Waveland Read Free Page A

sex trade in Cambodia, both reruns. The Cambodia show featured a touchy dentist from the States who was tricked in Phnom Penh into talking about how he liked to take seven-year-olds to his hotel room.
    “These children are so dear to me,” this guy said in his tissuey little voice. “I have visited this nation several times a year since I first started coming in the nineteen-eighties, and it is such a lovely country, such sweet people.”
    Vaughn felt sorry for the guy, this earnest pedophile. He was being kneecapped by the TV people and didn't seem to understand that; he just kept on confessing. But he deserved to be kneecapped, so Vaughn settled in to watch, thinking of the guy's family and loved ones, the people who depended on him and who cared for him back in Lincoln, Nebraska, or Continent, Georgia. He was a creepy little man, all hair andno forehead. He seemed to have a constant and insatiable hankering for the Cambodian boys, but on this day he was the star of the show. He was pleased. He was smiling. He was the pedophile unfairly tricked by cruel documentary filmmakers, a case study in the modern.

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    Greta had the rode-hard-and-put-up-wet look that he was a sucker for—a look few women could pull off because, if you had it, you were traveling so close to skanky, cheap, and beat down all the time that it was easy to mistake one for the other. But she had it mastered; she never missed. Before the husband, her family was a story. Father died when she was a kid. Raised by her mother, single parent, messy childhood and adolescence, small college to study interior design; then her mother died and left her a little pile of cash and the bungalow in Waveland. She didn't like her mother much but was grateful for the leavings. Then the marriage, then that went haywire and she moved to Waveland, where she restored the house to its original specs, cleaning things up; but then Katrina arrived. The house got a few trees through the roof and lost a wall, but she was invested in it so was quick to do the repairs.
    Vaughn had run into her when hunting apartments at the beginning of the summer. She was renting her renovated garage; he was the first tenant. They had architecture in common—she was doing small jobs for people with old houses along the coast. He'd trained in architecture at Tulane and Yale, in the Goeters years when the idea was, How do we burn down the architecture school this week? Afterward he'd worked in big and none-too-good offices in Atlanta and Dallas, and elsewhere, and had finally more or less retired to the coast of Mississippi to get away from the business. Gail was with him for most of the trek. They had some money saved, and he was going to pick up some work along the coast. Beach houses, he was thinking. That was the idea. It never quite worked out the way he planned.
    The courtship with Greta was offhand. They started going to dinner, going to stores together, seeing movies, trading ideas for her ongoing renovation of the house. That put them together a lot of the time. He was glad, too, because most of the time since he and Gail split had been dreary, as though the light was always filtered through tarps.
    One night he and Greta had dinner at Sun Deluxe, a tiny Chinese place run by two Vietnamese women, a typical coastal place—a whitewashed repurposed Exxon station with mismatched booths and flat silver ashtrays, the tables covered in strangely textured red plastic, sticky paper napkins, cheap chopsticks, jars of orange sauce on the table, an all-you-can-eat buffet every night, and no customers. They had an especially good time, and when they got back to her house, Greta invited him in and showed him a bedroom she said he could have if he wanted it.
    “You could stay here,” she said.
    “Here?”
    “Inside,” she said. “Not a big thing, just instead of having to go out there all the time, I mean. Unless …”
    “No, no,” he said. “I got it. I'm there. Let me get my stuff.”
    So he