The cyan sky clashing tight against the green hillsides along the Ohio River made Alain Bell wonder why he ever did drugs. Not lately, and not a frequent vice by any means. Less frequent if the sky looked like this daily. Few places it even came close. Tucson, maybe. Alpine, Texas maybe. Alain had been both places on a burn-across-the-country trip with his first cousin and a now-dead friend. Drugs were a less frequent vice since Lottie had thrown up blood and died in the back seat of his brown Pinto ten years before, too.

Too much coke he and Jill hadn't known she'd bought from a guy with stringy butter-blonde hair at the Denny's on Dyer in El Paso, Texas. Stepped on with, among other things, a lye-based industrial cleanser. Her heart excited banging blood through the damaged membranes twice as fast, sending a black angel to rip her soul out of her thick blonde skull. Not thick enough to save her from the angel, or her own stupidity. More's the pity, Alain thought. Now, that's what he thought. Then, he'd been a bit less acerbic.

The autumn sky hurt his pale gray eyes like it always did, too much coffee and driving the old pickup out to Anderson to deliver another piece of antique furniture Pop had decreased in thickness by a layer or two in the refinishing. Too many times it'll all disappear -- Brad Bell's tacit motto. Brad didn't care. He was good, did good work. Just did it. Just did it day in day out every day like Alain drove from Point Pleasant all over the area and back in the old white pickup. Like everybody he knew all his life living here just did it, whatever it was. Growing things, fixing things, playing music, teaching school. You did it, you bought food and a roof over your head, you died and some of the money buried you somewhere, usually up the hill. The Ohio flooded too often, it had to be up the hill.

Alain didn't want to be buried -- he wanted to be burned. He'd had the 'organ donor' option marked on his license. Wanted to be parted out and fried, put in a little leather box to be left on a shelf somewhere and nobody wasting tears or silk or flowers. He was still single, though. Maybe having somebody to waste tears or silk or flowers would change his outlook. Alain doubted it.

Still single never married dad once removed. Kay Lynn the liar -- I use a diaphragm -- fat blonde, little male clone of herself spawned unintending by Alain Bell three years before. He'd learned three things -- wear a rubber, watch where you leave the seeds, never sleep with a woman you don't want to take a chance on an accident with. Kyle was cute enough, but fat and dull like his mother. She'd made his name sound like hers, even. Not exactly the same, but close. At least she hadn't wanted to name him Alain.

Josie Bell had a hell of an imagination -- his name was pronounced 'Allen'. He seldom corrected anyone who misspelled it that way. Close enough. 'Alain' was a European spelling. Like Alain would ever see Europe.

Hell, he hadn't even made Los Angeles on the trip with Jill and Lottie. Had ended it up at a Holiday Inn in Tucson, Arizona while the police lobbed questions at him and Jill nobody could have answered but Lottie, stiff in a pool of her own blood, curled fetal in the rear of the Pinto. She'd never made a sound. They'd thought she was sleeping. Neither of them had been stupid enough to carry drugs that far from home at their age, let alone buy them from a total stranger in a strange place.

"Did you know she had it?" gray, stiff vice sergeant who'd seen just about everything, taking the 'bad cop' role except there wasn't a 'good cop' and Alain was small meat, to whom he answered politely and refused to dredge up anything but the truth. Probably a disappointment to the cop, but there wasn't anything else. He knew they'd found nothing on him, nothing on Jill, nothing in the car except what Lottie had -- the killer coke. No record locally. No record back home.

Jill had broken down and the cops had been nice to her. Alain guessed if he'd crumpled they'd have been gentler with him, but losing control scared him too much, and it had been his job to take care of the girls. He already knew he'd failed miserably in Lottie's case, but what she didn't tell him he couldn't have known. Losing control would have made him seem guilty of something other than his ignorance. He didn't want to if he could help it; he could help it and he didn't. This cop didn't exactly have a Jones out for his composure, though. He just seemed pissed off to have it dumped in his lap.

"Listen, man," Alain had said to the officer, lighting a cigarette. "You and I are in boats a whole lot alike. I wasn't doing drugs or carrying. Even if I had been I wouldn't have been dumb enough to buy cheap coke from somebody I didn't know in a strange city. I warned her not to, so she just didn't tell me. I bugged her about it major just last night. Jill and I both did. We didn't want this to happen but it's exactly what we were worried about. It was like telling her not to scratch..."

Alain didn't think he'd said anything appealing. He'd never known what of that had opened up a door in the cop's head, but something had.

They'd put him back in the room with Jill and she'd locked herself around his neck like a barnacle, whimpering. She'd never been quite the same after their night in the Tucson police station, but Alain supposed he probably hadn't, either. Jill had quit using anything much stronger than coffee and cold pills, and Alain had never touched cocaine again. He could imagine what kind of pain that must have been. And Lottie had seen enough coke already by age eighteen, she'd have been able to see if it had been an obvious step-job. He didn't begin to trust himself to know it, if she hadn't.

If he did anything, he smoked marijuana once in a blue moon -- but it would have screwed up his appreciation of a day like this. No horizon, just slightly dry, still-green tree tops crammed up against a ribbon of blue all along the Ohio. He shouldn't do it at all, or drink, but he did both. Sometimes to excess, seldom alone, and usually he arranged not to have to drive himself home. Even if that meant riding home and coming back for his ride the next day. Brad didn't really mind that, even if it interfered with a pickup or delivery once in a while. Better, he'd hinted, to have Alain in one piece and still a licensed driver, and not have to liberate the work truck from impound.

Down inside Alain knew that meant his father loved him. But Brad Bell always made such things seem so sensible; so pragmatic. There was little affection in the way they cared for each other -- just faith. Alain was always there when his father needed him, and Brad returned the favor.

Better than most men in their late twenties got on with their fathers, he supposed. It didn't want expression -- they both knew it was there. Somehow it just seemed flat. No character. Stale beer. But even stale beer would serve its purpose, and the relationship was precisely the same.

One thirty-five and counting on a Thursday. Nearly ten years before Jill had married a guy from Chicago she met at the University of Cincinnati; dropped out of college and moved to Oregon to join a borderline religious cult -- well, according to Uncle Earl, who thought the Boy Scouts were a borderline cult. Everything was 'almost' something dangerous to Earl, as if the whole society he lived in were screaming down a frictionless funnel. Alain felt that way sometimes too, but not about everything, like Earl. Mostly, he felt that way about himself.

The Chevy truck he drove now had 240,000 miles and some change on the engine, transmission and drive train. Two alternators and two carburetors were all he'd replaced besides the usual belts, hoses, batteries. If GM was still turning out trucks like this, and construction companies still paved a road like they'd paved this smooth, flat four-lane thoroughfare paralleling the old muddy Ohio, not everything in the world could be rotten yet. The road had been here as long as Alain had been alive -- longer. Definitely longer. He and Brad had argued about it for an hour one day until Brad called the County Engineer and had it confirmed straight in Alain's ear. Alain hadn't even cared much; had suspected his father was right. Watching Brad's frustration -- mild, self-righteous -- tickled Alain somehow. Nothing had hung in the balance. Brad hadn't been really pissed, just kind of sharpened. When he was working wood and when he was right in an argument Brad Bell had his true edge. Alain admired him. Wished he had an edge; suspected he didn't.

But he wasn't sure he loved anything with single-minded devotion like his father. Working wood, proving himself right in an argument and being married to Josie. Alain had never been in love with a woman. Not even the first one. Though not for lack of trying. Sometimes Alain thought he'd been through every woman within five years of his age in the Tri-State area. He was ready at this point to call off even the five-year limit. Legal age and younger than his mother, maybe that was more realistic. Maybe he was wasting his time limiting himself to single women... English speaking women... hell, maybe drawing the line at --

"Whoa there, Casper. Desperate but not latent yet..."

He turned on the radio -- the local piss-warm boring mainstream rock station. Now in the throes of financial trouble, all the DJs -- even the vets -- had a sort of low-key panic in their voices, as if they desperately wanted to beg you to stay tuned even if you hated Genesis because We used to be the coolest thing in town and we ate all the other stations who ever competed with us through slightly shady, monopolistic deals and alienated most of the people who used to love us by aiming for the lowest common denominator but -- hey! Hey...

Pitiful -- Cincinnati radio kind of stank. Alain had loved FM radio as a teenager. There'd been a time he'd had a handful of rock stations all barking his advertising dollar. When he hadn't even had a dollar, half the time. Maybe that had been the problem. The people who'd really loved radio hadn't had the silver to keep it alive. They were bored kids stuck home, no cars to drive, or if they did nowhere to go... too far out from the city to have much to do but screw, scrounge up dope and beer and drive around listening to the radio.

If he missed it, of course the songs were all still here. Most of what the station played was ten years old and more. The format had barely changed since then. Barely changed at all...

He turned right, up away from the Ohio on Eight Mile Road, into the nouveau riche and old money and starving themselves to squeak out a life in this township. Anderson Township, the invisible nose-up suburb. Everybody recognized names like Terrace Park, Indian Hill. Alain knew nothing much west of Riverfront Stadium, Vine Street up through the Corryville strip, the University of Cincinnati. He'd driven ruts in the road from there east, Fairfax, Norwood, Tusculum, Eastgate, Clermont. Not unusual -- Cincinnati was and had long been sharply divided by Interstate 75. Too wide to spit or throw rocks across, or east- and west-siders would spend all their free time doing one or the other of those things.

They all thought he was a hick, though. Long hair, pickup truck. Touch of Ohio River Valley twang. Like he had on hobnails and his hands were dirty. Clermont County -- he'd as well have said Appalachia to some people. Or Jakarta, Indonesia for that matter. He'd got a good education out of his small-town school, probably as good as any Catholic school kid in the city. He watched PBS and read a few books a month if he felt the urge and liked the reviews. Listened to a little NPR. Not a total redneck.

It must have been the pickup truck. In fine enough shape for a six-year-old truck, but obviously a utility vehicle. Alain's old Ford Escort wasn't any better for improving his image. It was hard-used, had never been much of a car, the radio worked most of the time, the cassette deck wasn't quite as reliable. But Brad had been willing to float him an interest-free loan on it, which Alain worked off in the shop. After he'd paid off the loan Brad had started paying Alain by the mile and Alain had found a small third-floor apartment in New Richmond that took in the sun nicely early in the mornings and didn't cost too much. Brad didn't pay much, but Alain didn't do much. It seemed a fair enough trade.

Except Alain had never learned to do anything else. He knew the mechanics of the wood business well enough but there was obviously some magic in it for Brad that Alain didn't possess or have access to. Right now he knew how to drive a stick shift, how to find anything on the eastern side of I-75, how to roll a joint, how to load a rifle, how to do minor auto maintenance and repairs, and how to cook five or six very simple meals. He could get any book from the library if it was available. He could fill out his own taxes.

Alain usually refused to think what would happen to him if anything happened to his father. He could continue to do the work, of course and find a kid to do the deliveries. He didn't love the work as Brad did, but he knew if push came to shove he could do it well enough to feed him and his mother.

Better if he hired someone to do the woodworking and kept on with what he was doing. But not much.

Best if nothing happened to Brad Bell.

Just as summer made Alain feel lazy, autumn made him restless. He rolled down the window two inches and lit a cigarette, propped his head on his hand, elbow on the windowsill and hung the filter off his lip. Six blocks, turn right, six houses down on the left, blue mailbox, hot pink chrysanthemums beside the walk. He backed in the driveway with the magnetic sign facing the front door -- the passenger side -- and finished his cigarette. There had been two magnetic signs, one for each door, but Brad had taken one to put on his own pickup. Alain hadn't bothered to move the other sign. It was just as well where it was.

He dropped from the cab and picked up a three-part receipt; wrote the truck's mileage -- 240,186 -- on the lower right corner. Miles were how Brad paid him, instead of by time. It was usually about the same but sometimes a trip up into Butler or Warren Counties, or down to Maysville did his wallet good. And the girls in Hamilton and Maysville didn't look at him `like he just fell off the turnip truck,' as Josie sometimes said.

As he reached out to rap on the door it opened. Alain wobbled a bit, fist still in the air, starting to laugh as the middle-aged woman grinned and touched his off-balance shoulder almost nervously; sort of apologetically.

"I startled you -- I'm sorry! I've been waiting for this, I'm just eager."

Alain laughed and handed her the receipt. It was an antique cherry dresser with an inlaid mosaic -- if he concentrated he could have said of what -- on the thick veneered drawer fronts.

"Well, I won't keep you in suspense. Where does it go?"

"Oh -- upstairs, but you can just put it in the livingroom. My husband and I can move it when he gets home."

"You're sure?"

"Yes, let's do that."

Must have been for her bedroom, Alain thought, grinning to himself. She was just enough older to be a little shy about it -- to prefer a young stranger stay in the public part of the house. Or maybe she thought he didn't look up to carrying it upstairs. He knew he was deceptive that way. Small and wiry like his mother's family. He had a rolling truck he used for heavy pieces, but this double dresser wasn't, really. He tossed back the moving blanket -- heavy flannel quilted over felt -- and stood in the bed to lift it down over the side. The body of a dresser usually wasn't very heavy.

He followed it to the pavement, hefted it again with forearms on either side of the center post and carried it through the open door, into the living room. The woman's name was Marlene -- he'd read it off the receipt in case she hadn't answered the door -- Pitzer. She wasn't in the room. Alain figured she'd gone to write a check. Brad would carry some accounts thirty days, but this call tag had been a COD, which meant it was a first time.

He carried his tool kit in after he'd reassembled the dresser and checked the fit of the drawers. Sometimes the trip in the truck resettled old wood and left the drawers sticking or noisy. The inlays looked like bird's-eye maple. He pushed all six drawers shut and ran a hand around each; shaved a few molecules off the drawer runners here and there, oiled all the runners and wiped the piece down with a little linseed. It really was a fine piece of work, both to start with and the restoration. Again, Brad had done a beautiful job of it.

Marlene joined him studying it as he crouched to realign the wood chisels in his kit and close up shop.

"It was my grandmother's. The estate has been in probate for almost ten years. This was part of it. My aunt and my mother were fighting over some other pieces, they wouldn't let this one go either. My aunt died a few months back and they finally released everything -- to Mother."

"It's very nice. I'm sorry to hear about your aunt, though..."

The woman's hazel eyes met Alain's as he rose to stand straight beside her, tool box in his hand.

"I guess I was sorry, too. It's hard to be very sorry though when things become so bitter around you. They acted like a couple of children about it..."

Alain grinned.

"I know what you mean. My mother and my aunt and uncle had a battle royal over a box of silver certificates when my grandmother died. One of the three of them made it disappear, but I've never been sure which one of them it was. Dad thinks it was my mother, though. She won't even admit it to him."

Marlene laughed. She was attractive -- long thick graying black hair pulled into a tail over one shoulder, long ribbed forest green sweater, black leggings. The sleeves of the sweater were pushed to her elbows. Her feet were bare. She was thin and had a face like a little fox. The wedding band on her ring finger was wide and showed a soft yellowish in the afternoon light.

"Well, I have the check for the balance. He didn't even go over his estimate..."

"Brad's pretty good about that. He can usually tell just by looking."

She cracked her toes on the cream and navy-flecked Berber carpet.

"Must be nice. You know the business?"

Alain shrugged.

"Yes and no. I could handle it about long enough to find somebody else to do the work. I'm not good at it like he is. He's got a real talent for it. I haven't."

She sighed and ran a hand over the slab of satiny cherry wood that formed the top of the dresser.

"Sometimes I don't think I ever had any talent for anything. Well, here's the check. Did you need a copy of the invoice?"

She trotted out of the room leaving Alain with the distinct impression she'd revealed more of herself than she'd intended. Bare feet, he thought. Does it every time.

Not like he hadn't seen more than his share of attractive, insecure middle-aged wives babysitting houses, waiting for coffee tables, dressers, cabinets. This was a fine piece -- and so, quite frankly, was Marlene. She didn't seem lonely enough to turn this into anything more than a casual, financial interaction though. Her husband might be a cop. A lawyer. A dentist or doctor. A surgeon who had to operate on Alain someday in an emergency. She wasn't that lonely.

"Dad wanted me to let you know he'd recommend Old English brand polish to use on that finish. Or you can use linseed oil, if you want to work that hard. Some people don't."

She held out the triplicate tear-away form and he returned the pink copy to her and accepted the check.

"If anything comes up, the number is on the invoice. Should be okay, though."

"Okay. Thanks very much -- I'll call if I come across anything else. Tell your father he's got himself a regular."

"I'll do that."

It wasn't that she wasn't attractive, Alain thought. He'd been with less attractive women. Even pursued less attractive women. But as usual, at least in Alain's experience, another man's wife wasn't worth the thrill of the chase. Or the chaise either, in most cases. Alain grinned at the wordplay. Let people think he was dim. He wasn't dim enough to seduce or encourage a woman he couldn't hope to satisfy. That was a kind of heartache it had only taken two lessons to cure.

He stopped at Arby's at the Nine Mile Road intersection of Beechmont, hopped back out to Nine Mile and headed down for the Ohio. Nine Mile was a great road even if Hamilton County had reduced the speed from fifty to thirty five. Alain played the game. He wasn't getting paid for time he'd have to spend sitting in the truck while some jackass Anderson cop with an attitude ran twenty license checks on him trying to find nonexistent moving violations on his lily-white driving record.

Some guy in a black Mazda Miata rode his rear bumper for most of a mile before shooting around on a barely-acceptable decline in the road. Even in that car Alain wouldn't have attempted it. Not because he was a coward so much as protective of his perfect driving record. He'd had one speeding ticket early on -- ten years ago, now. Since then, nothing. It was as much a challenge as really breaking the law, following it near enough you never got nicked. And a hell of a lot less expensive.

He'd pick up Brad's lunch, too. Josie worked in Amelia at a lawyer's office. It was just far enough she couldn't come home for lunch most days. Sometimes if he wasn't swamped Brad drove up the hill. Usually not. If Alain didn't bring home lunch or drag his ass out of the shop, Brad wouldn't eat until dinner. If it weren't for doing it for his father, Alain probably would have forgotten to feed himself.

A few years before Alain might have considered the young woman who served him at the drive-through at Arby's a prospect. Now he'd got so he could recognize trouble on sight. There were kinds of women who married one man, did what they had to and stayed with them all their lives. There were ones who married the wrong one, dumped or got dumped around thirty, got married again and stayed married -- something like his mother. Ones who never quite got married but had a long series of serious romances with men they couldn't quite marry -- he'd pegged the woman at Arby's as one of those. Ones who, like Alain, were stupid or optimistic or desperate enough to go at it year after year, even after the hope died. And there were those poison angels who were always trying to win something, who had an agenda but never revealed it and just slipped out of your life after a few weeks or months without a `good-bye', usually relieving you of a car, a credit card, something of moderate value right along with your self-esteem. They were by far the commonest among the available women he met.

Alain was no idiot, he didn't fool himself there weren't the same or equivalent variations on that theme in his own gender. He'd known a few of the women he'd been with intimately enough to have discussed previous lovers in depth with them, usually as the affairs were winding down into friendly strangerships. He even had a few female friends from that string of women whose company he wouldn't trade for anything in the world. But they were all -- to a woman -- devoted to something in their lives that put up the soft but immovable barrier of arm's length friendship.

Theresa, for instance, though he'd never slept with her, was married. Antonia was living with the same man she'd lived with before she and Alain had made their brief foray together. Andrea was a traveling sales rep for the distributor from which Brad bought most of his finishing supplies -- on the road too much and too married to the job and the travel to settle for an office job and a marriage she didn't have much faith in.

In some ways, that one hurt more than the others because Andy wasn't technically unavailable, and because she regularly looked Alain up, got drunk with him and wanted to play around, `just this once, you've got such pretty hair, come ON Alain...' usually delivered in Victoria's Secret underwear, standing in the middle of Alain's small, cluttered living room, a bottle of Killian's in one hand, a Salem light in the other.

Andy was the blonde. Brown-eyed, so not as naturally blonde as her head advertised. Not that Alain needed that to prove, at this point, that she dyed her hair -- there was more than one way to tell it. She had a year-round booth tan. She'd gone to school in Amelia and been a cheerleader, to the University of Cincinnati and been a sorority sister. She had a young face and a good build, if not as athletic as it had probably been in her cheerleading days. Still, very nice.

Antonia -- Toni -- was a redhead. Like Alain, her very midwestern mother whose heritage was largely Irish had given her a European name. She'd insisted on Toni, which worked for Alain -- but he hadn't allowed her to call him Al. He'd told her -- and it was true -- it made him think of Uncle Al, a staple of Cincinnati television from the early fifties up through the late seventies. Uncle Al had, apparently, been something of a troll. Alain wasn't sure if that was his own impression or one he'd borrowed from his mother. Josie had always called him an `accordion-playing, nasty little troll.' Toni hadn't insisted. Names, she'd said, weren't very important anyway. Toni was as tall as Alain, five-ten, and sprinkled with the freckles of a tan she'd always known she couldn't get. Alain had thought but never said her skin looked like heavy cream with cinnamon sprinkled over the top. Never said it to her, anyway.

Toni had been with Mark five years when Alain met her, away from him five hours. She'd been sitting on the tailgate of his pickup at a Corryville night club after last call one night. When he'd laughingly suggested she get down she'd done so, but he'd seen she was in no shape to drive herself home. In the middle of working out arrangements to get her a taxi, it came out she had no permanent address, then she'd nodded out on him completely. So he'd taken her to his apartment.

She'd stayed two months then gone back to Mark, but never quite left Alain either. It was okay with Alain. She'd never quite been there, it wasn't like missing much when she was gone. She drank too much and liked screaming matches. Alain hoped Mark did too -- he didn't. She didn't call him to fight now -- only to talk about music, a subject about which Mark knew little.

Theresa was, of course, a brunette. Alain had known her years before as a friend of Jill's. She was the most like Alain inside, the one he'd struggled hardest not to be in love with. Any time that seemed likely he avoided her for a while. She'd been married a long time -- Alain wasn't quite sure how long. He'd gone on a six-month drinking binge around the time she'd met Eric and decided to marry him. Disgusted with himself, primarily, for having slaughtered time he could have used trying to build something permanent with her. She'd asked at one point early on to build something, move on with something. Alain hadn't wanted to alienate Jill from himself, or from Theresa for that matter. He'd found out too soon Theresa didn't go back on many decisions, hers or anyone else's.

And Eric was so kind about it, as if he knew. There was a vague `best man won' condescension any time he and Alain shared a room. Obviously Theresa had described the friendship to Eric and it gnawed at Alain to know what she must have said to make Eric act the way he did. Probably something a whole lot like:

`I tried. He said it wasn't worth three friendships, what we could have had together. So what did he think, I was going to wrestle with him over it? I figured he was right. Obviously he's never been quite sure...'

Eric had been stiff but never overt at first, he'd gradually grown to be more personable. Alain liked him. If he couldn't have brought himself to build something with her, this was the best of all possible worlds. Not a very good one... but the best one he could imagine.

What stank was he'd done it to himself, that was all there was to it. Plain and simple.

Sparse traffic on 52, few cars here and there both directions and one bright red Volkswagen Jetta with the hood up and the flashers on, a pair of tight black Levi's hugging a very inspirational ass bent over the front fender. He eased onto the shoulder in front of the car, flicked on his flashers and dropped out to approach.

"Hey -- need a hand with that?"

A head lifted; tightly curled chestnut-colored hair halfway down the back of a man's black leather jacket -- sleeves too long, hair too long. Wide, slatey eyes like his own, full lips and a nose a little too big.

"Well... maybe. Got a pair of vise-grips?"

She was fixing it herself. Alain grinned.

"Just a second."

He flipped open the tool box in back, lifted out a pair of vise-grips and carried them back over.

"Here. Need a `hand' hand?"

She blinked back at him; flash of annoyance before she shook her head. Tough girl, serious but just a little too pretty to be taken serious. Alain wasn't about to ruffle her.

"Here, then," he said, slapping the pliers into her outstretched palm. "I can see you know what you're doing. Some things do take more than two hands."

"That's why I asked you for the vise-grips. Thanks."

Alain propped himself on the tailgate of the Chevy, crossed his arms and waited. `What an ass -- she probably doesn't even care if it looks like that.'

"Don't get me wrong, I mean, I hope my timing isn't really bad saying this but... I... really like your hair. It's not a come-on or anything, I swear."

She stood half-straight and turned to stare straight at him momentarily.

"Well, y'know, considering you were perfectly willing to just hand me the pliers and stay out of the way like you actually thought I knew what I was doing, maybe it wouldn't be a totally unwelcome thing. A come-on, I mean."

She started to push back her hair, but the tips of her fingers were grimy.

"Maybe I could hold that back out of your way for you..."

"Oh, yeah. Sure, thanks."

Alain stepped over, stood beside her and lifted the spill of curls into his hands. It was soft, looked a little like his own, if a lot longer. In fact, they resembled each other a good deal just in general; small, wiry, reddish hair, pale eyes.

Probably had a jealous boyfriend. Maybe two.

The engine was in fine fit other than the fact it didn't run. She was securing a wire clip on a pair of wires. Her hands had done this before.

"Looks like it's in good shape."

"I try. I don't do it all myself, but I do what I can. Oil changes, body work, filters -- you know. The stuff mechanics make a pile on `cause most people are lazy. There. Maybe."

Alain dropped her hair as she stood straight and removed the vise-grips.

"It's my fuel injection system. To get it really fixed is gonna cost me about three hundred bucks. That hurts my feelings profoundly..." she said, snatching the keys off the roof to drop in the seat. She turned the key but the car didn't start. She shouted a string of obscenities at the windshield, though her expression showed more resignation than anger. She got out of the car, keys clutched in one grimy fist.

"Okay, Good Sam -- could you call my garage for me? I give up."

"If you don't have it in your head I'm an ax murderer, I can give you a ride into New Richmond. I'm on my way to Point Pleasant, it's right on the way."

She studied him, jangling the keys in her hand while she chewed on her lower lip.

"Hell. I guess a psychopath would have insisted on helping. Thanks a lot..."

"Come on."

She leaned across the seat several times to squint at the speedometer. If she was worried about the speed he was driving, she could have saved her energy. Alain was going just a touch shy of sixty-five, as always.

"I know this is too old for forty thousand miles. How many miles has it actually got on it?" she asked, finally.

"Two-forty. This is what I do -- I drive all day. I deliver furniture."

"Yeah? Seems like kind of a boring job."

Alain grinned. He'd heard it before.

"Sometimes it is. Most of the time it's better than having to stare at the same bunch of faces eight or ten hours a day, though."

His usual response, a flip `only if I didn't like my own company,' wouldn't come out of his mouth.

"I'm a floating bank teller. I worked last Saturday, they gave me one weekday off. I have to do that about once a month. Lately, they've let me have Thursday."

"Which bank?"

"Provident. I get to move around some. I've been at the one up on Beechmont about eight months. It's not too bad, I guess. I don't mind them too much, right?"

"That's probably about as good as it gets."

"Yeah. As far as I know it is. Never had anything much better."

"This is all I've ever done. I work for my old man."

She grinned.

"Great work if you can get it, huh?"

"I guess, yeah. He pays enough to keep a roof over my head, a car on the road, beer in my refrigerator -- all the essentials."

She nodded and was quiet for a time. They were nearing New Richmond faster than Alain thought he'd ever seen it come up.

"You live in Point, then?" she asked.

"No. I have an apartment in New Richmond. You?"

"Amelia."

"Want me to run you on up the hill? You in a hurry to get anywhere?"

"Oh, no. Don't. I can see you've got your lunch here."

"Yeah -- have to go out to Point and drop it off first. Dad didn't have anything for me to do this afternoon, he was feeling kind of bad about it."

"I don't know, it seems like an awful lot to ask."

"Hey. You didn't. Ask, I mean. I offered. I spend most of my time driving around Clermont County. What's another twelve point six miles?"

He was afraid maybe he'd overstated his case. You could be too friendly and nobody would trust you. There wasn't much reason for her to, except he'd left her alone to fix her car herself and hadn't insisted on her letting him take a look at it when she'd given up.

That must have gone a long way, though. She nodded and turned to look at him as he slowed for the stop light in the middle of New Richmond.

"Odds are pretty slim you'd rape and murder me in broad daylight. I really appreciate this. We both know you don't have to go so far out of your way."

"My name's Alain Bell."

She laughed quietly -- a nice laugh, almost a masculine laugh.

"Angie Martin. Guess I could have said so sooner, huh?"

"No need. You don't have to trust me any more than I have to help you out. Besides, I suspect you could turn me inside out if I tried anything on you."

She grinned -- feral, a little. Alain liked that, too. Lord, it had been an awfully long time...

"I try to give off that impression. Glad to know I'm succeeding."

"I guess you got a sort of negative proof -- I had no messing in mind."

"None whatsoever?" she asked. She wasn't looking at him when Alain glanced over -- the corner of her mouth he could see was kinked into a grin. Only she knew how ironic a grin -- he couldn't see the other side.

"It isn't my business to worry about that. You have to decide that one, it's not my place."

He saw her nod.

"I must say that's an odd way of looking at it."

"Hey, you have a fiancee or a live-in or a husband, for all I know. Or you're gay. You can't be a nun, because I'm sure no nun in her right mind would wear those jeans, but..."

She didn't look at him for a while then, as he slowed for the second light, she did.

"I'm straight. And single. Is dating as hard for you as it is for me?"

"I don't know, Angie," he said. "How hard is it for you? Hard enough, I guess."

"Hard enough for you that you'd go out of your way to help a strange woman out on a Thursday afternoon, maybe?"

He grinned but didn't look at her. She was pretty sharp.

"Maybe. It was more like I knew I trusted me to stop and help you out, but maybe not the next guy who drove by. Maybe the next guy would have messed with you. I knew I wouldn't and I figured you'd see that soon enough."

"And I did. You don't always go out of your way to help total strangers..."

"You're right, not always. Probably more often than most people, though. I always at least offer to drop a quarter in the phone."

"You've heard of karma, right?"

"Yeah. Sometimes I think things even go that way a little bit. Other times, I know they do."

"Well, how about this -- I'll take you out for dinner somewhere for going so much out of your way."

Some tiny part of Alain wanted him to mount at least a token protest, but it was exactly what he wanted and he thought she might need it, just to feel she'd made a fair exchange of the whole business. Good enough.

"Okay."

"Tonight okay? Or would you rather make it the weekend?"

"Tonight's fine, actually. It's tough to get in anywhere on the weekends anymore, unless you eat at four or wait until midnight."

"Have any objection to me making the plans, then?"

"Not at all. I'm assuming you mean for it to be your dime, so you call it."

"Anything off limits?"

"No. I'm not picky."

"I'll hold you to that."

"If it ain't head cheese or monkey brains, I'm game enough. My sense of adventure isn't quite dead yet."

"Well, I guess that puts Head Cheese Diner and Two Brothers' Monkey Brains Grill right off the list..." she said. Alain thought he was starting to be a little befuddled by having a pretty girl in the truck. He thought for a fraction of a second she was serious before he caught on.

Brad was out under the maple tree in the driveway when Alain lifted the Arby's bag and dropped out of the truck.

"Was starting to wonder. Who's she?"

"Her name is Angie. She was broken down on 52, I stopped. Got anything for me this afternoon yet?"

"Um... well, no."

"I'm gonna give her a lift back up to Amelia, then. I'll come back after that, see if there's anything later."

"You actually stopped to help a total stranger?" Brad insisted, squinting at the windshield over Alain's shoulder.

"An attractive female total stranger..." Alain added.

Brad grinned.

"Good point, son. I'll keep your lunch for you."

"You'll forget and eat it like you always do. Don't worry about it. Maybe I'll pick something up in Amelia. Marlene was completely happy with her dresser. She said she'd call you next time."

"Good enough," Brad said as Alain handed over the receipts and the personal check. It had a rather clever, bright neon design he hadn't noticed when she handed it to him. "Even better if she passes it around to all her friends."

"Maybe she will. See you later."

Angie was quiet most of the way up the hill. Alain wondered if she wasn't regretting accepting his offer of help in the first place. He'd implied something, maybe, persisting as he had. Well, maybe he hadn't seemed the follow-through type to her. He wasn't sometimes, but there was something about the tilt of her long, short-nailed left pinky finger rising and falling almost nervously against the white and gray polyester seat cushion. Something that wouldn't let him back out, quit now. He had to follow through because he could too easily be convicted of failing to so many times. He'd let too many people have that idea of him. It was early enough yet to make sure she didn't.

"Can I ask you something?" Angie asked. Alain had been wrestling the best question to start with her, wishing she'd say something to disturb the slightly dusty, thick-with-wood-shop-smells air in the Chevy's cab.

"Uh... sure."

"Have you ever been married, Alain?"

"No."

"I have. How old are you?"

"Twenty-nine."

"I'm twenty-seven, thought I'd get that out of the way before you had to ask."

"I wouldn't have. Asked. My mother told me you never ask a woman over twenty-one how old she is..."

The slightly masculine laugh, slightly feral grin tugged at Alain's right ear and the corner of his right eye.

"I know I look younger. Telling my age doesn't hurt me. I suppose that'll change."

"Maybe it won't. Maybe you'll always look younger than you really are."

She laughed again and Alain did too.

"Maybe so. I've got this sinking feeling that won't be nearly as much consolation when I'm over fifty, though. But thanks -- it's nice of you to humor me."

"You're young to have already been through a marriage. If I'm being too pushy, tell me to back off..."

"Is it okay if I smoke?"

"Sure, long as you roll down the window a little bit. It's my truck, but Dad used to smoke and the smell drives him nuts, he drives it now and then. I smoke too, I just roll down the window."

She did, and lit a cigarette.

"I started it, you might as well know my sordid past. My marriage was murdered by success... not mine. His. We worked like a couple of dogs for five years. I dropped out of college when we got married. He worked part-time nights and stayed in school. He was a business major. As soon as he got a job out of school, I started getting the major business. He got a job at P&G, traveled a lot. Met a lot of flashy, well-educated women who made at least as much money as he did... bailed out on all his old friends and started kissing ass for all the people he worked with. Never screwed around, I don't think... but he lost interest in the world we lived in. Started taking women he worked with to the parties he had to go to instead of me.

"I wouldn't have the nose job, the teeth job, the goddamn tit job he wanted. He wanted to turn me into a collector's piece. He didn't want me anymore, or what we'd had. His new world wasn't anything I wanted, either. I'm not stupid, you think? But I like being an intellectual barbarian, I couldn't pretend to like Picasso or Prokofiev. I like Dali and Guess Who, I don't think that makes me deficient as a person because I can't learn to be a fucking society babe. He wanted me to get my hair cut off -- do you believe that?"

Alain grimaced at the thought before he could catch himself. He was only hearing her side of the story, of course... but he wasn't hoping to date her ex-husband, and he thought she sounded fair enough about it, if the hurt and anger were only so well-contained. Who wouldn't have been? Regardless the reason, he knew from Theresa and Toni's experiences a relationship like a marriage seemed too promising at the start to resist, no matter how unlikely success seemed. And having it fail had to be an awful shock.

"How long has it been since?"

"A year. But it was in the process of being over about a year before that. I didn't date for four months after, even old friends of mine who were pretty pleased to know I was back on the market again. Until four months ago, I'd never slept with any man but Clark. You'll probably have a hard time swallowing that one..."

He turned away from a road he'd driven five hundred times or more to catch her eye for a moment. The sun slashing across from the window washed out her iris, made her whole eye look white and he looked back at the road.

"Not at all. I have a friend who got married when she was twenty, she's never been with a man other than her husband. So what? I mean -- I don't mean for that to sound rude, I'm sorry. It's just... if that's your thing, good for you. That's all I meant, I guess. Not `so, big deal, who wants to hear about it.' People own their own bodies, it's up to them to decide about sharing them. Right?"

"Right. Sometimes... I guess I'm jaded about it, still. Sometimes I wish I'd never got married at all. I mean, it never occurred to me `til the second guy I was with after Clark -- I could have gone on forty years and never been with anybody else. And if it'd worked that would have been cool, I guess. But I would have missed out, too. I don't know. I don't think my folks were ever with anybody but each other before they got married. They're older, they got married in, like, fifty-one. When most good rural kids actually didn't do it until they got married."

"I think back then, sex was something you were brought up to be scared of. Church used fear to keep kids from playing around and getting in trouble by scaring them to death about sex. It worked, I guess. In some ways, not knowing you're missing anything must make you feel more settled in a relationship. It's harder for me to imagine because I'm almost thirty and there's only one woman I've had a relationship of any kind with for more than five years that has sex in it. And she's on the road all the time. One of us decides not to return a call a time or two, I guess it's over. I don't know if I want it to be over, but there's not a snowflake's chance in hell there'd ever be any security or stability in the thing if it went any farther, either. We both know if something came along that offered that, we'd both give up what we've got with each other. There isn't much there to start with. You know?"

"Well no, not exactly. But I see what you mean. I can't get past the third date most of the time. And even when I do I start measuring things up to the way it felt and looked when things were good between Clark and me. I lost my ability to trust anybody when he bailed out. I couldn't trust him and I'd known him eight years. We'd been about as close as two people ever get. I mean, the only other man in the world I trusted was my dad. That's hard, to lose the central fight in your life. To win most of the battles then lose the war. And by default."

Alain thought she shouldn't have sounded so calm. Her left hand was balled in a fist on the seat between them, her right hand flicking the cigarette repeatedly at the slit in the window even though there were no ashes. But the jutting of her chin a bit past level was the only play of any of it on her face. He bet she didn't lose many arguments.

He felt a brief stab of something like pity for the man who'd lost her... more for what he suspected she'd put him through than for losing her. This was a dry kind of ice. She'd been hurt and learned to handle that hurt with her brain. But even if it made giving up easier, it made it nearly -- or perhaps completely -- impossible to ever understand, or ever handle, anything any other way. Twenty-seven was young to give up on your heart but Alain knew he'd done much the same thing. It hadn't been any one crisis bad reaction, just a reaction to failing persistently until he had to understand why, and screw it if taking it apart meant it would never work right again. Hadn't worked worth a damn up to that point either.

"People probably keep telling you you think too much. They tell you if you'd just gone ahead and done what he wanted it would have been okay."

"Well, some of them do, of course. And even my mother thinks I'm too logical about it. But you can't express what it feels like to another person without making it sound like it's made you a whole lot crazier than you really are. We didn't, like, split up and get back together two or three times. When I said `uncle', I meant it forever. And I made it sound too simple -- Clark didn't actually say, `oh, you're not ever going to be fancy enough for me,' or anything. We tried to find compromises... but it just seemed like all the compromises `we' were going to make involved me giving up something and him having something he wanted, including me. I let it be that way, I don't blame Clark for that. Since he was the one who stuck with school, I thought he deserved the chance to do the best he could with it. So I never asked for anything. For a long time he didn't either... and we gave each other at least enough to get by just because we knew how much that was. It's like we were under a spell, almost -- on a drug. As long as we both cared enough and gave each other what we had, it was enough. Then he stopped giving as much and started expecting me to give more. Because -- and this is my fault, too -- he was making most of the money. I didn't take the jobs I had because they paid well, I worked them because I knew I could get them and they wouldn't be so demanding I'd get canned because I couldn't keep up. One of us had to hold down the bottom line..."

"You just don't seem like the kind of person who'd be happy that way..." Alain said before he could consider how presumptuous it actually was to say it. He worked the corner of his eye to see if he'd upset her but Angie only sighed and nodded absently.

"You're right, I wasn't. When I moved out I went over to temp work. It may not seem like an adventurous step but for me it was, a little. Now Provident's bought me out from the agency that put me in there, but it's okay. They move me around every so often. Every three or four months is just about right. Seems like almost everywhere you go somebody's going to rub you the wrong way -- but if they swing you out after a quarter you can put up with more than if you knew you'd have to put up with it every day as long as you have the job."

"I see dozens of people a week. Only one I have to deal with every day is my old man. Can I ask you another personal question? And don't answer if you don't want. Did... did you leave?"

The silence galvanized the dozen cubic feet of air in the cab. Almost like it had filled with glue. Alain couldn't even hear her breathing. She moved, finally, to flick her cigarette butt out the window.

"I did. Clark was getting fat and his fingers were sticky."

"Oh, I get it. From... having his cake and eating it too."

"Hard to eat when it turns bitter, I expect. But he'd probably have still been going on with it now if I hadn't called it quits. I needed a change of life... or a change of scenery. You know he used to keep telling me... he'd always love me. Isn't that horrible?"

"Well..." Alain heard her sniffle, felt an odd sort of twist in his gut -- though she'd gone on with the answer, he'd made her cry. And then she snorted out an angry little laugh -- again, almost like a man. "Yeah, Angie... it does sound kind of horrible, I guess. I'm ... look, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to upset you."

She laughed a lighter laugh, then.

"Oh Alain... it has been a long time since a man has apologized to me. And meant it, I mean. Clark still calls me every now and then. I guess to assess the damages. And to tell me I'm still the most beautiful woman he's ever known. He's a fucking idiot. I didn't let the door hit me in the butt on the way out, y'know?"

"If you weren't an intellectual barbarian, maybe that would let him keep his foot in the door. If I was doing that, it would be to try and keep my foot in the door. But I'm not sure I'd be that stupid. Or insensitive. And I'm not exactly the world's most sensitive guy. That does seem almost... cruel."

"Yeah, it does to me, too. But he knew I'd be the one to leave, you know? Why should he? He could go out and work and play all his work games, talk shop to all his work friends and then come home, fuck his pretty wife and keep her for a show piece -- a sort of token reminder of when he was a college kid and somebody else took care of the bills and the responsibilities. But you're not stupid. You know you're only hearing my side."

Alain nodded and tapped his pocket in search of his own cigarettes as she rolled up her window.

"So? Why would I have any interest in hearing Clark's side of your story? He's not here, is he?"

She slapped the seat between them gently, wiggled her fingers.

"I do like the sound of that."

Alain turned to wink at her and she grinned at him.

"So it doesn't sound like you had very many doubts by the time you left," he observed.

"I... guess not. Oh, I didn't doubt there was no way we could stay married the way things were. I wasn't getting what I had to have. I guess he wasn't just dealing with his cake. He was eating mine too, and grinning while he did it. Even when he was with me he seemed to want to be doing something else, or he was on the phone or reading trade magazines. I wasn't the most important thing in his life anymore. My mistake -- I realized it when it happened. Three years ago I was locked in a lousy job I hated, I kept it too long because I didn't like myself. I was failing and I didn't know why. I wore floppy, shitty clothes... pulled my hair back in a tail all the time. Never wore any makeup. I guess I sorta cracked because I knew all the way back then I was losing him. So really, it started long before I even told you. Maybe it starts all the way back at the beginning, you know? Maybe there's never any chance for it to last more than a few years."

"A few years would be nice. You're lucky, in a way. Lucky you got that much out of it. Not everybody ever has even that much."

Her eyes on the side of his head felt sympathetic. Alain was afraid to look, he didn't want to know.

"You'd know, huh?"

"I guess, yeah. I wasn't fishing for any sympathy, though. I've never tried very hard, I admit it."

"But you've never failed very badly either, if you didn't."

He sighed, then laughed gently.

"Yeah. I guess there's always that."

She directed him into a cluster of neat brick apartment buildings behind an open field just outside Amelia, at the top of the hill. There were four skinny buildings -- one-bedrooms, he assumed -- and eight wider ones. He pulled up, at her gesture, before one of the skinny ones, as near as he could get to the wide cement sidewalk that met the blacktop, and held the truck still.

"Well, thanks for the lift. So, we still on for dinner?"

"I guess so. What apartment?"

"Oh -- five. On the left at the top of the first flight of steps. You can't miss it."

"What time?"

"Oh, say... seven. Ish. I'll probably have to spend the rest of the afternoon trying to talk the guys at my garage into going down after my car. It's like a cast party for `Deliverance', but they're savants. Very talented, I mean."

Alain laughed.

"I know what a savant is. I saw `Rain Man', okay?"

Angie grinned and shrugged the strap of her clunky black leather purse over her shoulder. Alain noticed the strap looked like it had been broken and resewn several times where it suspended the purse on a copper ring. It was a slightly clumsy but familiar gesture, complicated by the too-long sleeves on the jacket. Dangerously endearing if he had to witness it too many times.

"You want my number in case you elect to bail out on me?" she asked, reaching for the palm-sized ring notebook Alain kept over his visor. She ripped out a sheet, halved it and quickly scribbled a number.

"553-2491," he recited as she handed back the book. She flashed him a look -- sort of like surprise, but not quite. She scribbled it on the other half of the slip of paper and handed notebook, number and ballpoint back to him.

"I'm not the only one with free will to bail out," he shrugged, tucking the folded slip into his shirt pocket.

"I'll see you later, then."

He waited until she was in through the swinging entry door, let out the clutch and rounded the lot. She had a one-bedroom, which meant a roommate was unlikely. No kids, at least not by any indications she'd given so far.

But still, for all they'd talked about some very personal things, Alain wasn't sure she'd even been very much interested in him. He had to admit it, at least to himself -- he wouldn't have blamed her if she wasn't, he wasn't sure he would have been, either. It was hard to tell, she'd been so... honest. Bold as a ripe raspberry and painfully straightforward. Yet it didn't feel like she'd given him a thing but her phone number.

He didn't even remember her last name.

"Martin," he said aloud, head dipped back in a pastel blue lavatory. He started to open one eye. Mona -- the only woman who'd cut his hair in fifteen years -- squirted his brow with piss-warm water about that time and he refrained.

"What? After all these years you won't talk about your girlfriends, you finally cough up a name... and it's a guy?"

She tilted the chair back up and wrapped a thin cotton towel around his head; handed him another for his eyes.

"Martin is a last name, Mona."

She grinned from behind him, over his shoulder, into the wide mirror.

"I must admit I'm relieved."

"Oh, you knew better than that. A few of the girls I've dated have dragged in here bitching about what a cold, noncommittal S.O.B. I am, surely."

"Nah -- they just think you're some kind of mystery. It's a rare local girl has the patience for a mystery. Most of `em are looking for something simple. A good dinner, a good time. A big wedding..."

"A fat ass and three soaps a day," Alain added.

It was an asshole thing to say, but it was funny. Alain could tell Mona didn't want to laugh, she got around behind him but he could see her eye was crinkled up in the mirror.

"I always think you're exaggerating when you tell me what a prick you are. And then you actually come in here... and I remember you're not. Exaggerating, I mean."

She combed his hair and Alain settled in the chair, ankles crossed, heels on the floor. Too tall for the foot rest, too short to sit up and put his feet flat on the floor in front of the foot rest.

"You know, you never cut more than half an inch off my hair," he said, after she'd been clipping a while. "But it always takes you forever. Can you explain that?"

Mona laughed and turned him to face the mirror. She had about five years on Alain. He had about five inches on her. He estimated they probably weighed about the same.

"Honey, you want me to stick a bowl on your head and just zip it around the edge, you're done in five minutes."

She lifted a brow in question. Alain shook his head and laughed.

"You go right ahead, sweetheart. You don't tell me how to do my job."

"That's right."

Alain didn't feel any more sure of any of it after the haircut. The hair down his collar just made him feel more prickly and out of sorts. He'd dropped the truck in Point, brought back the Escort and walked to the beauty shop. The wind was cold on his head where some of his hair was still damp. He shrugged farther into his wool bomber and stepped up his pace.

Winter was dawdling its way into the river valley --- a few days in the fifties, a few in the thirties. No great rush. Everybody would still be here and the river and life in the world would keep right on flowing downstream. It took a lot to freeze the Ohio; even more to change the river valley's natives.

Not that Alain had any great urge to change anything. He reached into his jacket for a cigarette and cut across Hotel Street, toward the old Episcopal Church. They'd torn down the steeple -- it had been empty of its old bell for over ten years already. Rumor had it the bell had been hocked to pay bills back in the depth of the last recession, but Alain knew different because they'd called Brad to see if anything could be done to salvage the bell tower some time back.

The bell was in the church basement. The renovations to make the hundred-plus year-old structure safe would have cost close to a quarter of a million. Rather steep for the building fund of a church whose attendance seldom exceeded two hundred fifty, most of whom were lucky to spare a grand for themselves over the course of a year, and didn't care if the bell sounded in the belfry or the basement.

Most of them were farmers from several miles up the hill or down the river who'd attended the church for twenty, thirty or forty years and had seldom if ever heard the bell anyway. Alain didn't blame them. Status would have been the only reason to push those people to collect that kind of cash, and while there was plenty of pride to go around in the neighborhood... a bell in the church belfry wasn't likely to inspire it. Two hundred sixty people's behinds warming the old oak benches was a likelier spark, though the Episcopals he knew hadn't ever been much on recruiting.

The local churches generally went gently in that respect. Two hundred fifty was nothing to complain about. Everybody who needed church was pretty much already there. The only hope was to lure members out of one of the other local churches, and that was about as likely as the Episcopal congregation coughing up a quarter mil to renovate its belfry. Nothing much changed here.

On occasion, a personal squabble or a marriage between families turned a Baptist to a Methodist, a Methodist to an Episcopal. But even that was rare.

Alain had attended the Methodist church here in town with Josie when he was young. It hadn't really seemed oppressive to him until ugly things came along in his heart and his life the bible couldn't address to his satisfaction. And good things, too. It was pretty well understood that both beer and sex were verboten -- or sex outside proscribed circumstances, at any rate. And then the incident in Arizona with Jill and Lottie had crushed the brittle shell of a faith Alain had already pretty much emptied by that time.

There was no excuse for a world where things like that happened, as far as Alain was concerned. If there was a God nobody should have to pay with their life for ignorance.

He unlocked his door, tossed his keys on the cluttered book case where his stereo and TV rested and trailed out of his clothes on his way to the bathroom. Bad mood... bad idea. Maybe getting the hairs out of his shirt would make him feel better.

"No -- Alain, Mom. Not sure how he spells it. Bell. I'm not sure -- he's either from New Richmond or Point, he lives in New Richmond now. I just wondered if the name was familiar at all. Hm. Well, anyhow, we're going to dinner. No, tonight. Hell yes, Mom -- I was a pushy broad about it! Well, you win some and you lose some. At least I've got a date tonight, and he has a job, a car... a brain. I'll talk to you tomorrow night, let you know how it goes. You, too..."

Angie hung up the phone and studied her nails. Bad? Yeah. Definitely looked like somebody who worked on her own car. Besides that, she'd broken her left thumbnail two days before fixing one of the sinks at work they'd been begging maintenance to fix for six months... and one of the stuck double-glazed windows here in her apartment that hadn't closed right since she'd moved in a year before, too, which accounted for the ding on her right index finger knuckle.

She hadn't been sleeping well, that's why she was getting scraped up so badly. Poor sleep and the approaching cold weather made her hungry and clumsy all the time. No way to really get around it, either. It just got worse the older she got.

She studied her face in the bathroom mirror. Well, at least she still looked good. Not that she was really on the prowl. Angie didn't consider herself merely once-burned. After all, every few weeks the last year she'd been with Clark, she'd start to believe things were improving. He'd pay attention. She'd feel better and, as a consequence, she'd treat him better. And just as it seemed they were about to fall back into rhythm again he'd do something to her that was so glaringly inconsiderate she was snapped back into the conviction it was over. It was like they'd broken up ten times that year, not one. She thought if she picked up the phone right now and Called Clark, he'd probably sound hurt and still, after all this time, a little baffled.

After all, he'd gone into denial early on. Had reverted to asking her why she wanted to hurt him `this way'. When she told him -- and she did, in the most emotionless and precise terms she could muster -- he inevitably dropped that firebomb: `But Angie, you knew this was why I was going to school. You promised me when you married me it was for better or worse. We got through the worse part didn't we? It's better now, isn't it?'

Well, of course it wasn't. Not for Angie. Maybe for Clark, yes -- maybe success and money and no time for responsibilities to his wife was better. He'd asked why they still hadn't had kids. When Angie couldn't say who she was, she was sure she didn't want the burden of telling some little somebody else who he was.

None of this made her dread the thought of having dinner with Alain Bell any less. It had been easy at eighteen, stupid and brave as they'd been. Angie touched where the black kohl she smudged at the corners of her eyes had spread, in the oil of her skin, to make her look weary and ten years older. Well, maybe not quite ten... dammit all. But the look on the guy's face when he'd reached out to hand her that pair of vise-grips...

It had been a long time since she'd been the slightest bit interested in what a man thought of her who didn't affect her mother or her paycheck. She'd gone out with three men right after the divorce, quit for a time, tried again a little later when she was sure she was ready to go to bed with someone new. It had made for some sticky, not too pleasant resolutions. At least the guys she'd dated had the option to dump her, either at the point where she insisted they wear a rubber or immediately thereafter. Okay by her. Any guy who wouldn't take a simple, reasonable precaution could go die of AIDS if he was that anxious.

Clark had been willing to wear one most of the time, even when they were married. Any guy who wouldn't now -- in this sexual and social climate -- wasn't any better than him, and in fact was even less willing to accept her welfare as a priority. Angie was pretty sure Clark had been faithful to her, it had always been for her benefit.

The fact she wasn't dating any of those guys anymore spoke volumes.

Now she'd cluttered the clear surface of her mind. She remembered that much from her one year of college; remembered the things she'd loved and learned that everyone else had been convinced were useless electives -- philosophy, sociology, psychology. They didn't seem to have given her much of a jump on her life, all things considered. And splitting with Clark had crashed a lot of her castles. But Angie didn't think she'd ever known any other woman walking out of a marriage as capable of rebuilding them to suit herself.

It occurred to her with kind of a jolt, Alain Bell didn't seem at all the type to interfere with her castles. If he'd been alone that long, he wouldn't be nearly as choosy in many ways.

But he'd be a damn sight more choosy in others.