he said, looking over his shoulder at me.

"No," I said irritably. Had he not heard me, then? "I'm Anny Butler. I run Outreach. You've done some work for us before. We had an appointment..."

"So you did," he said, reading from the chart. "Though it says here that the child's mother would be bringing her. Well, I'm glad to meet you, Anny Butler. You folks do good work."

"The child's mother has done a flit," I said, wondering from where on earth I had dredged up that expression. It sounded like one of those flip, cloying English murder mysteries that I particularly loathed. Murder should not be funny. "She may never be seen again. You do good work, too. Thanks for working us in on your Saturday afternoon. What am I keeping you from? Golf?"

I was babbling, which did not please me, and besides, it was patently obvious that this man had never played golf in his life. He would have been forcibly removed from the course at the country club.

"As a matter of fact," he said, not looking back this time, "I was cutting my toenails."

"Yuck," said Shawna, and we all laughed. There was nothing else for it.

The office he took us into was small and clean and white and untidy. He sat Shawna down on the table and began to unlatch her brace and remove her buckle-up shoe.

"Let's see what we've got here, sweetheart," he said. I stood awkwardly in the corner, because there was no chair, and busied myself with studying the diplomas and photographs on the walls. Duke, Johns Hopkins, certified by several boards, licensed to practice medicine in the state of South Carolina, fellow of several colleges of this and that. I assumed from the dates on the diplomas that he would be about fifty, though he looked a Mickey-Rooneyish thirty or so, with the turned-up nose and the blur of freckles on his face and arms.

One of the photographs was of a stunningly beautiful dark-haired woman and two equally beautiful young girls, daughters almost certainly, from the resemblance, on a beach that could be any beach anywhere. They wore sun hats and smiled into the camera. Teeth flashed. A movie family. Another photo was of the woman, in white pants and a striped T-shirt, and a much younger Lewis Aiken, on the deck of a sleek, low sailboat. I recognized the low pile of Fort Sumter behind it; the Charleston harbor, then. A third photo was of a tall, narrow, pink stucco house, with round white columns and sheltering palm trees. It was placed end to end on its walled lot, with matching up- and downstairs verandas and an iridescent tin roof. A Charleston single house, it was called, because it would be a single room wide and no telling how many rooms deep. I had heard that the earliest denizens of the city turned their houses with their ends to the street to catch the stray breezes from the harbor, and also that they did it because the early houses were taxed on the number of windows visible from the street. I supposed that, Charleston being Charleston, either or both explanations were correct. From its air of floating in space, I thought that the house was almost certainly on the sea-fronted Battery.

Lewis Aiken got the child's massive shoe off, and her sock, and began gently to rotate her foot. Shawna frowned and jerked her foot back, and then screwed up her face preparatory to more weeping, and reached out for me. I moved to go to her, but he said, "It's maybe better that you're not in the room. I've found that they settle down quicker if the parent or guardian or whatever isn't here. Would you mind too much waiting in the office out there? This shouldn't take long."

Feeling ridiculously rejected, I went back into the silent outer office. He shut the door between us, so that I could not hear them. Sudden visions of child molestation bloomed in my mind, but they did not last long. Somehow it was impossible that this smiling, tousled man would harm a child. And we'd worked with him so often before....

I wandered restlessly around the little anteroom. More photographs hung on the walls, and I bent to examine them in the purpling cloud-light.

A big studio portrait of the dark woman, in her wedding dress, dominated the wall behind the receptionist's desk. Close up, she was even more stunning than in the smaller photos: there was spirit and a sort of imperious pride in the tilt of her head, and her smile teased. Her groom had apparently not made it into the photo.

"We did it! Love, Sissy," a sloping backhand said across the bottom corner of the photograph. It was dated twenty years before. So, the girls were teenagers, probably. He did not look old enough for teenage daughters, but there was no doubt that they were his and the dark woman's; they flanked the big portrait, and there were photos of them at all ages, from grave, beautiful toddlers through graceful preadolescents on horseback to the ones I took to be the most recent, clustered about. Always they smiled identical white smiles; always they were photographed together.

Twins, I thought. They're twins. This is a magical family. Dr. Lewis Aiken and his beautiful wife, Sissy, and his twin daughters -- I leaned closer -- Lila and Phoebe. I'll bet they've been in every magazine and Sunday supplement in the Low Country. Why does the man who has everything spend his Saturdays struggling with leg braces and crying children, not to mention mothers like Tiffany Sperry?

But I knew the answer. "Lewis Aiken is an absolute saint," I had heard other foundation workers say. I had snorted, because so few people really are, but perhaps this square red man was, or something close to it. There was assuredly nothing of the holy martyr about him, but I knew that meant nothing. St. Francis was profoundly ugly. Josef Mengele was an elegant man.

Thunder cracked outside, and the hot, straight-down rain of the Low Country sizzled onto sidewalks and sluiced off car roofs. From the looks of the dense sheet of water, this was no passing shower. I had, of course, no umbrella, mine having been sent home a week or so before with a tired black woman carrying her grandson. Cerebral palsy, I remembered. In all probability, not so much could be done for him as for this child. Some of the cruelest and most random-seeming afflictions had no cure. We could find, at best, palliative care. I sighed, hoping that the grandmother and her charge had made it home safe and dry. Shawna Sperry and I would not.

"Shit," I said under my breath. "No good deed goes unpunished."

Presently Lewis Aiken came out of his office holding the hand of little Shawna, who stumped happily along beside him, a lollipop stick protruding from her mouth.

"It's a little linty, but it was the best I could do," he said. "I feel pretty optimistic about Shawna. This is fairly straightforward. I want her to see another pediatric orthopedic man... Clive Sutton; I'll write it down for you, and call him. I don't do the surgeries on the children I see. Conflict of interest, and all that shit. But Clive's done them for me before, and he'll adjust his fees according to your budget and the mother's ability to pay. Probably do it for nothing, but don't tell him I told you that. Will you call me after he's seen her?"

"Of course," I said, taking Shawna into my arms. No way was I going to let her slog through that downpour. "Thank you for waiting for us."

"No problem. God. Look at that rain. When did that start? You want to wait here until it slows up a little? I'm not going to close up quite yet."

"No, they're expecting her back at the foster home. And I've still got to track down her mother before tonight, if I can. Our budget doesn't run to too many nights on the town."

"Well, at least let me give you the office umbrella. We used to have several, but they're not like coat hangers; they don't screw in the closet and breed more. They disappear."

"I'll bring it back," I said gratefully.

"Don't bother. My receptionist will love the chance to bitch at me for letting our last one get away, and I'll love sending her out for new ones. We have a sort of complicated arrangement, but it suits us." I laughed. "Thanks," I said, and opened the umbrella and held it awkwardly over the heavy child, and ducked out into the storm.

The umbrella provided a little shelter for Shawna, but virtually none for me. Just as we reached the Toyota, the umbrella died a violent death by turning itself inside out, and before I could get Shawna into her car seat and get back around to my side, I was as wet as if I had dived into a pool.

"Shit, shit, shit!" I muttered, wringing my skirt and twisting the water out of my sopping hair. It was stifling in the car, but I knew that if I turned on the air conditioner, the child and I would both soon be shivering violently. The foster mother was the belligerent sort who delighted in finding errors and outrages in our handling of her charges so that she could report them to social services. I was already in her book for failing to find the child's mother. A soaked and shivering Shawna would provide her with fuel for months.

I cracked the window to let in some of the rain-freshened air, and dabbed at Shawna's face and hands with the towel I kept in the car after one of my children threw up her Happy Meal.

"We'll get cool when the car starts," I said.

"Bath," Shawna said happily, taking in my wet clothes and hair and face.

"Bath is right," I told her. "Let's get you and me both home and into some dry clothes."

I hoped fervently that the aggrieved foster mother had some spare children's clothes on hand -- most did -- because Shawna had nothing but what she'd had on when her mother had faded into the bush. Otherwise, if she had not returned -- and I had no hope that she had -- I would have to find clothes for Shawna, and toothpaste and such. I cursed Tiffany Sperry, not for the first time. What on earth could matter more to her than her handicapped child? But it was a useless curse, and I knew it. To the Tiffanys of the world, almost anything could matter more.

"Here we go," I said, and turned the key in the ignition. Nothing happened. I turned it again, and again. Nothing but a kind of ominous metallic burring. Outside, the rain racheted up its intensity a notch.

"I'm hungry," Shawna whined. "I want to go to the bathroom."

I put my head down on the steering wheel and closed my eyes. Lightning forked, and thunder boomed. Shawna began to howl.

There was a rapping on my window, and I looked up to see Lewis Aiken standing there, scrubs and hair plastered down with water, still barefoot.

"What's the matter?" he mouthed.

"Car won't start," I yelled back. I felt ridiculously guilty, as though he had caught me in some monstrous ineptitude, or even worse, thought me engaged in a ruse to get his attention.

"Come on," he said, opening my door and letting fresh rain gust in. "I'm parked right behind you. I'll run you both home, and we can get your car taken care of later."

"There's no need," I began, and then stopped and blushed. Of course there was a need. If he did not take us home, we would plainly sit in his parking lot all night.

"Thanks," I muttered ungraciously.

He plucked Shawna out of her car seat with a deftness born of practice and covered her face and head with the towel I handed him. He ran with her to a big, mud-spattered green Range Rover and popped her into the backseat and opened the door for me. I climbed in and sat there, shivering and puddling water on his upholstery. From the looks of it, it had been dampened with far worse.

He ducked into the driver's side and sat shaking the water from his head, and then grinned at me.

"This could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship," he said.

" 'Of all the gin joints in all the world, I had to walk into yours,' " I said, and we both laughed. Suddenly things felt okay. All right. This situation, which a moment before had been a catastrophe, was... not.

Later, after the rain had abated to a sullen drizzle and Shawna had been settled for the night under the righteous roof of the foster couple, he took me home to my apartment. I rented a small one in a redbrick building on the corner of East Bay and Wentworth, with nothing of the charm of surrounding Anson-borough to recommend it. But it was cheap and close to my office, and I had gradually made it into home. I had, I realized every so often with a slight shock, been living there for nine years. The building had changed owners four times in that space of time, and I really did not know the current ones, a youngish couple who lived in the bottom apartment and kept an eye on things. The former owner had been a thin, heavily made-up woman whose sole passion seemed to be attempting to catch me and the fussy old retired College of Charleston professor across the hall in riotous living. That she never succeeded did not lessen her efforts. I had been glad to see the new owners. They seemed pleasant enough, in an anonymous sort of way, and we nodded amiably on the stairs. I did not plan to change my habits, which were as abstemious as ever, but I was grateful that the landlordly perception of them seemed to have changed.

"I can't thank you enough," I said as Lewis Aiken brought the Range Rover to a stop. "I'll call the garage about my car, and they can take it from there. You've done enough for me and Shawna."

He stretched and pulled his wet shirt away from his body.

"Will you make me a cup of tea?" he said.

I stiffened. What was this? Not, surely, what was euphemistically called in my mother's day a pass--"Did he make a pass at you? You tell me the truth--" but if not that, what? Surely he knew that I had seen the photographs of his beautiful family and house. Obscure disappointment rose in my throat.

"Isn't your family expecting you at home?" I said. "You've spent the entire afternoon on Shawna and me. For goodness sake, go home and get dry and have a glass of wine or something. It'll be better than my tea, I can promise you that."

"My family is in California," he said. "My wife and I divorced several years ago, and she and the girls live in Santa Barbara now. Her family is there. And I'm cold and I've got a fifty-mile drive ahead of me. I really wish you'd give me something hot to drink. I promise that your virtue is safe with me."

And I believed him. For one thing, he was the sort of man you simply believed. Period. For another, what man in his right mind would put the moves on a woman who looked like a drowned marsupial?

"It's a long way from the Battery, but I'll be happy to make you some tea," I said. "I don't have anything dry you can put on, though."

And I blushed furiously. He grinned.

"I'll sit on a towel and be fine," he said. "I really do just want a shot of something hot. I've got to get back to the country before long."

"Where's the country?" I said, getting out of the Range Rover and slogging up the steps to the veranda of my apartment house.

"Edisto Island," he said. "My family has always had a place out there on the river. It's too big and too empty, and I rattle around in it, but it's one of my favorite places on earth. I stay there part of every weekend."

He came around the car and put his hand under my elbow and we went up onto the veranda. I thought, with laughter rising hysterically in my throat, of how we must look, a short, wet, red-haired, barefoot man and a short, wet, round, spaniel-eyed woman. I wished the former owner could see us. She would finally be vindicated.

"I'll bet you came in just to see Shawna," I said, fumbling with the big old key in my lock.

"No, I spent the night in town last night. I've got a little carriage house behind a big house on Bull Street. I'd have been here anyway."

"You don't use the big house in the photo?" I said, blushing again at my own effrontery. It was total.

"My wife wanted it and I didn't want her to have it, so I deeded it to someone else," he said matter-of-factly. "It was in my family, not hers. That's when she lit out for Santa Barbara. Mama and Daddy sprang for an adjoining casita."

"I'm sorry," I said. I was. He had, it seemed, lost almost everything.

"Me, too," he said. I could hear nothing of pain in his voice, but it must be there, under everything.

"Tea coming up," I said, and opened my door.

"This is nice," Lewis said, looking around my minute living room, and I saw that in his fresh eyes, it was. It is easy, in Charleston, to think of rooms being beautiful only if they are centuries old and rich with moldings and mahogany and portraits and silver; it is the curse of living downtown, where such rooms are the norm. But there are other ways of pleasing the mind and eye, and I had to aspire to them, because the first was forever beyond my reach.

I had painted the small, high-ceilinged room a soft butter yellow--"Tuscan Gold," the paint swatch said -- and done the high moldings and windowsills in white. I had bought the two wing chairs from a secondhand shop in West Ashley and the beautiful, gut-spilling camelback sofa at an estate sale on Tradd Street. I had laid over them soft throws and shawls and pieces of old fabric I had found over the years in the shops on King Street. King Street was the provenance of my favorite things; in its antiques shops, as fabled as Aladdin's cave, I had found small oriental rugs so thin and fine that they rippled like silk; mismatched pieces of porcelain, bits of old silver, prints and lamps and mirrors with their ornate frames all gone to tarnish. Over my tiny white fireplace mantel I had one original painting, one of Richard Hagerty's surrealistic tropical scenes, with a wonderful primitive leopard peering through such foliage as had never bloomed in an earthly jungle. I had saved for a year to buy the big painting, afraid each day that someone else would snatch it, and when I brought it home and hung it, the room swam into a kind of focus and sophistication that saved it absolutely from being the fusty lair of a spinster. The painting anchored and lit the room. I added ficus and palm trees and a few treasured orchids. The result was part Cotswold cottage, part family parlor, part seraglio. I never came into it without feeling its arms come around me.

I got towels from the bathroom and gave them to Lewis, put on the kettle, and went in to change into dry jeans and one of my brother's old shirts. I toweled my hair and combed it with my fingers and turned on the thumping window air conditioner whose stale, powerful breath would soon turn my three rooms into an igloo, and went, as barefoot as he, back into the living room. Outside, the rain had started again.

"It's a wonderful nest," he said, wandering around the room and looking at my clutter of things. "I hate spare, cold, 'modern' rooms. They look like the furniture should have price tags on it. Are these mainly family things?"

He had taken off his wet shirt and hung it on the back of a kitchen chair and had a towel draped capelike around his shoulders. It struck me that there was no capacity for embarrassment in him. He would say and do whatever he wished with no thought for decorum. I wondered how Charleston had produced such a man.

"Yes, but they're other people's families," I said. "We always rented, and my mother didn't leave much but some clothes and photographs and a set of Melamine dinnerware. My sister has that. But I always wanted a place like this, that looked as if it had been a part of my family for ages. So I borrowed other people's."

I had not meant to sound pathetic; I was proud of my room and thought myself lucky and clever to have it. But he turned and looked at me soberly.

"You're pretty much alone, aren't you?" he said.

"Why do you assume that?"

"People who spend their lives looking after other people often are," he said. "I see a lot of it. Is that why you do what you do? Because taking care of people fills you up?"

I looked at him.

"I do what I do because I like it and because I do it well," I said. I was annoyed with him. How dare he come into my space and drape his wet clothes on my furniture and presume any sort of insight into me? It spoke of a familiarity I allowed very few people, certainly not people I had met three hours before.

"I'm sorry," he said, grimacing. "I've always been that way. Into my head, out of my mouth. My mother always said I was a throwback to some pirate or criminal or something on my father's side. She certainly raised me better. I apologize. I have no right to any of your life except what you choose to share."

The teakettle sang out, and I went in to it gratefully. They were not the words of a casual acquaintance; they assumed a relationship that did not exist. I did not particularly want a relationship of any sort, and did not know how to handle this man.

We drank the tea in silence, watching the rain fall and listening to its monotonous spatter on the veranda railing outside. It was almost full dark now. I wondered when he would go home. I felt crowded and irritable.

"Listen, would you like to order a pizza?" he said. "I'm hungry, and I don't want to stop after I get on the road. I promise I'll be out of here right after that."

"Are you buying?"

"You bet," he said, and went to the phone in the kitchen. I heard him dial almost immediately; he did not have to look up a number, then. This was a man who had a long familiarity with take-out pizza. Well, he was alone, too. People who have memorized take-out numbers usually are.

The pizza came and we ate it in the living room before my empty fireplace, drinking the half bottle of merlot I'd found. I thought it had been left over from a dinner I'd cooked for Marcy and her boyfriend months before. It was on the brink of going sour, but the warmth of it felt good going down. Predictably, the air conditioner was chilling the apartment.

I went into the kitchen to turn it down and Lewis followed with our plates and glasses. The window above the unit had frosted with its breath, and he went to it and wrote on it with his finger, Annie.

I moved up behind him and reached over and crossed out the ie and drew a y. Anny. He looked back at me, smiling slightly.

"When I started first grade, I wanted a nickname more than anything," I said. "Everybody else had one. My first name is Anna, so I told the teacher that everybody called me Annie, only I couldn't spell it, so I just added the y. Somehow it's stuck all these years."

"That's one of the saddest things I ever heard," he said, turning to me. "Why didn't your parents give you a nickname? Why didn't you tell them you wanted one?"

"Oh, for pity's sake, don't make a poor soul out of me," I said. "I like my nickname. It's not like every other Annie you meet on the street. But since you ask, nobody was around much to give me one. My father left us when I was eight and my sisters and brother were younger, and by that time my mother was pretty much a drunk. I took care of us, and I liked it, and I was good at it, and I think I was as much parent to them as they needed. They've all turned out really well."

"I'll bet they have," he said. "Is your mother still alive?"

"No. She died my first year of college. We lived in North Charleston. I was able to stay at home and go to school, too."

I took the last swallow of the merlot in my glass.

"I don't know why I'm telling you this," I said. "It makes me sound like an orphan of the storm, and I'm not; I have a very good life. It's the life I've chosen. I wouldn't change it."

"Wouldn't you?"

"No. Listen, don't you think you ought to get started? The rain's letting up and you've got a long drive."

He did not answer. Instead, he said, "You never had a childhood, did you? You never played, you never had anyone who took care of you."

"I had a grandmother who loved us all very much," I said. "She lived in Myrtle Beach. We saw her often. She was always there if we needed her. She sent us money regularly; it kept us in the house and fed us when I was in school. And I did play. I used to lock myself in my room after the kids were in bed, and I'd dance all over the room, and act out stories, and play the lead in every movie I'd ever seen. I must have read every adventure book in the library. I wrote stories, too, in my diary."

"I'll bet nobody ever saw them," he said. "I bet nobody ever saw you dance. You know what? I'm going to take you dancing. I know just the place. It's out on the river. We'll eat oysters and play the jukebox and dance up a storm."

"Lewis, why did you get divorced?" I said. I did not even feel strange asking it, not in the midst of the extraordinary conversation we were having. Turnabout was fair play.

"I think she finally just didn't like living with me," he said slowly. "I'm not a very social animal. Sissy was -- is -- social to the nth degree. I guess I missed one too many galas. I couldn't change. Even if I could I wouldn't have."

"Do you still love her?"

"I don't know. I certainly did for a long time. I just don't like her very much. She's not really a very nice person. I hate thinking she's raising the girls to be just like her, clothes and lunches and parties and all that. They were such funny, good little kids. They've left holes in my heart."

"Do you see them?"

"Well, it's a long way to Santa Barbara. Sissy doesn't come back here. I get the girls whenever I can manage the time and she feels like it. It's not enough."

"No," I said, still looking out my frosted, calligraphed window. "I don't imagine it is."

He came up behind me and put his arms around me and rested his chin on the top of my head. I didn't think he had to stoop much to do it.

"Your hair is still wet," he said. "I'm not kidding about the dancing. I'm going to call you every day until you say yes."

I thought of his world; I imagined the rich tapestry of friends and cousins and sweethearts from out of his childhood; the dense, baroque network of connections that was so uniquely Charleston. Lewis Aiken would not lack for women to eat oysters and dance with. Women of his own set. Smart, beautiful women. Downtown women.

"Lewis, why me?" I said into the window.

"Why not you?" he said, and kissed the top of my head and went out my front door. I listened to the soft growl of the Range Rover's engine until it lost itself on East Bay.

That night I turned the radio to a soft-rock station and I danced barefoot, in my brother's shirt, danced and danced until I lost my breath and fell into bed, and slept through the wet night without dreams.

Copyright © 2004 by Anne Rivers Siddons