STONE FREE

Two women stood on the sidewalk on a sun-spattered residential street in Cincinnati’s Columbia-Tusculum neighborhood. Rambling, quirky late 18^th to early 19^th Century houses lazed behind newly minted cement ribbons, aging beauties smug about their facelifts. Some were painted bright colors, sherbet shades, on the outside — shutters and woodwork — some stolid white clapboard with black, Wedgewood or cranberry-colored trim. The front door the two women faced was cranberry; most of the trim and gingerbread were evergreen.

The woman on the left was thirtyish, African-American, wearing a mustard colored Liz Claiborne business suit and a cerise silk sweater; the other was White, also thirtyish, wearing a blue-heather ragg sweater, five-pocket L.L. Bean denims. Both wore expensive shoes. Just incidentally, each had a shelf in her respective bedroom closet bearing precisely thirteen other pairs of footwear.

"They didn’t even negotiate," the African-American woman said. "So you’re getting the full one-fifty. I know it didn’t matter much to you, and I understand why..."

Evonne Clark was the African-American woman’s name. She was a Realtor. She’d sold the house to the White woman — whose name was Genevieve Reynolds — and her husband, whose name had been Roger and who had not been living for just over eleven months, seven years before. Then, the house had brought in seventy-five thousand dollars. Roger and Genevieve had invested nearly fifty thousand dollars and plenty of sweat, over the course of seven years, to bump the price to double at resale.

Genevieve hated that if Roger were still alive, she wouldn’t have had to let the house go. She loved it or they’d never have bought it in the first place. Four bedrooms were simply too much for her.

"You’re right I didn’t care about the money, at lest not the same way most people do. I just hope the Suzukis are happy here."

Evonne nodded.

"How’s your new place?" she asked, glancing at her watch. Her commission on this house had more than bought two or three of the suit she was wearing, but she was a single mother with two kids approaching high school at light speed, who also had to be on time for the next potential commission.

"Nice. Small, neat, clever. It’s only a little more than I need. Well, I know you have other appointments, and I don’t want to keep you..."

Evonne regretted Genevieve had caught her looking at her watch, but it was true.

"You’re right. Well, if you’re ever in the market for something on this side of the river again, give me a call."

"I’ll do that, Evonne."

As Evonne turned over her black Integra and started to roll slowly along the street under the confetti sunshine, she felt a surge of something like pity. It had been eleven months and a few days since Roger Reynolds’s death, but Genevieve still looked like a married woman, somehow. Her dark auburn hair was long, cut blunt and worn loose; she wore no makeup, at least today, and looked, climbing into her Toyota Rav4, like she was running to pick up her kids from soccer practice. Evonne knew Genevieve and Roger had no children, or Genevieve wouldn’t ever have sold the house. Even one kid would have loved the house enough to make it worth keeping, she thought.

Genevieve watched the black Integra roll past, flicked her fingers at Evonne in farewell, rolled down the Rav4's window and lit her first cigarette in over eight years. Evonne made being single look like such a good life, she didn’t care if she was ever married again. Genevieve hoped time would make her that confident, too. Tears dropped over her unpainted cheeks to blot in the crew neck of Roger’s sweater. She’d kept a few of his things, given the rest to the Salvation Army. In tune with his way — their way — of living, she’d only kept things which had utility, things she could use. The Rav4 had been his, as well as the sweater.

Soon, an Asian family with a teenager, a nine-year-old and an infant would fill the bedrooms she and Roger had never filled, with love, noise and spirit. Though it didn’t stop the tears, Genevieve found herself able to smile. It was what big, bright, strong houses like that one were meant for. If she and Roger wouldn’t be filling them, someone else should.

Prelude

It hadn’t ever crossed Genevieve’s mind that one Friday evening in mid-spring, with the leaves on the trees still a bright and tender green, she might come into the house she and Roger had called home for six years, since just after they’d married, and find her life completely changed. Between her parents’ house, college dormitories, post-college roommates and then Roger, she’d shared every domicile she’d claimed.

The three flashes on the answering machine somehow exaggerated the silence of the tall, narrow, airy clapboard house — Roger should have been home by now, she supposed maybe he’d gone on to the office first instead of coming straight home. Should there have been something threatening in the echo of her boots on the hardwood, as she shucked them off? The slip of her cashmere jacket over her sweater, faint staticky crackle of the acetate lining as she shrugged it off to the coat rack?

In retrospect, she knew, many people whose lives had changed in a moment felt an awful, absurd compulsion to claim they’d felt it — the event — coming. Genevieve wasn’t one such. She’d passed the answering machine and gone straight to the kitchen; opened the refrigerator, loaded a package of frozen chicken breasts into the microwave, a bottle of Beaujolais into the refrigerator, programmed the microwave for ‘defrost’ before heading back out to the foyer to start the playback on the machine.

The first message was time-stamped at five past nine a.m., just after she’d left for work. Roger calling from LAX, the first leg of his trip home. LAX to DFW, and with the layover — he’d called again from Dallas to tell her the second flight had been delayed an hour for maintenance, some electrical quirk, the plane wouldn’t be taking off until after two o’clock Eastern time.

That wouldn’t have had him to CVG until after four-thirty. So maybe he was just stuck in traffic yet, on his way up from the airport in Boone County. Heaven knew the interstates were awful all along the east side of town, especially in Kentucky, at rush hour, on a Friday.

She’d started away from the phone when the third message, time-stamped four-twenty-two, began playing. Only when she recognized Roger’s dad’s voice did it make any impression on her.

"Page me as soon as you get home," his voice said.

At that, though, Genevieve still thought of an unaffecting disaster — Roger’s father or mother had been injured in a car accident, or one of his siblings. She almost shrugged it off, almost said, ‘let Roger get it when he gets in, I have to fix dinner...’

She made herself page Owen Reynolds, set the cordless on the kitchen counter near her and checked on the defrosting chicken. She was rinsing her hands when the phone on the counter beeped again. She dried them, picked it up and pressed ‘Talk’.

"Are you sitting down, Gen?" her father-in-law’s enervated voice ventured.

"No, I was working on dinner. Roger ought to be here any time..."

"Sit. Now."

Her heart suspected, just about then, but Genevieve’s brain didn’t catch up — wouldn’t, in fact, for several days. She moved to the dining room, eyes on the still-open microwave door, the light inside the oven. Everything was normal, and that would protect her.

"Okay, Owen. I’m sitting."

"Roger’s plane went down just after takeoff at Dallas. No survivors. There was some kind of collision, another plane, I can’t digest all the details yet, but... Roger’s gone."

It sounded like he’d rehearsed the words. As Owen had said, Genevieve couldn’t process anything but the kernel of it, either. Roger... plane... collision. The ‘gone’ part went straight to ground, however. For eight years, some part of her that had yet to speak had been waiting for that. It felt like the sound an old shotgun made when the magazine was full and the barrel clicked home against the stock. Click — another life.

It could be mistaken, Genevieve knew, for a hidden desire to be rid of Roger if she admitted to feeling that way. It wasn’t true — Genevieve hated when things changed this way. She loved — had loved — Roger. He’d treated her impeccably when he’d been with her. It was just that he’d been gone so much, they’d both taken the possibility of something happening to him in his travels as a remote, unpleasant but very real possibility.

Besides, Genevieve had been on the school bus with many friends and a fraternal twin brother, John, both of them in Third Grade, when a deer had crashed out of the bushes in the middle of a rural curve and the bus driver, instead of simply plowing on over the deer, had panicked and allowed the vehicle, after a long skid on the gravel, to crash through a guard rail and into a twenty-foot ravine.

Part of John, who had popped up off his seat as soon as the deer appeared, had been thrown clear of the bus. Part of him had not; had been dragged out of the pile of children, text books, lunch boxes, gum erasers and wire-bound notebooks full of spelling tests that had collected in the down turned snout of the bus.

Unlike many of the children, Genevieve hadn’t been knocked out in the accident. She’d bent over to retrieve her notebook, which John had knocked to the floor getting up; had bounced off the seat in front of her and been wedged under her own, when the bus lodged in the crevice. She’d remained trapped under the seat for half an hour before the police and ambulance had arrived.

She’d been able to hear John’s voice screaming incoherently for the time it took his halved body to pump its life away, but probably fortunately, she hadn’t seen any of it and didn’t know until hours later her brother was dead.

The bus driver and several of the children had been smothered under the crushing weight of bodies. Genevieve had escaped that fate, too. Her injury had been relatively minor — her collarbone had been broken. And, of course, at least for a while, her life.

Some part of her, though she’d been too young to understand it then, had set into motion the process by which she grew up incapable of much surprise over the loss of things and people she loved very much. Deaths of pets, disappointments, puppy love breakups — none of them fazed her.

It was only years later she realized it was strange that she’d managed to maintain a capacity to become attached to anything at all, though. She’d read a lot about grief and loss over the years, found most people who’d suffered such catastrophes early in their lives compensated more simply -- by refusing to become attached to anything, however attractive or necessary it might be, if there was a chance of its being lost. Genevieve felt fortunate she’d grown from it differently, for whatever reason. Never loving anything well again from the age of nine seemed a bleak prospect.

"So what happens now?" Genevieve asked Owen. She wanted to curl up under the kitchen chair, howl and suck her thumb, of course — and she’d do something like it later — but she couldn’t yet.

"I don’t know, Gen. They have your number — the airline, I mean. I’m sure they’ll call you some time today. I assume Roger had plenty of insurance..."

"He had a term life policy, and the airlines always pay out, too. The mortgage was insured for payoff if either of us died. He didn’t want me to have to worry about any of it right away, if anything happened to him."

Owen made a rhythmic, strangled and yet strangely melodic sound Genevieve didn’t realize was a laugh until he spoke again.

"It always seemed morbid, to me, that he had all that stuff lined up like that. I guess he was just being realistic, but it sounded to me like he expected to die suddenly."

"Owen, it was the opposite of morbid. We took care of all those things, all those routes of security, so we could get on with our lives and not have that hanging over our heads all the time. In a few hours this is going to hit home, but it won’t be the same for me as it is for most people. I won’t be wondering how I’m going to live through the next few months or years, how I’m going to eat and have a place to live. I can think about what’s really happened, instead of having to waste lots of energy on the small stuff."

"Y’know, Gen, when Roger went so whole-hog for that Buddhist stuff when he was at college, I wondered where the hell I’d gone wrong... but that sounds a lot like all the twaddle he used to spout at the dinner table when he came home at Thanksgiving, so I guess in the end it wasn’t all bad."

Roger’s college major had been Asian Studies, with a minor in economics. He’d wanted to work for the United Nations, the Peace Corps or maybe the Red Cross, eventually. He’d ended up a liaison for a U.S.-based steel manufacturer with strong Japanese ties. The money had been good, though that hadn’t impressed Roger much. He’d only dated Genevieve after he’d determined it didn’t impress her, either. Never, in the two years they’d dated or the six years they were married, had it been a problem. Money was a tool, they’d both felt that way. Roger had come to that way of thinking through studying Asian cultures and Buddhist thought. Genevieve had been raised with the notion.

"You know, Owen, I think I’m going to go out and get in the car right now, while my brain still works, and go to Mom and Dad’s. I’ll give you the number and leave it on the answering machine."

She’d gone back out the door, leaving wine in the ‘fridge, chicken in the open microwave, her folks’ phone number on the answering machine.

Even a year later, all she remembered clearly of the next several days was locking the deadbolt on the front door, getting in her beat-up old Toyota Celica, and turning the key in the ignition. She’d operated on brain-benumbed autopilot of pain for the next six days, aided in part by a ten-pill prescription of Librium from her childhood doctor out in the sticks, her mother’s half-adept application of cathartic conversation and expert provision of comfort foods, and much sleep. Somewhere in there, she’d called insurance companies, the airline, Roger’s employers and his friends; she’d arranged for his cremation — such as was left, since his body had been ripped apart and only about forty pounds had arrived, at his designated crematorium, for further immolation. It did seem sad his organs hadn’t been donated — Roger had wanted to leave his corneas, if nothing else. Not even they’d been usable by the time the wreckage was investigated and the bodies were recovered, though.

But the whole Buddhist, pragmatic, living-in-the-day philosophy Genevieve had tried to learn from Roger had made it possible for her to pick up on the following Tuesday, take a shower, put her makeup on and go in to the record store where she worked. If she’d merely been an employee, she’d have called in sick a third day. But she had a stake in the store and felt responsible.

A year after she and Roger married, Stone Davis — who at the time owned the store in toto, a new and used book and record outlet in Clifton — found himself facing a horrible financial tangle at the end of his second marriage. He was afraid his probably soon-to-be-ex wife would try to attach the store when she filed for the divorce he thought he knew was coming.

He’d grieved, and made Genevieve aware of the fact her job might be in danger. She’d discussed it with Roger, who’d suggested she offer to buy half the store. She’d offered, Stone had sold her forty-nine percent. Genevieve liked working there, liked Stone well enough to find the thought of his losing the store grievous. The solution had been win-win.

Since the store was all he had, Stone was happy for the bailout. Genevieve hoped he hadn’t had too many moments of regret since. She’d already been managing the store some of the time, at that point, making many ‘editorial decisions’, though the reality was Stone would probably police them more thoroughly now, since she now had a stake in the profits, too.

The first recommendation she made had been that ‘the store’ buy a personal computer. Stone had waffled over spending the money for a day and a half, then he’d come in the second afternoon toting his soon-to-be-ex wife’s Sears-special Packard Bell system, set it on the counter and waved a transformative hand over the two-waves-outdated monitor as if Genevieve could weave it into cloth-of-gold. She’d called him Rumpelstiltskin and got to work.

Within a month, she’d entered the inventory of books, magazines and records, bought a modem and linked up with a local Internet service provider to track values on the stock. Records Stone had marked too low were priced up to just a hair below what the market would bear; the dogs were sold cheaply to the handful of customers they knew made their livings off the flea market circuit. The same went for the books.

As little as she liked it, because it bore the stink of faddism, Genevieve also brought in the fake-tattoos, henna kits, hair dye and body jewelry most of the other stores in Clifton sold. Stone, even at his age, went through periodic phases of wearing rings in every pendulous flap of flesh above his belt, and possibly some below it — Genevieve didn’t want to know — so there was no danger of attracting a clientele either of them, or any of the oddball kids they hired in the store to work the registers, could possibly consider offensive.

It was impossible to carry that much ‘finger tchotchke’, as Stone called CDs, jewelry and paperback books, without a fairly high loss level. Only the vinyl was difficult to sneak out the front door. And not even it was impossible. Genevieve hadn’t yet won the magnetic tag war, because of the initial investment. She thought she was getting close, though. A couple of weeks ago, one of Stone’s prizes, a mint copy of Strawberry Alarm Clock’s ‘Incense and Peppermints’ album had sprouted legs on a busy Friday night.

It was autopilot for the first three days Genevieve was back in the store, and a sort of painful, inept haze the next two, but by a week from Friday she was starting to connect again. There’d be plenty of darkness to walk through yet, she knew, but Roger would have hated thinking he’d paid so dear a price for her to find no joy again, in anything, ever. How disappointed he’d have been in her if she let his death kill the best parts of her, too.

Well, okay — but that was cold damned comfort those nights she woke up alone at three o’clock a.m. in an otherwise empty bed, wandered through the house half-asleep looking for him. Roger wasn’t haunting her — she was haunting herself. But for years he’d been absent so much. Genevieve realized it was going to be much harder for her to resign herself to his permanent absence, when all eight years with him had been a continuous series of temporary absences. Ones, unlike this final one, from which he’d ultimately return.

Work was good. Simple as that — having a place to go every day that was little involved with Roger’s and her history together was a necessity. There’d be no financial need for her to work, of course, if she couldn’t. The airline settlement alone would have covered her modest living expenses for fifteen or twenty years. It would be a while before she saw any of it, and probably a while after that before she’d be able to bring herself to touch it. Though she’d probably think otherwise later, at the beginning the money just seemed tainted, somehow.

After three weeks of waking up in the middle of the night, every night, thinking she’d heard the phone and surviving her brain’s stupid determination that it might be Roger, Genevieve knew she was going to have to make some changes. She was seeing a shrink, at her mother’s request, though Roger’s death had no taint of negligence and she’d been going through the phases about as efficiently as could be expected. The Federal Aviation Administration had determined a wind shear had pushed another plane into a nosedive, which had struck the plane in which Roger had been flying as it rose from the runway. No fault was apportioned either pilot and both planes had been inspected within days, showed no structural problems.

The airline had recently contacted her attorney and offered two and a half million dollars to settle. The number meant nothing to Genevieve. She’d also been contacted by the family of another of the passengers who was scouting sufficient interest to file a class-action lawsuit to take the airline for yet more money. Genevieve had politely but firmly declined. Suing the airline for more money, when the traditional price for a lost human life had already been offered — and without any hassle on the airline’s part — seemed gruesome to her. There was nothing that would bring her mouth-breathing, Salman-Rushdie-reading, myopic, brown-eyed, hash-smoking soul mate back from the dead. Five million dollars gained dishonestly would only have seemed even more dirty than what all airline passengers accepted as the cost their families would be paid for their lives, and the airlines accepted as the cost of doing business.

It might have been different if there’d been any negligence found by the F.A.A. in the investigation. Nobody could punish a freak wind gust. Those things happened, especially in Texas.

Mortgage insurance had paid off the rest of what was owed on the house they’d bought and restored in Tusculum. It was clear to her she didn’t want to live in it alone anymore. Besides all the memories it held, good and bad, she’d never quite got over the first ten minutes back in after she’d gone to New Richmond to stay with her parents just after Roger’s death.

It would have been difficult enough to deal with entering the house for the first time as a widow, having the notion firmly fixed in her mind that for the rest of her life she walked the way without Roger. The chicken she’d left thawing in the microwave had festered while she’d been gone, filling the whole first floor of the house with the vaguely sulfurous odor of dead flesh.

She’d had to throw open the windows and leave for a couple of hours until the place aired out. Two days later, the microwave still smelled of something dead, no matter what she did to try and remove the smell. She’d donated it to Salvation Army, with all fair caveats, bought a new, smaller model.

Everything in the kitchen had seemed perfect for two — Roger’s only concession to money for comfort, his only extravagance, had been a top-of-the-line Jenn-Air range with all the bells and whistles. He’d loved cooking, had been good at it, and Genevieve had appreciated the convenience of having a stove that would turn on a dime. What would have seemed an extravagance for other people was simply slightly extended comfort, for them. Now, though, even things bought by the poster child for the Middle Way seemed extravagant for Genevieve to use by herself.

Roger’s Toyota Rav4 sat in the driveway. There were still payments to make on it. She could simply have sold it, but Genevieve forced herself to think about it rationally — a woman alone in Cincinnati, with its bipolar winters, probably wanted to sell the old, small car and keep the newer, more multipurpose vehicle. She’d driven it any time he’d been out of town in the winter and liked it well enough, it wasn’t a hard sell. The Celica — six years old, with seventy-five thousand miles on its odometer — went through Wheeler Dealer with a photo she’d taken herself. At her father’s urging, she’d put his number in the ad instead of her own.

It wasn’t hard to let the Celica go — she’d bought it second hand just after they’d bought the Tusculum house, since they were only a few miles from the record store. Roger, who’d only driven Toyotas or Hondas since college, had nudged her into buying it. "Once you drive Japanese, you’ll never go back," he’d teased. She’d asked him why he’d wanted to marry her, and the discussion had devolved from there into much good-natured nattering. But she’d taken his advice on the car, and had never had to regret it. The car was neither more nor less than she needed for her purposes.

Now, the purpose — survival on her own again, after a two-year, gradually escalating relationship and a six-year marriage with Roger — had altered. The Rav4 would protect and serve.

But living alone, even in the gentrifying and improving digs of Tusculum, was starting to seem uninviting. As was the case with many such considerations, she and Roger had discussed her alternatives should anything ever happen to him — and to even her surprise, vice-versa. The house was too big for either of them to have occupied alone. Its value on the market had doubled, between their renovations and the influx of young, hip types who’d slowly followed to become their neighbors. They’d agreed if anything happened to either of them, the other would sell the house to a family and find something smaller.

In fact, they’d already discussed selling the place because the selfishness and smugness — or outright strangeness — of their neighbors was beginning to weigh Roger’s spirit down. His sense of community was greater than Genevieve’s, who’d grown up well outside town, near New Richmond, with neighbors half a mile to a mile away. Roger had grown up in Mount Washington, with a street full of kids his age and a lot of intercourse with all his neighbors. His surroundings had a more immediate effect on his state of mind.

When they’d bought the house, at 171 Lytle Circle, the neighbors at 169 had been an older, empty-nest couple. Their house had been in the woman’s family since it was built. One seventy-three had been occupied by an elderly man who’d bought the smaller brownstone after the death of his wife, and who’d shared it with his divorced daughter and her teen-aged son while the son grew. But the Burtons — the empty-nesters — had sold and migrated to Arizona to improve her arthritis, and Mr. Stottlemaier had died, leaving the house to his daughter and grandson, hoping to provide for them. The daughter had remarried within six months, a man who had three kids on the split-custody program, and they’d had to sell the Tusculum house and move out into Clermont County for want of sufficient affordable space.

169 was taken over by a uniformly bland, smug couple in their late twenties, who drove two humongous Lincoln sport-utes, one with a Christian Right organization bumper sticker, the other with a Dole campaign banner from the last general election. They’d had to dig up Mrs. Burton’s thirty-year-old chrysanthemum patch to make room for the second sport-ute; and besides, their rottweiler had gnawed off many of the flower heads within the first week they’d lived there.

The people who’d bought the Stottlemaier place had been yet more disturbing. Bright, trashy and melodramatic, they’d gifted the neighborhood with two exceptionally grubby teenagers — one, with his head shaved until it looked like gunmetal, a boy; the other most likely a girl, though the short, spiky hair and loose clothing made it by no means a certainty. Both had tattoos; the boy the logo for the band ‘311' on his shoulder, the one Genevieve thought was a girl, something that looked like a heart with a dagger driven through, on her calf, just above her left ankle. Both kids were escorted by a steady stream of low-slung pickup trucks and Honda Accords in a variety of dark colors, all with black-tinted windows and stereo systems with more power than the average college radio station, thumping out gangsta rap at concert volume from six at night to three in the morning all year round. Every kid Genevieve had ever seen get out of any of the cars or trucks had looked like he or she could have been a brother or sister to the kids who lived in the house. They listened to Black music, wore Black clothes, drove cars like Black kids drove and called Black kids niggers in casual conversation.

When Genevieve had visited the realty office to discuss putting the house on the market, she’d chosen the Black woman, for her agent, who’d sold them the house seven years before. Though she never said the words aloud, Genevieve hoped the house would be sold to a large family of color. The neighborhood needed a bit more diversity than its current pale, pride-lost and weird Germanic denizens gave it. As badly as the White kids in the old Stottlemaier house seemed to want to be Black, she thought it would benefit them if somebody came along to show them what it was really about.

Money wasn’t really an object, but Genevieve had already made up her mind about several things. First, she wanted a small house or condo in an area of some diversity — either of ethnic origin or, at least, of age, economy and family composition. She wasn’t as sensitive to it as Roger had been, but even she knew living couched between people who were in her same socioeconomic environment and who looked, sounded and lived the same way she did would be boring; living between people like their new neighbors would stifle her heart. She wanted her old neighbors back, the Burtons, the Stottlemaiers, though she knew that was unrealistic. She wanted at least half a chance one of her immediate neighbors had voted for someone she didn’t despise in the last general election.

Reality, however, stepped in. The Greater Cincinnati area was overwhelmingly conservative. If they chose to live outside the city limits, most people her age lived in either jumbled, crowded Kenwood or Blue Ash to the north of the city, or on the western edge of Clermont County, to the east.

She figured she had a couple of other options. There was always taking bag and baggage and starting all over in another part of the country. There were few areas — north of the Mason-Dixon Line, at least — which were even remotely as constipated and hidebound as Cincinnati. Hell, Dayton and Columbus probably weren’t any worse.

Stone recommended she look at some houses in Fort Thomas and Latonia before she wrote off Greater Cincinnati entirely. Fort Thomas, especially, was a fairly young area, he said, with mixed residence types, though he couldn’t vouch for racial diversity. Having grown up in a condo on the other side of the river, he also suggested she look for a small house instead, though she’d been considering a condominium. Stone reminded her kids and pets next door still made the same amount of noise, whether you had a lease or a mortgage. Genevieve appreciated that reality check — she’d been out of apartments long enough for their disadvantages to have faded from her mind.

A month before the end of her first year alone, she finally waved goodbye to 171 Lytle Circle.

Start

It was a short drive to her new home from the old one — drop to Kellogg, east past the auto graveyard and through California, the S-curves between the golf course and the sprawling, Art Deco behemoth of the Cincinnati Water Works. Not far past, the exit rose from Kellogg to the I-275 bypass. She was barely on the bypass before she was in Kentucky, barely in Kentucky before she was off the bypass and on the I-471 connector for downtown, barely on I-471 before she was off at Grand Avenue.

Moving to the other side of the river, oddly enough, made most things more convenient from her new house than the one in Tusculum, which had been closer in road miles. The new house was only five or six miles south and west of the city, as the crow flew, and all interstate connector, where the old house had been four-lane urban streets, with light after light. Most of the way, the right lane on both sides was reserved for parking. It could take as much as a half hour to get to the store from Tusculum.

Living in Fort Thomas, I-471 gave her access to both downtown Cincinnati and the whole bypass loop within five minutes, and she could make the store in no more than fifteen minutes in the worst traffic. As near the interstate as she was, the house — an old brick Cape Cod a few blocks back off Grand Avenue — was in a quiet spot. A large sycamore out front shaded the porch, but the windows on the south side allowed enough light to keep it from seeming dismal. There were two bedrooms, a dining room that could be pressed into other service if she wanted, and a basement that could probably be finished into a workshop if she decided to learn to do something she didn’t already know that would require a workshop.

At least half of Genevieve’s remaining possessions were still in boxes. She’d unpacked the kitchen and enough of the master bedroom to get by. The Aiwa tabletop stereo Roger had used in his office, and the bigger television, Genevieve had chosen to keep. She’d given Roger’s home computer, the audiophile-quality home sound system and the second and third television sets they’d received as wedding gifts and never turned on in six years, to the closest public school she could find in Fort Thomas. They’d only ever watched the old Magnavox TV Roger had owned, when they met, about five hours a week. There was no point having three televisions.

The old Magnavox ran more now, with hi m gone, but Genevieve still only watched twenty minutes of news in the morning, another twenty at night, a little PBS here and there, "Kids In The Hall" or "Monty Python" or, if she was really lucky and caught it, "SCTV". And of course, buffered with her bottle of Beringer Zinfandel, there had been "Homicide: Life On The Streets" on Friday nights before its cancellation.

She’d slipped back into some of the habits of her mid-twenties — smoking, Friday nights drinking in front of the television. Not all were bad — she’d also gone back to reading copiously again.

On her father’s advice, Genevieve had spent four years working on a bachelor’s degree in business administration in college. She’d resolutely hated every related course, scorned the classmates who didn’t hate them, gotten reasonably good scores in spite, then developed a serious bout of strep throat and spent finals week of her senior year of college in the hospital running a fever of a hundred and four degrees. The job had come through and she’d waited until the following autumn to take her finals, let them mail her diploma.

Participating in the operation of a record store was helped not a twig by her almost degree. Such operations defied all theories about marketing and customer flow. It was a heart-string business. The only reliable surge was around Christmas. Aside from that, it was anybody’s guess when VH-1 would mention Devo or Donovan and touch off a rush on their stuff. Well, fairly often it was Stone’s guess, which explained how he made a decent living for two of them off a used record store, something he had been told was an impossibility. Used vinyl and disc stores only had a snowflake’s chance near universities.

Of course, in a strong economy, discretionary income of the sort that bought used music wasn’t hard to come by, and the stock wasn’t expensive to maintain. And frankly, Genevieve liked the work and the people and being around all the old music almost as much as Stone did. Music, via Roger, had settled in her bones.

It was fifty degrees, with a sort of greasy rain sifting down from the sky, on the one-year anniversary of Roger’s death. Genevieve was still numb when she thought about it, mostly. Or perhaps resigned was a better description. In many ways, cliche or not, it seemed both like Roger had never left and like he’d never even been in her life.

It was harder to force herself to know his loss since he’d been gone nearly a quarter of the time when he was alive. If they’d awakened together every morning for six years or more, eaten together every night... if it hadn’t largely fallen to Genevieve to handle most of the operation of the household... if it hadn’t already felt like he wasn’t really there, it would have been devastating. Both her arms and her heart too easily set in the old, anticipatory mode of ‘waiting for Roger’, regardless what her brain knew.

Only time, she knew, would change that. The store, ‘Stone Free’ — a nod to both its owner and a thirty-year-old Jimi Hendrix song — stood dark between a university sports bar and a trendy clothing store on what the locals called ‘Short Vine.’ Stone had been working in another record store when the building had freed up ten years before, debating the investment of a tidy insurance sum dropped in his lap when his maternal grandfather died. Stone had learned the ins and outs of the dying — or so he’d been told then, and was told repeatedly over all those years — trade in used vinyl by small record stores. At the time, Camelot and Tower Records looked like behemoths, eating all the music in the world and shitting bankrupt small businessmen in their wakes, and nobody wanted to invest in used music.

Stone, however, had seen precisely the unfilled corner — someone wise enough about business in general, willing to cater to trends in nostalgia, willing to invest the sweat to practice both art and science. Someone who loved music — loved rock and roll, and vinyl, and going to people’s houses to look at crates full of crap in their musty basements — might still tweak a decent profit from the trade.

Besides the storefront retail, Stone Free merchandised through newsletters, sponsored shows on local public and college radio stations, and brought in not-yet-hip young authors to sign books in the bookstore-coffee shop.

At Genevieve’s suggestion, Stone Free opened a coffee bar in the book area, and carried a better selection of exotica such as collector’s editions of Anais Nin, Kafka, Camus and Chekhov, scooped up at library shelf-clearings and the yearly Brandeis Book Sale. As with the records, they began carrying used books and accepting books in good shape in trade. Three tables allowed the usual coffee customer — female, eighteen to twenty-five, shy or at least quiet — somewhere to sip coffee in relative peace. Unlike Borders and Barnes and Noble, which had turned into meat markets for the literate, Stone Free had remained a hit-free zone. Stone liked to carry books on herbals, Eastern religions, Pagan mythology, ritual art and assorted histories of intoxicants. Those, too, worked well for their crowd. In recent weeks, they’d had good luck with a paperback edition of an Indian cookbook.

It also helped that Stone had a good sense of friendly space — they joked about Feng Shui, but it really just seemed like common sense. The store was well-lit, pleasant, reasonably quiet, and open enough they could all watch for petty thievery without making the place claustrophobic or making themselves oppressive. Stone had purchased the building for fifty thousand dollars, ten years before, and remodeled it extensively — he’d bashed out walls and replaced them with pillars to open visibility, raised the ceilings and installed dropped incandescent lights with paddle fans. His greatest complaint about most of the stores in Clifton — especially the record stores in which he’d worked before he’d opened his own -- had been the greasy, unappetizing fluorescent lighting. The second floor of the three-story brownstone housed most of the office space, with a small corner Stone wanted to devote to textiles or retail clothing when he had time to plan it. The third floor was devoted to inventory.

The changes he’d made in the building had achieved their desired effect. Stone Free didn’t look like a seat of the pants operation, it looked like someone cared about it. It had taken about five years for the good repeat business to start — college kids who’d come their freshman years to unload music for cigarette money came in again when they’d graduated and acquired decent jobs, to buy back some of it. At the ten-year mark, those old catalogues they’d received, often complete, started to become dear again. Any time a less well-financed store went under, Stone bought out the inventory.

And now he had Genevieve, a willing accomplice with sufficient discretionary income she’d been able to bail him out when Jayda had tried to take the store. Since he’d sold Genevieve half the store less one percent as soon as he saw the stink looming, Jayda had only been able to attach his personal assets. Stone’s heavy reinvestment in the store — long a sore point with his second ex-wife — had foiled her somewhat by limiting the liquid cash available for her sharks to scent. He had to give up the condo in Hyde Park, his Audi and what seemed a stifling sum of thirty-five grand a year for five years.

"It’s only money, V," he’d said at the time, with a serenity that surprised Genevieve. "She can’t hurt me where I live. I live here, and the way things are now nobody can change that but me. I have you to thank for that."

As Genevieve punched in the security codes for the store’s side door, her watch read nine thirty-two. It was overcast, windy, with the sky swollen and dripping like a hangover black eye Mother Nature didn’t remember from a tequila bender the night before. But it was only spring — late April. Some chilly, dismal weather still remained to be endured in Cincinnati as late as the second week of May, most years, but Genevieve still resented it, somehow.

She doffed her down parka to the coat rack in the second-floor office she and Stone shared — two old well-rubbed wooden school teachers’ desks covered in post-it notes and invoices, receipts and music magazines. Posters of glam-rock bands — T. Rex, Bowie, Mott The Hoople-era Ian Hunter — framed the walls, and in a corner behind Stone’s desk, a three-foot-tall pot plant soaked up dismal, bluish light.

She clicked the ancient AT&T answering machine to ‘play’ while she put a pot of coffee on, turned on the radio — tuned to WNKU, Northern Kentucky University’s college station, one on which they sponsored programming — and listened with half an ear to Ladysmith Black Mambazo, the other half to the machine. There was only one message on it.

"Hey, V — Stone. Won’t be in ‘til noon today, made a trip to Euclid on Thursday after work and stayed over yesterday to eat zabaglione. Martha and Joe are both supposed to be in there today, so you should be okay ‘til I get there. Don’t let Joe work the coffee bar — he won’t learn how to run the espresso machine right, I get complaints. Later."

Stone had a sister who lived in St. Louis, where Euclid Records had quite an operation — they were one of the premier jazz collectors’ sources in the Midwest. Stone idolized the whole business, wanted to make Stone Free equally successful or, as he said, ‘bullet proof’ selling pop and rock music and merchandise.

Euclid also sold rock and pop, and traded in used vinyl, but they could be persuaded to exchange stock for stock when Stone had good jazz kip to trade. Two weeks before, the estate of an old friend of Stone’s father had sold him a full set of Charlie Parker’s albums, including vinyl, reel-to-reel tapes and acetates. He’d paid book value for the entire collection to get the Bird work, to the widow, a charming woman who’d once dated his father and who’d been left sufficiently comfortable, he didn’t feel guilty making money on the late audiophile’s collection. The Frankie Laine 78s probably would never fetch book anyhow, but he’d paid that to get the Charlie Parker. She had no room to grieve over the money he’d given her.

Genevieve started the downstairs coffee machines herself, started the register, checked the previous night’s receipts. Martha always left her books clean. Personally, Genevieve didn’t like Martha, who had the tendency to manipulate men to her intentions, sometimes including Stone. That she called to mind a miniature, red-haired, hippy-chick Marilyn Monroe doubtless contributed to the magic.

It never occurred to Genevieve the college boys who came into the store might find her attractive. At thirty-three, she suspected she was pretty much invisible to them, struggling through their welter of navel-ringed, tattooed, nubile and succulent fellow collegians smelling of patchouli and honeysuckle shampoo. That was life.

Martha was, as always, five minutes early and Joe, five minutes late. Joe never managed to balance his register right, though he was never more than five dollars off. Joe, however, knew his shit — his memory for artists, titles and records was encyclopedic. That was every bit as much good for Stone Free as good mathematical skills and on-the-second punctuality. And Genevieve liked Joe. He was a good guy with a quirky, intelligent sense of humor who didn’t treat her like he thought she was his mother.

While Roger had been alive, Stone and Genevieve had followed a schedule of sorts: during the week, Genevieve worked mornings and Stone evenings Monday and Wednesday, they switched shifts for Tuesday and Thursday, both came in until five or six on Fridays, and they usually alternated the whole day Saturday and Sunday off. Martha worked ten to six each weekday, with a standing lunch break around one o’clock; Joe skipped out Tuesdays and Thursdays and the occasional Sunday. He often chose to work four ten-hour days, but he always put in his forty hours, and never refused to work a Friday or Saturday, so Genevieve and Stone never hassled him about it. One or both of them was in when the other two weren’t, and Genevieve put in at least forty hours, sometimes as much as fifty. Stone had practically lived in the store, but he didn’t seem offended that Genevieve hadn’t.

After Roger died, Genevieve spent some part of every day in the store, like Stone. Since both were single, and both on the letterhead as owners, nobody could gripe about the fifty or sixty hour week they worked. Either of them could pull a day off without too much trouble, anyway, arrangements as they were. It was a comfortable, reliable existence for them both. The store had been Stone’s life for ten years. For the past year, it had gradually become Genevieve’s as well.

They took in a full set of Beastie Boys discs at ten minutes after ten, from a freshly-minted suit-and-tie guy Joe and Genevieve posited was a Procter and Gamble new-hire; sold the full set at ten minutes before noon to a kid with a gold-sheened buzz cut and an eyebrow ring wearing a still-stiff Moeller High School sweat shirt.

Joe was originally from Syracuse, a college dropout in his middle twenties who claimed never to have stopped wearing boot-cut Levi’s between their phases of popularity. Today, he wore — over Levi’s and a black turtleneck — a mustard-colored sweater with a black Charlie Brown zig-zag and black Converse high-top Chuck Taylors. Genevieve sneaked behind him to drop a Vince Guaraldi disk in the background sound system when the Moeller kid left.

Martha came forward from the bookstore a few minutes later to buy some singles from Joe’s register. Joe and Genevieve had been bopping to ‘Linus and Lucy’ as she approached.

"This is a cool song — what is it?" Martha asked in her breathy, ingenuous voice.

Genevieve and Joe froze and blinked at each other cynically. It had to be faked. Nobody could be that clueless and breathe all day, every day.

"Vince Guaraldi," Joe finally responded, winking at Genevieve with a hint of a smirk. "You know, Charlie Brown?"

"Oh, yeah! I remember now. I thought I’d heard it before..."

Martha turned in a swirl of spiral curls and rayon layers, clumped her platform-soled clogs back toward the other register. As much as Joe seemed disgusted, Genevieve suspected the pheromones — if not the manipulation — worked something on him, too.

"Like patchouli, or are you just glad to see me?" Genevieve teased, mimicking Mae West.

"Huh? What?" Joe insisted. "Get outta here. I’m gay, she can’t jerk me around."

He smirked into the register as he counted the singles in. Genevieve, who had moved over to sort some new records into the "D" bin, looked up at him.

"Oh, are you? I thought you said you were celibate. Like all but one of the rest of us around here..."

Joe cut his eyes at her, fingertips still resting lightly on the register tray.

"I am. Therefore I think. I have no sexual orientation. I could be gay. I’m as much gay as I am straight, right now."

She laughed, and he finally allowed the other side of the smirk to rise and turn his expression into a grin.

"Celibacy doesn’t mean you’re impervious, Joe. It just means you’re resisting..." she advised.

"My body might pay attention to a girl who’s never read a book without pictures, V, but that’s all there could ever be to it."

Genevieve thought that curious — she’d assumed all men found Martha, or the concept of Martha as played out in any woman, irresistible.

"You asked her out and she turned you down, that’s it, isn’t it?" she guessed.

Joe’s expression was a strange mix of amusement and approbation.

"I did not — really. Helpless, manipulative women require too much maintenance. I think British cars are cool, too, but I want to get to work every morning. I can afford to do that in my Honda. I rather like my Honda."

Maybe it was true, Genevieve grudgingly allowed. Guys like Joe might have decided they wanted to relax with a woman and not have to scour their brains constantly for possible ulterior motives.

"You restore my faith in your gender once in a while, Joe..." she offered as the door opened and Stone entered, water trailing from his Starter jacket and ball cap as the door pulled itself shut behind him, jangling the discordant set of copper bells Genevieve had tied on the inside handle.

"Greetings! Greetings. Guess what I got in Saint Lewie. C’mon, guess."

"A mint copy of ‘Crazy World of Arthur Brown’..." Joe guessed.

"Close, but no cigar. Not too far off. Got a guess, V?"

Genevieve couldn’t precisely say when Stone had dubbed her ‘V’. He’d complained Genevieve was too long a name, but she’d balked at Gen or Geni, or any of the other possible subdivisions. She hated both those, though Roger’s dad had always persisted in calling her Gen. V, though, seemed inoffensive enough.

"Ah... um... well... nope."

"Some loon fanatic’s entire Todd Rundgren collection. I mean the whole enchilada — including a rare mint condition copy of the first album, ‘Runt’, with the full-length versions of the songs in the ‘Baby Let’s Swing’ medley and everything. And a copy of ‘Todd’ with the poster."

The film running in Genevieve’s brain stuck for a fraction of a second, and the film burned in half over the bulb, flapped loose on the reel. A year to the day. She had, probably, an identical set of albums stashed in a plastic milk crate in the basement at home. Todd had been one of Roger’s favorite things to listen to. He’d liked good art rock, Todd, King Crimson, Pink Floyd, he’d even bought several Grateful Dead albums. Until they’d started urine testing him at work, he’d loved to take a Friday night once a month or so and ease back in the recliner in the room he’d used for an office, smoke a bowl of hash and disappear into an old album. When it had been Todd, she’d sometimes joined him.

All the stuff surged up to the surface of her brain like acid reflux making its way up her throat when she barfed, but there was nowhere for it to go — Genevieve had never fainted in her life, and apparently she wasn’t going to start now. It would have been a blessing, in a way. She usually felt better when she threw up. Fainting might clear the synapses, too.

"You okay, V?" Stone’s voice sifted through the noise into her ear.

"Huh? Um... well, yeah, I think so. I..."

"Hey, come on up to the office for a few."

The tag end of the film continued to flip, but her legs engaged to carry her around the bins and through the door, up the stairs.

"It’s been a year, hasn’t it..." Stone said. It wasn’t a question. He shook out the jacket and hung it on a peg next to her parka, near the door, dragged his hand through long, black hair and shook his head briefly to reorganize it.

"Today. It’s been a year today. Roger listened to a lot of Todd, that’s why it got to me."

She lowered herself stiffly into her chair, picked up a rubber, sand-filled stress ball and kneaded it roughly with her right hand.

Stone’s hands pressed over her shoulders from behind, rested lightly. Something in Genevieve wobbled briefly before the reality grasped her — she had quite a friend in him. It made her feel more stable, more certain.

"I have three or four Valiums, if you want one. I don’t ordinarily advocate self-medicating emotional trouble, but you didn’t make this one for yourself and there really isn’t anything you can do to make it go away. I know you want to stay here today — you couldn’t possibly want to go home and be alone on a day like this. It might make the rest of the day tolerable."

She tipped her head back to blink up into his face. Stone’s eyes were gray as wet pavement, his hair was fine, glossy and black, still fairly abundant. He wasn’t handsome in any traditional sense, but there was something right in the harmony of his features. Something, at least for Genevieve, comforting. She nodded.

"I’ll take it. You’re right — it’s a hard day. But it’s an easier day because at least I have this to do on it."

It had been over a year since she’d just sat and looked into a man’s eyes. That Stone was her associate, and someone sufficiently cynical about love, sex and relationships to let it drive him into celibacy, mattered not a quark. He cared about her, if not for her, seemed happy to see her happy. He’d stood in very nearly the same place a year before, minus a few days, her first day back at work. Then, there’d been tears in his eyes.

"You’re a good guy, Stone. Thanks — it means a lot to me to have a friend like you."

He smiled — it made her a little dizzy to see his face change upside-down. She reached up to clasp his hands briefly. Hers were icy, his were warm. He buffed at her fingers briefly, then moved away — though his grasp on one of her hands lingered momentarily, dropped away only when he stepped back toward his desk.

"Don’t take this for any more than it’s meant to be, but I love you, V. You’re a good friend. I admire your strength, your bounce. You’re good at being supportive without being possessive."

She dropped the stress ball as he handed her a pill, reached out for the cold dregs of the cup of black coffee she’d left on the desk that morning to wash it down. Her insides still felt like confetti dancing in the bag of a vacuum cleaner, but it was at a level she could tolerate now.

"I love you, too, Stone. I admire the fact you have sexual ethics."

He sat back at his desk, turned the rolling chair around to face her and picked up a solid glass paperweight that held the old, faithful red and white Cincinnati Reds team logo from the seventies trapped in the glass; rolled it idly from hand to hand for a time before he spoke.

"Not sure I know what you mean," he confessed.

"You got burned. Twice. You kept trying, but you found yourself acting out, trying to burn the women you were with because you’d been burned. So you cut loose and backed off the field entirely. I can’t imagine most men do that because they’re afraid they’re going to hurt someone else — they probably don’t ever back off or, if they do, it’s because someone has hurt them badly again."

His eyes wandered for a moment before they fastened on hers again.

"You’re right that it’s why I stopped seeing women. I just figured everybody who knew me would think it was because I was a coward, though."

She heard Roger’s voice framing the words that came into her head, but the pure human logic of them was unimpeachable.

"Stone, getting hurt ourselves sucks. It’s painful and difficult to get over. Hurting other people should suck just as much, if not more, but most people don’t seem to think of it that way. Having a refined enough sense of the pain you can cause other people — and a feeling of responsibility for it — is pretty unusual. It’s honorable. If it seems cowardly to someone unenlightened, who gives a shit? I know exactly what you’re saying, exactly why you chose the alternative you did..."

He didn’t — perhaps couldn’t — look at her for several seconds. The paperweight smacked alternate palms in quick succession until he lifted his eyes again, then remained balanced loosely in the tips of his left hand’s fingers.

"Thanks. Listen, I was thinking about cutting out of here around six tonight, I’d like you to come with me, if you’re up to it. Don’t take this as a come-on — it isn’t meant to be one, I swear — I just really miss cooking for someone. It’s been well over a year..."

After the initial urge to refuse passed, Genevieve found the idea appealing. Other than trekking back up to New Richmond every couple of weeks to visit her parents, she hadn’t been out since before Roger left town a year before. She’d run the tunnels like a laboratory rat — Stone Free to home to Kroger to New Richmond. Hardly anywhere else.

"I’d love to, actually. You will have to understand it’s a tough day for me — I can’t guarantee the quality of my company..."

His brows went up gently, he compressed his lips and stared at a point just over her shoulders when he spoke.

"Yeah, I know. That’s mostly why I offered today. I don’t think you ought to be alone tonight."

That last sentence, more than the touch of his hands or any profession of emotional loyalty they might have shared, brought home to Genevieve what a resource they had in each other.

"You’re probably right. I’d just get drunk by myself and cry. It’s a little less depressing to do that accompanied. I’ll bring the wine. I’ll probably drink plenty."

Stone grinned and set the paperweight back on his desk.

"I’ll get a bottle of Maalox to send home with you. It’s been a year — even a Civil War widow would have started making public appearances again."

Genevieve sighed before she laughed.

"A Civil War widow would have had places she was expected to go. I don’t. Roger and I never really did things with other couples or got involved in the community because he was gone so much. It was a potentially annoying situation we didn’t want to impose on other people, so we were just asocial."

Stone studied her for a time.

"Suppose it’s not easy for a woman alone to start doing that kind of thing, either."

She closed her eyes, thought, ‘please, Stone, don’t ruin a nice little moment by showing me how much you pity me...’

"It’s not easy for anybody. It’s harder for me because I was happy enough. Roger was the guy I was meant to be with. Neither of us left by choice. I’m comfortable enough, and I’m discovering I can be happy with my own company. Not because I’m so devastated by losing Roger, or because I’m afraid or weak..."

She opened her eyes on Stone’s somewhat injured gape.

"I never suggested it had anything to do with weakness. I don’t think you’re weak, V."

"Sorry," she shrugged. "Guess I’m afraid somebody might think I am. Like you don’t see me every day — if you thought I was weak, I guess you’d probably be right."

"I think you’re strong enough to hole up way too long by yourself. You’re too smart and too young to do that, V. I don’t want you to wake up when you’re sixty years old and regret the last thirty years. My mom did that. That’s all..."

Genevieve had, of course, envisioned it as one possible future for herself — that she’d never quite get her life back into gear, that she’d end up a skinny, sour old woman in gingham dresses and dingy cardigans, with three or four yappy little purebred dogs, sitting in a rocking chair complaining to the flowered wallpaper how decadent the television was. She’d refused, however, to believe it was the only alternative. At the same time, she didn’t know what the other alternatives were, and hadn’t yet found the energy or motivation to pursue the thought farther.

"I’d already written that off, becoming the old sweater and dachshund lady, Stone. I’m just not sure what I do want to be."

"Are you going to figure it out working around college kids and watching ‘Homicide’ reruns?" he insisted.

"Probably not," she allowed. "It’s not like they know I exist, or like I don’t own a VCR."

"It’s the Zen detective, isn’t it? What keeps you watching that show..." Stone guessed. His voice was gentle.

"Well... Bayliss does remind me a little of Roger, yeah. But then Munch reminds me a bit of my old man, too. An embittered old ex-beatnik who ended up printing textbooks for a living because it was the only thing he could feed his family with that didn’t make him feel like he was eating babies for breakfast with sugar and milk. He’s fifty-eight and he’s practically the vice president of the company. They offered, he just chose not to let them promote him to a title. He said it would have got in the way of his actually doing his work."

"Your folks are young. My mom’s sixty-five, and I don’t think I’m much older than you. What, you’re thirty-three? I’m thirty-five. How old was Roger?"

"Roger was forty, but he acted like he was twenty-five most of the time. Which I liked, I won’t deny it. It made me feel younger, too. It was kind of like the picture of Dorian Gray, though. I feel like I aged ten years in the last one."

She leaned forward in the chair, which Stone seemed to take as a cue the conversation was over for the moment. Genevieve was relieved, a little. More because she wanted to save something to talk about later than because there was anything she hesitated to say to him.

The rain had ended about a half-hour before they left the store, at ten after six. After some indecision on her part, Genevieve had decided to drive the Rav4 to Oakley rather than leave it at the store and pick it up the next day. She didn’t doubt Stone had something that would pass for a sofa she could sleep on, if she didn’t feel like staying up until she was sober enough to haul herself the eight miles back to Fort Thomas.

She had never seen anything more than the outside of Stone’s house. He’d bought the small, white clapboard "fixer-upper" on the improving edge of Oakley, with a front yard as patchily bald as a dog with mange, fiberglass shutters bolted on beside the front windows and the once-white paint grayed and peeling at the corners. Stone had said, when she’d dropped him off one evening after his car refused to start in the lot at the store, the house was finished and comfortable inside, had central heat and a central air conditioning unit, new wiring and new plumbing. The yard mattered little to him — he seldom saw it in daylight, as much time as he spent at the store. The less grass there was, the less to be mown.

It was well into spring — a few hesitant blades showed, bright, tender green against the mahogany-colored mud, but overall, the lawn had the stink.

The front door was weather-worn oak with piers of beveled glass running up the right and left of the central pane, a worn-out — probably once brass — door knob that rattled useless in the socket six inches below a sturdy dead bolt that snapped back smartly. Stone leaned in and punched his security code into the alarm system while Genevieve wrestled with the thought she shouldn’t be there. There was no reason to feel that way. Who’d care but the two of them?

It was obviously a man’s house — though it didn’t look significantly different from Genevieve’s, the few relatively minor differences were telling. Stone had a wide-screen TV; Sports Illustrated and The Sporting News frosted the coffee table; a bobbing-head baseball player doll with a Cincinnati Reds uniform stared blankly into the room from the top of the left stereo speaker. Near a doorway that led into the dining room, a poster from the 1990 National League playoffs graced the wall, from the last time Cincinnati had made it past that point. They’d beat the Pittsburgh Pirates in the playoffs, then gone on to shame the Oakland Athletics in the World Series by taking four straight games, the Reds’ ‘Wire To Wire’ season. The poster was flanked on the other side by a framed plastic yard sign, "Baseball at Broadway Commons", from which the metal mounting frame had been removed.

"So... how ‘bout them Reds?" she teased. Stone grinned at her.

"It’s a mostly harmless addiction. Here, let me put those in the refrigerator for a while, I can start on dinner."

She weighed the two bottles of Beringer 1996 Zinfandel in the bag. She was ignorant, mostly, about the finer points of wine drinking — she only knew she liked it. Of course, Roger had liked it a bit himself — sometimes, a bit more than was good for him. He’d had his last DUI just before they met, fortunately for him. It had nearly cost Roger his driver’s license, squeezing in under the wire of some new legislation that would have made a second offense a mandatory suspension. He’d had another, ten years before. Neither time had he been far from home, both times he’d been pulled over for running stop signs, both times he’d been damned lucky the police took him for a suburban husband "too-many-beers-over-the-gas-grill" type and hadn’t thought to search his glove compartment.

He’d have still been doing time on the first DUI when he and Genevieve would have met, if the cop had found the brick of hash he’d been driving to his dealer’s to pick up, four blocks away, one vodka tonic over the limit on a Friday night.

"You know, he was a great guy, I’m not disputin’ that..." Stone said to her as she brought herself back into the present, still clutching both bottles of wine, just in his kitchen doorway. "But someday, whether you ever have another guy in your life that way again or not, you’re gonna have to stop canonizing Roger. Or whatever it is Buddhists do..."

Genevieve set the bottles on the counter.

"I don’t, exactly. It’s just that he was the drums in my life for over eight years. He wasn’t the whole band, but he was the drums. Eight years is a long time. And I’m not a Buddhist, Stone. A lot of that stuff makes sense to me, and I do tend to act like one at times, but that was Roger’s bag. I often think it was just his excuse for making more money than God and not feeling guilty, and for smoking dope." Stone handed her a corkscrew as she spoke. She twirled it idly in her hand for a moment, then fitted it over the neck of the bottle and began driving the screw into the cork. "Give me an alcohol buzz and loud music that doesn’t endeavor to enlighten me too much, if I’m feeling lost or bored or tied in a knot. The other stuff, I’ll handle when I’m better."

She drew out the cork carefully and stared down the neck of the bottle, already regretting opening it — it had been on the shelf at Kroger and needed a touch of chilling to be precisely right. Her own eye stared back up at her through the narrow opening, green and long-lashed. It was like a glass-bound wishing well. Genevieve wished she could just once feel like she was whole, by herself, not only a crippled half of a relationship that could no longer be.

"Here, let me..." Stone offered, setting two ample wine glasses on the counter beside the bottle. "Want me to put the other one in the ‘fridge?"

"Nah — let’s set both of them outside the back door. The refrigerator is too cold, this stuff’s better right around fifty degrees, or so they say. I shouldn’t have opened this one, it’s too warm to drink, but hey — let it breathe a little Oakley for a while, it’ll be all right."

"Will do."

He stepped across the kitchen and unlocked the dead bolt on the back door, set the bottles of wine on the back step — Genevieve could see edge-worn concrete in the light that seeped from the room — and closed the door again.

"Hey, why don’t you go put something on the stereo? It’s the same as the one I bought for the store, fell off the same truck in Juarez..." Stone suggested. He’d lined up a package of Butterball chicken breasts and several plastic Kroger bags filled with produce, turned on the gas ring and lifted down his wok from the top of the refrigerator as she’d stood woolgathering about Roger. Stone apparently cooked like he was planning a battle. Genevieve liked that. She lifted her glass of wine and turned to leave the kitchen, turned back and lifted an eyebrow.

"Anything in particular you’d like to hear?" she asked.

"Uh-uh. Whatever works for you works for me."

She nodded and tried not to feel like a complete interloper walking across the rope rug icing the hardwood floor like the coconut-caramel-walnut on top of a German chocolate cake. It was approximately as gratuitous as icing on German chocolate cake, too — the floor was beautiful, dark-stained maple. It made Genevieve wonder if the slightly scuffed oak floorboards in her house could be improved by professional treatment.

Since he had an oversized television, Stone had installed CD cases in the section of the entertainment unit — cheap, press-board with a boiled oak-paper veneer that you put together with a flimsy, aluminum Allen wrench that came in a plastic bag with the plastic screw-covers — where the television would have been. There were probably two hundred in there, and as Genevieve looked more closely, she saw there were two torchiere lamps with bases that held about seventy-five discs apiece flanking the entertainment unit, plus all the extra spaces in the entertainment unit itself filled with discs. At least four hundred here, in reach of the stereo. Impressive even for a guy who owned a record store.

She ejected the tray for the stereo’s disc player — as Stone had said, a twin of the one at the store. Both were high-level JVC setups with disc players, home-theater quality power amplifiers, twin-cassette decks, and DJ-quality turntables. The speakers on this one, as the one in the store, were nearly four feet tall. Audiophile quality, similar to the stereo of Roger’s she’d donated to the middle school in Fort Thomas, only ten years newer.

But if the stereos both men chose were similar, they were the only similarities. Roger had been tall, blonde and, for want of a better way of describing him, ‘laid-back’. Stone wasn’t tall, especially, had the blackest hair Genevieve had seen on anyone who wasn’t pure ethnic, and had a bit of nerviness about him that was fun to be around for reasonably short periods of time. But any guy who’d managed to choose women to marry who were wrong enough for him to precipitate two divorces, or who’d managed to ruin two marriages — depending on how much faith one had in Stone — had to have some fundamental problems.

Genevieve popped in the first, eponymous Ben Folds Five album and pressed the ‘start’ arrow. She couldn’t think of anything else, at that point, but the CD player had a tray that would open to accommodate changes without interrupting the current disc. ‘Ben Folds Five’ started with a ham-handed, chord throbbing four-four, soon accompanied by a descending glissando on bass and the classic small rock drum kit. The ethereal un-funk of the piece was completed when Folds’s cold-pressed southern tenor tortured the opening line, "Stop the bus ... I want to be lonely..." and ‘Jackson Cannery’ was underway.

The disc was going on five years old, but she’d loved it. Roger hadn’t hated it so much as he’d been ambivalent about it. He liked lead guitar, there was none on Ben Folds Five. The piano was the lead instrument. That had been the most charming thing about it, for Genevieve, who thought too much of rock and roll had been ruined by the effects of testosterone on lead guitarists. Keyboard players were usually nerdy. They were the ones who needed rock and roll.

If a song like this had hit the radio when she was in college, it would have been a great excuse to dance the pogo; jump up and down, never quite let your feet flatten on the floor before you bounced back up. It looked stupid from farther back, she remembered, but it felt great while you were down on the floor, in front of the stage, whipping the bridge of your nose with your hair... harboring the Long Island iced tea that was your entire drinking budget for the night already in your gut, wishing you thought you could smoke a cigarette there in that elbow-to-elbow crush without setting someone on fire. Not dancing to be sexy, not showing much anything but how strong your calves and ankles were. Well, maybe showing the endurance of your brassiere, but that hadn’t ever been a great concern for Genevieve. She wasn’t built so generously that doing the pogo for a couple of hours put any strain on her foundation garments.

She tried a few hops, experimentally. The flimsy entertainment unit wobbled. The bobbing head Cincinnati Reds player nodded at her as if to say ‘I told you so’. Genevieve shrugged and moved to the right-side torchiere/CD rack for further inspiration.

In the past year, she’d kept her eye on the incoming discs at Stone Free for things from the late seventies and early eighties that wouldn’t have passed muster with Roger, things she’d sold to stores like Stone Free back when she was in college, to pay for her weekends out. The Ramones, Nick Lowe, Dave Edmunds... Cheap Trick’s "Standing On The Edge". Elvis Costello’s "Armed Forces". Joe Jackson’s "Look Sharp"; the one with Is She Really Going Out With Him? on it — she pulled the disc from the torchiere to the left of the entertainment unit and opened the case.

"What do you like in your whiskey?" Stone called in from the kitchen. "I don’t think I can wait for the wine to get cold enough to drink."

Sizzling sounds were drifting in from the kitchen — Genevieve took that as a signal for her to come back out and mix a couple of highballs for them. Usually cooking consisted of throwing a frozen dinner in the microwave, at her house. She didn’t mind mixing drinks in payment for Stone’s trouble.

"Be right there."

If Genevieve had to describe the most fitting way to memorialize Roger's death a year later, she probably wouldn't have said it would be spending it getting drunk with Stone, listening to music Roger hadn't especially liked. It seemed to be the best thing for her, though, and Roger... well, Roger was gone. If what he'd believed about his soul was true, it had dispersed into the global consciousness like sugar in hot water.

She thought she understood that, at least in principle, and it made no less sense than the messiah and angels the Methodists had steeped her young soul in as a child. She liked the fact Roger believed all ritual was prayer. It made more sense to her, that particular part, than periodic grape juice and flat crackers.

Even though Roger hadn't liked the particular artists she’d liked, he'd loved music. Genevieve hadn't showed his single-mindedness about the instructive possibilities of the art — she didn't believe all she listened to had to be enlightening or uplifting in any spiritual sense to be worthwhile. As long as her critical faculties could screen out any negative messages, the visceral magic of happy musicians playing well was spiritual enough for her all by itself.

For a while, in college, before she met Roger, Genevieve had dated mostly musicians. She'd tried dating guys at school, friends of friends, people her mother met at church — accountants, business majors, English teachers — but had been disturbed by the fact nearly all of them believed they had an itinerary they could follow for the next fifteen years. Internship, graduation, marriage, tenure, IRA, kids, Chevy Blazer, soccer, Montessori... every one of them, she knew, had his head in the clouds big time.

For all they didn't sound especially ambitious, she thought most of them would be shocked when things didn't go precisely by the book. Even at twenty years old, Genevieve hadn’t been able to envision a bleaker prospect than facing down an angry forty-year-old CPA she’d married — after the de rigueur year of dating, pregnancy scare, full year’s engagement, wedding with bridesmaids in watered aqua satin carrying lilies — who’d finally realized he wasn’t in control of his life after all, and was going to have to ‘wing it’ like women had since the beginning of time and, before the industrial age, most men had understood they’d have to, too.

Musicians had no such illusions. Whether you played classical piano, blues or pop, all genres of music were sketchy at best, future-wise. If you had a template in your head that mandated marriage, money and kids, you didn’t plan to live by the whim of a city budget and a conductor’s temperament to play for the symphony, or ride the even more whimsical tides of popular music. Your plans generally included the gigs or contract you had booked and the next month’s rent.

Peter Pan didn’t try to push Wendy into a prenuptial agreement, and Wendy, for her part, didn’t gripe about balancing Peter’s checkbook for him or diverting the occasional collection call, as long as it didn’t come to the number listed in her name in the phone book.

She’d still been dating musicians — a bass player named Avery who was in both a glam-metal cover band and a cow-punk "new country" outfit, who seldom had trouble paying the next month’s rent — when she met Roger at one of the new chain coffeehouse/bookstore outlets. She’d been looking for the latest copy of the UTNE Reader, as had Roger. There’d been one copy. Roger had invited her out to dinner so they could trade the lone copy of the magazine back and forth. She’d accepted. They’d split the cover price at the counter and made their personal history.

In a way, Genevieve had been mildly disappointed she hadn’t heard from any of her former paramours — in fact, she’d only heard from Avery once, long enough to tell him she’d found someone who might actually want to shack with her, if not marry her — but she’d been relieved, too. Avery, even, had been a little too businesslike for her taste. He, too, had an agenda, though it hadn’t been sufficiently restrictive to send Genevieve screaming out the door. Avery had confessed to her he also had places he expected to be, dates of arrival. He had been living in the future, not in the present, and therefore never quite in touch with either his life or the music he played.

Genevieve had failed in college. She hadn’t failed college itself; her grades had been tolerable and she’d packed her head full of facts about business. She’d learned she had no heart for dirtying her hands in the cesspool of it. The job she’d found after she sort of finished school — advertised as "assistant manager, and I do mean manager, this isn’t just a sales job (and I don’t just mean manage to make it to work three days a week), of a college strip new and used record outlet," had appealed to some vaguely anarchic part of her soul; had rubbed up against her antipathy about business and the whole agora since school ended. An impossible job with an improbable store. Perfect.

It had been during Stone’s second divorce, he’d been spending fifty to sixty hours a week on paperwork, attorneys and watching his house and car to make sure they weren’t ‘appropriated’. He’d needed someone competent and hip to handle the store on a daily basis, since he couldn’t. He found her.

The only confrontations they’d had were early on, when some of the bullshit she’d learned in college still seeped through her good sense and powers of observation. Stone had seen it all, by then. After the first six months, Genevieve learned to trust Stone’s instincts; after the next six, she learned to trust her own as well.

The first whiskey sour all but evaporated — she drank it before one of Ben Folds Five’s four-minute pop miracles had faded completely. Stone was watching her — he had her back. He didn’t seem unduly concerned, so Genevieve determined she wouldn’t worry either.

"So, if this is too personal, just tell me to go pound salt," Stone began as she stepped back out into the kitchen. He licked sesame oil off the side of one finger he’d slopped while flipping small chicken tenderloins, broccoli, onions and baby corn with rather more enthusiasm than was strictly required in his gas stove-top wok. "Think you’d ever want to get married again?"

Genevieve deliberated while she mixed her second drink, watched him slip glances at her waiting for her answer.

"I really haven’t thought about it. Well, that’s not exactly true — I have thought about what I miss about being with somebody, but I’ve never actually thought about the precise fact of getting that involved with someone else again. It just seems like so much to do — get used to all that shit again, you know? What about you?"

Stone laughed, scowled into the wok.

"Yeah, right. I think I’ve pretty much proved to the world, myself and my mother that I’m not cut out for even serial monogamy. Hell, I’m only thirty-five. I’m not giving up on women or on relationships entirely. But I don’t want to be in an adversarial relationship with every woman I get together with. As soon as I see something going somewhere, I start imagining how good my car’s going to look parked in her driveway after the divorce, since I know the judge will always award it to her. I can’t let go, anymore — I spend half the time I’m with any woman I’ve dated more than three times thinking how she’s going to look with an attorney for an accessory. I’m not selfish enough to just date for sex anymore, either. I grew out of that at least six months ago..."

Genevieve hurt for him — it was sad to hear anybody say something so brutally cynical about himself. But he grinned and winked at her, so she shrugged sympathetically.

"Yeah, you sure can pick ‘em. I’m afraid of that, too, though. I quit dating guys I might have wanted to marry back in college, they all had this disgustingly rigorous schedule. I mean, those are the same guys I’d be looking to date now. They wouldn’t be a damned bit different, either. They’d still have an agenda, still be trying to hammer me into their idealized notion."

Stone frowned, lifted the lid on the pot of rice on the stove’s back burner.

"Hm. You may be onto something there. Both my wives were practically begging me to do that — to tell them what ‘the plan’ was, when everything was going to happen. Obviously the store was at least reasonably successful, or neither of them would have had to hire a lawyer to divorce me. But it didn’t seem to connect with them that it worked and made me money because I put whatever it took into it to make it go that way. They never got it — I was supposed to magically make it into a nine-to-five job, as if I were an accountant, and to live my life like it was on rails, but still make the same kind of money I made at it when I worked a fifty or sixty hour week. A life like that would scare the shit out of me. I mean, hell — if you’re living on a train, constantly checking the schedule all the time, what are you waiting for except death? I ain’t ever been an angel — death won’t do me any favors. It’s going to drag me out of this world kicking and screaming. I know if there’s a hell, my ticket’s already been punched for that. Even if there ain’t, why would I want to be in a hurry?"

Genevieve studied his frown, laughed and hoped he didn’t take her laughter the wrong way.

"I never knew that was why guys like that bugged me so much, but I guess you’re right. It’s so ‘Death Of A Salesman’, so predictable and prosaic living like that. See, Roger wasn’t like that. He wasn’t haphazard — he knew what he was doing. He just assumed knowing what he was doing would get him where he wanted to go. The point of the journey is never arrival..."

Something about the mention of Roger’s name or the way she spoke the words made Stone pick up his drink and swallow most of it on one breath.

"Y’know, V, you might hate me for saying this, but I’m gonna say it anyhow... if you never get over losing Roger, you’ll never move on. Whatever moving on means to you, of course..."

"It’s not losing Roger I’m having such a hard time getting over, Stone. It’s feeling like in a lot of ways I never really had Roger to begin with that bugs me, right now..."

She wasn’t sure she’d said it aloud. Stone didn’t look up, and he didn’t speak for almost half a minute, concentrating on the food on the stove in front of him.

"I’m not sure you heard what I said, V," he finally responded.

"I did hear you, Stone. I know what you’re trying to say. But how do you get over a decent marriage that ended completely, totally, without any acrimony whatever? You had the option, with your divorces, of being angry, raving, fantasizing revenge. A freak natural phenomenon took my marriage away. Who do I get pissed off at? What’s there to release? Roger left me with more than enough — there’s no struggle for me. I could go on living like he’s just around the corner indefinitely. There’s nothing really tragic about the way I’m living now. I’d like a good fuck, once in a while, but that’s about all I’m missing from my life."

Stone’s eyes lifted slowly from the wok to her eyes. Before he even spoke, Genevieve had the sense he was about to say something fairly remarkable.

"Listen, V — when you want something that qualifies as better, something more rewarding than what you’d call ‘a fuck’, I want you to know I’m here."

He stared into her eyes and drained his drink.

"I never knew you felt that way, Stone," Genevieve finally responded.

"What way? V, you and I have a better relationship than I’ve ever had with a woman but my mother. I wouldn’t mess that up for the world. But we must trust each other pretty well to do what we do with the store — there’s something more than a casual friendship. I don’t have any ideas about tying you down, or having you tie me down. I wouldn’t want to fail at a romance with you, and I’d be a fool to presume that spark is there for you, or even to think what I feel sometimes qualifies as that kind of spark for me. I just think that would be safer alternative for both of us than taking a chance on getting a disease or being taken apart by strangers if we’re really just looking for sex. Which, let’s face it, sometimes we probably both are..."

Genevieve reached out to pick up his drained drink. Stone let her take it. She stood at the Formica table and took her time refilling it. Besides the fact she was starting to feel a bit of a buzz, she didn’t want to speak again until she was sure she could say the right thing to him.

"Now say what you really mean," she said when she moved back across the kitchen, set the glass at his elbow and propped herself by her elbows on the counter.

"What do you mean? I find you very attractive, V. If I didn’t feel like a shell-shocked war veteran, I’d be giving it hell trying to convince you to come dancin’ with me, I can’t lie to you. But I suspect you still have a lot to close out in your own mental account over Roger, and I do feel like a war veteran. I miss having somebody in my life. I’m guessing it’s not going out on a limb to say you do, too. You and I respect each other, we like each other, and we both get horny. At least I know I won’t go obsessive compulsive on you and beat the shit out of you if you want to date other guys, do a test run, that sort of thing... I know I’m not suited to that kind of relationship, at least not today..."

Genevieve was fairly sure that wasn’t all there was to it. She knew Stone was right about there being more to the relationship than ‘strictly business,’ that seemed to be inevitable if a business was to work as well as Stone Free did. It was more than mutual physical attraction or he’d never have offered to cook dinner for her. It didn’t feel quite right just that moment, though — it felt like a distinct ‘not yet’ to her.

"This isn’t a rejection by any means, Stone," she began, blinking up from her drink into his eyes. "I don’t think I’m ready to have a go at any thing, serious or not, with you right now. You deserve better than you’ve had. I wouldn’t even begin to be involved with you other than as a friend until I was absolutely sure I could offer that to you. As for the sheer athleticism of sex, well... I’ll keep it in mind, but... well, it just doesn’t seem right. I can’t see sex as merely a physical thing, especially with you — because I care about you, Stone, as a friend. I’m not putting any limits on anything by saying that — I think friendship is the basis of all good relationships of any kind, whether they go beyond that or not. I’d like to be the one to prove to you not all women are like the ones you’ve been with, but something in my heart or my head keeps saying, ‘not yet’, for whatever reason."

Stone studied her furrowed forehead, shook his head, scowled, then nodded and laughed briefly.

"That’s the nicest refusal I ever got — and you construct a helluva back door, too, V. Dinner’s about ready. Wanna step out and get that bottle of Beringer off the back stoop?"

"Will do," she grinned.

As much as she’d wanted to get totally wasted, drunk beyond all description, Genevieve had the last glass of wine from the bottle and lost her urge to consume any more alcohol.

"Want another whiskey sour?" Stone asked.

"No, thanks. I’m coasting just about right. Y’know, you really were right about it being a bad idea for me to be alone tonight, though. I’d probably have downed a whole bottle of wine alone, watched bad movies on Showtime until I was sober enough and gone upstairs to collapse."

They sat at opposite ends of Stone’s frazzled mauve velour camelback sofa. Stone’s heels rested on the cheap laminated oak-veneer coffee table; Genevieve had her ankles crossed up over the peak of the back of the sofa.

"All you need is a cardigan, a rocking chair and a terrier and you’d be all set."

"I’d need more than three terriers to be a crazy old dog lady, though, wouldn’t I?"

Stone chuckled.

"Yeah, I think that’s a prerequisite. Ya’ gotta have at least three — dogs, cats, fish, whatever — before you qualify as crazy."

"It wouldn’t be worth it if I couldn’t qualify as a crazy old dog lady — if not, why bother? Besides, I think I’d have to be a lady, too. Mom finally gave up on that bullshit when I was about seven years old and just let me wear pants to church because she got tired of seeing my underwear."

Stone laughed.

"Well, while we’re picking apart the analogy, you’d probably have to be old, too. Now we’ve wrecked your whole pretty illusion."

Genevieve sighed theatrically.

"Guess it’ll just have to wait. Wonder if it’s too late for me to work on being a diva?"

He shook his head and reached up to clasp her ankle briefly.

It was two o’clock when Genevieve deemed herself sober enough to make the jaunt back to Fort Thomas. The clouds had worn themselves thin rubbing their backs against the sky — stars showed through the holes. It was colder behind the weather than it had been before the rain. Genevieve left Stone’s house in an old, lined Island Records windbreaker he’d picked up at a music trade show. It smelled of CK One cologne at the collar.

Thoughts of her old dating habits accompanied her across the Combs-Heil bridge on I-275 while Derek and The Dominos stretched out on ‘Key To The Highway’ on the blues show on WNKU. Strangest thing of all, if Genevieve recalled it correctly, her mother had seemed somewhat relieved when she’d turned from dating ‘marrying men’ during and after her stint at Northern Kentucky University. Alice had even liked Roger — seemed pleased Genevieve had found him.

Of course, Genevieve had known her father wouldn’t completely approve of anyone she married — she had been a Daddy’s girl from Day One. Even Oswald Miller had been satisfied enough with Roger, who was well-educated, well-spoken, deferential, peaceful and treated Genevieve like he wanted there never to be any question he valued her place in his life.

Tears tracked Genevieve’s cheeks. Bonnie Raitt’s ‘Something To Talk About’ distracted her sufficiently. She’d come up against that thought a thousand times the past year, and it always halted her because with it, the tears came. This time, though, she forced herself to complete the thought.

It was true Roger had never left any question he cared about her. Genevieve had never worried he was unfaithful here at home, and if he was fooling around overseas, he was at least sufficiently discreet she never suspected, let alone knew it. He’d loved her, treated her impeccably. But Genevieve had thought, often, he had never needed her. Of course, neither of them had needed the other financially when they’d gotten together. Roger’s single life had been more comfortable than hers in raw financial terms, but even Genevieve had been well above the poverty line when they’d tussled over the copy of UTNE Reader at Borders that night.

Because Roger had chosen to try to live a non-violent, non-confrontational life, they’d seldom truly fought over anything. The best way Roger had found to truly be non-confrontational had been to hold everything in his life, including her, at arm’s length, so he didn’t get angry or upset about it. It was peaceful, but looking back now, Genevieve wondered how she’d tolerated it. It might actually be nice to have someone in her life passionate enough about her to be angry or disappointed — even merely frustrated — when she didn’t agree with him completely.

Roger had been sweet, understanding, civil. They’d had a marriage like most people had in their fifties or sixties, when all the kids were gone and there were no major decisions left to be made.

It would have been okay with her if it had gone on until they were in their sixties, too. She’d have been foolish or selfish to complain. But if Genevieve had it all to do again — and she only had to decide she did — a man with a little more varied emotional palette might be interesting. One whose face showed more than five or six pastel versions of normal human feeling. Since she’d no choice whether she did it again — her life had left her no choice but being alone or doing it again -- she wanted to make major changes if she did.

If she found another man with as little investment in her as Roger and settled for it, she’d be a bigger fool than even she thought she was. She’d always think of Roger, be comparing it to him. Not only would that be — in her mind — disrespectful to his memory, it would be a waste of a perfectly good opportunity to find something different, and unfair to the person she allowed to get caught up in her emotional baggage, to boot.

The wind was damp and bore an edge when she locked the Rav4 in the driveway and headed up the steps. She and Stone had joked about her becoming an old dog lady, but as she pushed open the old, heavy wooden front door, she realized it would be nice to be greeted by a dumb, loyal pair of eyes emerging into the blue half-moon the nearest street lamp made on the maple floorboards.

She knew she worked too much and too irregularly to suit the schedule of a dog — she’d grown up around a menagerie of animals, she knew approximately how much care each required for comfort. A cat would fill the niche nicely, though, and would doubtless like the dust-prone, slightly crazed old house. If cats had space, access to windows and free rein of the house when nobody was home, they were generally content.

Roger had been violently allergic to animal dander of any kind. It would have been nice to have had a cat for company, as much time as he spent out of town, but he sneezed if Genevieve came home from her parents’ house with cat hairs on her clothes. There was no question whether they could have a pet.

Genevieve set her keys on the kitchen table in the eat-in area, checked her voice mail — none — and shucked her jacket to one of the chairs. The light from the street lamp also made a square on the floor, midway between where she stood and the back door, off the kitchen. She could almost see a cat approaching her through it.

She’d check, when she went up to New Richmond to visit her parents on Sunday, to see if there were any kittens wandering around the compound. Waldo and Alice usually neutered any family pets they chose, but because they lived on a moderately traveled road not too far out from town, people often dumped pregnant cats at the end of their gravel road with the expectation somebody else would look after them.

Genevieve’s mother, Alice, had a friend up the hill who ran a ‘no-kill’ animal shelter. She had a farm similar to Millers’, outside Amelia, where she kept the animals she took in. She accepted donations to defray the cost of feeding, neutering and caring for the animals, mostly cats, who showed up at her door or at the doors of anybody in the county who could still afford a farm. If there were no litters at Genevieve’s folks’ place, she’d check with her mother’s friend. Her life and this house made a silent but unmistakable appeal for a cat.

Genevieve stripped and crawled into bed after brushing her teeth. That people would just dump an animal they’d chosen to take in was a mystery to her. She’d been raised by people who were fascinated with, and attached to, their pets. Waldo had trained all their dogs, over the years, to work on a leash, heel, get down and shake hands.

The cats, while less malleable, came when called, stayed off the dining room table, and mostly would take food from his hand politely. He’d trained the dogs with treats, the cats with a combination of treats and spray water bottles. Cats hated to be wet unless they chose to be, it was an effective teaching tool that hurt them not at all. Any cat who refused the bare minimum of conditioning merely stayed outside most of the time. None of the dogs ever failed to meet Waldo’s minimum.

Genevieve had always been fond of the family pets, though less attached after John’s death. She’d been starting to drift off to sleep as she thought about it, but a realization widened her eyes briefly. Roger had seemed perfect for her because, deep inside, she had been afraid to be attached to him too deeply. She’d been loyal, devoted, had loved him as much as she’d ever loved anybody but her parents. But that had been limited, the depth of her love, by the loss of her twin brother nearly thirty years before.

Sadly enough, that had been justified in Roger’s case. Her eyes closed again. It had probably saved her enough, she hadn’t been utterly devastated by his loss.

Before she could let her mind consider what she’d been cheated and had cheated Roger in the transaction, she fell, thankfully, asleep.