Robert Cooper Deauxville, III sang along with the music-on-hold at the Honda dealership.

"Fool if you think it’s over... ‘cause you said good-bye... fool, if you think it’s over... tell you why..." he sang.

He thought, but wasn’t absolutely certain, the song had been recorded by Chris Rea, a miserable Top 40 hit from the sinking days of AM pop radio. He was too old, if he remembered that; if he remembered AM radio before the days of fascist lunatic talk shows and self-help call-ins. Anybody who remembered a day a female under forty bought a Barry Manilow album was just too damned old.

But, hey — he had outlived Christ.

"I believe in miracles... where you from, you sexy thing..." who was that? He didn’t recall, though now the song would be inexorably impressed in his medium-term memory, sans artist — at least until he could go home and percolate Hotbot or Allmusic on the World Wide Web..

He punched the phone over to the speaker, leaned back in his new, prematurely-creaky swivel chair and crossed his ankles on the corner of his new Rubbermaid desk. Knuckles locked behind his head, he contemplated the cardinal who persistently glared in through the sealed triple-pane behind and to the left of the desk.

A mangy tree he thought might be a ginkgo, if it ever had any leaves, blocked most of the light the only window — a twelve by eight foot stunner of fifteen percent tinted triple-glass, new enough the seal was still intact — might have admitted. A dry September, the tree was yet more mangy than it had been a year before, when he’d leased the office.

Much to everyone’s surprise, including his own, he’d managed to pay the rent every single month in that year. Well, there had been a ten-day holdup back in July, when his bank account — nearly all the accounts, in fact, at his bank — had been locked due to a security code breach on the ATM system. Some hacker kid had violated the computer and changed all the four-digit passwords to one of six or seven four-letter obscenities. Bob’s was already ‘cooz’, he wondered idly what could have been much more obscene. No juvenile hacker kid had a filthier mind than he.

His ex-wife had her account at the same bank. He’d skipped the office rent for two weeks, though he’d continued to receive payments on invoices; cashed those checks and subsidized both his and Julia’s fairly prudent households until the crisis passed. As badly as she’d been routed in the fiery crash of what had been at least a halfway decent marriage, he managed to assuage his regrets as much as Ju would let him by providing such financial support as he could. She had paid him back promptly, as soon as her account had become available. But Julia wouldn’t have been left owing him a day longer than was necessary.

"Mr. Deville?" a voice he could only identify as ‘young blonde’ interrupted Andy Kim’s rendition of ‘Rock Me Gently’.

Bob wiped eyes he hadn’t known were wet, dropped his feet flat on the floor and blinked away the cool angle of Ju’s bare shoulder framed by the dark green sheets of his now-bachelor bed.

"That’s DOUGH-VILLE..." he sighed.

"Oh. I’m sorry, Mr. Deville. Your Accord is ready, they were just finishing it up. I’m sorry you had to hold so long."

Bob thought of thanking her profusely for the memories, but convinced himself the best alternative was to get hell off the phone before the conversation devolved into his usual tense nonsense. Besides, she wouldn’t have even the foggiest notion what he was talking about; she was too damned young. Probably hadn’t even heard of Peter Frampton, and that was only the late seventies. Most of the songs... he grimaced. Most of the songs he’d been hearing had probably been released at least two or three years before she’d been born.

"That’s okay, thanks. How much is it going to be?"

"Two-hundred fifteen and forty-five cents. We’re open until seven tonight."

He grimaced again, or to be more precise simply deepened his existing grimace, but didn’t let the number faze him. The car was hardly worth that much money these days, but hell. He couldn’t afford to buy a new car and still drink beer on the weekends. Or wine, or DeWar’s, or whatever painkiller he opted to adopt.

"I’ll be there before seven, thanks."

He dropped the phone on Cordee Honda’s service department with the faint taste of Pepsi Light — it was the lemon flavoring that made the difference — in the back of his throat. Pop Rocks? No, much later. Pixie Stix.

The computer in the corner, faintly humming and blackened by a screen saver, released a shout of, "a shrubbery!" sampled directly from a well-worn VHS copy of "Monty Python’s Holy Grail" into the gigs of hard disk memory on his cobbled-together but extremely powerful work computer. It was so powerful even he had no idea what it could do. He’d used it five or six times to affect pizza deliveries to his Amelia apartment just as he was arriving home, that was more than anyone would ever have suspected a home computer would do back when he and his younger brother had rolled on the floor giggling with delight when they’d received a Commodore 64 for Christmas.

The average electronic pocket-minder he could buy from Staples for the cost of a couple of tanks of gas in the Honda had more processing power and speed than the old Commodores — most were 64K, some 128K, almost all worked faster than the old C64. But then, you couldn’t back out to a prompt, type a few lines in Basic, type ‘run’ and have the pocket minder say ‘Ricky smells his own farts’ in an endless string up the left side of the screen.

He could probably have done so with his WinTel Machine Of Doom, but he didn’t know enough about the programming of this machine. He knew how to type in the program names of the DOS programs, or poke the icon in Windows for the current upgrade of Netscape. In fact, the computer had seldom been exited from Netscape since he’d finally broken down and bought the Internet navigator program. It was an excellent image reader, ran reasonably well with Windows 95, did the job.

The job? Robert Deauxville (Coop Deville to more callous acquaintances) was an ‘information procurement technician.’ In other words, he ‘found stuff.’ He found the best Internet sites for people to glean information, or found the information itself, or found lost people, or lost songs, or lost movies. Lost TV shows. Between the Web’s pages there was a vast, encompassing world of apparently useless information.

On this side, there was an equally vast sea of people with question marks in their heads — advertising companies, writers, college professors, thirtyish adolescents on nostalgia kicks, high school reunion committees — who were willing to pay a flat fee for certain types of information without having to get their toes wet in the information ocean.

That was where Bob paid for his office and fed himself. His company, prosaic as it might have been, was called ‘Infotek’. It sounded smooth, professional and generic. The company could have been twenty-five people. Ju, in fact, had told him he probably gave the impression Infotek employed twenty-five people, if he put customers on hold as long as he put her on hold when she called him.

Ju again. Must be a full moon, he thought. Usually, when he’d gotten that picture of her lying in his sheets, he’d be all evening chasing cobwebs and never unload her. Like a virus... What was that William Burroughs quote? Language, that was it. ‘Language is a virus’ or something close. Well, so is my ex, he thought, but it was bitter and not very funny. Maybe William Burroughs felt the same way about language, though. After all, he’d shot his wife in the head thinking he was William Tell. There were days...

No. There had never been a day Bob had wished death on Ju, though there had been a few — extremely few, but it only took one — he’d sat in his bathroom with a packet of Wilkinson Swords in the pocket of his bath robe and considered dying to ream her out of his mind, finally and forever. It was the only way that could have allowed either of them to walk on into the rest of their lives with a truly clean slate. They’d tried to start it again without more than minimal success. It would never be a fresh start, though God knew they’d tried four or five times, as recently as two months before.

But two months before had ended in a whimper, not a bang and he suspected that was how everything would end between them from now on. They’d been divorced a year, or ‘dissolved’ as Ju had insisted, and had been separate nearly two years before that. In no hurry, and never really sure things were over, they’d circled each other at first like ocelots, now more like buzzards.

That wasn’t kind. Not exactly true, either. But close.

It was Friday night, he could spend the whole evening sitting here filling purchase orders for current address and/or phone number for Smith, Dave from Bethel-Tate High School class of 1982 (whom he’d actually known, but that was a longer story than even he wanted to consider just now). But if he did that, he’d just keep hearing Ju’s half adolescent-boy laugh, feeling her hand on his shoulder, seeing her auburn curls spread over his green sheets.

Or he could call a cab, run out of the office complex and down to the stop on Beechmont Avenue near the car dealership, pick up Beany (the name of the 1982 Honda Accord four-door he’d driven since he’d dropped out of college just short of his degree) and figure out how to get drunk and still get himself home.

"I’m a’coming, Beany..." he muttered to himself, reaching on his way past for the black leather bomber he wore when he wasn’t making sales calls. It was simple, no chains or logos, only the one zipper. Kind of like the face that stared out of the mirror the jacket had obscured, on the inside of the door. Dark hair inclined to curl, dark eyes, nose a touch too big but, thank heaven, straight. That’s about as much as he ever saw, reaching to comb his hair into a somewhat artful mess with his fingers after he’d drawn the jacket over his shoulders. Out of the corner of his eye he caught a glimpse of the cardinal, still sitting on the sill, before he opened the door and entered Friday night.

In the next building there was a taxi dispatch office. He tripped over the loose threshold plate on his way in, smiled and waved at the middle-aged brunette tapping a pencil against an old black pulse-dial Western Electric phone. She was speaking loudly, pushing enunciation with her lips with such exaggeration her face was contorted. Bob grinned and waited on his feet, near the desk.

"All right, sir, we’ll have somebody out there as soon as we can. Uh-huh, it’s okay if you bring Mitzi in the cab, as long as you have her in a carrier. Uh-huh. That’s okay."

She hung up the phone and blinked up at him.

"Well, if it ain’t Coop Deville. How’s tricks, kiddo?"

Rita was one of the few people he’d allow to call him by the aggravating nickname without exacting some sort of payment. All his life, no matter how he’d attached other names, no matter he’d refused to use his middle name, Cooper, for ten years, people still called him Coop Deville. That was Clermont County for you. It was like people could sense it aggravated him beyond reason, consequently they hit him with it early and often. But his aunt, Rita Love, had endured as much torture by her name since she’d married nearly thirty years before. She could call him Coop Deville if she wanted.

"The computer does most of the work, you know. All I do is call people and say, ‘it’s done, ma’am’ and they send me money. I’ve finally figured out how to freeload and still pay my bills. It’s the apex of generations of breeding."

Aunt Rita grinned and flashed him a wink that would have been lecherous on anybody else, or in any other situation.

"Damned straight. I figured out a way to get paid for talking on the phone all day, I thought I’d managed the ultimate scam. I guess you’ve done me one better. But you ain’t gonna have another generation, so I guess you might as well be the apex. Besides, there isn’t much lazier a man could be without lying on the sofa on an IV."

Bob scowled and shook his head.

"Thanks, Aunt Love. I needed that at six on a Friday. So, you got anybody coming in, or in the neighborhood soon?"

She studied a neon pink plastic clipboard that covered the small amount of clear space between her and the phone. The rest was covered with pink message slips. The date on the one nearest Bob was a week old.

"Yeah, where you going?" she asked.

"Beechmont Avenue, need to pick up my car in the shop. It’s right off the interstate."

Rita glanced back down at the clipboard, chewed on the cap to the pen and slipped it back behind her ear.

"That’ll work. That old man I just talked to lives down that way in a retirement apartment complex, you know, down by that ugly church. Freddie’d have to drive down that way anyhow, so he can drop you off on the way to pick up. He oughtta be in shortly, if you want to sit down and wait."

"I’ve got nowhere else to go until I’m on wheels, I might as well."

The phone rang, and Rita spoke while Bob leaned into a slightly bent vinyl chair the color of a Sunkist orange, its proto-Scandinavian wooden armrests buffed down to a satin by resting elbows. The metal frame sagged as if a giant had sat in it. Which meant Freddie had sat in it.

Strange enough he’d thought about Ju, but he’d thought twice about Ricky and that was even stranger. Bob’s younger brother had died in an auto accident of questionable cause at the age of seventeen. Two weeks before his high school graduation, in fact.

Bob’s mother hadn’t ever really recovered. As if in reaction to her upset, his father had never seemed to acknowledge Ricky was gone. Bob had been twenty, a college junior, living in Columbus and attending Ohio State University on a regents scholarship, studying computer science. On coming home, he’d seen the two choices he’d had for reacting and chosen Robert Cooper Deauxville, Jr’s alternative — he pretended to everyone, including himself, none of it had happened. Almost as if Ricky had never been born.

The plan, when Bob was fifteen and Ricky twelve, not long after they’d received the C64 for Christmas, had been for them both to attend college, study computer science and become great innovators in the field. They were going to go into business together and become rich because they knew where computers were going. Largely, they’d been right. Unfortunately, somewhere around fifteen, Ricky had deviated from the path by becoming first an alcoholic, then a dope dealer, then dead.

Though he hadn’t broken down, Bob had lost his heart for higher education when he realized Ricky wouldn’t be following him the next year. He dropped out at the end of his junior year, while he was still carrying a 3.25 grade point average, moved back to Cincinnati and got a job doing data processing for Procter and Gamble, ambition in neutral, brain in overdrive.

"Oh, here comes Freddie now. He won’t get out of the cab, I think his hip’s bothering him again — here’s the address on Beechmont, you can save my bunions the trip, if you don’t mind."

"Of course I don’t. Thanks, Rita."

"No problem, Sweetie. Say hello to your mother for me next time she calls. I never used to get a chance to go all the way out there to Bethel when she and Robert lived out there, now I never get to see them except five minutes at Christmastime. What with your Uncle Harris sick half the time, and Janey will never stay with him, she’s got her own brood..."

Bob sighed, nodded sympathetically and accepted the folded slip of pink memo paper from Rita’s hand.

"I know what you mean. If they didn’t stay with me when they came home in December, I doubt I’d see any more of them. And when they still lived out in Bethel, if I hadn’t lived halfway there I wouldn’t have gone either. Sometimes it seems like Bethel’s the end of the world these days."

"Honey, Bethel was always the end of the world. All days. You just didn’t know it until you got tall enough to see over the wall. I’ll see you later. Maybe we’ll do lunch some day next week."

"I’d like that. Come around the corner, I’m there every day from nine to six."

Freddie waited in the cab. Bob waved the phone memo at him as the door pulled itself shut on the ringing phone and Rita. Freddie smiled and nodded, waved at Rita through the plate glass. She waved back.

Freddie was an enormous black man who, as far as Bob knew, resided in the ten year old Chevy Malibu he drove for Clermont Cabs. Bob wasn’t sure he’d ever seen Freddie on his feet; it would have been difficult to imagine him getting out of the car, though the bent chair in the dispatching office belied it. Rita told Bob Freddie had worked construction for at least fifteen years, until he fell off a roof ten years before and broke his hip.

Though he hadn’t been nearly so corpulent at the time, Freddie had never been a small man, either — being incapacitated for three months with the broken hip had destroyed his already tenuous grip on his weight. This Freddie told Bob the last time Bob hopped a ride to pick up Beany. He’d lost his girlish figure, Freddie laughed. Now, this was about all he could do and with the added weight of almost another grown man on his frame, his hip was never quite right even after healing and physical therapy. One thing had contributed to another until driving a cab was about all he’d been able to do when he went back to work.

But the money wasn’t bad, and Cincinnati was a fairly safe place to drive a cab. Especially Clermont County, where most of the calls were elderly people whose families didn’t have time to drive them from place to place, who could no longer drive themselves, or drunk working-class dogs like Bob, late on weekend nights, who’d lost track of their tequilas and knew better than to try to drive through Batavia or Amelia or Milford or Terrace Park half-lit on a weekend night. Freddie had several regulars.

"Hey, Old Man Moody must have a date with ol’ Miz Winston tonight..." Freddie grinned as Bob climbed in beside him and handed over the note. "She lives in an elderly Metro Housing apartment complex over by Amelia, I take him over there a lot on Friday nights and pick him up again to take him home about the same time on Saturday. His family comes to take him to church on Sunday mornings, they don’t know he spends all night and the next day with the old lady. Course, when you’re eighty, maybe it takes a little longer just to get going, huh?"

Bob laughed.

"I wouldn’t know, it’s been a while. It might take me that long to get started."

"Now, I know it wasn’t that long ago you were spending just about every night with your ex ol’ lady. Couple months ago, wasn’t it?"

Bob scowled and nodded as Freddie brought the Malibu around and started out of the lot.

"Well yeah, but ... I don’t know. Most of that wasn’t about making her, it was about trying to make ourselves sane. Which of course we both knew wasn’t going to happen."

"How long has it been since you’ve been with anybody but her, though?"

Bob laughed. Rita sure shot off her mouth liberally around the help, he thought wryly. But he knew he’d called and gotten Freddie to pick him up enough times, drunk off his head on a Friday or Saturday night the past year, Freddie had probably got most of what he knew honest. If Bob didn’t remember saying it, it didn’t mean he hadn’t.

"I haven’t been with anybody else since I met her, Freddie. At least, not that I can remember. You never took me anywhere but my address, or took any pretty women home with me in the back of the cab on a weekend, did you? Or even any ugly ones, for that matter..."

Freddie laughed and fired up a Winston long cigarette. Bob’s hand went to his pocket, but he’d quit two weeks earlier for the tenth time. He figured he’d last about five minutes before he bummed a smoke off Freddie. Quitting hadn’t seemed as urgent since he and Ju split legally. Who was he living forever for, anyway?

"Want one? I know you told Rita you’re trying to quit, but I know how many times you’ve tried to do that, and I know how many times I’ve tried. Figure you’re about as successful at it as me."

Bob’s rueful grin brought a cigarette out of the pack already held out toward him.

"You’d be about right — give me one, I’m not even going to play around about it tonight."

Freddie surveyed him; the green traffic light reflected off the sheen of his ebony forehead. There was a Buddhic appropriateness about Freddie; a sort of contented sigh that seemed to hover in the back of the man’s throat all the time. Bob suspected that predated the weight — he doubted many people as heavy and handicapped by it as Freddie were really contented. Freddie’s hand went to the pocket in the dark T-shirt, he produced a lighter for Bob.

"Hell, you’re a big boy. If you want to kill yourself, who am I to stop you?"

Bob grinned, lit the cigarette and rolled down the passenger window an inch.

"Hey, thanks. I’ve quit too many times already to think there’s much chance I’m going to succeed at it. They say the only thing it’s harder to quit is heroin. Cocaine ranks right up there. For that, they oughtta make you feel even better than they do, though."

Freddie grinned, pushed the Malibu around the corner and onto US 50.

"Hey, but you’ve got about even odds of smoking twenty years and not getting particularly sick from it. You live twenty years on horse or coke, you know you did it, even if you manage to quit. Most people don’t live that long on either of them."

"That’s true. Nicotine’s a tyrant, but it’s a fairly equitable one."

Freddie laughed again.

"It’s the working class man’s heroin, that and coffee. But you’d know, I know you’re not lining a 401k out of that computer-digging business you do. You could probably work for somebody else and make a pile, you know that."

Bob grinned calmly while Freddie swung left to cut off a cement truck turning right onto the interstate bypass ramp. The Malibu moved out pretty well. Bob had known it would, Robert pere had owned one when Bob learned to drive. He’d passed his driver’s test in it, in fact.

"Yeah, I know. But somebody else would always be telling me what time to get to work, what time to get home, who I could take as a client, what was worth the time and not, telling me I should wear a suit and a pair of wing-tips. If owning my own soul is the price of barely scraping by, I’ll scrape for the next forty years and weasel away enough to feed myself until I drop dead from emphysema. I make enough to buy a fifth of whiskey a week, that’s about as adventurous as I need to get these days. I’m not on the walker yet, but I’m too young for most things money can buy you except more of what I already have."

Freddie nodded. The sigh, when it came, seemed to encompass Bob too.

"I like to hear people say things like that, you know? I like knowing not everybody’s eaten up with greed. I don’t care what the bible says about adultery or fornication or false gods, I sincerely think the greatest evil there is is wanting more than you can have on your own merit. I mean, if you can’t get it for yourself, what damned business you got expecting it? I know, my people have had a hard time getting what they deserved on their own merit..."

The Malibu accelerated smoothly into the traffic on the interstate bypass. When he didn’t have a paying fare, Freddie drove about eight miles over the speed limit, like virtually everybody else in Cincinnati did on the road if they didn’t drive faster.

"You’re right, Freddie. I’d never argue with you there. I can understand some people wanting more than conventional wisdom says they merit because they’re women, or black, or Mexican or not as bright, but if they can do something as well as a white man, why shouldn’t they get as much as he does for doing the same thing? At least what I do, nobody cares what I am. If I give them something they think is worth the price I’m asking, they pay it and I go away without feeling like I’ve screwed anybody for it."

"Yeah, I know what you mean. Driving a cab has its advantages, you know? I get paid for the miles. I get paid the same for the miles a white person would, and a woman would get paid the same. Like what you’re doing, driving a car is something being a white boy doesn’t necessarily give you any advantage on. Nobody could really say a white boy could do it any better."

"I’ll drink to that for you later, Freddie. I suspect you don’t drink."

Freddie frowned, watching traffic slow leading up to the messy Eastgate Mall snarl at US 32.

"Not often, you’re right, but how did you know that?"

"You do your job as well as you’re able. If I was driving a cab for a living, I probably wouldn’t drink often either. I’d be taking other people’s lives as my responsibility, I sure wouldn’t take chances with that. I respect people who do things like this, Freddie, honestly. Rita, too — she has to be on top of things. It’s not like getting a cab is always a life or death matter, but you and I know it’s usually a quality of life matter, if it isn’t life itself. This old guy you’re going to pick up could spend his Friday nights and Saturday mornings staring at the television getting senile instead of working his way up to grabbing his old girlfriend’s hand at four o’clock on Saturday. If you weren’t here, if there wasn’t a cab service available to him, he’d do exactly that — and that’s sad. It’s good to know he has an option."

Freddie laughed and lifted his elbow to touch Bob’s.

"Rita’s right. You’re a good kid."

Bob entered the tall glass temple of the Honda new-car showroom and aimed his softsole feet at the customer service desk. A wave-pattern of salesmen heel-clicks, exalted by the tabernacular acoustics of the glass and linoleum; hushed voices filled with a friendly zeal washed in his wake as he halted and lugged a long fingered hand through his hair, focused on the female behind the Formica counter.

She didn’t not look like Uma Thurman, though in truth she had the better hair. He doubted somehow this was the woman who’d called him and promptly put him on hold back at the office. He desperately wanted her not to be, was closer to the truth. She wore pale honey-colored hair in that parted-in-the-middle, seventies shoulder-length cut that had become popular again lately, with a strand from each side in front tucked behind each ear.

Bob wasn’t partial to blondes but he could think her attractive in an ‘other men’s fantasies’ sort of fashion. She blinked rather large, greenish eyes at him through small, square Ray Manzarek glasses, the lenses tinted a few shades toward cobalt, pursed pale painted, generous lips before she spoke.

"May I help you, sir?"

Damn, that ruined it. She was the one who’d called him. Disappointment transmuted into a vague, hazy irritation, he nodded.

"They’ve got my car back in the service shop. If I go back there, I know for a fact they’ll pretend like I don’t exist. Their receptionist has probably left by now. If somebody doesn’t page Hank or Art, they won’t come up and help me. Could you just page one or the other of them to come around so I can pick up my car?"

She grinned, tried to hide it, then let it go.

"That’s right, you’re the ‘82 Accord. Hang on."

She picked up the phone, punched up the intercom and said, "Mr. Deauxville is here for his car, Hank."

At least she’d remembered the name this time. Robert was impressed — he hadn’t told her again.

She turned back to blink at him, lips pursed in a thoughtful, wry little frown.

"I’m really sorry about the name thing, earlier. I had all three lines going, there was a family with four little kids on the floor trying to look at a Passport with no salesmen in the building. DOUGH-VILLE, right? It has an ‘X’ in it, I noticed from the invoice when I entered it this morning — is it French?"

Bob was eased by the apology, impressed with her memory. But he still wasn’t partial to blondes.

"Yeah, actually it is. Dad’s grandfather was first generation from France. A lot of his family lives in Montreal now. It’s about all the French I know, though, my name."

She laughed. Not a bad laugh. Bob estimated she was twenty-two years old, if she was a day.

"I know a little, but if I said what I knew on the streets of Paris I’d be trailing a mob. I had an uncle who was in Normandy for a while during World War II, he taught all us kids half a dozen ways to proposition somebody in French. None of us knew what any of it meant until my brother got into second-year French in high school..."

A swinging door flapped in the dimness beyond the desk admitting a greasy, bearded man who looked for all the world like a blue-painted fireplug, waving a service order in one hand, a key with a bright yellow paper tag in the other.

"What say, Coop? She’s all done, ready to go," the man grinned.

"Don’t you DARE touch my desk!" the receptionist warned, one hand flailing a warding gesture to warn Hank away. "Go back to your lair to do your evil business."

Bob followed Hank back through the door. It flapped again and Bob found himself in the underworld of the service shop. Beany waited, gleaming dully in the high overheads like a greased cockroach.

"That little car is sure a keeper. Two hundred twenty K and half the brand new cars they drop off the truck don’t run any better, cold on the pavement," Hank sighed.

Bob grinned and nodded.

"Figured she’d be gone long since, but I’ve never been able to make much of a case for getting rid of her. Think I can keep her a while without too much investment?"

"Well, I don’t see any reason why not, but you know how it is. Once you get a Honda or a Toyota up much over a hundred and fifty K, you’re pushin’ your luck."

"Oh, now — how many miles you got on that old blue Toyo four-by-four pickup out in the back lot, Hank?"

Hank grinned and folded the receipt into Bob’s hand.

"Pert-near half a million. But I do all my own work. I check her over every weekend. You’re leaking a little oil around the valve cover, might want to plan on seeing to that a few months down the road. Also, your front passenger tire looks like it might be a little wore on the inside — you ever have new ball joints on her?"

"Not that I know of. Is it expensive?"

Hank’s head jerked over his shoulder quickly, then he leaned nearer Bob.

"Be about a hundred twenty bucks and a case of Miller Draft. Call me at home from now on, Coop. You’re payin’ twice what you should to have her worked on, and waiting around more’n you oughtta."

He slipped a folded sheet of paper down inside the receipt, winked at Bob.

"Thanks, Hank — I wouldn’t have asked."

"I know. Nobody ever does. I don’t always get to work on her when you bring her in here, either, and I like working on your car. Ball joints aren’t anything real urgent, either. Give me a call in a month or two, I’ll have another look then, unless something else comes up. How’s that?"

"Great. Thanks a lot, Hank."

"It’s nothing. Good luck. Barry, would you bring up that bay door?"

Beany wasn’t just a car, after all. She was an extension of his body. Like Bob’s body, he cared for her intuitively. Thus far it seemed to have worked. There were things that had to be fixed, things that could wait and things he never fixed. It had been five years since he’d had any knobs or switches on his heater controls. The heater fan blew a tepid, weak stream of air across the windscreen at all times, unless he dismantled part of the dash — which he did at the change of seasons from hot to cold, cold to hot — and rearranged the switches internally. For summer, a faint breath of air was plenty to keep the occasional fog off. Comfort things didn’t get fixed on Beany. They were part of who she was as a woman.

Like there was a snowball’s chance in hell Bob would try to turn west across four lanes of Beechmont Avenue at seven on a Friday night. He switched on the right signal and waited for a break in traffic to squeak Beany out into the incoherent flow. It would clear somewhat on the east side of the interstate bypass, but Bob estimated it would be ten minutes before he got through the clogged artery and into actual traffic flow again.

He considered it, turned in at the BP station and bought a diet soda, a packet of Camel Lights, a disposable lighter and a small box of chocolate-coated graham crackers. If he was going to be waiting anyway, he might as well have cigarettes. He’d known when he quit this wasn’t the last time he’d start smoking again, unless he put the quits on quitting. By thirty-three, he figured his habits were pretty well ingrained, there wasn’t any Coop Deville the fourth waiting in the wings to echo the PSAs about how it was every parent’s responsibility to live until his kids grew up or some other such heart-rending nonsense. The first drag was the best. He got it just as he moved back out into the traffic at the light.

There probably weren’t going to be any more Robert Cooper Deauxvilles. Watching his parents lose Ricky — and losing Ricky himself — had been more than enough to put him off filial relationships for the rest of his life. Ricky had been bright, though more athletic than intelligent. Bob had been the bright but uncoordinated one, the one who couldn’t manage to operate a paddle-ball. He and Ricky hadn’t played together as kids until Robert pere had bought one of the first video game machines, the mega-marketed Atari 2600.

Bob switched on Beany’s radio, turned to the Northern Kentucky University NPR station and left the volume relatively low, window down, thumb notched over the last half-inch of window glass that didn’t disappear into the door anymore when it was rolled down, cigarette fuming just below the windowsill. After the Atari, he and Ricky had spent a great deal of time together. The Commodore only cemented a mutual fascination with electronics.

They’d procured ten crystal radio kits between them before Robert Junior had realized they weren’t making ten radios but one with ten crystals wired in parallel in effort to make a very strong AM receiver. He’d bought them a very strong AM radio kit from Heath, then a shortwave receiver kit when they’d succeeded with the AM. Neither had gone as far as amateur "Ham" radio, though — he’d presented them with the Commodore for Christmas the next year, along with several books on Commodore Basic programming. It hadn’t taken more than an hour for Bob to discover how to make the C64 spew invectives about Ricky’s personal habits, in color. Their learning progressed at a rapid pace from then on.

There were two things Ricky, between thirteen and fifteen, had never forgiven his older brother. He’d never forgiven Bob the discovery of dating and girls, and he’d never forgiven Bob going off to college in another city. When Ricky was thirteen and Bob started dating, it hadn’t amounted to much — Bob was still there most of the time, spent what time he didn’t spend studying toward a college scholarship working through Basic and DOS programming, assembling their first PC from bits and pieces they’d cadged and bought and found and traded with members of the Clermont County Computer Users Group and CINTUG. Neither had been a classic computer geek, Bob didn’t consider himself one now, merely knowledgeable and interested but with a life outside computers.

Unfortunately, Ricky’s life outside computers had involved football. He’d been quite good at football. More than good — scholarship material. Ohio State University had offered him a sports scholarship about a year before he twisted his Pontiac into a pretzel, halfway between Amelia and Batavia on 132, in fact. Ricky was an excellent quarterback, probably good college material if not pro material.

There was one drawback. Ricky hated football. He hated football players, hated cheerleaders and the marching band, hated what he considered the exploitation of young men by the colleges, hated the fact his body was strong and capable — or, more precisely, more strong and capable than his mind. His envy of his older brother became more bitter and more evident the longer Bob was in Columbus at school. The only thing Ricky had enjoyed about playing football had been the perquisites. People had been willing to give him, free of charge, all the alcohol and marijuana he could consume, plus the occasional snort for a special occasion.

Drugs hadn’t been rampant in Clermont County thirteen years before. Bob thought they probably weren’t near as rampant now as they were other places, nor as rampant yet as they were likely to become there. The demand and the ability to pay hadn’t been there then. That’s why he’d been so surprised when Ricky had been yanked into juvenile court for peddling dope. Joints, mostly, to the kids at Bethel-Tate and Williamsburg at the football games, the occasional quaalude or amphetamine.

OSU had dropped Ricky like an empty Gatorade jug. He’d been suspended from school, from football, grounded by Robert Junior and June. By far none of these things seemed to prove as rough on him as what Bob had done to him. Bob had said he was disappointed. Bob hadn’t known then how important his approval was to his younger brother, and he had been disappointed — he’d waited three years for Ricky to join him for the last year at OSU, they were going to shoot off into the atmosphere. Now, Robert Junior probably wouldn’t be willing to foot the bill to send Ricky through college at OSU, though Ricky had been accepted for admission in spite of the legal hassles.

The accident of undetermined causes occurred the weekend after Robert Junior confirmed their suspicions and told Ricky he could go to the University of Cincinnati if he wanted, but he wasn’t paying to house Ricky away at school after what he’d done right there in his hometown. Ricky had tried to argue he’d be better off close to his older brother, but it hadn’t carried any more weight than when Bob had tried the argument, repeatedly, in the months leading up to Robert Junior’s final decision.

The police had ruled it an accident. Robert Junior had shrugged it off as drunkenness, though the blood alcohol report had revealed Ricky hadn’t drunk enough to raise him above the legal limits. Bob knew Ricky had committed suicide, but who would have cared to hear it? He kept it to himself, knowing precisely what his contribution had been to the mess Ricky had made of his life, and ended none too neatly, on an early Saturday morning a few weeks before his commencement.

Now, thirteen years later, Ricky Deauxville was a bad haircut in a football uniform in an ancient Bethel-Tate High School yearbook, and Bob’s life wasn’t in much better shape. But Beany would never let him screw himself into a hillside. She wasn’t going to let him.

The traffic did ease as he passed through Withamsville and into Clermont County, on his way home to check his answering machine and the E-Mail on the PC he had at home. It was now the equivalent of a mid-line Compaq, just barely up to the Internet work; he’d bought it several years earlier for Ju when she’d wanted a word processor and spreadsheet machine to do some extra work at home. It had been the top of the line then, a two gigabyte hard drive, sixteen megabytes of memory, a CD-ROM. Now, it just barely did the job, and though he knew — intellectually, at least — what was in the machine, he couldn’t begin to comprehend the business monster that stared at him every day from the corner of his tiny office.

When he and Ju legally split, she asked for no alimony — only for a computer system that was exactly what she wanted, not his idea of what she should have wanted. Bob agreed gladly, though at the time it had strapped him a bit. He’d eaten macaroni and cheese and Hamburger Helper for a little over three months, then gotten on with life.

The house in Amelia where he lived now had been their house. Ju had picked it out, her parents had paid the down payment eight years before, just after they’d married. Now Bob was working off the money he felt he owed Mr. Chalfont — though Ju’s folks hadn’t asked — in services. Not only were Bob and Ju still on pretty decent terms, he was still friendly with her parents. Clermont County was too small yet to allow for mature people to hate each other if it could be avoided.

Leon Chalfont operated a small construction company in Owensville where Ju had — and still — worked as his secretary and accountant. Bob did materials research, found new suppliers and just generally provided whimsical trivia for Leon as Leon asked. They’d agreed at five years, he’d have settled what they both felt was due.

Bob still wasn’t sure if Ju felt respect or contempt for his insistence that he pay her father back some portion of the down payment on the house. He didn’t understand Ju’s footing with her parents these days — or ever, were the truth known. She’d worked for the company since high school — for Leon, at least. It had seemed odd to Bob she never visited them except holidays, funerals, family dates and the occasional Sunday at church. ‘If you worked with your old man,’ she’d countered, ‘you wouldn’t be dying to socialize with him either.’

It was a moot point. Bob’s mother and father had moved to New Mexico when Robert Cooper Deauxville pere had retired from CG&E ten years before. They visited once each year, from December fifteenth through New Year’s Day, then flew back out to the rocks and dirt almost as if they were escaping pursuit.

June Deauxville had never really recovered from Ricky’s death, though. Possibly, the memories really did seem to pursue her. They weren’t always kind to Bob, he knew what it was to dream the funeral home’s error of opening what should have remained a closed casket at the end of the formal visitation.

They hadn’t fixed Ricky up much, it wasn’t supposed to be open, after all. June hadn’t fainted, though she’d let out a banshee wail that prickled the hairs on the back of even Bob’s valium-loaded neck. As if they hadn’t already been standing; as if both Ricky’s life and death hadn’t been gruesome enough everybody had to see the results of a two and a half gainer by a 1979 Pontiac LeMans off the two-lane between Amelia and Batavia. Ricky had never been a seat belt convert. Bob and his father had never intended for June to know what she couldn’t have helped but learn — the EMT had spent twenty minutes searching for Ricky’s head in the weeds surrounding the divots the Pontiac plowed in the muddy, late spring field.

Beany stopped and the driver behind Bob honked a horn. There was nothing wrong, this was his usual failsafe Friday night routine — The Pantry on 125 in Amelia. Insurance in case he never got up the gumption to go out to a bar, in fact. Eight weekends out of ten, he didn’t get up the gumption, just sat before his computer drinking too much of something or something else, eating microwave popcorn or taco chips and inhumanly hot salsa. That sounded good, but he’d promised himself he was going out tonight.

He cruised the aisles of The Pantry anyhow, picked up a fifth of DeWar’s scotch and a twelve pack of diet sodas in case there weren’t any at the house — there usually weren’t any at the house on Friday nights, when he showed up with hooch and taco chips. It was a hard go quenching his thirst after the taco chips with whiskey and tapwater.

If he had a brain, he thought, grinning at the girl who recognized him every week because he came in the same time, same night every week (he should be embarrassed about that, too) he’d buy a gallon of orange juice or something a little better for him than carbonated Aspartame. But there was little enough joy in his life. It was Bob’s hope the chemicals and alcohol would actually pickle him at his current age and level of decrepitude, which was still fairly acceptable. It seemed to be working so far, though his liver wasn’t visible from the outside and might have been no treat if he could see it.

"Beany, old girl, it wouldn’t be a treat for anybody to see his own liver. What was I thinking?" he muttered, rolling back out of the liquor store’s lot to wait out another traffic light. He had the whole routine down — only stopped at places on Friday nights that were adjacent to traffic lights. You didn’t survive on US 125 under any of its several guises — Ohio Pike, Beechmont Avenue, Route 125 — without the aid of traffic lights and well-orchestrated right turns.

You did not turn left across US 125 anywhere from the Beechmont Viaduct down by the city to the other side of Bethel, nearly forty miles out, any time from approximately four-thirty on Friday night until at least seven on Sunday unless you had the benefit of a traffic signal.

Once he was through Amelia and safely in the fifty-five mile per hour zone again, Beany stretched out and seemed to sigh. She’d missed him, he could tell. He didn’t take her far at highway speed though, turning on Lindale-Mt. Holly Road toward home. He thought he sensed her sulking a bit as he switched on the signal two miles back at the ramshackle Cape Cod he called home.

"Sorry, old girl. Afraid it ain’t one of them highway nights. I’ll take you out tomorrow afternoon and we’ll let you show off the work, right?"

He locked the door, as always, though half the people who knew him thought him paranoid. He wasn’t nearly far enough off the highway to leave anything sitting unlocked, and Beany was — it hurt to realize it — just about the only thing in his boring, wicked life he gave a shit and a half about, out of sheer wanting to care. Everything else he had to care about because it fed him, supported him, held the rain off or bought his DeWar’s and — again — cigarettes.

There were four messages on the ancient AT&T answering machine when he settled the DeWar’s and sodas on the kitchen counter. Well, there were four flashes on the machine, which probably meant one call and three hangups the machine hadn’t circumvented before the lady’s sweet voice said twice, ‘if you’d like to make a call, please hang up and try again... if you need help, hang up and then dial your operator.’ Someone — The Replacements, he thought — had parlayed annoyance at the voice into a marvelous little pop song, about ten years before. Bob had to settle for screaming "shut up you bitch! I said shut up!" through the first hangup. The second call was Ju.

"Hey, give me a call before you get settled in with the monster and your liquor. I want to ask you something. On second thought, get settled in with the monster and your liquor, then call me — you’re always more human."

Beep. Then the siren of the phone lines again, to which he responded in precisely the same manner, though with a little more verve the second time since Ju’s voice was almost as annoying these days. The fourth message was Robert Junior.

"Hey, kid. Give us a call when you get around to it, haven’t heard from you in a while. Call collect if that business is eating more than it’s producing, it’s okay."

If the business had been failing, not only would Bob not have called his father collect, he wouldn’t have called him at all. He propped himself on the counter and punched the memory on the phone for his parents’ number. If Robert had called him within the past eight hours, chances were they were still at home. Sometimes they took jaunts out of Las Cruces for the weekend, to Santa Fe or Tucson or Phoenix. It hadn’t been that long since he’d called, had it, he wondered? Couldn’t have been more than two weeks. Or three.

"Hello?"

"Hey, Mom. Que peso?" Bob laughed, a family joke engendered by June’s early attempts to learn to speak Spanish when they’d first moved to New Mexico. Before, of course, she found out most of the local Mexicans there spoke better English than she did.

"Well, well — if it isn’t the prodigal. Your father got it into his head it had been at least a month since you’d called. I kept telling him it wasn’t more than three weeks, though that’s long enough. Then I remembered I was the only one who talked to you when you called then. He was in town getting the new plates for the car, he wasn’t here."

"Ah, that explains it. How’s the weather out there, anyhow?"

His mother groaned, but even in the groan he heard the same tantric sound of contentment he’d heard earlier in Freddie’s voice. So his seventyish mother’s voice reminded him of a fiftyish black man’s voice? Not much struck Bob as strange anymore. His brain did weirder things than anything he could ever have hoped to see on the sensationalist shows on Fox.

"Infernal. But my agaves are blooming still, they’ve been blooming for months. At least they and the cotton plants love the heat. Your father’s allergic to the pecan blossoms, did he tell you?"

"No, he left a message on my machine. Just asked me to call, he thought it had been a while. It has been a while since I’ve talked to him, it’s been at least a month. So they found out what was wrong with his nose."

"Yes, well. They’ve given him some kind of infusion to spray up his nose. He insists it isn’t doing him any good, but his voice sounds better and he doesn’t snore at night now. So basically, it took care of my problems. If he refuses to feel better, that’s his affair, right?"

Bob laughed. Though his mother’s conversational skills were less tight than they’d been before Ricky passed away, they were considerably more colorful now. He’d liked the change thirteen years ago; liked it progressively more as the years passed.

"Absolutely. Is he there?"

"As a matter of fact, he is. Hang on, Bob."

She set the phone on the counter and he heard hard-soled shoes click away from the phone. He’d visited, knew most of their house was cool ceramic tiles grouted with peachy terra cotta. He’d loved the house’s high ceilings, skylights, soft corners and the general landscape, with its jagged corners and limited palette. Like the spacer between courses of a meal. But from the sound of her feet, June Deauxville had yet to adjust, after all those years. She was still wearing the two-inch heels she’d worn all her life.

"Bob? Hi, how’s it going?" his father greeted rather too heartily.

"Pop. Not too bad, all things considered. I’m not hurting for money right now, actually — just time. I’ve been on the computer about twelve hours a day, by the time I get off the modem at night it’s too late to call you guys most times. I’m sorry, it has been too long since I called."

"That’s okay, it wasn’t anything urgent in terms of life or health. I just wanted to let you know I’ve finally officially dropped the ‘Junior’‘ off my name, if you want to start using it. After all, your grandfather’s been dead nearly fifteen years, I thought it was more than time to succeed as the senior Robert Deauxville."

Under the bantering, joking tone, Bob knew his father was serious. He didn’t take it too seriously — just seriously enough.

"Okay. I don’t have it on anything official, much. The company charter for Infotek, that’s about it. Might be worth it to change it there, that’s all I know of."

"Do you ever hear from any of the rest of the family? It’s been at least five years since any of them have called me..." his father asked.

"Well, as a matter of fact, I heard from Genevieve’s granddaughters a few weeks back, they called me from a pay phone on the way through town. They looked me up in the phone book, I was the only Deauxville, they knew it was me. I met them at that Perkins off the Mason exit, up north, we had dinner. They were on their way to Florida for one last fling before school, apparently the twins are starting college this year up at University of Western Ontario. They were on their way down I-75, they’d already been on the road eight or ten hours and decided to stop for dinner. Carole had slept most of the day in the back seat, she was going to drive for a while. They were hoping to make Knoxville before they had to stop again. They called me again from Fort Pierce to let me know they’d got in, so I wouldn’t worry."

Robert laughed.

"Genevieve’s girls could survive a nuclear holocaust, I’m convinced. She’s a tough gal, she surely taught them as many survival skills as she knew."

"I don’t doubt they made it home okay, though they never called. Or maybe they decided to bail on the Great White North and stayed in Fort Pierce, I don’t know. I don’t have Aunt Genevieve’s number in Montreal, she moved I guess."

"Did she? I don’t have it either. That sister of mine is so resolutely French. I’ll get her new address someday when she just drops in on me unannounced on vacation and expects me to put her up for three weeks. Not that I’d mind, you understand..."

"I offered to put the girls up for the night, but they didn’t want to lose any time on their way to Florida. I guess staying with a stuffy old maiden aunt wouldn’t have appealed to me much, either, when I was seventeen or eighteen. But I did offer."

Robert laughed.

"Hard for you to think of yourself as a stuffy old anything, isn’t it? I remember the first time I felt that way, it was when Genevieve got married. She treated me like I was her father. Not like your grandfather was dead then, or anything..."

Bob laughed with his father, this time. His aunt was a character, and an amusing one at that. She was very much still French, as Bob had noted most French Canadians seemed when he corresponded with them on the Internet.

"Maybe she’s just eccentric. Lord knows that runs with the genetic strain. Like I could ever claim to be normal..."

"I’d be ashamed if my son claimed to be normal, Bob, and you know it. I never was. All the rest of your mother’s and my friends moved to Florida. They don’t know what they’re missing..."

"You’re damned straight they don’t. If I ever thought I could take a two or three week break from this stuff, I’d be more than happy to load up Beany and come out to visit you for a while. I like it out there. It’s peaceful, for some reason."

"I’m glad you think so, too. A lot of people think it’s desolate. I guess maybe it takes an overblown ego to find this landscape peaceful."

Bob grinned and tapped out a cigarette.

"Nah. Well, maybe that or the opposite — an extreme lack of ego. It didn’t bother me the time I came out because I had no thought I’d ever exceed my surroundings. I don’t think I exceed them here. I have a little male cardinal who comes and sits on the windowsill outside my office window every day. I don’t know why he does it. He’ll show up about ten in the morning, sit there for an hour or so, fly off to eat I guess, then come back off and on all day. He’s always there at six o’clock when I leave to come home. He’s a mutant, it’s almost frightening."

"Maybe there’s something that’s shiny or looks like food on the other side of the glass. That’s the only two reasons I can think a bird would be that persistent."

"Either that, or he just resents the fact he can see the room but he can’t hop into it. I mean, that building’s been there for at least ten years, they don’t live that long, I don’t think... but maybe there’s been a family of cardinals living in that same basic space for the past thousand years, who knows?"

"You could be right. It’s just genetic habit for him to return there. Still, it’s curious."

"Maybe I’ll see if I can find an ornithologist on the Web and ask if birds do that. I know they say humans don’t, but..."

"I don’t know as I believe that. Sometimes, I think we’re genetically programmed to screw up our lives and we pass on that programming from generation to generation. If we didn’t, earth would be heaven and there’d be no reason to believe in an almighty."

Bob puffed on his cigarette and pulled the fifth of DeWar’s out of the paper bag.

"That’s a convincing argument, Dad. Well, I’ve got a few things I need to get wrapped up online tonight, and Ju called, she wanted me to call her this evening, too."

"Um. Bob, have you ever started seeing anyone other than Julia? I worry sometimes you’ll get stuck on that and never move on with your life..."

Bob couldn’t bring himself to tell his father finding another woman would seem unfaithful even though he and Julia had been apart three years now; legally for one.

"I don’t know as I’m ready to move on with that part of it yet, Dad. I haven’t met anyone yet who’d make it worth it. I suppose if I did, I would move on."

"If you never go anywhere but your house and your office, that’s never going to happen, you know."

Bob wanted off the phone intensely, just at that moment.

"Dad, I really would rather not talk about it right now, okay? If Ju’s a problem, and I’m not admitting she is a problem, she’s my problem. I’ll work it out myself. Maybe I just don’t want anything from anybody right now..."

Robert was quiet for several breaths, then he sighed.

"You’re right — it really isn’t my business. And you’re right, also — Julia is your problem, not mine. I’d just hate to see you regret having wasted years hoping for something that wasn’t going to ever happen."

"I’d hate that too, Dad. But nothing else is happening right now, that’s all I really know. She’s not keeping someone else out of my life. There aren’t likely to be very many somebody elses in Cincinnati worth having in my life."

"Good point. Better it not be the wrong one, you’ve done that already. If you’re smart enough not to do it again, you’re smarter than most. I’ll let you go son, it sounds like you’re doing something constructive with your time, so forgive me for being a little childish about not hearing from you. We just miss you, your mother and I."

The bald confession both surprised and choked Bob. He cleared his throat and his eyes at once.

"Hey, Dad. I’m not the one who moved fifteen hundred miles away, am I? I’m trying to get things arranged so I can visit in the spring, if you’re not expecting someone else to camp on you. Probably sometime in April, it’ll be the first vacation I’ve had since I started the business. Depends on the money, I may have to wait until my tax return comes in. I don’t know, Christmas was good last year — lots of lonely people looking for old friends and lost lovers, you know. The AT&T commercials come on and they start weeping and signing checks..."

Robert laughed.

"I know what you mean. We may or may not be back for Christmas, Son. Your mother’s back has been bad enough already, we’re trying a new mattress on the bed now to see if it was the problem, we’re hoping that takes care of it. If not, I don’t know if she can take two of those two hour Delta flights again. I’d hate to miss it, but we might have to..."

"I’ll understand. I hate flying so much, if it came down to it I’d drive Beany out there in April before I’d fly. If she’s still on the road."

"I think one of the reasons you don’t have another woman to replace Julia Chalfont is, you’re in love with that car. I’ll talk to you later, Bob."

"Later, Dad."

The thought of being alone at Christmas for the first time in his life would hit him tomorrow. He wasn’t giving it time to hit him tonight. He snatched a diet soda out of the cardboard carton, snapped the cap off the fifth of DeWar’s and dumped approximately two and a half shots in a highball glass. To hell with calling Ju, if it couldn’t wait she’d call again.

The phone rang as he was chasing the Scotch down his throat with soda. He swallowed, breathed and picked it up.

"Hello."

"Hey, Bob, this is Kevin Carmody. Remember? From P&G..."

"Oh, Jesus — yeah! Kevin! I remember you. You had the data processing terminal next to me in Research and Development. What, they transferred you to Zanzibar or something, didn’t they?"

"Not quite — to Springfield, Illinois to administrate accounts for Taiwan."

"That’s what it was. Passing through, or are you back at the home office?"

"Passing through, I don’t work for P&G anymore. Look, I’ll make this quick and dirty. I’m in town for a couple of days, I’m in the middle of an ugly divorce and I was hoping for either some domestic bliss to make me feel like the world’s a friendly place or a single alcoholic like myself to join me in an evening of bacchanalia. Which is it going to be?"

"Kevin, Ju and I have been divorced for almost a year, but the closest to bacchanalia I ever get is drinking Beringer red Zinfandel in front of my home computer. I know some good places to go, though — where you staying?"

"The Holiday Inn out by CVG airport. You still up there in the sticks?"

"Amelia, yeah. I just knocked back two shots of DeWar’s on an empty stomach, I probably shouldn’t take Beany out on that... if you’ll buy the cab on the way to the bars, I’ll buy the one on the way home. You do have part of the day here tomorrow, don’t you?"

"I don’t fly out until Sunday at five. Still at P&G?"

"Nah, I’m in business for myself. Nothing like the money, but no geeks or monsters telling me how to dress or talk or what to do. I rather like the independence."

Kevin laughed. Bob remembered the laugh.

"I wish I could say the same, but I’m tied to the money machine. I took a job with IBM, they’re moving me again. I’m on my way from Chicago to Albany, decided to drop in at Cincinnati on my way across the Midatlantic and see if I could scare up any action in Cinci first. I’m glad to hear you’re single too, I was starting to think I was the only man between twenty-five and thirty-five who wasn’t either married or crazy."

"I can’t promise you I ain’t crazy, Kevin, if that’s what you want me to do. Write my address down, any decent cabbie ought to be able to get you to US 125 at least."