After crew change, the mates and a few of the deckhands decided to eat at a corporate Mexican joint near the hotel, a place where you could get cheap margaritas as big as your head. That wasn't my jam so I called a cab into New Orleans. If I was lucky, I'd win big at Harrah's, check out a show, and talk Danielle into spending the night with me.

Odds dictated I'd see the music.

But now, some years later, I can tell you I won three hundred dollars at the Blackjack tables and that Danielle did agree to meet me. We watched a jazz show in La Roche before taking a cab back to the hotel. My luck was high, and it was a night redolent of time and place. But more clearly than any of those events, I remembered the cab driver who took me into town.

She told me her name was Annie—an older woman, early sixties, and skinny, un-softened by a life spent sitting behind the wheel. Annie wore her hair in a silver bun, spoke with a rasp, and let me smoke cigarettes in the cab while she drove. I dragged filterless Lucky Strikes, felt delight in the sensation of solid pavement skipping beneath the tires, and told my driver of the five weeks I'd spent offshore. "Living on the ship is rough, but now I get a five-week vacation."

"Just got back, eh? You got a sweetheart in town?"

"Not really." I alluded to somebody I might be seeing because I wanted to present myself as the type of person who didn't have to be alone if he chose otherwise. On the other hand, Danielle, tired of an itinerant lover, was no longer enamored with me. I didn't tell the driver about Danielle, but explained that my employers only paid for one night in the hotel before scheduling my flight. "But I used to live with a woman in New Orleans, a local." Annie was born and raised in New Orleans, and, like all the locals I met, it meant something to her that I'd been willing to shack up with a native.

"You good to her?"

"Well, I left. She didn't like that." Years had passed since then. Julie had invited me back occasionally, and when she did I accepted. But then she moved to Austin and I realized that, if anything, I'd kept her lingering in New Orleans longer than was good for her.

"She cheat on you?"

"Not that I know of. No, she didn't cheat."

"You sleep around on her?"

"No."

"You know how I know you're not from New Orleans?"

"How?"

"Because I believe you. That's something you'd have learned about the place if you stayed. Everyone here is sleeping with the neighbor. You got people cheating up, people cheating down… New Orleans is a city of dogs. Sure, we know how to throw a party, and we'll treat you just sugary, but NOLA can't keep her pants on."

I could describe that drive to you now because I'd taken it a hundred times. I loved New Orleans – even the sprawl out into Kenner, or up to Metairie. It was dirty and, I swear, when returning to shore I could smell the city from the helicopter as we flew over the Gulf and into the mouth of the Mississippi. It was a funky, sweaty place, and all that sweat and funk had leached into the levees and the bayous and the swamps and the canals and the crumbling asphalt. It had leached into the soil so that now it was what fed New Orleans at the root. Hundreds of years of funk and sweat, and no small amount of blood and tears, always trembling to the surface like a ghost trembles, or the place it haunts.

"But it didn't matter whether or not you kept your pants on, because you left her, and that was probably worse than staying and sneaking around. You don't look half bad. You probably left and went and got yourself a little piece right away."

And that was when Annie told me about her husband. "A cheating man, who betrayed me with the craziest floozy you could ever hope to find—a psychotic black woman fifteen years younger than him. A big girl, too. Big as he was, maybe. I couldn't believe it when he told me. He said, Annie, hon, I gotta go. Oh, stupid man. He said it like he had no choice in the matter, like he just needed to follow his heart, and I suppose he did. Women are supposed to be the passionate ones, and when people call us irrational, they're wrong. A woman might lose her head, but she does it rationally. A man gets a good piece, and he don't know where he is anymore.

"So Jim left me saying he didn't have a choice. I don't know that it was love, but I also don't know what else it could have been. And when I say Sonia was psychotic, I mean it in the scientific way. And Big Jim knew, too. She had to go to the hospital a couple times a year when she'd start hallucinating. It wasn't long after Jim moved out, she began calling the house, claiming I'd hexed her and that I better let Jimmy's heart go free, because he weren't mine no more. I told her, Honey, he's all yours. You can have him. I've had my fill of that selfish man. At some point, she stopped accusing me of stealing him, but she never stopped calling. Sometimes he'd disappear for a night or two—probably just out drinking—and Sonia'd phone me up in tears, asking where I thought he was.

"Jimmy wasn't the only one who disappeared, either. Sometimes Sonia would vanish for a long time, and then she'd come back, and no one really thought or said too much about it. I don't know if it vexed Jim. Maybe it was a relief.

"And Sonia didn't realize it, but Jim was also calling me. Sometimes on those same nights he disappeared. He'd say, Annie, baby, I never stopped loving you, and I want you to let me come home. Kept telling me he'd made the worst mistake he could ever make and begging me to let him come home, but I never had much use for men after Jim. Sometimes I had someone on the side. There was a married man for a couple of years, but I always hated him a little bit, because he wasn't any better than Jim or the ex-husbands of all my friends.

"You see, right around the same time, all four of my girlfriends got divorced. We'd gotten married within a year of each other, and now we were all getting divorces, and I swear to you that each of our husbands asked to come back. They left, saw freedom was scarier than they'd imagined, and each of them came back. I was the only one to hold out. My girlfriends let them back in. But they didn't last except one, who remarried her husband and has stayed remarried. I told Jim, I don't trust you, and I don't want you no more. You hurt me too bad to ever forgive, and I love you, but you aren't my husband any longer.

"That poor man, he'd made some bad choices. It was Sonia who called me after Jim went to the hospital. I picked up, and the operator said, You have a collect call from New Orleans Parrish Prison. Do you accept charges from… and then Sonia said her name. I just thought, What has she done to him? She was still hallucinating on the phone. She knew she done something bad, but never told me she'd stabbed him. She just said, Jimmy's been stabbed.

"I found out pretty quick that Jim wasn't going to die or nothing, but he did need surgery, and he would take a few weeks to recover, maybe a while before he could work again. But Sonia didn't know if he was alive or not because no one was telling her a thing. I talked to them down at Orleans Parish Prison and explained that she was touched and needed medicine. They finally moved her to the mental health ward, which I guess really is just one jail cell over from the jail cell they first put her in. They never gave her lithium, or whatever she was needing at the time. After a handful more days, she came out of it on her own, enough to know what she'd done. And next time I got a collect call, I made sure she knew she weren't no murderer.

"It was finally Jimmy who bailed her out, after he'd been in the hospital nine or ten days. Later he had to testify that she'd been unhealthy, but the court still wanted to put Sonia in prison. I told him, Jim, you're trying to save the life of a woman who's going to stab you again. That woman is touched, and you bring out the devil in her. Because Big Jim had that way with women. It wasn't a good quality. He wasn't someone women lusted after. But if a woman loved him, he wasn't a calming man to be with. Heck, I thought I was a level-headed woman, and Jimmy had me acting in ways I never thought I would in a million years. I lost my dignity around him.

"But he helped her. Sonia didn't have to spend too much more time locked up, and Jim was waiting for her when she got out. And that was their life together.

"When I heard that Jimmy had died, I wasn't surprised. He liked to drink, and he liked to eat. So a heart attack at sixty-one for an unfit man—that was how he went, and it didn't seem so bad, either. He got out of here easy and without too much fuss. I went to the funeral, and Sonia was there. I expected her to be screaming and mourning as loudly as a person can, but it was the one time I'd known her to be subdued. That didn't mean she wasn't missing Jimmy. I know she loved him fiercely, and she was as sad as I'd ever seen anybody. In fact, I didn't think Sonia was capable of being sad like that—all folded into herself and small-looking. She was heartbroken, and she didn't have too many people who wanted to spend their time with her. So I sat with her for some time, and I held her hand, and then, when people were moving on, she didn't want to let go. But what do you do?

"I didn't see or hear from her after that. I called a few times over the next couple months. I was sad and I was missing Jimmy, because he hadn't really done anything so bad—nothing every other man around here don't do. I wanted to talk to Sonia, but she didn't have her voicemail turned on anymore. And when I asked her people, they also said she didn't come around so much, and then she weren't coming around at all.

"It was six, seven months after Jimmy's funeral I got a call from the insurance lawyer. Jim had been living with Sonia so long, I didn't have anything to do with his estate after he died. We'd been divorced seventeen years—what do I have to do with any of that? But the insurance people called and they told me Jim had a life insurance policy, and I was the beneficiary.

"I told them, You got the wrong lady. Jim and I are divorced. I'd signed all the papers. I was relieved when it was over. Jim was the one who'd been dealing with all that, and when he said we was divorced, I had no reason to doubt him. But the insurance man insisted. He said he'd been trying to sort it all out, and Jim had never filed the papers. He'd never changed the beneficiary on his claim. So it turned out that Jim left me eighty thousand dollars when he died. I tried to tell the insurance men that it weren't meant for me, but they insisted. They said, No, you're his widow, and his wife is specified in the policy. Finally, I just figured Jim wanted to do one thing to make up for all the mistakes he made.

"Or maybe he felt bad that I never kept another man—like he'd ruined me or something. Or maybe it had nothing at all to do with me. Maybe Jim just couldn't let go. He loved Sonia, but I believe he loved me, too, and I don't think he ever let go of that. Or maybe it was all a mistake. You can imagine what a shock it was for me to find out I'd been married that whole time. That was that. I'd never been divorced after all. They gave me the check, and I won't tell you it didn't help, because that made things a whole lot easier."

We were parked at the curb of Harrah's by the time Annie was done telling all this to me. She wished me luck at the tables, and gave me one last morsel of romantic advice. "You be good to those ladies, you hear?"

"Did Jim leave anything to Sonia?" I said, my door half open.

"I thought she'd have had the estate, but I don't know what happened to it. I did think of it. After all, she wasn't a bad person. She spent almost as much of her life with Jimmy as I did—'bout the same years of her life, too. I went to their old place after I cashed that check—first time I'd ever been there. I didn't know what I'd offer but I wanted to tell Sonia about the insurance. Or maybe it would have hurt her to know, and then I'd keep it to myself, because no amount of money is worth another heartbreak. But she weren't around no more. Some other folks were living in the place, and when I asked about Sonia, they knew her, but they also didn't know where she went. They moved there at first to help care for her, and maybe they also needed a place to live, but they said Sonia started her vanishing acts again, and then she just stopped coming back.

"That's the other thing about New Orleans. Sure, everybody has seen everybody without their clothes on—NOLA likes to have a good time and she'll welcome anybody with open arms—but this city's built on a swamp, and those bayous will swallow you whole. The Mississippi will carry you right away from here, and the party goes on without you. The city mourns its ghosts, but there are too many lost souls to remember. Think of how many we lost in the storm—dead, scattered, forgotten. Sonia vanished, and far as most were concerned, she never really existed."

I thanked Annie for the ride, stepped onto the curb, and took two steps toward the casino before I heard her calling me back. She was leaning toward the open passenger window. "Hey handsome, I got something for you." I put my hand out, and she dropped a penny into my palm. "For luck. I found it tails up, but I think that's the kind of luck you want around here."