He was only a few weeks shy of 40 when Cain called him, and on days when he felt guilty about the whole thing he hid it behind that excuse: midlife crisis, staring into the abyss of mortality, the appeal of youth, that whole thing.

But the truth was he'd found her attractive even before that. In the last photo he'd seen of her she must have been thirteen, and in that moment right before recognition set in, he'd thought, "Wow, she's hot." Long legs, what they used to call "coltish," but who said that anymore? A bit of thigh paler than the legs, showing from where her denim shorts had pulled up because of the awkward impossible teenage way she was sitting, everything canted at angles. Hair in that transitional phase between childhood and the experiments she'd subject it to in high school. A lightly freckled face beginning to hint at beauty. And the lines of her T-shirt, the promise of breasts.

She had never been his step-daughter because he'd never gotten around to marrying her mother. But that was a legal truth and an emotional lie. For five years he'd gone to parent-teacher conferences, packed lunches, overseen homework -- and done it for her more often than he should have -- settled arguments, and gone to zoos, aquariums, state fairs, and talking puppy movies a hell of a lot more than in the rest of his life tallied up.

"Cain." What a name for a girl. For anyone outside of soaps and pulps. Her younger sister's name was Christ. No shit, Christ Bodhi McLean, but everyone had the sense to call her Christie. Their mother -- Delia -- had been quirkycute, the kind of effusive and seemingly eccentric but secretly frightened woman who'd appealed to him so intensely when he was in his late 20s and going through one of those stupid not-yet-mid-life crises a parent's death can bring on. It'd helped that she was younger yet divorced -- someone he'd known wasn't looking for a wedding any time soon, and still had all the charm of young women, their enthusiasm that made even their jadedness and stabs at cynicism cute.

It hadn't worked out, for all the reasons it began in the first place, and eight years had faded it into some unstated Life Lesson -- the time when he was a father, the time when he Got Serious for the first time (two long-term relationships since then, clocking in at 2 years and 4 respectively), when balancing his budget had Really Mattered, when he'd first thought about Buying A House and Planning For The Future. He'd let it all slide once they split up, because that sudden lack of responsibilities had made him feel twenty again.

Now here he was almost 40, and he hardly ever thought about those times until Cain called him in the mid-afternoon on a day when he should have been at work but had called in can't-give-a-fuck. His wife had nodded, probably ready for a black mood to come around the time of his birthday, and just asked him to make dinner then, since he'd be home.

He let the phone ring twice before he answered it, just in case it was work. Cain's unfamiliar voice asked for him tentatively, and he thought she might be a telemarketer, but said, "Speaking."

"It's -- this is Cain McLean," she said, her name even worse in full. "I don't know if you remember me -- I mean, well, I'm sure you remember me --"

"Cain!" he said. "Wow. Of course I remember you. How are you?" It'd been eight years since he'd seen her, and he'd only talked to her on the phone a couple times after that, in the months immediately following his moving out. Delia -- and Delia's family, who still hoped she'd go back to her ex-husband -- had thought it best he cut off contact cleanly. "Is your mother all right? Is anything --"

"Oh, she's fine, she's fine," Cain said. God, she sounded like a teenager. She was a teenager, which was hard to fathom. He'd been there from age 3 to 8, years that offered little hint as to young adulthood. "No, I just called because -- is this an okay time? I actually thought I'd get your voicemail..."

She didn't want to talk to him, he realized. This was awkward and weird for her. Well, of course it was. "I had the day off," he said. "It's all right, Cain, what's up, what do you need?" That was such a parental thing, he realized, his knowing she wasn't calling to chat.

"Well, I heard you were living in New Orleans these days?"

Ah. "I'm fine," he said. "I evacuated before the storm, and my neighborhood didn't get hit very bad. My fridge was the worst of it, personally. It's --"

"Oh no, I know," she said, "I know. I googled you. There's -- I checked lists of missing people and everything, it said you were in Texas?"

"Yeah, I evacuated to Texas until things blew over."

"Yeah, I saw that on the message board thing. And that you'd moved back. You can find like anything on Google now. But the thing is, we were -- my friends and me, we were going to come down for Mardi Gras? Because that's when our Spring Break is?"

"Oh okay," he said. "Does your Mom know?"

"Yeah, of course. Missy, my friend Missy -- I don't know if you remember Missy -- oh no, I was ten when I met her, wow, that was a long time ago -- Missy's older sister lives here, she'll be like our chaperone. She moved here for college, she's like twenty-five. She works at Octavia Books? You might know her?"

"I don't think so," he said.

"Well," she said. "Anyway. I was wondering -- there's a lot of us, and Missy's sister's place isn't very big, and when she found out my -- my step-dad, my ex-step-dad -- lived in New Orleans, well, do you think I could crash on your couch?"

"For Mardi Gras?" he asked.

"For that week. Like afterwards and everything."

His wife wasn't home to ask, but she'd gone through a thing once of saying he ought to track Cain and Christie down anyway, get back in touch, in case they ever needed anything -- there was a hint like he'd abandoned them -- so he shrugged. "Yeah," he said. "Yeah, let me give you my email address too, so you can let me know your itinerary."

"Totally," she said.

It was months from Mardi Gras, and his birthday came and went and left him 40 in its wake. He celebrated with a surprise party featuring friends from college, a few awkward and maudlin moments, and a spectacular blowjob from his wife that had left him wondering why they weren't usually that good. She thought it was great that his step-daughter would be visiting, but reminded him she wouldn't be in town for the first half of the week. His wife had been raised in New Orleans and not part of the crowd that got ecstatic about Carnival the way some towns had people who got ecstatic about local sports -- so it was twenty-three years since she'd stayed around for parade season, and these days she stayed with her sister in St Petersburg Florida, going to Ash Wednesday mass with that part of her family and coming back the next day.

His wife gave him this news with a grin, like it was sitcom-funny that he was going to be home alone to deal with a teenager who'd probably be a little secretly drunk, as though he was a sitcom husband who had miscapades -- escapades? misadventures? -- every time she turned her back. Oh, he loved his wife, he'd kill a puppy for her, but he hated the way she fell into those stereotypes. He made dinner as often as she did, and they unofficially alternated laundry duty. He'd been separating whites from darks so long he coulda run a Mississippi lunch counter.

Cain arrived the Friday night before Mardi Gras, a few hours after he got back from driving his wife to the airport. He buzzed her in at the gate and went down to make sure she found her way through the courtyard and to see if she had anything that needed lugging. He grinned when he saw her, and so did he, because they had both looked right past each other, looking for someone familiar instead of someone changed, before the mind caught up to the eye and dialed it back.

She was sixteen now, and he had no idea if she looked her age or not, because everyone under 25 looked about the same to him now. Her legs were longer than they'd been in that photo her mother had emailed him a few years back, but less spindly -- her hair less transitional, and he was relieved that it wasn't shaved on one side or dyed blue or anything -- her clothes showed a lot of midriff but no cleavage, although she had it to show. It was very, very strange looking at her -- as though trying to find the eight year old buried by adolescence, a shadow beneath the skin. He tried to remember distinctive features to look for, and none came to mind -- no memorable birthmark or mole, no oddity, only the freckles on her nose and beneath her eyes, which half the girls in the world seemed to have.

When she opened her mouth, he saw two of her front teeth still overlapped a bit -- and that brought it back for him, all those childhood smiles on Christmas and at the zoo. Christ.

"Cain!" he said.

"Oh geez," she said, and he supposed he meant he'd changed too. Well, he was supposed to, that's how it went.

He gave her a hand with her luggage, which was heavier than he would have expected. "Are you here for dinner?" he asked. "Or just dropping stuff off, or what?"

"Either way," she said. "We can hang, I can split. I don't have any plans till like, eleven."

So he set her up in the apartment's spare bedroom that was storage more often than a guest room, and they got fried chicken and dirty rice from the only joint still open in walking distance. More and more opening every week, though, he told her, and she nodded with just enough wide-eyedness that he knew she'd seen some of the city's ruins already. He was determined not to dwell on that -- not to let this kid associate him with the damage of the city.

"You're really cool," she said at one point, through the closed door behind which she was trying on yet another of her outfits and gauging whether it was appropriate to the weather, the humidity, the chance of rain, and the tenor of whatever party she had lined up. "I don't remember you being cool."

"I don't remember me being cool," he said. "But it's been a long time. People change."

He hardly saw her through the weekend. She's be out all day touristing -- parades, beads, Bourbon Street -- and out late partying, crashing in the guest room when he buzzed her in and dutifully having oatmeal and coffee the next morning when he insisted she shouldn't be going out on an empty stomach. By Tuesday morning she was dragging, and he recognized the look on her face, the face of a Carnival-goer who was too wiped out for the last hoorah on Mardi Gras but would force themselves to it anyway, because how could you say you went to New Orleans for Mardi Gras but didn't do anything on the day itself?

For his part, he did what he did every year, he went to one weekend parade in the parish and Zulu and Rex on Tuesday, and this year it felt a little more important -- damn right uplifting when he saw a familiar face in the crowd, one of those faces you only see at a Carnival parade but you see them every year, like the neighbors you only know from the grocery store or midnight mass.

He buzzed her in at three in the morning the night of Mardi Gras, or the morning of Ash Wednesday, however you looked at it -- three hours after the streets had been shut down and Carnival officially over. She looked pale and sick, just straight-up overpartied, and he wondered if these days overpartying included coke or ecstasy or whatever they did now, or if it was just pot and cheap booze like when he was that age.

"Hey," she said, and gave him a little one-armed hug, her second since arriving in the city. "Can I -- some water? Can I have some water? Sorry." Her voice was slurred and her eyes bleary. He remembered a thousand nights -- God, that probably wasn't an exaggeration -- from college and its aftermaths, when his mirror had had a lot in common with her.

When he brought her the glass of water, she was passed out on the couch, with the Saints throw half pulled onto her. He thought about carrying her to the guest room, but she wasn't eight anymore -- if she woke up, she could find her way herself. He left the glass on the endtable behind her head, and adjusted the blanket to cover her feet, after slipping her shoes off.

Back in his own bed, pretending he was thinking about other things, he masturbated to thoughts of her -- to the smell of her perfume, which wasn't quite right for her and was therefore perfect for her age. To the image of her slender neck and the concavity where it met her collarbone. To the hint of full breasts beneath her clothes, and the curve of her thigh. He rocked his hips up off the mattress, pushing his cock through the hole of his fist, and kept her face out of his mind until the moment before he came, when she looked up at him with a child's eyes as he plunged into her forbidden cunt.

In the morning, he overslept. He'd used his vacation days for Ash Wednesday and the day after, like a lot of people, and didn't bother with the alarm. He went into the kitchen to make coffee, walking quietly to keep from waking Cain up -- and before he entered the kitchen, looking beyond the open expanse of hallway, he saw her on the couch. Her eyes were closed, but she was awake -- the Saints throw covering her from the waist down and pinned under the arm closest to the back of the couch -- her shirt pushed up, one of her hands on her breast as the other busied itself beneath the throw.

She was masturbating.

Her feet were planted on the arm of the couch, canted against each other, toes clenching and unclenching, her heels rocking back and forth as her hips moved. Her eyes weren't just closed, they were squinted shut -- and she was biting her lip, which he had always thought was maybe the sexiest thing a girl under thirty could do.

He watched her.

She stayed to a regular rhythm, clench unclench, rise rock, squeeze release, and he noticed she was using quite a lot of pressure on her breast. Her mother had loved tit play, had loved to have her tits bitten and twisted and pinched. It was only when things began to go stale between them, in that year or two before they split up, that her breasts had a chance to lose their bruises -- until then, there was always some old yellow mark lingering when a new one was left.