I have never seen the singer who disturbs my sleep, inadvertently provoking me to lie awake an hour or more and ponder everything the daylight hours convince me I've relinquished. It's difficult to say exactly when he passes, though my internal sense of time suggests it must be well after midnight, close to two or three. Nor does it happen every night, and any pattern, if there is one, I've not been able to discern, except he comes before the mourning doves begin their soft lament—or whatever our inclinations toward pathetic fallacy construe their sweet monotonies to mean.

Never quite alert enough to rise before he vanishes, I've not peered out to glimpse his figure in the halo of the streetlamp. But his voice invades my room, disrupts my rest, a living ghost that conjures other phantoms in its wake.

This time of year we tend to sleep with open windows, so the freshness of the night can enter and displace whatever staleness lingers from a sultry afternoon; with blinds or curtains swaying in the bedroom windows at the slightest breeze, one house after another, there's not a chance he could be unaware of this. He simply doesn't give a damn. And what the devil is he doing at that hour—blithely heading off to some delightful job as janitor or baker?  Returning homeward from some tender tryst? 

A lilting voice, I must admit, that lets itself be lofted on a gentle swell of melody, each time a melancholy ballad more or less untouched by fleeting fashions, the words unknown to me, the moods not unfamiliar. I catch no more than fragments of his songs, the sort of phrases one would summon for a lover's ear, clichés delicious and sincere as they are stale ... " ... when you awaken ... " " ... recall that moment ... " " ... when bitter winds ... " " ... how far I've wandered ... " " ... like summer rain ... "

After hovering a moment in the dark, the serenade dissolves " ... among the roses ... "—why don't lovers ever sing of dahlias or periwinkles? 

Well before Mancini, roses were inseparable from wine, but this minstrel is not intoxicated—everything about his tone belies the possibility: a clarity and nuance bereft of any Dionysian frenzy, the timbre warmly modulated, each syllable enunciated with perfect aplomb. As well as utter disregard for others. At first, of course, I was incensed: could he not spare a moment's thought for people who had to face the coming day in their own good time, rising with at least a simulacrum of renewal to greet the challenges and daily demons that awaited them?  Why impose his carefree spirit on those who slept alone, or with companions only dread of solitude or weariness had made agreeable?

I am a quiet man, and ask for little; unable to achieve the peace that has eluded me, I've settled for a silence that comes as near to it as one can reasonably hope. It's clear enough by now, at nearly sixty, that my ship has missed its port. But as long as tempests pass me by, I'm resigned to spend my days becalmed.

Apparently he cannot guess how frequently my days are fraught, if not infested, with noisy episodes and breaches of the frail tranquility I like to think I've earned: a radio across the street erupting with that spurious oracular virility adopted by announcers to promote the latest bargain none of us can live without; the whining of my neighbor's tile saw punctuated with thumping hammers, as her incessant prenuptial remodeling measures and assembles her portion of future bliss; the yellow-jacket wasps that, in diabolic counterpoint to the honeybees' cherubic drone, mount a fanatic siege upon my efforts to enjoy a glass of Beaujolais or a few passages of Epictetus in the serenity of my own ill-tended garden. Not to mention the harangue of dogs as pitiless as politicians, the braying flatulence of motorcycles, the shrieking children for whom play and mutual torment are as yet indistinguishable.

Of this petty pandemonium he is oblivious. He saunters down the sidewalk (or perhaps the middle of the street) passing between pools of artificial light into the cool penumbras and nocturnal shadows, a mortal Hermes on a mission to ignore if not dispel every banal inertia and velleity to which we ordinary souls have fallen prey; guardian of travelers, harlots and thieves, bringer of portents and dreams, he drifts beneath a dome of stars, aglow with all the passions we have tamed or put aside, that we might safely dwell within our houses, among detergents and appointments, trivial conflicts and affections, orderly cabinets and grocery lists, the haven of our habits keeping the risks of other, half imagined destinies at bay ...

For it is not love alone of which he sings; romance was but a gate, a single incarnation of that threshold where transgression and transcendence approach, embrace, and intertwine. And in this world we've made, one cannot function if we draw too near that gate, where the sacred trickster lies in wait to rob us of the very gifts he has delivered.

But the young man fancies he embodies the god that enslaves him; his narcissism breeds insouciance, blinds him to what happens when you surrender to his lures ... You're liable to let a promising career in astrophysics drift away, allow yourself to go astray, seduced by one star or another, imagine Venus beckons to a sort of life that's more authentic or ethereal.

However much men hasten to delude ourselves, the domestic impulse is more despotic than we dare admit. And for a few years, I suppose, neither one of us exaggerated when we spoke of love. I certainly don't blame her for my choices; futility and cowardice, I've found, are nearly always twins. Besides, we stumbled into something close enough to happiness, and with the advent of a child, it's tempting to convince yourself that you've arrived.

Insurance policies were easier to navigate than distant galaxies, adjustments far more docile than abstruse equations, yet well before that evening I cannot forget, the pattern had begun to fray. Silences had deepened without ripening, the emblem of intimacy becoming its husk; tolerance edged ever closer to indifference. In the end, it's always a question of boundaries and limits, and given the fervor of political discussion at the office gathering that night, it was easy, without her at my side, to lose track—was it one too many, or two?  And though it's not difficult to anticipate a little girl's exuberance in welcoming her father home, just how precisely might one calculate the impulse to surprise, the path a joyful lunge could take, her figure suddenly emerging from the shadows of the porch to dash across the driveway?

Indignation comes as readily as shame, and both awaken a corrosive nest of dormant scars. And so, intrusive as my wayward minstrel is, I hesitate to scold him, refrain from rushing to the window to assail his thoughtless peace of mind. Soon enough he'll come to know the cost of his illusions, whether he forsakes or clings to them.

From the solitude of bed, I let him pass by unmolested, scattering behind him much that I have lost, so many things I once expected or desired: aromas of spice and incense unperceived, promiscuously swarming in a Bangkok alleyway; an archaic volume of astronomy on the shelves of the Observatory Library in Helsinki, whose sepulchral leaves will not divulge to me its secrets or absurdities; the intricate geography of shoulders my cautious lips will never graze, the covert warmth of hips forbidden to my palms; my daughter's face as she approaches the altar in a dazzling wedding dress, or keeping watch beside my failing body, telling me forgiveness had been granted long ago.

Despite the subtle torment he inflicts, I'll continue to avoid reproaching him, for his sake and for mine. Robbing me of sleep, he'll leave me lying for a good while in the dark, conscious of the fragments that remain as he recedes into the night, under constellations I rarely notice now, whose names I scarcely recollect.

My son steps inside the room and stands by the door. I lie still so he might think I'm asleep like two of the other patients in the room. Their families often visit them. A third guy sits up in his bed across the aisle. He can still talk well, says his name is Roger. He makes sense, must feel lonely in here with the rest of us. Roger says they never had to shave his head because the hair fell out on its own.

I pretend to sleep so my son won't come stand over me. If he does, Roger would prop himself up in bed and ask, "Is he your son?"

"I fathered him," I'd say, "a long time ago," if I could speak.

I hear his footsteps and feel him standing over me. Because my right eyelid droops, he might not have seen my eyes close in the dim light.

"Is he your father?" the guy across the room asks.

"Yes," my son says. What other answer can he give with me lying here?

I sit by father's bed and wait for him to say something while he still can.

Two oxygen prongs and a feeding tube run into my nose. The doctor tied my left hand to the bed railing so I can't pull the tube out. The medication took away my appetite. I don't care about food anymore but I leave the oxygen alone because of the pneumonia. I don't want to smother.

From the indentation on the cranium, above the left ear, cancer covers his drooping right eye and lips, lies on the atrophied right shoulder and the arm and leg slender with the tubes running beside the tendons. Medication bloats his other side now, gone to flab in spite of physical therapy. His left hand tied to the bed rail—so he won't pull the feeding tube out—holds the last of his strength.

I wish he'd hurry up and say what he has to say. I've got no last words for him, so let's get it over. Nothing but time and waiting.

"Do you know who I am?"

I look at him waiting for me to speak. I've studied his face before, but I do it again to make sure. We share no features. Not the same curve of lips. Not the same hairline.

I say little while I wait because I want to hear his dying words if they come. Last Tuesday he said, "Wrong. All ... wrong." I wanted to believe the slow, strained phasic speech: "I ... want ... go ... car ... no ... away ...."

I look away from him when a nurse and an intern enter the room. They walk to bald Roger. The nurse wipes his head with iodine. I remember that.

The veins have gone from his arms. Just beside the neck the I.V. enters his shoulder. Mother has gone. My brother doesn't come to visit anymore either. They finished with him after he had finished with them. But I have waited to hear him say what he has said to no one else, listening all the way down for the last words.

"Dad, I need to ask you some things."

"Shit," father says.

I intend to hear apologies, more than an admission for which I have no use. I think, say you're sorry for lying to me, for saying we'd always be close and I could tell you anything. I lied about my grades and he never knew because he never tried to find out. He lied about his secretary. In his workshop I saw him kiss her on the mouth.

As I watch the nurse put a cap on Roger's head that leaves a square of scalp uncovered—a door to an unopened door—I want to ask him, can you hear them knocking yet?

"The doctors ask me a lot of questions but I don't know how to answer them."

I expect to hear a quaver in his voice with his next words.

The intern puts up the rails around Roger's bed.

Once, after not seeing my father for four months, he came to the house to take my brother and me away for the weekend. I ran out the back door and hid behind a boulder in the brush growing on the hill. He called my name for a long time before driving away with my brother. I wanted to go with them, but he needed to know how I felt. Hearing him call my name almost made me change my mind and come running down to him.

"Do you want to live?" my son asks.

I want to tell him, figure it out on your own. My mouth says, "Me no know." The doctors have been asking me for a long time. I can't talk to them either. My son just wants to keep me talking as he holds out hope that I'll say something. Even his younger brother and my ex know better. I thought that woman would never stop talking. She probably hasn't. She's just stopped talking to me.

When he could talk, he never told stories. He lied.

"I'll come see you every weekend," he said when I begged him not to leave. "You don't want me to live with someone I don't love, do you?" he asked me. I know he meant my mother but I need to hear him say it. Instead, only profanity surfaces the Tegretol and Dilantin.

Maybe I lost a couple of years with him. He could've picked up a telephone or written a letter. Once when I did come to see him, he hid from me. I came set to spend the day with him and as soon as I turned into the driveway I saw him run out of the backyard and up into the brush. He might as well have kicked me in the balls. His mother and brother couldn't tell me why he ran away. I tried calling him but he hurt me so bad I almost started crying, so I quit.

When the seizure comes, his mouth twists so far around his face that no sound escapes past the bones that have rolled across his throat and trapped his screaming behind them. I stay in the room. Nurses can do nothing except dope him up more.

"Me no know," I say to him again and turn away to look at Roger's smooth cap and scalp.

I keep my hands still and wait for it to finish so he can say something. But Father's mouth—pulled up over his cheekbone then down onto his neck—can say nothing, ask mercy from nobody.

When he puts his hand on my head where the doctors cut me twice without success, I look at him for a moment, then back to Roger in his cap. The intern unlocks the wheels to Roger's bed. They'll never cut me again.

I place my hand on his shivering chest, to feel the words that the mouth refuses to form. Then, because words come from the mind, I move my hand to feel the dent in the skull where the cut and the cancer must have scrambled whatever he wants to say.

"Don't worry, Dad."

I can't lift my arm to take his hand away.

"It doesn't matter now," he tells me.

That's right, I want tell him, No regrets. None.

"We should have talked more." I move my hand back to his chest where his soul must be writhing, but I won't weep, not for him, not for me.

The nurse and the intern roll Roger right past my bed on his way to surgery down the hall.

So with his flesh filling my throat, I forgive him in silence as I have always accused him.

"How ... why?" I hear my voice say. The words come out as clear as anything I've ever said.

"If, when," Roger answers, looking at my son.

The moment Graham stepped into the room behind Ed Aquilla, he recognized the young woman. She was sprawled on the wooden floor, tripped backwards as if she had lost her footing, arms splayed above her head, one leg wrenched at the knee. "Oh my god, it's Dreaded!" Graham's words came out as a gasp that Ed didn't seem to hear. He was kneeling beside the body, his broad back straining against the blue policeman's uniform, hands already in latex gloves.

"Her name is Deirdre," Graham said, this time loud, urgent information. "My daughter Holly roomed with her. But only a few months." He repeated the name. "Deirdre." The sound felt odd to him. With Holly, he had called her Dreaded, demanding that Holly move out at once, find another place, come back home. Get away from Dreaded.

Still silent, Ed touched a finger to the carotid artery. But it was clear that she was dead, the way the empty eyes gaped upward. Her body didn't seem injured—no wounds or blood or bruises. Yet Graham knew she had been killed. He had predicted it a year ago, shouting at Holly, "That girl is trouble!  One night you'll open the door and find her murdered!"  But he had imagined blood splatters, knife slashes, bullet holes, mutilation.

Graham backed toward the doorway, hands deep in his pockets, knowing he shouldn't touch anything in that room, afraid his few footsteps had been a mistake.

Next to the size of Ed Aquilla, the body looked like that of a child. There was nothing to her, scrawny legs protruding from pajama bottoms, brittle arms in a dirty tee shirt, the face gaunt, pale, scabbed.  Drugs, disease, malnutrition. She barely came to Holly's shoulder. It had tortured Graham to see his daughter sharing space with Dreaded.

He considered calling Holly with the news. "See, see. I was right. Somebody killed her." Then he realized that might make Holly hate him.

Ed was the one to flip open a phone, telling someone to send an ambulance and the coroner. Then he spoke to Graham. "I'm sorry. I didn't expect we'd find this."

"I should know these things. What you have to face and how you manage it."

The two men had been sitting with coffee cups at the police station phone bank when the call came, a raw male voice saying he was sure something was wrong in an apartment, blurting an address, and hanging up.  Graham was there because the town council made him liaison to the department, and he had taken to spending evenings in the building, telling people he did it because of his responsibility but knowing it was an excuse to fill time now that he and Maggie were living apart. She was still in the house, he in a condo he couldn't sell, his stuff stored in a stack of boxes.

Ed Aquilla and he had become friends, talking more about local real estate than police work. That was Graham's profession. Ed moonlighted as a painter on days off, and Graham had begun recommending him when he advised clients to spruce up their property.

When he heard the caller give the address, Graham knew the house, though he wouldn't have guessed the something wrong was Dreaded. It wasn't where she had shared an apartment with Holly. He had been one of a list of agents who tried to sell the place, a series of realtor signs posted on the front lawn. But he and the others knew it was futile, shared their pessimism at agents' gatherings. Dilapidated, yard overgrown, roof sagging, wedged between a gas station and a rundown machine shop. Who would want to live there? Who could see a profit in renting rooms to people desperate enough to have to?

"You probably shouldn't be here," Ed told him. "Anyway, there won't be room when all the others arrive."

Graham nodded. "I'll wait in the car."

Soon after he got into the front passenger's seat, he heard sirens, two more police cars swerving around the corner with flashing lights and siren blasts as if a crime were still in progress. People had complained at Council meetings. "All that noise just because somebody ran a stop sign." The cops in town were bored. He knew it. They would roar to a brush fire, congregate at the scene of a fender bender, men and a couple of women with college degrees whose main function was public service. Directing traffic, making a presence at school events, helping with flat tires. And now they had a murder.

Graham pictured them crowded around the body, gawking, trying to grasp that someone had killed a young woman in their town. Dreaded.  A human being he had met a few times, didn't like, considered a threat to his daughter. He felt shame at his relief.

What if Holly had still been rooming with her? She might have been there when the killer arrived. A second victim. He couldn't shut out the image of Holly lying on that floor, her thick black hair twisted under her skull, her gray eyes vacant. He clutched hands over his knees, awash in cold sweat. Then it struck him that Ed, the police, would want to question Holly about the months she had spent with Dreaded.

•

Holly didn't answer her cell phone. "Hi. Tell me something good." Loud music behind her greeting, heavy guitar chords, smashing drums. But Graham wouldn't leave a message, didn't want to inform her that way.

Maggie should know too. Holly lived with her mother in the home where she had spent almost her entire life. When he moved out, she moved back in. At the time he told himself he had sacrificed his marriage to get his daughter away from Dreaded. But he couldn't really believe that. It was all the shouting, the days and days of sullen silence that had driven Holly out of the house. He knew they should stop for the sake of their daughter.  But they didn't, couldn't. One night they found her in the front hallway, duffle bags over both shoulders, suitcases in her hands. Maggie had tried to embrace her but couldn't get past the luggage. He had just called Holly's name and "Don't." But his daughter was out the door without a word, not even a goodbye. He and Maggie had stared at each other until he finally said, "She'll be back." Maggie let out a wail and ran upstairs. It turned out he had been right. Holly was back. He wasn't.

Graham parked on the street, unwilling to pull into the driveway. It felt strange to stand on the front porch and ring the chimes.  Even though he had a key, he wouldn't use it. When no one answered, he looked at his watch. Just before ten. Maggie might have gone to bed, but not Holly. He rang again and this time heard footsteps on the stairs, sensed an eye peering at him though the peephole and guessed it was Maggie. He wondered if she would turn away, deny him. They hadn't spoken in several months beyond a few exchanges of voice mail. But she opened the door very slowly, as if ready to slam it shut. "Yes?" she said, the uncertain way she would respond to a salesman.

"I have to talk to Holly."

"Holly is out with friends."

"She's not answering her phone."

"They went to a movie."

"Then I'd better tell you."

She opened the door wide enough for him to enter but blocked the way to the living room. He'd have to stand in that small space.

Maggie was wrapped in a pink fleece robe, one he didn't remember, her hair rolled in curlers, her face washed of makeup. He didn't feel anger any more. Seeing her after so long didn't arouse any emotion. Not regret, not yearning, not sadness. Perhaps it was the news he bore, what it might mean for their daughter.

"Do you remember Deirdre?" He used the real name.

She nodded, eyes puzzled.

"I was at police headquarters when a call came in. I went with Ed Aquilla." Graham knew that these details didn't matter. Still he couldn't come out and say it.

"Yes? So?" He could tell she was beginning to get annoyed with him, all the times she had shouted, "Get to the point."

"Deirdre's been murdered."

Maggie's face fell. "Oh, that poor girl." She was weeping though she hadn't approved of the roommate any more than he had. He remembered her yelling at him: "Don't call her Dreaded."

They stood close enough for him to reach out and comfort her. A pat on the hand, a touch to her shoulder. But he did nothing. Perhaps Maggie's tears came for the same reason he had been shaken: It could have been Holly. Someone could have murdered Holly.

Graham clutched the doorknob. He had to get away from her grief. "Let Holly know what happened. And tell her she has to call me."

"Why?"

"The police will want to talk to her."

"What for? What did Holly do?"

"She lived with the woman. She might have information."

"It was you. She never would have moved in with that person if it hadn't been for you."

Graham stomped down the path to his car, sat and took deep breaths before he could drive off.

•

He expected Holly to call early in the morning, but she didn't. The few calls he received were from clients about open houses and pending contracts. Ed phoned to ask if he were ok and said he had to go as soon as Graham told him he was. He waited until he knew Holly was at work and speed-dialed her. She was number 2, right after 1 for emergencies.

Caller ID must have identified him. She said hello, her voice distant. He missed the enthusiasm of her recorded message.

"Did your mother tell you?" he asked.

"Yes, she told me." Flat, no emotion.

"Did she explain that you and I have to talk?"

"We're very busy today. Deadlines."

"This can't wait. Meet me for lunch."

"I was going to skip lunch to get work done."

"You have to see me." It was a command.

The pause lasted so long he thought she had hung up.  Then, "All right."

•

In the restaurant Graham wondered if she would show, glancing down at his watch again and again past the time they were supposed to meet. He had chosen a steakhouse on the highway, too fancy for a lunch but one he knew would be almost empty at midday, offering privacy. Two men at the bar were familiar; but he just nodded when the hostess led him past them. He rearranged his silverware, knotted an edge of tablecloth in his lap.

When Holly appeared in the entranceway, he covered the watch with his hand so he wouldn't look down, determined not to mention her lateness. Fortunately, she was wearing slacks, not a skirt and not the shorts she insisted on wearing from early spring late into the fall. His daughter had a lovely face, much more attractive than either of her parents. He had spent fruitless hours during her adolescence trying to determine what features of his and Maggie's had combined in Holly. But her legs were wrong, out of proportion, short and thick. Did she know how unflattering the shorts were?  Was wearing them an act of defiance, flaunting a defect? Of course, he couldn't ask and couldn't stop wondering what other defects he didn't know about. Maggie was always telling her how pretty she was, he nodding in agreement. Smiles animated her face. She wasn't smiling now.

He considered standing to pull back her chair and decided that would be too obvious. Even before she sat, she said, "I told you it wasn't a good day. They weren't happy I went out."

"This is important."

She nodded, mouth fixed.

He pressed the question. "Are you upset?"

Holly shrugged, flipped her dark hair back over her shoulder. "She was just somebody I knew."

"You lived with her. Six months"

"I've lived with you and mother more than twenty years."

Graham met her eyes, a signal to explain. She stared back, unblinking.

"The police are going to want to talk with you."

Holly closed one fist around a fork, the other around a knife, pointed them straight up. "That makes sense. They want to know if I have any idea about who killed her."

He hadn't let himself consider that possibility, unwilling to believe Holly had known the same people as Dreaded. "How could you?"

"I'll save any suspicions I have for your police."

He reached out and covered her hand with his, pressed it down to the tabletop. "You know I'm the Council's liaison with the police."

She pulled her hand free. "Why did you have to get on the Council anyway? People didn't vote for you."

"I didn't run. They asked me to fill out a term when Bob McMillan got transferred to Oregon. I thought it would help me stay busy once I was on my own."

"You should have taken up woodworking."

"Holly, please tell me. What do you know?

She pulled her cell phone from her purse and checked the time. "I have to get back. They'll fire me." Graham could see her shifting on the padded chair and sensed she was about to stand up.

"What about eating?"

"I suppose I'll have to go hungry. There are worse things."

Halfway to the exit, Holly turned and spoke to him, so loud the men at the bar stopped their conversation. "I knew this would happen to her."

•

In his office Graham tried to do paperwork, spread forms across his desktop and sat over them with a pencil. After an hour, he slashed a long mark across one sheet and told his secretary he was going out. Council work.

At police headquarters, he couldn't find Ed Aquilla. The woman at the desk told him he was with the coroner. Graham said he would wait and poured coffee in the break room, stirring in cream, though he usually took it black. When he realized what he had done, he dumped the cup into the sink.

He rehearsed in his thoughts what he might say to Ed:  Can we speak off the record? Holly knows something she won't tell me, only to the police. But maybe she didn't. Maybe her claim of suspicions was merely a way of upsetting him. Maybe she knew nothing at all. But maybe something she told Ed would just cause trouble for her. For him. For all of them.

Ed came into the room and sat at the table. "I heard you were here."

"What did the coroner say?"

"I should have looked more closely. Somebody pinched her windpipe. Suffocated her. She was such a frail thing. She couldn't fight back."

"Would it have mattered if you noticed?"

"No. But I'm supposed to be observant."

"Did they find drugs?"

"Sure. But that's not what killed her."

Graham shook hands with the man, something he never did when they parted, deciding not to ask when he planned to talk to Holly.

•

He microwaved a Lean Cuisine for dinner and drank water, pulling the pitcher from behind the wine bottles in his refrigerator. The TV news played in the other room, then switched to what must have been a comedy, fake laughter sounding in the background. He didn't pay attention, just waited for the time to pass until it was night.

Parked outside his old house, Graham had no idea if Holly were home, uncertain what he would reveal to Maggie if she weren't. But he knew he had to tell her mother about his concern.

This time Maggie opened the door wide as if she wanted him to come inside. "Did she say anything to you?" he whispered. She shook her head. He asked her to bring Holly down.

The first thing he saw on the stairway was her thick legs in faded denim shorts, ragged edges high up her thighs. She clumped clogs down on each step as she descended. "I was going out."

"It's chilly tonight," he told her.

"I don't get cold."

"I'm worried about you."

"Isn't it a bit late for that?"

"I'm not talking about the temperature." He saw Maggie hovering at the edge of the room, read her familiar expression of concern and felt sorry for her. He felt sorry for all of them, the remains of a family stiff on a gray carpet.

His intention was to tell Holly what Ed Aquilla had reported but instead asked, "Why did you move in with someone like her?"

"Dreaded?" The way she sneered the name mocked him.  "You probably think it was your fault. The two of you being horrible to one another. All those shouts and glares and slammed doors. Dad, don't flatter yourself. You're not that important."

"But you came back as soon as I left."

"Because I was terrified." An edge of fear distorted her face. Maggie stepped toward her.

"Of what? Of her?"

"I moved in with Deirdre because I wanted to be with her. We shared interests."

"Drugs?"

"That and other things."

Maggie shook her head. "It couldn't be. I never saw any signs."

"Mother, you wouldn't know a sign if it bit you. I've had the benefits of living with the two of you. I'm very good at deception."

"So what changed?" Graham asked, surprised by how calm he was being.

"There were people I hadn't known about, hadn't anticipated."

"The people who killed her?"

She folded her arms across her chest. "Probably. No, certainly."

He wouldn't ask what their motive could have been, didn't want to know. "Will you tell that to the police?"

"If I did, those people would kill me too."

Maggie clung to her daughter's shoulders, trying to embrace her, but Holly resisted. "So what do you want me to do, Daddy? Mr. Police Liaison?"

It wasn't even a decision. "I'll tell Ed Aquilla I spoke with you. That you barely knew her or anything about her life. All you did was see an ad for a roommate. But he'll have to interview you himself."

"And you want me to repeat your lie."

"Yes. That's what I want."

Sobbing, Maggie wrapped her arms around Holly. Holly was sobbing too, mother and daughter huddled in tears. Graham couldn't look at them. He turned and walked out of the house, his hand trembling on the door knob as he pulled it shut.

"Correct change, sir, sorry, ma'am—" The bus driver's eyes question her rugged, rectangular face and flick down past her shapeless coat to her too-dainty-for-her-height, faux-fur-trimmed boots. He coughs and hands back a rumpled dollar bill. "Ten more cents," he drones, staring at the masses on 42^nd Street. Asha digs in her coat pocket for a dime—final fare from a life suffered to one she now dares to reclaim, thanks to Dr. Bida Zuglische's miracle treatment, H-lipo.

The bus strains uptown. Asha teeters and sprawls on the arm of a man so obese his massive buttocks overflow two seats. He jerks awake.

"I'm sorry!" Asha's shrill falsetto draws momentary stares. She recovers her balance, composure, and husky alto, which attracts new stares. "But thank you for—" [an arm like a king-size pillow?] "—breaking my fall." 

His waking eyes lift to her long face and prominent brow. She absorbs his appearance. Striking blue eyes. Flowing, shoulder-length, silver hair. Soft, touchable lips curved in smile. His demeanor: delicate, sensitive, and effeminate, out of synch with his suit jacket, tie, and immensity. Her complete opposite.  And yet—a hermaphrodite!? Seems unlikely, given the rarity. She squeezes past and unzips her coat.

She totters sideways down the aisle through pockets of Old Spice cologne, marijuana-steeped wool, curry, a phlegmy flu, dried sweat newly wet. Some passengers peer at her thick eyebrows and horsy face and wend their way down past her small bosom to unzip her pants—how do city people do that? What can they learn?  Truth? Brotherly love? Or fuel to fire "us against them." Oh, to flounce into a men's lav with swirls of feather boa to appall them all. But they're not worth her trouble, not anymore, not now. A pothole jolt plops her into empty seats in back. 43^rd Street. The countdown begins, she thinks, but to be precise, as she always is, she must count up for uptown.

Asha settles in to wait, but migraine begins to gnaw her brain. Far above the city, she imagines, Zeus has signaled to spoil her fun and grips the bowl of her mind for lesser gods to feast. Zeus—useless and treacherous like the God of her youth. She fills her mouth with saliva, swallows two Fiorinal, and counts by thousands to 47, her age. 47^th Street. How synchronistic.

Up front, the fat man suffers a sneezing attack. He needs a good pat on the back, but no one moves, so Asha does nothing. When in Rome, Greece, Manhattan. 48^th Street.

Battling headache and gods in the usual way, she composes life's real-time script. Her eyes pan Manhattan through soot-dark windows. Theatre marquees spill into west 40's canyons merging east and west with sky above rivers. Gargoyles and griffins glare from gothic cornices. Well-groomed executives shunt a bag lady in grimy plaid coat and pink bunny slippers. A disheveled man urinates on Bank of America. A vendor's black fingerless gloves conduct commerce through steam at a roasting-chestnuts cart. 57^th Street.

Cradled in city movement, bus pitch, and medication, her mind drifts to the past year of wormlike food: microwaveable noodles in a cup, a steaming spaghetti test strand tossed at the wood cupboard—done, if it sticks upright; not, if it flops. Slow-motion drop of last grayed and torn bra into rainy day's wastecan—go bra-less, want not. Cut to bathroom wall and a fly's faceted eyes reflecting a hundred views of a limp penis—hers. Ad nauseam, assembly-line freelance editing. Growing bank account. Close-up on checkbook and the magic number: the fee for H-lipo, new a year ago, per the website of Dr. Bida Zuglische. H-lipo manipulates a hormone, leptin, the catalyst for women's menses and menopause. An injected chemical-hormone mixture, which Dr. Bi (Asha's coinage) did not name, reduces leptin production to a trickle. A second injection, this a chemical and amino acid combination, also unnamed by Dr. Bi, binds remaining leptin to fat, neatly removed via liposuction. Voilá, an official adios to biological woes: true herms reborn sans "the curse" and "on-the-rag" hissy fits—sans hot flashes, night sweats, and the not-a-tickle/not-a-tingle unassaugeable aargh in the arch of each foot.  Free to play at man or no-nonsense businesswoman, effective this afternoon. 63^rd Street.

Asha leans her face on the cold window, away from the greasy spot, squinting in search of skyscraper tops. Dark clouds shroud the upper rooms, where gods no doubt lounge and play cat's cradle with puppet strings knotted to mortals below. 67^th Street.

The final strains of the "Pastorale" overflow someone's headphones. Pleasant—Beethoven calming the final movement of female strife. Scratch that, hope dashed—hot-flash sweat pours down neck to front and backside cleavage. Asha mops with her scarf. 77^th Street.

"Excuse me." Asha totters toward the front. The bus lurches right, and brakes squeal up to 78^th. She fidgets behind the fat man, wedged in the aisle. He's tall.

It's early. A double espresso would be nice. Asha spots a Starbucks at the next corner and paces herself behind the lumbering fat man. Rock-salt boot droppings streak the terra-cotta tiled floor. The counter boy thinks they're together—she of the manly face and he, the feminine fat man—more of a laugh than the boy will ever know. The fat man offers to buy her espresso. Incongruous, his tenor voice and gargantuan frame. She declines and aims for a pastel armchair by the window.

"Where are you headed?" The fat man, midway back in the café, motions her to a high table, a pinhead under his girth. Her feet root between him and the comfy seat with a view.

"Uptown.  An appointment." She evades the truth, paranoia a habit engrained by her mother, who taught her to hide who she is because people will never understand, hide in the locker room, skip a shower after gym—better you stink than they think you have a dick.

"With Dr. Zuglische?" he asks.

"How—?"  Asha mounts a bar stool at his table.

"It takes both to know both," he says with a reassuring tilt of his womanly head.

Asha scans the café, empty except for a Jackie O wannabe, with scarf and dark glasses, face in book, secluded in the back corner near a fake potted palm.  Books scattered on her table.

Asha peers into his eyes, so blue. "Is that Big Apple code? You're a—hermaphrodite?" 

"They call it 'intersex' now, for political correctness," he says.

"What are the odds?" she wonders aloud, brown eyes moon-sized but not yet trusting.

"This Starbucks probably sees more herms, pre or post H-lipo, than any establishment in the city," he says.

"It's a group treatment?" Asha asks in astonishment.

"No, but one person a case study does not make." He shifts for better purchase on the wooden stool.

"I'm confused. I've been saving for a year for a miraculous treatment that's strangely not front-page news, and you call it a case study?" Asha's gaze falls to his big-boned wrists, to the knuckle dimples behind each sausage finger, to the tabletop, faux marble of swirling teal to complement the café's sea-and-earth color palette.

"Dr. Zuglische will never get government grants, and no one can benefit until trials are run. That's where we come in—we and other herms who find the H-lipo website. We are funding the next social revolution." His smile of authority reveals extraordinarily white teeth.

"What do you mean?" Asha asks, flushed with stupidity.

"Once we guinea pigs prove H-lipo works, the treatment can benefit women worldwide."  His face radiates magnanimity.

All females? She's been planning for a year to become male after H-lipo. Yet another trick of Zeus and his cronies: tugging the carpet from under her carefully conceived plans.

"I suspect—with no proof, mind you—that Zuglische's goal is twofold: to sever the last shackle on women's equality, and to help herms survive. He's probably a herm himself."

"I thought Dr. Bi was a she," Asha ventured.

"Dr. Bi? That's good. I guess his—her—gender could be perceived either way from the photo on the website. Proves the point, don't you think? In any case, the worst-case scenario if H-lipo goes awry is we get slender, svelte even, and perhaps grow wings." He winks. "If I could hide a vagina all these years, what's a pair of wings?" 

Asha smiles with delight. Who could have known she'd meet a herm at all, let alone one with a sense of humor as huge as his ass? 

"I'm Fat Man. Nice to meet you." He reaches to shake her hand.

"You're not fat," Asha lies. "Fat is leaving your home in a piano crate." 

"You are a kind liar," Fat Man says. His smiling eyes are tropical blue. Not fake contact-lens blue. True Caribbean Sea blue. His protective grasp envelops her small-boned hand.

Asha considers names. Sebastian won't do. "Chimera. Pleased to meet you." 

He opens the first of two bottles of Fiji water lined up between them.

"Cheers!  How'd you get here?" Fat Man asks.   

Unused to conversation, Asha fumbles, "Do you mean in life or today?"

"Take your pick," Fat Man says.

"Given the way my brain compartmentalizes, the story begins at age 12." She checks her watch. "It's eleven—my appointment's at one o'clock—here's the abridged version." 

"Mine's at noon. Fire away." Fat Man settles in, clasps his hands comfortably between sagging breasts and belly shelf.

Don't fall for comfort and familiarity, her mother always said. Never drop your guard, her mother says in her head.

"Since my first menstruation" [Mother dearest, drop dead], "I've used 'red H's' to describe a Host of dilemmas—H for Hormones, Herms, et cetera."  She exhales her H's like breath in frosty air. "I discovered my first flow with Horror one summer at dawn as I squatted over a pee Hole in the ground on an overnight Hike two miles down a Hill from local Hygiene.  An inauspicious welcome to womanHood. Back then, you Had to endure menstrual cramps. The school nurse, 'Helms from Hell,' tsk-tsked at my suffering so I Heaved on her desk. The next month, she pointed straightaway to the bathroom, and I Hurled while closing the door. Puke gushed around the frame, in and out, lovely sight. But I digress." 

Fat Man grimaces and laughs. "You had it bad!" He unscrews the blue cap of the second Fiji bottle.

Behind Fat Man, college students fling backpacks beside lounge chairs, chairs too small for Fat Man's rump, which hangs off his stool and draws rolling eyes from the students. Fat Man excuses himself, buys two more Fijis for him and another espresso for her.

"You read my mind, thank you." Asha continues in a quieter tone. "The night sweats started—   Is this too much information?" 

"Your history is uniquely yours yet affirms normalcy in mine. Please continue," Fat Man says. They contemplate each other. Few people understand. Few herms ever meet.

She disentangles the silver earrings from her brunette mane. "The night sweats started four years ago. The periods stopped, but not the hot flashes.  Screaming 'Why me?' at the ceiling proved futile." 

Fat Man rubs his belly like a marine biologist wets down a beached whale. "Yup, been there. So I decided to travel. Lived in an RV, which amazingly shrank.  RV this big, me—."  His hands spread wide. His honesty is a magnet; his voice, a compass. "Finally settled in a roomy log cabin out west. How about you?" 

"I searched for relief online. I didn't trust men to find a cure, so I explored only sites that mentioned female doctors, which meant interminable clicking, two steps back, one step forward." Asha taps the table with her index finger.

Fat Man teases: "Don't think I didn't hear that streak of feminism." 

Asha smiles paternally through her Freud impersonation: "Men vahnt vomen zubzervient, zlavess to their bodiss, number two in a patriarchal zoziety. Thiz iss vell-known fact." 

As Fat Man laughs, his belly shakes like a hiccupping Shamu, like a sloshing water balloon flung from upper rooms.

"Number two as in shit," Asha adds.

"I got there. Are you an actor, Chimera?" Still laughing, he drapes his jacket on a nearby chair, then wipes his neck and face with a clean napkin.

Asha does the same. Can it be that their hot flashes come at the same time? "I'm a copyeditor by trade, romance novels, arcane university-press manuscripts, the gamut. But I'm a director at heart—I like the control." 

Fat Man's eyes light anew on her face, not like the gripping migraine now past.

"You were raised boy," Asha says.

"Yes."  Fat Man gazes into middle space and memory, then smiles. "I grew to love words and context. Cast, pearl, slip, and seine? Father teaching fishing. Cast, purl, slip, and skein? Mother teaching knitting." 

"So you were cast in a dual role," Asha adds slyly.

Fat Man's eyes crinkle with appreciation. "No, but Mother did insist on planting seeds of choice." 

Asha ducks and whispers, "Those kids are eavesdropping." 

Fat Man glances over his shoulder and back. "They're harmless. Too impressed with their navels to bother with old farts." 

"Thanks so much." Asha feigns offense but can't help grinning.

"You were raised girl," Fat Man states.

"Yes, and I'm female at the core." Asha sighs. "But I've been planning on switching to celibate man." 

Fat Man scrutinizes her face and finds no answer. "Why?" 

"Because I never—  It doesn't—  To provide for the future. I can die an old male content in my own digs with untapped money in my bank account, or an old female who outlives her savings and lands in the state nursing home fending off fondlers.  I have to play man—it's as simple as math." 

"Have to? Math? Where is the honesty, humanity, in that?" Fat Man asks with concern.

"Herms and humanity? Oil and water." That said, she hears her own negativity, preached to one who seems to perceive more than she. "Let's change the subject." 

"Why?"  Fat Man asks in earnest, not to provoke.

She confides with sadness, "So I don't get—ugly-er." 

He reaches verbally to console her. "'Beauty lies in the eye of the beholder.'  Beauty lies."

Asha nods without assimilating fully. Silence menaces their conversation, the honest kind, which strangers share when they don't expect to meet again.

He prompts with her earlier comment: "So you followed web links to hermaphroditism?"

"Yes.  Herms—the cruelest prank ever played by the gods." Asha's displeasure pinches her lips, flares her nostrils.

"Gods plural?" he asks.

"A drunken clique contriving our pitfalls for perverse amusement. One deity would never abuse his children this way." She searches his lips for a sign of agreement.  

"Define 'way'," Fat Man says. His arms rest on the table like felled masts. Her slender hands, close to his, tingle. Her arm hair rises, concealed under long, pewter-gray sleeves.

She can't fathom his need for explanation. "The way the world sees us: as freaks." 

"The world doesn't know who we are unless we tell them. I don't see myself as a freak. But, I agree, the world is hermaphobic." Fat Man nods, then adds, "We all have phobic stereotypes."

"I don't." Asha gasps—too-quick a response, denial exposed.

"Are you sure?" His eyebrows arch.

She studies the table. Fat people wallow in their own waists. Their drooping buttocks?  Proof of rebuttals to self-control. But, in all fairness, Fat Man seems noble, no glutton, no bull.

"Once we grant ourselves permission, we can love them as ourselves, love ourselves through them," Fat Man suggests.

Asha frowns. "How Christian." 

"I am Christian." He pulls a silver cross and chain from inside his blue shirt.

She projectile-vomits words at his face, "If we're made in God's image, did Jesus have a vagina?!" 

Conversation stops at the college kids' table. The counter boy, on tiptoe, peeks over cup stacks. The Jackie O wannabe could be from Madame Tussaud's. Asha thinks fast, fills the silence: "You know, the line from The Vagina Monologues." Nearby conversation resumes.

"Nice cover," Fat Man whispers. He excuses himself and heads for the restrooms. Out of sight of the others, he catches Asha's eye. He points to the Mens Room door, scratches his head in puzzlement, squeezes into the Womens Room. Asha laughs so hard she almost pees. Fat Man returns, breathing heavily. The stool complains under his weight.

"How often do you do that?" Asha asks, still convulsed with delight.

"Whenever someone needs a laugh," Fat Man says with kindness.

"Thank you, and please forgive my outburst." Asha whispers, "I truly am curious—Do you believe Jesus had a vagina?" 

Fat Man's instant response: "If He did, do you trust he could understand you, love you?" 

An unsettling question. She recalls the initial warmth of her Sunday school teacher. The nasty boy under the table sticking his hand up her skirt and fingering her underpants. His giggling. The teacher doing nothing about it. No scolding. No nothing, except the word spreading into taunts and conspiratorial grins. Outcast in God's house. Her mouth opens. No words form.

Fat Man leans close. "Let's make it more tangible. I am a man, and I have a vagina—ambiguous and dysfunctional, mind you, but a vagina nonetheless. Do you think I could understand you, love you?" 

"Yes."  She holds her breath.

Their eyes lock. "There's your answer." He leans back and pounds the table like a judge's gavel. The students glance over but continue talking.

"Fundamentalists would burn you at the stake," Asha whispers, intrigued. His silver hair gleams like angora in the sun. "Do you have a significant other?"  She ponders her words, new and satisfying.

"I'm not partnered, but I've attracted a chubby chaser or two." He winks.

She tries not to laugh at her image of him on top, a limbed ton of granite deflating his lover's lungs. He drains the fourth Fiji, which seeps from his skin in armpit sweat rings.

Dare she ask? Yes, it's logical. "You'll stay male after H-lipo?" 

"No."  

Asha runs her fingers around the espresso cup rim. "If God made us in his image, why do you want to change?" 

"Call it an exercise in free will," Fat Man says.

Too cryptic. Her face drops. Although, if she adopts a male persona, and he female, there is still a chance for—commingling. "I like your eyes," she says before thinking.

"I like your eyes, too," says Fat Man, quietly, which, just like that, sets Asha's body on fire. She tries to keep surprise and "love me, for God's sake, please" off her face. God singular?   

"I want to explore myself and female voice," Fat Man explains. "I'm a writer. Lover of words, symbols, and myth. Technical writer by day, mostly software manuals, lucrative contracts. Fiction writer by night." 

"A writer," she repeats. Titillation of the mind is a magnificent turn-on.

Fat Man's curiosity, Bunsen burner blue in each iris, crests in waves that wash through her eyes and down, to pool warm down there, lapping against and in.  Fiction by night. Fusion by candlelight. Asha's modesty slips to her ankles under his visual probe, which tongues and sucks in tantalizing foreplay. Her code of celibacy yields like a virgin's hymen.

"There are other ways," Fat Man says.

"Ways to what?" asks Asha, wide-eyed, fearful he refers to the Kama Sutra, which she's never read.

"Ways to study female voice and myself. But H-lipo will be faster. Once leptin is removed, at least this once, I hope to assess what doesn't feel 'normal' or what does, assuming the answer's in the contrast. Time will tell." 

"How long?" Asha asks. The passion she'd sought futilely for so long, and finally spurned, now burns in throat, virgin's vagina, and penis-size clitoris afire with desire but lifeless, superfluous. She could part her legs under the table and grasp him tight, again and again while enfolded in his massiveness, filled, embraced by the filler, merging—a dream of lust masquerading as love in the dreamer's eye. Lust lies in the eye of the beholder. Lust lies.  

Fat Man whispers, "Long enough to prove who I am." 

Asha swims nude in his eyes, lapis lazuli and turquoise in a Caribbean inlet. In let. Let in. Leptin. Sirens slice the air, and red lights blip across Starbucks' walls. The fake Jackie O stares at her page.

"Where have you been all my life?" Asha winces at her boldness and the worn cliché.

"Mostly traveling. Home is Parks, a tiny town between the Grand Canyon and Flagstaff.  You?" 

"Home is Pomona, Pennsylvania, between the Poconos and coal country."

Fat Man smiles. "Pomona, goddess of abundance—horns of plenty!  Our P's, your H's—pH, alkaline and acid, balanced. Could be a sign." 

Asha shrugs, suddenly shy. "Only that we're both and neither. In between." The sheets. Is there a back room here? No time.

"May we exchange emails?"  Fat Man writes his address on a napkin.

She pulls a notepad from her purse, prints neatly, glances at her watch. "Time for you to go." Stool legs scrape.

"Give me a hug, Chimera, my new friend," Fat Man says, opening his arms wide.

"Call me Asha." She presses her breasts into his. His arms envelop her like a plumped goose down quilt. Despite the rotunda of his abdomen, impressive arousal lower down. He'll feel no movement in her down there, not that kind.  His question answered? His sweat rings have no smell. Does he like her jasmine scent? 

"Call me Simon. After H-lipo, let's meet downtown at the TKTS kiosk, 47^th and Broadway. Six o'clock? I'll get tickets for Phantom of the Opera.  We'll have dinner first. My treat." Fat Man holds her coat just so, and she slips her arms easily into the sleeves as though they'd perfected the act over years.

"I'm dying to see it," Asha says. "But I'd miss my bus home."

"I'm staying downtown in Tribeca, at a B&B with some vacancies. It's safe."  Fat Man's assurance is matter-of-fact. "All spacious rooms complete with toiletries. A gourmet breakfast: eggs Benedict, crêpes with sour cream, fresh cantaloupe with berries." 

"We'll make a night of it!" That's not what she means!  Or is it? "I mean—"  Falsetto voice again.

"'Make your choice'," he says sternly, then breaks into a grin. "A line from Phantom.  There's no pressure, Asha. I'm as comfortable with you as alone." 

She lowers her eyes, not wishing to reveal her disappointment.

"And that's as comfortable as anyone can ever be." His voice soothes, and his hand presses lightly against the small of her back in gentlemanly guidance toward the door. His touch rekindles fire. Asha conceives the script fast: Thrust him back on the stool and straddle him tight, unbuckle his belt as he raises her skirt, his immense paunch an impenetrable wall that blocks what she seeks, his redwoodian manhood. Her pelvic bones stretch; fine fractures permit a full ten centimeters. Cut!  She's seeking her manhood (right?), not his, not giving birth. Brakes screech over on Broadway. He'll burn for blasphemy, she for fickleness and lust.

"Why don't you go ahead, Simon." Asha nods at the door. "I've a pit stop to make." 

He squeezes her hand tenderly, says, "Let go, let God," and kisses her smack on top of the head where it is soft during infancy until the skull fuses.

En route uptown, he passes the café windows. Pausing, he peers in and salutes, then waddles from view, all three hundred pounds of him. The college students mimic waddling in their chairs but seem genuinely embarrassed when they realize she's watching. She heads for the restroom.

On the tiled wall over the sink, the spell breaks as surely as if mirror shards flew. Too old for romantic nonsense, too set in her ways. For a year, driven by one goal with a lifetime of reasons. Plan A never needed a letter before, yet its rationale can't hold a candle to passion, Plan B, an adolescent dream of requited love. H-lipo changes hormones. Will she still be her, afterward?  Should she risk a death of sorts to live, or risk a life of sorts to love? Why does desire confuse the issue at the eleventh hour? 

The students are gone. She stops by Jackie O—clever, up close, how lifelike the mannequin's hands. Some joker has turned her book upside down. "Read and Share," says a sign by the scattered books. Asha removes the thick paperback, Kerrigan's Copenhagen, tucks it into her purse, and props a different book in the motionless hands.

Each step uptown toward Dr. Zuglische's clinic overwhelms Asha with unexpected panic and confusion. She flees on a downtown bus. Fingering the white napkin with Fat Man's—Simon's—contact info, she watches the city slip by her window. Snow settles and melts on subway-heated sidewalks, coats people like confectioners' sugar.  Their heads hang penitent before wind-flung flakes. Humanity, fallen from grace? Snow falls from the heavens, from grace, on all of God's diverse children, yes?  Simon's napkin doesn't answer.

A woman behind her reads aloud. "Central Park is itself a work of art, including 80 statues and monuments. Artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude's 'The Gates'—7,500 saffron banners, free-hanging from saffron vinyl frames—is free to the public and open February 12^th through 28^th. Viewed from buildings surrounding the park, the closely spaced banners simulate a golden river winding through leafless branches, highlighting 23 miles of pedestrian paths." 

Restless, bewildered, she gets off the bus at 72^nd, dons scarf and dark glasses against brilliant snow. Eastward lie open gates crowned with saffron banners, which billow with chill breeze and beckon like ritual to wandering pilgrims. She walks toward and among playful throngs, following snowy footpaths festooned with sunny orange. She pauses transfixed at frenetic yet frozen bronze wings. The "Eagles and Prey" statue. More like horns of a dilemma: a snow-coated woolly goat is wedged in a cleft, between a rock and a hard place; piercing its back is an eagle's talon, like a liposuction hose.

Further east to "Christopher Columbus," bold explorer, who gazes heavenward with outstretched arm, palm raised. Amid those gathered at the statue, a father reads to his blind teenage daughter, whose long chestnut hair flies free on the wind: "scoffed at before,/ during the voyage, menaced,/ after it, chained,/ to the world, he gave a world." The teen smiles and catches snowflakes on her tongue. Church bells flood the changing wind with a hymn from Asha's youth, "Holy, Holy, Holy." She heads south toward their peal. "There is none beside Thee," the blind girl sings in as pure a soprano as a Vienna Choirboy. Asha turns. The girl smiles through her as at a distant steeple.

Orange banners flap and swirl like matador capes, guiding Asha toward the bells—toward transportation home or TKTS kiosk. Past South American "El Libertador," Simon Bolivar, whose breathless steed is frozen pawing air above a boiling saffron sea. Liberator. Simon. Lover of words, symbols, and myth. Simon, "Fisher of Herms." He will like that, even after H-lipo. She pulls notepad from purse and prints, "Buy underwear." Hanes? she wonders, pen in air. She pictures her usual plain-Jane white cotton. "Hardly." The lone word gusts with her breath. She writes in cursive on the pad as her words billow and dance in the wind, "Heliotrope satin." Ice crystals fall, frozen in perfection for an infinite second, melt, and bleed her inked words.

It's the first day of spring—too cold for swimming, yet the outdoor pool of the Baltimore apartment complex is already uncovered. From her ground level apartment window, Nancy notices a male mallard with his iconic emerald green head and gilded beak confidently gliding on the water's surface; the white neckband, like a starched collar against his rich brown chest, gives him the air of a dandy with not a care in the world. "Lucky ducky," Nancy says.

The two-bedroom apartment is sparsely furnished; it only needs to see them through five weeks of recovery. Nancy barely has had time to locate the nearest supermarket and stock the temporary residence with the necessities like coffee and tea, milk and cereal, canned soups, eggs, yogurt, peanut butter and bread. Until she's up to cooking, anything more elaborate will have to be delivered. Her mother desperately wants to come down from Boston to care for her daughter and son-in-law; her cousins say they'll put all aside to be there for her, but Nancy refuses their offers: the strength required for what she is about to do for Jean-Georges must not be susceptible to the anxiety of others and hovered over by a multitude of nervous hens as though it were a communal incubating egg. On a more selfish note, she does not wish to share this intimate experience between her husband and herself.

Her decision to donate a kidney has been an easy one for the simple reason that she does not want her life with Jean-Georges to end. But they are incompatible, this couple, in the scientific sense; in fact, until now, there has been no one who qualifies to be her husband's donor.

Organ transplanting is a waiting game, and while they waited for a cadaver donor match for Jean-Georges, Nancy searched for another option and found a long shot: an in-house swap—a hospital with enough operating rooms, staff and surgical wings to perform multiple exchanges. For many months the hospital studied six patients with failing kidneys and six donors who, like Nancy, were incompatible with their relative or friend but compatible with one of the other recipients. Too many cooks spoil the broth, Nancy thought at first; one of them was bound to get the worst doctor and she feared it would be her. But Jean-Georges was rapidly declining. They had not only exhausted the possibilities, they were out of time.

Throughout the process one more obstacle threatened to stand in the way of the transplant and, in turn, the transplant threatened to stand in the way of the obstacle. Nancy and Jean-Georges were in the throes of another waiting game: they planned to adopt a child from France—a deaf boy that Nancy had found abandoned without any identification while traveling on a train in the Maritime Alps. A boy whom doctors had determinted to be three years and three months old. A boy they had named Pierre.

The French adoption authorities had not been perturbed to know about Jean-George's history of congenital kidney disease, though they were under the impression he was in remission. And if the transplant team in Baltimore had known that adoption of a very young child was in the works, it would have eliminated Nancy and Jean-Georges and upset the entire swap project since it relied on a domino effect. But it was not the other five people with kidney disease that Nancy was concerned with; they were, in her eyes, just organs—a means to an end. She thought only of Jean-Georges and Pierre and, therefore, the couple decided not to lie about the adoption or Jean-Georges' health status—depending upon to whom they were speaking—but to say nothing.

•

Nancy has never doubted their decision to adopt Pierre until now, the night before their surgeries, as she sits beside her husband on top of the covers of his bed in this apartment that contains no trace of their two decades together. She rests her head against the flimsy wicker headboard that moves each time she does, and she becomes plagued with doubt

"Are we wrong to go ahead with the adoption? Is it irresponsible?" she asks Jean-Georges. "What if something happens to one of us?"

He is lying face up, eyes closed, in a body aged far beyond his forty-three years.

"Pierre will be in the best hands with you, should something happen to me. And if it is the other way around, I cannot begin to think about that—but, because you worry, I reassure you that I will be an exemplary father."

"And if something happens to the both of us?" They've been over this numerous times. "I know. If it's after we've gotten him, my cousin Joanna will take care of him. And if it's before—he'll be adopted by a French family. I know. I know."

"Nancy, we've looked at this from every vantage point. Stop torturing yourself."

"Maybe it was wrong from the beginning, Jean. You never wanted children. I pushed you into the adoption."

"I never said I didn't want children. All the rigmarole trying to conceive, all that guilt. You thought that I was too demanding, too needy, but I was trying to make a life with only us in it. I'll get used to this. It's just that it's been the two of us for so long."

"No room. I told myself there was no room for children in a marriage with you. Tell me I was wrong. You'll get used to being a father, won't you?"

"A good father."

"And the fact that he's deaf?"

"I've accepted that. When I saw you come off that train in Nice, holding Pierre's little hand, leading him through the crowds, I thought, what has she gone and done now: promised to baby-sit someone's child for the rest of our stay in the city? I admit I was a bit jealous. You looked so radiant—happier than I've ever seen you. I could never make you that happy."

It hurts her to hear him say that and even more to think it might be true.

"I was a nervous wreck. I kept waiting for the father to stab me in the back or for the police to arrest me." She says, adding a tone of suspense to the scenario they have visited many times before.

"What could you have done? The father disappeared from the train without a trace. We went straight to the police. We gave him up. Relax, ma chérie. Everything will work out. You'll see. Don't be such a pessimist."

"I'm not a pessimist!" she insists. "I'm a realist. I can't help but see all the possibilities."

"Of what can go wrong."

He turns to her: the turquoise eyes that had bewitched her twenty-two years ago are now underscored with deep dark shadows only made more pronounced by his sunken cheeks. There is a grayish pallor about his skin that frightens her to think how close to death he is that she can barely look at him head on. He can slice right through her pretense and expose her fears. "Nancy, you don't have to do this," he says.

"Don't be an idiot! Of course I'm doing this."

"You have a way with words."

"I'm sorry. But you know I feel absolutely positive about the surgery. I just have dreams of some poor couple showing up at our door one day demanding their child."

"All kinds of records are being checked. All the reports of missing children in the EU. Who knows who or what the mother was, what happened to her. And the father might just have been a sick person, or a desperate person, or a very bad person."

"No, Jean. I don't think he was bad. If you could have seen the way he behaved with the boy. He was so good with him."

"He left him."

"I know. But I can't imagine Pierre having been abused." She shakes her head with conviction.

"Well, he was lucky you were on that train. Or maybe he was looking for you—someone right to take care of his son or whatever Pierre might have been to him. You believe in all that fate stuff. I do not. However you view it, you were a treasure the man came upon: a gift in exchange for a gift—an angel. Stop playing both sides of the tennis court and turn off your brain. You're driving me crazy."

"I'm done," she says. "And I'm hungry." Her surgery is scheduled for the first thing in the morning and she can't have anything in her stomach for eight hours. While she never eats before bedtime, the thought of not being able to only makes her aware of her empty stomach. Jean-Georges, on the other hand, is not scheduled until late afternoon and so he has just finished a large meal and now sips chamomile tea.

She gets off the bed, walks around to his side, and picks up the mug of tea from the small table beside the bed. She wraps her hands around it, brings it up to her forehead and holds it there."

"I think you missed your mouth," he says.

"I have a headache. The heat helps."

"Maybe you should see a doctor first thing in the morning."

"Funny."

His hand, thin and frail, floats upward and he pats her stomach.

"Don't," she says, waving him away. Forgetting that she is still holding the mug, she spills some of the tea. "I don't like it when you do that. I feel like you're consoling my barren womb. You aren't the only one with a dysfunction."

"His hand drops down onto the bed."

"Would you like something else to eat?" She feels badly about having snapped at him.

"No. I'm not hungry. Remember the first time we slept together in Aix in my parents' bed when they went to the sea, and I got up afterwards and made you a croque monsieur, and you were disappointed? 'It's just a grilled cheese sandwich fried in egg,' you said."

"I was not disappointed. It was delicious. I just thought it was going to be more exotic. It was my first week in France. Remember how hot it was in that flat way up there on the fourth floor? We were so sweaty and thirsty."

"Your first week? Did we do it so soon?" he asked.

"You know we did."

"Do you regret it?"

"The sandwich or the sex?"

"Having spent your junior year in France. Having met me. Having become a couple so quickly."

"How could I? I was drunk in love from the minute you pronounced my name."

"You just wanted a French boyfriend so you could learn to speak French better."

"Do you regret it? You were young. You gave up other women."

"I'd love a cigarette right now. That's the only thing you made me give up that I miss. Do you want a man or woman to get your kidney?"

Nancy hadn't even thought about who was going to receive her kidney; she hadn't thought much about any of the members of the swap since they were forbidden to know anything about each another. She was in this for her husband's sake and she viewed the others as one entity and a means to an end—Jean-Georges' cure.

"I guess it doesn't matter—as long as it isn't a Republican," she said.

"You know what I'd really like now even more than a cigarette?"

"What?"

"To make love."

She laughs. They both know the impossibility of that given his weak state. They have not made love in months.

"I knew you were sex crazed the day you cupped my derriere when you walked behind me into the registrar's office in Aix," she tells him.

He is looking up at her now, studying her face as though trying to see something he's never seen before.

"Here we go!" He uses that expression to confirm something that's been said to be true. "That is the day I saw you with your long black hair and those eyes and I didn't think you were an American at all. I thought you were from Malta or Tunisia or a gypsy from southern Spain, you had such a mysterious air about you. You walked past me and it was like being brushed by a field of strawberries, you smelled so good. I knew right then that I must have you.

"Ere we go," she imitates his accent. "Sometimes I think I shouldn't have made you come to the States. Maybe we would have been happier if we had lived in France."

"Oolala you take credit for everything, don't you? It was my decision too."

"But you miss Provence."

"I would miss here if we left. I'm just a malcontent."

"C'est vrai," She agrees.

"You know there's something romantic about having the surgery here," he says.

"You find Baltimore romantic?"

"It's an unknown full of possibilities. Besides, five weeks alone here with you with, no interruptions is very romantic. I'm going to bring you a croque monsieur when it's over."

"And just how are you going to manage that?"

"You'll see. I'll manage." He laughs. "I'm very resourceful."

"We should get some rest. We have to be at the hospital at the crack of dawn." Nancy finds herself as excited as a bride on the night of her wedding. "Do you need anything else before I go to my room?"

"Yes. My goodnight kiss."

She bends over and softly kisses him on the lips. She imagined them cold and hard, but to her relief, they're soft and warm.

"Promise me that you won't ever be sorry that we adopted Pierre, if something happens to me. I can't help it, but that's the only thing that terrifies me. As far as doing this, I've never been surer. I must sound awful asking this of you right now."

"You sound like a mother, that's what you sound like."

"Promise me you won't regret it."

He squeezes her hand as hard as he can; but the weakness of his once strong grip only reinforces her determination to undergo the surgery.

"Je ne regrets rien, ma Chérie. I regret nothing," he whispers. "There is one more thing I'd like," he says, eyes closed.

"What is it?"

"Stay here tonight. In my bed."

"You'll be able to sleep? It's smaller than our bed at home."

"It's the only way I will."

She goes over to the other side and slips under the covers where she snuggles up to him until their bodies are sealed together. She rests her head against his shoulder; he lifts his foot and crosses it over hers.

•

In the morning, Nancy bathes in euphoria for what she is about to do. While they wait for the taxi to take them to the hospital, she goes out to the pool to feed Lucky: she wants the duck to be there when she returns from the hospital and wishes she knew someone who she could solicit to care for it. As she approaches the pool, her bag of bread chunks in hand, she's heartened to see that a mottled drab brown female duck has joined the drake; she names her Mrs. Lucky. As a couple, they are so much more apt to survive.

The hospital, normally quiet on a Saturday, is abuzz with palpable excitement—all energy focused on the transplants. Though they have performed multiple ones before, it's the first time that a twelve-way has happened, and all dozen participants are lined up in a holding room, curtains drawn around each gurney.

It reminds Nancy of how, when she was a young child and having her tonsils removed, they lined the gurneys of children up in a ward, pinned white cloth diapers around their heads to cover their hair, and took them, one by one, up for surgery. She can recall being strapped onto a gurney and wheeled through the halls, into the elevator, and into a small green operating room where her doctor's face, a round mirror fastened onto a headband, peered down at her. An ether mask was placed over her face; she saw spirals—then blackness. She had been the last of the children to be taken to surgery, and she had felt lonely, singled out, scared.

But this morning, she is the first to go, right after a young woman draws her blood samples and then, with a black magic marker, makes a picture of an angel on her arm. But she isn't wheeled into the operating room. Instead, she's told to hop off of the gurney and walk like a prisoner on her way to her execution.

As she passes the eleven gurneys, terrycloth socks with rubber-gripping soles protecting her feet against the cold linoleum floor, she can hear the bodies breathing and she wants to pull open each curtain they pass and see their faces and carry them, like a Teddy Bear, with her into the OR.

"Don't touch anything blue!" they warn her when she steps into a room that is so high tech it resembles a ship out of a science fiction odyssey. They strap her into a table-like contraption. With her arms outstretched and immobilized like Christ on the cross, Nancy the sacrificial lamb surrenders.

•

There is a grilled cheese sandwich, waiting on Nancy's tray beside the bed when she awakes, only the bread is hard and the cheese rubbery from having sat there for so long. She cannot tell if it's dusk or dawn.

"I'm sorry," the nurse says, "but your husband gave us strict orders to have it here when you opened your eyes, so we couldn't time it just right. You've been on and off awake for hours. He wanted us to find a French Bistro nearby and order something called a cock masseuse, but this was the best we could do. It's from the cafeteria."

"Can I see him?"

"If you can get out of bed and into this wheelchair I have parked outside the door I'll take you for a little ride to ICU."

Nancy is startled to see tubes coming from every part of Jean-Georges. His hands rest on top of the thin white blanket. He barely opens his eyes when Nancy is wheeled to his bedside.

"Hi," she says.

He forces a smile. She raises her finger and touches it to the finger of his that is illuminated by the red light of the clothespin-like device that measures his blood oxygen. Looking like the two inebriated lovers in a painting that hangs over their mantle at home, their heads drop to one side and they fall asleep.

•

It doesn't take long for the secrecy surrounding the identities of The Swap Twelve to begin to come undone. They can be spotted by the way they walk, by the familiarity between certain patients, by the black angel on the wrists of a few, and the curiosity in the eyes of others who desire to know which one has been responsible for extending their lives. The anticipation crescendos until the staff realizes that something must be done, and a meeting is arranged, a multiple blind date of sorts, where partners and recipients and doctors and nurses come together in one room. A thanksgiving. A jubilant revelation. A family reunion because out of individual concern and intent, has been born a family. There is cake and music. There are tears and gratitude and hugging and kissing.

But like a camper who, on parents' visiting day, runs excitedly to the clubhouse only to discover among the adoring parents and children that her mother has not showed, Nancy's recipient is nowhere to be found. And for the first time, she is desperate to see and talk to this person within whom part of her now resides.

And like the camper to whom the counselor says, "Wait, come with me, I have a special surprise," and there behind a door not only stands the mother but the wayward father who disappeared years ago and the celebration is two-fold, Nancy is brought to the room of her recipient Maggie who is still too weak to join the party. And only then, does Nancy experience the rush that Jean-Georges and his donor felt and understand the implication of what she has done for this frail woman with red hair and freckles and green eyes who is also a wife of a pleasant looking man and, in addition, a mother of a beautiful teenage daughter who looks just like her. Together, husband and daughter nearly crush Nancy with their gratitude and all four break down and cry. Nancy is the heroine—the true angel. She takes Maggie's hand in hers and studies her translucent face the way a mother studies her newborn. "Thank you," Maggie says sobbing. And Nancy now knows how it feels to have given birth—to give life.

•

When reporters, photographers, and TV crews come to cover the amazing feat of the surgical staff, Nancy pretends she is sleeping to avoid being interviewed, fearing that word will cross the ocean and reach the French adoption authorities. She is relieved when she and Jean-Georges return to the seclusion of the apartment and thrilled to see that not only have Mr. and Mrs. Lucky survived but that there are now thirteen ducklings with them in the pool. Nancy has never known a duck to have so many ducklings; she swears they symbolize the twelve members of the swap plus Pierre. She feeds them every day—her most ambitious physical exercise—and hopes that the weather does not get too warm and bring big hairy humans and noisy kids with tubes and beach balls to run the family of ducks out of town.

"I can't cook. There's no dishwasher," she tells Jean-Georges.

"Since when is that a prerequisite for cooking?" He sits in the armchair, his feet up on a hassock. The color of the living has already returned to his face.

"I once heard that a woman poached fish in her dishwasher. She wrapped it in foil and put it through the wash cycle. She just left out the soap," Nancy tells him.

"You can't be serious."

"I am. But I wouldn't do it. I was insinuating that I can't cook because I don't want to wash the dishes. I can't stand at the sink too long."

"We can use paper."

"Don't get pushy because you're feeling better. Maybe next week. Right now we're still on the soup and sandwich plan."

As soon as Jean-Georges is up to it, he and Nancy go down to the pool together. They hobble out and sit on two chaise lounges where, with blankets pulled up to their chins, they read books like a privileged class couple of another era crossing the ocean on some luxury steamship.

In this way they go about their adventure of recovery until the night before their departure when—healthy enough to make the plane ride home—they pack to leave. They have survived; the adoption is still in progress; they have taken an incredible gamble on all fronts and they've won big time.

Nancy goes out to feed the ducks for the last time, bringing extra bread to last them a good while; she wishes she could leave a dozen loaves, and dig them their own private pond, and build them a shelter with soft hay to sleep on. She wishes she could take them home and show them to Pierre and to her parents and cousins and aunts and uncles.

Approaching the pool in the dark, Nancy becomes certain of what she thought she saw from a distance: one of the ducklings is floating motionless in the water; one of the ducklings has died. Mrs. Lucky is alone by a wall of the pool, emitting what Nancy perceives to be a mournful whine. And Nancy knows that something bad is about to happen.

The hospital staff doesn't wait until Nancy is home and surrounded by her family to call her about Maggie's death. Why would they? They came to know her well—this proud woman who preferred not to be coddled by nurses and orderlies and aides. The news numbs Nancy like a whole body epidural. Her perfectly good kidney was not good enough to save the grateful freckle-faced mother and wife who suffered a heart attack; her perfectly good kidney and Maggie are dead.

What a waste! What a fucking waste! she wants to yell.

"I'm so sorry, Nancy," Jean-Georges says from his bed.

There is no consoling her. She goes into the bathroom and scrubs the faint traces of the angel she's been trying to preserve off of her skin. Most of it wore off weeks ago, but she sees it as clear as the day it was drawn. She feels Maggie's warm hand, the husband and daughter's clutch so full of promise, the swelling of her own heart with pride. What a waste! She wants to scream at the top of her lungs, not caring if they hear her in the next apartment or in Paris. What a waste! She wants to sob but the sorrow is so great that nothing comes—just a dull aching moan

•

It's Indian summer in New England when the easiness of hot weather lingers into fall and teases with the notion that it might stay forever; but it never does, Nancy thinks as she and Jean-Georges ride to the airport. They are headed to Nice to claim their son and bring him back home.

Nancy observes Jean-Georges, tanned from a summer of rest, sports jacket over his arm, briskly walking through the terminal in a rejuvenated body. He is full of more life that she has ever seen in him. He boards the plane with the handsome stature of a diplomat. He chats in French with the flight attendants. He has already assumed his European persona as he prepares to reenter his homeland, albeit for a brief time; somewhere in mid air, he will leave America behind.

She feels no difference within her own body; she functions no better or worse than before. But every now and then she thinks of Maggie and feels that she's lost something. It comes in a little wave. It might be instigated by something she reads, or hears. I only have one kidney, she thinks to herself. But then it goes away.

When Stevie started howling in the back seat, Claire knew it was time for lunch. "Stevie!" she said sharply, "Stop banging your hammer on the seat!"

"It's not a hammer!" the little boy answered fiercely. "It's my gun!"

As she scanned the roadside for a place to eat, she felt a headache coming on. "It's not a gun, Stevie," she said, the forced patience in her voice slowly unraveling. "We don't play with guns—they hurt people!"

"When will you buy me a gun! I want a gun!"

"Stevie," she said, glaring at him over her shoulder. "We don't buy guns. Period!"

"I'm hungry!" Stevie yelled back, with as much bellow as his four-year-old voice allowed. "I want soda and a hot dog!"

Claire cringed. But this was Stevie's way of doing things, day in and day out—and how could she possibly take this wild American cowboy, this Comanche, to live in Montreal, to the quiet, elegant neighborhoods of Westmount, to her mother and father and sisters' polite monied lives where the grand brick houses rose rank on prosperous rank up the slopes of Mount Royal? They were traditional anglophones, not ostentatiously wealthy but with old-money comfort and style—and a certain stiffness that, she had to admit, always secretly annoyed her, so she'd gravitated to Peter's informal American energy as soon as they met. Her family were sure to raise their eyebrows at Stevie, with his shooting and yelling and endless motion, his demands and complaints, his loud fascination with cartoons and Disney. They'd look at her, gravely give advice, Claire, exercise some control over the boy ... Have you considered ... ?  She could see it all coming. Her sisters, like her, had taken any number of women's studies courses at McGill; it wasn't hard to imagine what they'd make of her son.

Could they ever see past the chaos to the child who impulsively hugged his father, Claire herself, even his sisters? To that heart still too small for goodbyes, so that he'd cried bitterly when the monarch his sisters had raised from a caterpillar, for a science project, finally shook its stiff orange-black wings and lifted away into Central Park?

As wisping clouds moved idly eastward over the broad glittering lake, she spotted a small diner ahead on the left, an old white-frame box beneath two dark trees, with an oversized red sign flecked gray where the paint was coming off. They were on the back highway, State Route 9, which hugged the New York side of Lake Champlain; she'd wanted Stevie to see the mountains, the lake with its lovely pine islands—deciding this partly on the strength of memories of Plattsburgh beach vacations during her Montreal childhood. She wanted the two-lane back-highway, with its gentle curves and pretty lakefront houses; she wanted the rustic charm of the North Country, a way of easing herself back into the slower and more wholesome pace of life in Canada—not the dull muscular sameness of the American "Northway" with its huge trucks and constant traffic, a ruler-straight line plunging toward Quebec. So she'd left the Interstate at Lake George, followed the two-lane through farms and orchards and lakeside villages, Silver Bay, Ticonderoga, Westport, Willsboro, had just passed Ausable Point with its tree-crowded delta jutting dark into the blue-white waters of the lake.

But Stevie'd ignored the scenery, especially when she tried to point it out to him, and even Enya and the Brandenburg Concertos on the CD player hadn't relaxed her. The beat-up diner wasn't what she'd expected either. Still, it would have to do—Stevie wasn't a patient child. And it was almost one.

So she pulled the Contour off the highway and rolled to a stop just beneath the sign:  Twin Maples Diner. On either side the two great trees held their dark red crowns heavily in the summer air. Beneath them the diner looked undersized, with a dark-green dumpster at one end of it. Claire took the key from the ignition and for a moment looked at the trees, thinking wordlessly of their strength, their balance in the world. Then she glanced through the diner windows, catching a hint of red gingham. Tablecloths--of course, she told herself.

She looked at the sky:  mostly blue, but high clouds moving in. Still, the clear weather seemed to be holding. She'd worried about Peter and the girls. Her husband was driving the rental truck with their two daughters, old enough now at six and eight to ride with Dad from the City to their new home in Canada. A new home for them; a homecoming for her. She'd come in the car with Stevie, hoping the individual attention might calm him a bit, and obliged besides to stop and visit an aunt in Glens Falls, which she'd done yesterday—her mother's oldest sister, who'd clearly been uncomfortable with Stevie as he ran around her dining-room firing his "gun" at her cats. Peter was probably in Montreal by now, unloading things into their new place just off Cote des Nieges, whistling and joking with the girls while he worked—he hadn't had to sit the previous afternoon away drinking tea and pretending to be pleasant while constantly chasing a four-year-old.

But that was yesterday; now it was time for lunch. "Come on, Stevie," she said sternly, opening the door for him, immediately sorry to have sounded so gruff. He got out, still clutching the little plastic hammer, and looked up at the diner. "Do they have soda?"

"I'm sure they do," she said, looking a bit squeamishly through the front windows at the long counter with its plastic-covered stools. A middle-aged waitress, heavy-set, heavy-breasted and big-haired, was pouring coffee for two older men in jeans and tractor caps.

She pulled the creaking screen open and steered Stevie, her hand on his shoulders, to a booth in the far corner. The place reeked of bacon and eggs. Through the hissing from a grill came country music on an AM radio, the subdued hum of conversation, clinking of plates and silverware. On the wall behind the cash register was a framed poster of a kitten suspended from a branch by its forepaws, big white letters, Hang In There!  On the counter were local crafts for sale:  googly-eyed mosquitoes and black flies fashioned from pine cones and pipe cleaners.

Stevie slid reluctantly into the seat—he'd wanted to sit at the counter—but instantly jumped onto his knees when he saw the small table-style jukebox. "I know how to do these! Dad showed me!" Soon he was banging the metal-backed song-list pages back and forth, delighting in the racket.

Yes, Peter would have taught him that—my American man, she thought, who—when she spoke of her fears about Stevie's wildness and how her Canadian family might react—would get that light in his eyes and start singing, just to bug her, that old song by the Guess Who:

American woman,
stay away from me ...
American woman,
just let me be
I don't want your war
machine,
I don't want your
ghetto scene ...

Peter thought it was hilarious, and she always laughed too. But still she worried.

The waitress ambled over. "Know what you want?" she asked cheerfully. She had a broad, fleshy face, bright smiling eyes, flecked blonde hair in wisps beginning to gray. She glanced at Claire's clothes—the black sweater and tight black stirrup pants, the block-heeled shoes—then pulled a pencil from behind her ear.

"Hey there, sweetie!" she said to Stevie, and winked.

Stevie grew suddenly shy, looked down, and then questioningly up at Claire. She smiled at him and nodded slightly.

"You're a sweetie! Tweety-sweetie!" he chirped at the woman. Then he pointed his plastic hammer at her.   "Bam bam bam!"

The woman laughed—till she saw Claire's burning cheeks. "Stevie!" Claire snapped under her breath.  The boy turned to her quickly, his eyes suddenly huge, then shrank back onto the seat with his head down.

The waitress looked at the boy and then at Claire, at which Claire bristled inwardly; she seemed to be sizing them up. But the indignation passed quickly. Stevie had been too much for her lately; she couldn't help wondering what the older woman thought.

"I'm sorry," she explained. "He's ... well, he's a little wild sometimes. A willful child." It was the title of a book a friend in Manhattan had given her. She managed a weak smile.

The woman beamed at her and leaned closer, speaking in a low voice. "Don't worry," she said, in motherly tones. "I've got two grown-up sons, and they're just fine—turned out to be fine men. Know how to treat a woman right, for one thing. And at this age they were just the same—like whirling dervishes. I swear, thought I'd lose my mind. But I learned that little boys do a lot of things they don't really mean. That's the secret." She gave a friendly nod, straightened again, and said, "Now—what can I get you?"

They ordered and she brought the food. Hot dog, fries, and a diet caffeine-free coke for Stevie, chicken sandwich for Claire—the only thing on the menu she thought she might be able to stomach. She couldn't.

Suddenly there was a crash from the kitchen. Claire turned to see—through the order window with its little bell and tickets up on clothespins—a tall thin man in an apron and dirty white shirt. "AMANDA!" he bellowed. "Get in here and pick up the goddamn pans!"

Stevie had looked up at the crash and the shouting. But when nothing else happened he quickly returned to his hot dog, chewing fervently.

The old men at the counter exchanged glances. Then each drained his coffee cup, put money on the counter, and walked out, acting casual. The waitress came running from the pie cooler she'd been cleaning and disappeared through the door behind the counter.

There was more crashing in the back, a low, muffled voice, incoherent curses from the man. Claire held her breath, a horror poised in her. Then the waitress came out, pushing the sides of her perm back into place, face expressionless.

The door burst open behind her. It was the man again, standing with the door half-open and propped against his thigh. "I told you before!" he shouted. Then, catching Claire's look, he made his face go blank and went back into the kitchen.

"Why's that man yelling, Mom?" Stevie asked, eyes big with fear.

"Don't worry," Clair reassured him. She reached across the table and caressed his cheek. He smiled at her and went back to his hot dog.

The waitress crossed to the pie cooler, with its glass shelves and brightly lit interior, chocolate creme, coconut creme, banana creme, cherry, apple-rhubarb. She began to clean the glass again. Claire saw how her shoulders sagged. After a time she wiped her hands and came over to the booth.

Flushed with anger and mortification—the woman's and her own—Claire knew she couldn't just sit there.

"Would you like dessert?" the waitress asked with false brightness.

"Bad day?" Claire asked softly.

The woman looked down.  "No," she said, almost in a whisper. "Just like always." Then she roused herself. "We've got terrific pies ... "

"No. Thank you. We're fine."

"But I want pie, Mom—can I please?" Stevie whined. And of course he ordered chocolate creme. As the waitress concentrated on her order pad, Claire looked over toward the counter. Through the little window she saw the man again, leaning against the wall beside the grill, as if exhausted—maybe drunk. The waitress noticed and turned to see what she saw. Then she turned back with a stony look.

"My boys' father died three years ago," she confided. "I re-married." She began adding up their ticket.

Say it, Claire told herself.

"You don't have to take it," she blurted, though also in a whisper.

"I know, honey," the woman said with a sigh. "No offense, but that's just common sense. The thing is—how do you get out?"

"It doesn't matter," Claire said, unswerving. "What matters is that you really make up your mind.  If you do, you'll find a way."

The waitress stood with her pencil unmoving on the order pad, looking anxious. Then she smiled.

"I never really thought about it that way," she said. The smile faded. "He's a good man at heart," she murmured, sounding suddenly like a little girl.

Claire looked her straight in the eyes. "But that really doesn't matter, does it?" she said, her whisper growing hoarse.

The woman's expression hardened; Claire thought she might lose her temper.  You pushed too hard! 

Instead, the woman just shook her head. "No," she said firmly. "You're right. It doesn't." She finished the bill and laid it on the table.

When Stevie finally finished his pie, Claire went at his chocolate-covered cheeks with a napkin.  "Mom," he said as she rubbed, "we have to give her a good dip."

She looked quizzically at her son. "What's a—what do you mean?"

"You know," he said.  "Because she brought us food. Dad said you have to give a dip. Dad says he always gives a good dip for that lady at Denny's, because she's sad. So we should leave this lady one."

Claire looked keenly at the boy, a lump rising in her throat. "Because she's sad, you mean?"

Stevie nodded solemnly.

She paused, feeling her heart beating in her chest. "You're very good, you know that?" she told him softly. "Yes—we'll leave her a good tip."

After paying at the register, she paused at the door, holding Stevie's hand, to glance back. But the woman had returned to the pie cooler, was rubbing vigorously at the streaks on the glass.

Once she and Stevie were in the car, she paused, then looked up again at the twin maples.  Something was different in her life; she could feel it, however small. That woman—We…connected…

She found herself thinking about the roots of the trees, thick taproots grasping downward, branching out in upside-down versions of the trees before her. Somewhere in the darkness, she knew, in the close-packed earth, even under the car she was sitting in, those hundreds of side roots reaching outward—farther and thinner—like fingers. And of course the roots met each other there in the dark, touched each other, each tree drawing strength and balance from that unseen mingling with the other.

She started the Contour and soon they were off again, slipping past the wide gray-lit waters of the lake. She glanced over to the Vermont mountains green and beckoning beyond it. But maybe today wasn't the day for sight-seeing. I could find a connector to the Interstate… She heard Stevie start playing in the back.  "Bam bam bam!" he barked.

Claire half-turned to him and smiled, trying to keep one eye on the road. "You really love that hammer, don't you, Stevie?"

His eyes lit up. "It's a gun, Mom!"

"All right! All right!" She laughed. "It's a gun!"

Sunshine

At thirteen they made the pact, swore they'd reign forever. The Acid King and Queen. He told her you have to do it this way, taking off his clothes in the middle of the woods and folding them on a patch of pine, because it's ritual, it shows a way to God. She nodded and peeled herself naked. He tried not to look at those freckled breasts, knowing she knew he was looking just the same.  They couldn't hide anything.

This is ceremony.

She said she knew that too.

They scored the yellow blotter from her cousin's friend, the one who said it would burn right through their brains. No matter. They already couldn't concentrate in class, couldn't stop drinking their parents' liquor, couldn't barely wait the three months before they'd be policed at 4:00 AM in the orange chairs of the elementary school, Wizard of Oz singing Dark Side of the Moon off some teacher's VCR.

In the woods they held each other's hands and the trees bent into a portal blowing a voice through their flesh. She came down talking of a tunnel in her grandmother's basement, that behind a bookshelf burrowed not into the middle of the earth, but a secret passageway to the second floor restroom of JC Pennies.  He said God lived in the dirt, and she agreed, said Hippo Penis, and they found laughter everlasting under the cap of a small red tree.

Mostly he rode his bike past her house morning and night tasting the air that watched her window and not feeling the crucible already hanging from his neck.

Escher

Fifteen.

The stairways went up and down and came around to beetles and fish, open panes of window glass dripping soaked and drowned.

She hung posters in her room, he drew imitations on the desks.

The hits were big—MC Eschers under their eyelids—and they went to class, laughed off lessons, learned walls can cry and breathe.

They ran away from home and stole her grandmother's Maxima with the factory equalizer and Guns & Roses all the way to the beach, a mix tape with nothing but Sweet Child O' Mine and November Rain over and over again.

But later he'd remember not the strips of Eschers they ate like Twizzlers, but the way she willed their car into space and took him in a Motel Six, her hands showing him there were still some beautiful things.

He could look right through her skull.

She could taste him in her throat.

The Eschers got bigger, stronger, and sometimes he worried the acid would be too much.

Next thing they're at the 7/11 and she's just gotten her license and leaves the car idling outside. Somehow she's arguing with the clerk, her purple batik skirt washing away the white light, saying the rotisserie dogs are cold, the nacho cheese is runny, and by the way, where's the secret passage to the world under the sea?  And there he is, his pupils wide as quarters, saying he's found it, right here beneath the Pennzoil display. Somewhere in the distance a clerk is saying Hey now, Hey now, and the words slip away even as they're said. Backing up, spreading his arms like Jesus Christ. At a full sprint he dives into the portal. Wow, she says. Wow, Wow, Wow. The bottom of the ocean shoots out of the hole, drips from the ceiling, spills from his scraggly blond hair. The clerk with a mop like a baseball bat, trying not to slip, pursuing and tumbling through the aisles. And because no one ever noticed, she rolls up the celebrity magazines and sidles out the door.

It was easy to blame the Eschers.

They found a way to hold hands at psychic distances and push their fingers safely through one another's skin.  And he'd only just started to say there had to be another way, as something made her smile, laugh, even if he already could tell it wasn't funny anymore.

We're made of plastic, she said, her face in her hands.

To prove it: a shard of glass he'd found the universe in, an anatomy lesson of flesh and blood.

Later during the three-day hold, the ER wouldn't believe he'd done it for all the right reasons: not because he loathed himself or wanted to die, but because he loved.

There's a way to lose yourself completely.

Which got his hold bumped to a week.

Microdots

This is when senior year never happened, when the holds and evals are steady and predictable, when she's in his room, showing him the acceptance to a college he swears does not exist.

From the Carmex container he dumps the purple microdots like caviar between.

To celebrate.

To push them all the way.

But she had given it up, too much unhinging the final door, coming too close to the God they'd been looking for all along. And she wasn't ready.

But there she is, eating acid all the same.

They stare at the acceptance letter written in a language he lost in a swirl of mental pixels by November of eleventh grade.

She tells him not to apologize or abdicate the throne.

He doesn't say it was always more than a pact, and she doesn't say he never has to.

Jesus Christ on a motorcycle: these hits are really strong.

The thing with acid is this. It's you in there, always has been, and just now, for this time, while your hand does cartwheels and your mind can't hold the seconds together tight enough, even then it's you.

Their clothes folded on floor instead of pine, their legs crabbed together, her hand in his stringy yellow hair.

They want me on medication.

Medication?

Not like this.

The place where his laugh once was is disappearing.

Heavy.

She can see the word fall right through the floor.

Heavy.

Her neck elastic now, his hands working. She slips him inside and feels him crying Houses of the Holy and Wish You Were Here.

This is when you remember it's dangerous to feel too much.

He snakes through and she lolls her head back and forth. It rushes between: what her mom's boyfriend said he didn't do when she was twelve, what his dad had said so often in whispers and in rage.

So many ways to use a voice.

It wasn't about God, either. All the acid in the world. Because she saw through it that time they ran away, Guns & Roses for 200 miles, his hand on her neck like maybe, just maybe, her head would dislodge and fly out the sunroof, and there he'd be, trying to explain to cops, parents, everyone, why she's lost her mind.

In the truck stop with the rigs lined like caskets, the smell of gas and yellow light, their seats reclined, the sunroof open, the night wide and forever above: they were too far already to double back. Dawn would beat them home and their parents would know the kids were not all right.

Sunshine, Escher, Microdots.

It gets into the hair, seeps into the spine.

He plucks one deep, the gray matter clinging to the follicle. She pushes her fingers through his neck, dips the hair into the spinal fluid, and they suck both ends like nectar from honeysuckle on a hot August day.

But that's not what's he's saying with the acceptance letter still unread.     

It's about a squirrel.

Somewhere he remembers to roll down a window, clear his throat and spit.

She moves their hands, finds what might be a constellation and follows it to design. Gods and humans, November Rain again and again. A truck shifts into gear and a sun, their sun, blinks on the horizon.

Squirrels, microdots, medication.

Somewhere there are parents in an argument about who their children are.

It's really about how he and his brother trapped the squirrel at the bottom of the outside stairs, the ones with the three stone walls that led to the basement, and how the brother, older, already gone, didn't have to say anything to start the exercise, didn't have to explain why to the twelve year-old at his side.

There's a tunnel, don't you understand?  And when we find it we can get away.

Their hands on the emergency brake together, he tells her this is my family.

His brother who chased the squirrel into the pit, and how all he had to do was nod at their father's unused pitchfork beside the never-yet-strewn pine straw, the one his dad brought home, drunk, loud, standing in the front door with the porch light's silhouette casting him across the room.

Only a perfect throw would do, gravity and patience, aim and will.

Afterwards they didn't even bury it, just his brother slapping his shoulder, reciting lines from movies that never got made.

Already he knew God would stop listening and it didn't matter from here on out—what he did, how hard he looked—the world would hide its beauty.

They leave the truck stop, hole up in the Motel Six, and she tries everything she can to show him how to find it, swearing up and down that they will be enough. 

But this is when she's not in the basement and losing her mind and crying on microdots, but when she's alone and crying at the face he couldn't shake, the one candle lit in the mirror, him picking at the corner of his pupils that refused to ever shrink, and she, rushing at him with the cup of water, trying to extinguish the candle and the mirror and everyway his face suggests all that has gone wrong.

Liquid

But it was too late to wash it all away.

Sixteen years later, when the child they would never have is sucking down liquid, tripping her way into bliss, she awoke at a reunion with her husband and the story everyone was dying to tell.

How he had lived through a kid, a divorce, an institution with white walls and locked doors that called him its own. A deluge had come from God and he never found that olive branch or the return of his sweet white dove.

She could never be a sweet white dove.

How he swerved into the ER lane, ran to the waiting room and tried to untangle the wire and ball sculptures that kept the kids distracted while the hospital sterilized everything left unsaid. There would be no note except the article in the morning paper and the remaining silence was a hammer that began to smash her life away.

How he held the security guards with the .45 he stole long ago from his dad, backed his way into the small chapel, a few pews and a giant cross and a little piano in the corner. He sat, smiled, cracked his knuckles and soothed the opening chords of the next nine minutes of her November Rain.

And how he doesn't have to sing because by the time he reaches the second verse they're people at the doors singing for him, nurses and patients and a janitor tilting his life on a broom, knowing it's his wedding and funeral wrapped into one. He shakes more sound out of the piano than the chapel can hold, his color coming back, his arms tightening up, pounding away at the silence with his own little hammers to show her what beauty might mean and how to get there.

And then we're at the 7/11, and the cops are at the door, pushing the rest of us aside, working their way into the pews and up the aisle. It's too late. He's started his crescendo. And we all begin to sing. You're not the only one, you're not the only one.  And he raises his hands like Christ on the cross, sprints up the aisle and into the hall with the .45 in hand, tossing the unsuspecting deputy through the gift shop's glass door.

And I know my part because no one ever notices. I reach into the toppled gift shop rack and grab the magazines, rolling them under my shirt, already outside before someone doesn't see he never stole the bullets.

I take the crucible and begin to run, leaving our kingdom behind, take it the rest of the way to the tunnel beneath the road, the one that digs down deep where God can never find us. I hurry inside, descending, descending, and knowing right or wrong this is the only way I can hear it if I ever tell it all myself.

My father had a girlfriend named Lydia Johnson during my junior year of high school. This was after the county commissioner elections where my father had all kinds of things from nail files to coffee mugs printed up with his name on them and even a billboard on the interstate with a picture of him and my mother both. Before the election we drove past that billboard a lot because my mother thought she looked really professional in it, and she would always say how they looked like a million bucks, like people you could trust to run the whole country let alone the county. After the election, my mother refused to take the interstate. The billboard company wouldn't cover up the campaign poster until somebody else bought the space and had their ad pasted over it, and so my mother took the long way to everything, and as a result I got to see a lot of backwater parts of this town that I hadn't even known existed. My mother left soon after that, and I can't really say that it made a whole lot of difference to me one way or another. She had spent a lot of time watching her soaps and the news, and for some reason she was always mailing cards and blankets to her favorite newscasters when they had babies or birthdays but could never remember my birthday or even to thaw out a ham for supper.

After she left, my father dated a couple of women but never brought any of them back to the house. My father decided not to run for office again even though before the election he had said he would. He went back to his landscaping business where he cut a bunch of accounts and let go of his employees and made it so that it was just him, a one-man show.

The next fall there was Lydia. They didn't say how they met, and I never asked. I probably should have paid more attention to what my father was doing around then, but the truth is I had my own life and my own problems to deal with at school. Lydia was a housecleaner, but in her free time she liked to go dancing and dressed pretty flashy for it. She liked to wear these small vests that seemed useless to me over tight T-shirts. She kept her permed hair up in a half ponytail with a poof on the crown of her head, and I always wondered what she put under there to keep it up. She was a little like my mother in that she didn't seem to talk about any real people we knew but instead talked about celebrities and fads like they were part of her life. She did not go to college and wasn't from here and sometimes she said things that made me think she was just pretending to be a housecleaner named Lydia Johnson, but around then I had pretty well trained myself not to care about most things.

What my father and Lydia did together did not concern me. I supposed at the time that they were out at bingo halls and bowling alleys—the kind of places where you distracted yourself from the cheap meal you were eating by focusing on your game.  Sometimes my father did not come home at night, but I had his old car to go to school and when I came home he was usually back. This is how it was in the fall, and then in November Lydia stopped coming around. I didn't ask about her, but one night my father spit out a bit of reheated pork chop and told me that she had moved to another state and that it was probably for the best since he hadn't been paying attention to me like he should've. I guess he was apologizing and maybe our relationship could have come a long way if I had said something right then, but I thought to myself that I liked it better without him paying attention and said nothing.

Then in the spring on a Friday, without knocking, Lydia opened the side door which we always used instead of the front door. My father and I were in the living room watching a TV movie, and Lydia walked across to the TV and hit the power button.

My father spoke first as though Lydia had only returned from a quick run to the store. "You're welcome to pull up a chair and watch."

I got out of my chair and went to the window. There was no car in the driveway so someone must have dropped her off or she took a cab though I have never seen a cab this far out in the country.

"I've been helping my mother sort through her things and move into a nursing home," Lydia said. She must have felt a little awkward about her dramatic entrance because she turned the TV back on at low volume and then sat down in my chair. She'd stopped wearing those little vests and had on a printed blouse with a large metallic bangle on the chest where the waist ties threaded through. "Her old timer's disease is getting worse, but this place is real nice, first class. If it weren't full of old folks, I wouldn't mind living there myself. Pool, tennis courts, social events. It's like a palace. I think there's even a massage parlor."

"That's nice," said my father. I personally thought it was nice to have Lydia chirping in here since we didn't usually talk much, but I could tell that my father didn't want her to think that her leaving was just going to be swept under the rug without a discussion.

"Let's go dancing," Lydia said. "I know this good place out by the township building."

"I don't dance," my father said coldly.

"Then let me take the girl out."

"She doesn't want to," my father said and turned his face toward the TV to show that he'd said his piece and that was that.

"Let's go," I said, mostly because I didn't like my father speaking for me when it came to what I wanted and what I didn't.

That was all Lydia needed to know she'd won. "Quick now and put on some dancing clothes," she said to me, and I ran upstairs.

•

In my father's truck, I sat in the middle seat that's not really a seat, just a converted armrest-cupholder. Lydia sat in the passenger seat picking receipts and candy wrappers out of her purse and shoving them down into the ashtray which struck me odd like something a child would do. It's habits like that that make it hard to say how old she was. Except for her hands, which were cracked and rough from the chemicals she used at work, her body seemed young, mid-thirties maybe, but she said things that made me think she must have been a lot older, around fifty like my father.

My father was silent behind the wheel, but I could tell his resolve was starting to wear down. He didn't want to seem like a pushover, but his leaning towards anyone was usually forgiveness and a second chance. He liked people and knew how to make them like him though it was a skill he did not use very often in those years after my mother.

When we arrived, I saw that it wasn't a dance hall at all but a township building that they used in the summer for livestock shows and fairs. It was one of those metal prefab jobs that you can frame and cover in a single afternoon once you've got the foundation set. We parked in the gravel lot where there were already thirty or forty cars and headed for the open door where light and music and the smell of frying were pouring out. Lydia strode right in without looking back while my father stopped and paid at a card table set up next to the door. A wooden dance floor had been laid out in the center of the concrete, and folding chairs sat all around the edges. At the head of the dance floor a raised box for the DJ bore the sign "The Tractor Twang," and around the top of the walls were T-shirts with those same three words, a different T-shirt for every year since thirty some years ago. Just where we came in a long window cut into the wall and you could see into the kitchen where they were cooking up burgers and had a great kettle of nacho cheese bubbling on the stove.

"Get over here," Lydia said, and I looked over my shoulder to see if she was talking to my father, but he was still at the card table talking to the bouncers whom he must have known from somewhere else. "Yes, you," she said and took hold of my elbow leading me to the dance floor. She stepped up onto it, then turned around to give me a good look like she'd been aware of me as a bargaining chip earlier but just then wanted to make sure I was fit to be seen with. She lifted my hair off my neck and let it fall back, and I shivered. "You have nice hair, would look really nice with some bangs. I'll bring my scissors round next time and trim it for you."  She wiped the corners of my mouth with her thumb and pointer finger and undid the top button on my shirt and said, "Now you're beautiful.  Let's go."

There were two circles of people on the dance floor. The center circle faced out and was all women while the outside circle faced in and was all men. A small lady in a fringed shirt shouted into a microphone, "Even numbers, people. We need to even this up. Let's get two more ladies into the cowboy ring." 

I stepped into the men's circle, but Lydia pulled me back. "No you don't," she said. "When you do it right, dancing with a person is like making love to them. You go over to that side and you're going to be making love to girls all night. Now put your shoulders back. And smile. Like you mean it."

The lady with the microphone called out a song to the DJ, counted eight beats, and then named a step. I was a pretty good dancer and went to all the school dances, but I didn't know this style of dancing. I kept my eyes on Lydia and copied everything she did with her feet, which she moved from corner to corner of an imaginary square. I studied that for a while until I thought I had it mastered and then started to work in her arm movements.

Lydia glanced at me and then leaned over without losing her step. "Stop acting like some kind of trained monkey," she said in a low voice. "I'm going to tell you this and save you years of trying to figure this out by yourself."  The announcer called out another step, and we all circled our partners till we came back to where we'd started. "The moves are not important, not in dancing and not in sex either.  Some women buy magazines full of fancy sex tricks and do you think any man ever takes notice?  What a man wants is to think that he is a skilled lover. Even if he is fucking you up the ass by mistake, you got to moan and smile and praise him, and the more he thinks you're enjoying it—the more he thinks he is some sort of love-making god—the more he's going to enjoy it and think he's found some sort of love-making goddess."  I could feel my face going red and looked down at the floor, but Lydia yanked my chin back up and hissed at me, "And for him to know you're loving it, you've got to look at him."

It was true that I hadn't seen any of my partners yet. Every few minutes, the announcer would yell "Rotate" into the microphone, and all the women would shift counterclockwise while all the men shifted the other way. I hadn't taken a good look at the first three, just felt their damp palms as we switched places and then swung each other back into our original circles. I looked up at the fourth one. He had on cowboy boots and a hat, and his belt buckle was the size of saucer. This was the idea of dressing up held by lots of folks around there even though it seemed to me like a costume, something to wear if you were in a John Wayne movie. He looked about my father's age and had faint facial hair and thick fingers. Each finger was as thick as a wooden broom handle and about as rough too, and I wondered what a person could do with fingers like that, if he could even turn a page in a book or button up his own shirts. I gave him a polite smile and nod but nothing like the show Lydia was putting on for her partner. She smiled broadly and laughed a laugh that never died out, just got louder or softer depending on the speed of the steps.

I finished out the song with two more partners and then excused myself. I felt sort of dirty, the way coins get when too many people have handled them, and, come to think of it, my hands had the smell of old coins about them. I thought it was kind of cruel for Lydia to have brought my father along and then dance with other men all night. In line for some nachos, I searched the crowd for my father, who was standing by the water cooler talking to a crowd of people. He was telling some kind of story, and the whole group was paying attention. My father's family had lived around here for at least five generations, and that's why he could find a tie between him and everybody he met. Finding that tie was his excuse for starting conversations. First, he'd say you looked familiar or he knew somebody with your last name, and then you'd compare schools and family histories till you came up with a match. No connection was too small for my father either. Just knowing you'd gotten food poisoning from the same state fair his parents had once gone to was enough for him to treat you like an old friend, like some long lost part of his personal history. He was always sincere about his interest in people, and it showed.

By the time I got my nachos, he had moved on to another group. Lydia was still dancing, though now the circular formation had dissolved and people were just dancing any which way. The bit of anger I had felt towards Lydia disappeared. She was good for my father; he looked happy out here among people. Seeing him shaking hands and laughing, I felt it in my bones that he was reaching some sort of turning place, shaking off that mood he'd had since my mother left, and maybe would even run for office again.

I threw out the rest of my nachos and headed for the rest room which was housed in a separate, shed-like building a couple yards away. A few girls were seated on the bench outside, and I recognized them from school. All three of them had been pregnant last year, but this year they were thin again. There was a rumor that one of them had let her baby fall off a bed and break its collar bone, and she hadn't even noticed until the sitter pointed it out. None of them had their babies with them then. Before, I would have talked to these girls, but then I didn't know what to say anymore; it didn't seem to me like we had much to say to each other.

The one with the broken collar bone baby caught sight of me at the end of the bench. "This isn't a line," she said. "We're not waiting in line. Go on in."

•

When I came out of the bathroom stall, Lydia was there. She had her purse in one of the sinks and was leaning close to the mirror with an eyebrow pencil. She caught sight of me in the mirror and said, "I can tell you don't like me much."

This took me by surprise. "No, I like you," I protested, but it sounded like a lie even though I hadn't meant it to be one.

"That's all right," she said ignoring me. "Lord knows you don't have any reason to trust anybody, and that is a real good quality to have. That's something that's going to take you a long way." 

"Why'd you come back?" I asked.

She put the pencil back in her purse and pulled out a lipstick. "Don't know really. I guess I'm going soft. I shouldn't of."

I didn't know what she meant by that, the getting soft part. Maybe she was sorry to be getting involved with a man with a daughter. I guess that's not anybody's first choice.

She said, "Your father's always been good to me, but he's the kind of guy thinks everything's got to mean something. You can hardly do anything around him without him taking it for some kind of sign. You know what I mean?"

I shook my head no.

"Of course you don't. You don't know enough men to know what I mean." She returned the lipstick to her purse and removed a hair pick. "You're still a virgin, aren't you?"

I blushed and scrubbed my hands under the faucet without looking at her.

"Didn't mean to pry," she said and zipped up her purse. On her way out she stopped. "I'm not really such a bad person. You can't blame me."

•

Back inside, my father was talking to still another group of people, but when he saw me, he came over. "Having a good time, dear?" he asked.

"Not bad," I shrugged.

"Need some money for the food counter?"

"I already ate."

"I found some old friends around here," he said. "Do you remember the Dunlevies?  We used to live next to them on Fish Hatchery Lane when you were just a baby."  The song ended, and the DJ started up a slow tune. He continued, "I've been trying to get Lydia's attention for a dance, but she won't look over my way."

"She tried to teach me," I said. "But I didn't really get it."

"Well," he said.  "I think I know how to get her attention."  My father picked up a folding chair and headed for the dance floor. He held the chair like it was a woman with one arm around the back and the other hand on the side of the folded down seat. My father swayed with his chair among the real couples, and slowly an empty space began to form around him. Some people laughed in a friendly way, and my father smiled as he danced. He liked attention and liked a joke and didn't mind making it at his own expense. By this point in the evening he had talked up most of the people here, and they were on his side. My father danced, throwing in some spins to please the crowd, and by then Lydia had to have noticed. He was waiting for her to come over and substitute herself for the chair, but she kept on dancing with some short, mustached guy at the other side of the dance floor as though she hadn't noticed at all.

My father continued to sway with the folding chair, but the mood started to spoil.   People had stopped watching him and had turned away. I remember wondering why that slow dance was so unnaturally long. I started to hate Lydia and him too for not stopping and sitting down already. He kept shuffling up there in a slow, small circle with a look on his face which was no longer good-natured and joking but faraway, dreaming. I hated that face, and I don't think I have ever hated anything since with the intensity of my hatred for him in that moment.

Lydia never did come over. Eventually the announcer in the fringed shirt tapped on my father's shoulder and tried to take away the chair to dance with him, but my father pretended not to notice her and did a partial turn with the chair away from her.

I suppose I should have felt sorry for my father, but all I felt was angry with him and embarrassed for myself. I didn't want anybody to make the connection between me and the man dancing with a chair so I left to go sit in the truck. My father had the keys so I couldn't turn on the radio, and I just sat there in silence except for faint music and occasional cheering drifting out from the dance floor. The moon wasn't full but big and was giving off the kind of light that makes everything seem smoother and calmer than it really is. Nothing much happened.  I saw a group of women leave together in a station wagon. A drunk took a swing at one of the bouncers. By the bathhouse, a stray dog tossed a baby rabbit into the air and then chased it into some bushes. At one point, I saw a woman who might have been Lydia get into a truck with a man and drive away.

I could have been waiting for five minutes or half an hour when my father finally came out. He said, "There you are. I've been looking all over for you."

He put the truck in drive, and I asked, "What about Lydia?  How will she get home?"

A spray of gravel went up behind us, and he said, "Lydia doesn't need anybody to look after her."  And I think that's the last we ever said anything about Lydia Johnson.

•

For a long time after that, it seemed clear to me that Lydia must have been some kind of stripper if not an outright prostitute. I could not imagine my father in a strip club, but thinking of Lydia this way made it easier to hate her. Now, though, it seems likely that she really was just what she said she was: a housecleaner with a mother with Alzheimer's. She didn't want to risk tying herself to a broken man like my father. And I can't really blame her for wanting to enjoy herself.

And it would be unfair to blame her for everything, for what happened to my father after that, because, really, it was a long time coming. Months after my mother had left, I asked my father to write me an excuse for school. What he handed back to me was not the note I needed but a single sheet of paper with the date, written in dying ink, and after that no ink at all, just the scratches and dents a bone dry pen makes across paper. He had filled the sheet and the back side too, and I do not know what kind of world of grief a man's mind goes to where he cannot tell his pen has run out of ink.

I suppose I am not without blame either. It took a long time for me to realize that there is a difference between living and letting things happen to you, which is mostly what I have done. I ended up not finishing high school, and I married the first person who asked me. I was sad to leave my father but didn't ever think of staying. My husband was a navy recruit, and he took me out to live on a base in California. Our house is too small, but I keep it nice, and everyone says motherhood suits me, which I happen to agree with. Sometimes, though not often, I have this feeling like I've married a stranger, and it is then that I think about what passed between my father and me the night we went dancing at the Tractor Twang.

That night we last saw Lydia, my father didn't say much on the way home. In the driveway, he shut off the engine but didn't get out of the truck. He kept his hands on the wheel and looked straight ahead and said, without any kind of introduction, "When we started dating, your mother and me, we loved to ski. Loved it. Every weekend we were up at Liberty Mountain and sometimes we'd drive the whole way up there in the evening just for a couple of runs down the mountain. Your mother wasn't very good at first but she wouldn't quit because she liked the way she looked in her ski suit. And she did look good. We had this matching set, both of us, all red with a black V across the chest and the back."  He paused. "Or, I thought it was black, but she always said navy blue, and I guess she was right, though I didn't really think it mattered."  He glanced over at me. He looked tired. His thick silver hair seemed gray and brittle just then. "Matching ski suits. I think that's something that only happens to you once in your life."

I didn't know what to say to that. I sat there and pulled my hands up into my sleeves because we were still in that part of the spring where the evenings are chilly.

My father tossed the keys onto the dash and got out of the truck. The porch light had been out for weeks so he came up to the door in the dark feeling for each step carefully with his feet. He climbed the stairs slowly, leaving the side door open behind him. He did not turn on any lights. From the truck, I could hear the faint sound of his feet across the kitchen, then the living room, then on the old sagging stairs as he climbed them in the dark. I heard the almost human groan of his bed as he lay down and then silence.

And I remember thinking that this was the moment when my father gave up. Things were finished for him. A small but persistent motor running inside him had wound down and died.