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‘Stop!’
‘The weird thing is that as fudged numbers go, they are still socially and racially unacceptable.’
There were murmurings and bursts of laughter and indecipherable ebbs and crashes of seeming silence that
would suddenly bring forth from a great distance,buy world of warcraft gold, like the approaching music of Ravel’sBolero,runescape money, some new
monotonous melody.
‘So what are you saying’ That nothing short of a revolution will do?’
‘Well, maybe.’
‘Well, that’s hogwash.’
I had once seen a hog washed. In whey. The hog was Helen,runescape gold, and she really liked it, the slop of the whey, then
later a cool hose.
‘It is the most unhelpful stance.’
‘Darling, maybe it looks unhelpful, but it seems to help others. I mean, someone has to be an idealist.’
‘That kind of idealism is cynicism of the most extravagant and ostentatious sort.’
‘Everything has to be doable here and now?’
‘Everything has to be less stupid.’
One of the biracial girls’Althea’stepped forward toward me with a joke. Her face was lit bright with it. ‘Why do
black people get so tall?’
‘Why?’
‘Because their knee grows!’ she squealed with delight.
‘Who told you that?’ I asked, and she pointed to one of the white girls in the corner. My having been told this
joke was a source of such hilarity that both she and Althea covered their faces with their hands and laughed so
?95 312163 3
hard that I laughed, too.
Reynaldo and I went to movies on campus, ones I deemed romantic date movies, and he would shift his legs
around restlessly and joke about the drama’s predictability. ‘Oh,cheap rappelz rupees, I knew that they would do that. Of course.’
‘How did you know?’ I whispered in the theater’s musty dark.
‘A call came in on my cell phone.’
And I would squelch a laugh, then minutes later he might say in his intermittent accent, ‘My cell phone says she
turns and walks away right now but then looks quickly over her shoulder.’ And of course he would be right. And
I would laugh. We would go back to his house and drink tea.
‘The first time I used a cell phone I felt so ashamed walking along talking. Talking to no one. Like a mad person.
But God when he made this great world put everything in it. He knew what to put in it so we could someday
have cell phones.’

even close, and was instead lying fetally on a sofa in a position of seller’s remorse,mu online zen, tears of devastation streaming
down her cheeks. How not.
But I could see now that Sarah’s concerns were not with Bonnie but with the mysterious, gone-missing birth
father. I could see she imagined that it might be he who was driving past, having somehow found out Mary-
Emma’s new address. He had not officially signed off on any papers. And though the agency had done all the
things it was supposed to do, advertise in the local papers and seek him out in the halfhearted legalistic manner
that fulfilled their obligation,mesos, it was easy to imagine a young guy in a bar or at work or walking with a cousin on
a nice day back from church or home from school and suddenly hearing he had a child given up for adoption,
and somehow wanting the child back. Had she not imagined the birth father as one of the Green Bay Packers, as
I had’ A minor celebrity, handsome, carefree, with no time for a relationship, let alone a child’ At the very least
she should have imagined him as perhaps the wayward son of one of the aging running backs.
‘I’m not sure that I’ve paid that much attention,’ I said.
‘OK!’ Her face reddened. ‘Have you paid attention tothis?’ She pointed wrathfully at the photo. ‘The
photographer’ Have you paid attention to him’ Who is this person taking pictures of Emmie?’
I did not say anything, because I could no longer speak.
The car with the booming rap song trawled by once more. ‘There it is again!’ Sarah cried, and raced to the
window. I could see her lips moving silently, memorizing, and then she went quickly into the kitchen and wrote
down the license plate number on a Post-it.
‘I’ve put the license plate number by the phone. If you see that particular car again, let me know.’
‘OK.’
‘It’s just ?’ And here she moved both hands through her hair in anguish, her words a kind of muttering to herself.
‘My whole life feels like a horror show of slowly moving cars ?’ I didn’t know what she meant by that’a funeral’
‘Look, I’m sorry. I’ve upset you,’ she said. She touched my shoulder in what might have been tenderness, but I
was too frozen to discern exactly. ‘Thank you for the picture. I understand. It’s a lovely picture. She looks
darling. But no more. Do you understand?’
‘Yes,’ I said automatically.
‘It’s not that I don’t trust your friend. It’s just, I might not trust his Rolodex.’
‘I don’t think he has a Rolodex,’ I said daftly.
Sarah’s eyes bore down on mine. ‘Now I’m going to tell you something I didn’t tell you before. I never phoned
the references you listed on your r’sum’. I hired you because you seemed angelic to me. You gave off an aura. I
didn’t phone one person on your list. Or, well,mu zen, I phoned one person, but they weren’t home. I didn’t care what
any of them said. I was a snob about you. I trusted my own instincts completely.’
I didn’t know what to tell her. Like everyone, I felt I was a good person. How could I tell her she should have
phoned the references’ How could I tell her,Why would you place your child in the hands of someone whose
references you never checked out’
‘I can see that you love Emmie, and I know she loves you. She says your name when she wakes up from naps.
You are, sometimes,runescape money, the first person she asks for. I don’t mean to sound suspicious of your friend, but I don’t
want him taking pictures of Emmie. When you go for walks with her, go someplace else, not to his place, not
with him.’ She put her hand on my shoulder and smiled. ‘Love is a fever,’ she said. ‘And when you come out of
it you’ll discover whether you’ve been lucky or’not.’

a comforter thrown over to calm an agitated dog. There was in the air a cold resignation good for reading.
My Intro to Sufism was taught by a self-described ‘Ottomanist,’ which made me think of someone lying
back with his feet up on a padded footstool,achat kamas, with a remote, in autumn. He looked charmingly rattled and had his
arm in a sling. He was Irish, and he spoke in the airyr’s and staccato of County Brokencanencork, as Murph
liked to refer to the entire country of her forebears. ‘For those of you who are in any way concerned about my
teaching the class,’ said the professor, ‘believe me: I know more about this topic than anyone in this department.
And for those of you concerned about my teaching while on painkillers for my arm, believe me: I also know
more about teaching while high than anyone else in this department.’
I sat next to a tall, handsome brown-skinned boy, who smiled at me and then sent me a note, as if we were in
high school.What am I doing in this class’ he wrote. I am Brazilian. What are you’
I didn’t know what I was in this particular context. I wrote back on his sheet of paper, I am a quasi Jew. What am
I doing here’
I don’t know, he wrote back.
In capital letters I wrote,ddo plat,WHAT IS THE BEST WAY TO KILL MYSELF’ WOULD A PEN TO THE NECK BE
QUICK’ Then passed it back.
He read it and beamed, smothering a laugh that brought forth a slight snort. The professor, who was speaking,runescape money,
looked glancingly in our direction and then away. The boy next to me wrote in all capital letters:YOU
DEFINITELY SHOULD NOT BE IN THIS CLASS.
I’m not sure what Sufism is, I wrote back. I slid him the paper.
I’M NOT SURE WHAT WINTER IS, he wrote once more in all caps.
Welcome, I scrawled. Usually it’s not this warm’a reversal of the old local joke. Usually it’s not this cold, we
?71 312163 3
used to say to visitors during a midwinter thaw.
WHAT?”!!!!! he wrote with great energy.
I feel that mysticism isn’t really happening here in this course, I wrote.
IT ISN’T.
Are you quasi mystic’ I wrote.
I’M PESSI-MYSTIC, he wrote back, AND OPTI-MYSTIC. BOTH.
After class, I went home and with my earphones on picked around on my electric bass, pressing my fingers into
the steel strings, toughening my calluses. I loved ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,’ which I referred to as ‘Mozart.’
I played and sang aloud over and over again the line ‘How I wonder what you are,’ which without any audible
accompaniment, to Kay-with-no-life upstairs, I knew sounded like the mad howling of a simultaneously sexed-
up and brutally injured alley cat. She had already told me this. Honoring the classics, I apparently nonetheless
sounded undone in agony. When I felt finished, when I felt expressed and spent,cheap wow gold, I found an old pack of Murph’s
Marlboros and smoked one in front of the bathroom mirror, blowing the smoke up and out, and turning my head

then looking at their watches again. Their glance up at me was quick, perfunctory, and when I got into the car
and sat in the back like their sullen teenage daughter I could see that this was not an outing I should be on.
Edward started to light up a cigarette, and Sarah swatted it away.
?50 312163 3
‘Afraid of secondhand smoke’ There’s conflicting science on that,’ he said.
Sarah gave him a look but said nothing. From my awkward place in the backseat I remembered a headline
from the student paper. ‘You know what they say about secondhand smoke,’ I said. I was a girl still finding her
jokey party voice and borrowing from others’.
‘What?’ said Sarah.
‘Leads to secondhand coolness.’
Edward turned in his seat to look at me. I had pleased him with this stupidity, and he was getting a better look at
me to see who I was today.
‘Did you have a good breakfast?’ he asked.
‘I did,’ I lied.
‘Sometimes that’s all it takes,’ he said,buy world of warcraft gold, turning back around, and I studied his hair-cape some more,buy world of warcraft gold, its weird,
warm flip.
The foster home we pulled up to was in a working-class subdivision. The foster family’s name was McKowen,
and on their garage was a big letterM in bright green plastic.
‘Are you ready to scootch?’ Edward asked Sarah.
‘I so am,’ she said.
Edward twisted back toward me. ‘That’s Sarah’s idea of the quintessential mom word:scootch. Scootch over.
Scootch in. Everybody’s gotta scootch and the moms are the scootch directors.’
‘That’s right,’ said Sarah.
‘I can kind of see that,’ I said, sounding doubtful rather than agreeable as I’d intended. Sarah turned the car off,
checked her reflection quickly in the rearview mirror, scrutinizing her teeth in case they were dotted like dice
with the scorched remnants of breakfast, then opened her door. The driveway was shoveled, and we all
scootched out. The slam of our doors all in a row made me think of a squad car pulling up and the cops hopping
out and going cautiously for their guns. Sarah was first to the porch,runescape money, eager and businessy, and rang the bell.
Edward and I were still trailing behind her like the rookies. She was already standing with the storm door
propped open against her shoulder. She was loosening her scarf. When the white wooden door of the
McKowens’ opened, she removed her hat, which had pom-poms on its ties. She quickly, unnecessarily poofed up
her hair. ‘Hi, I’m Sarah Brink,’ she said,mabinogi gold, and thrust out her hand. ‘We’re here to see the baby?’
The woman who answered the door was large and blond and seemed to have a bit of a limp as if one hip were
stiff, though all she was doing to suggest this was shifting her weight in the doorway. ‘Nobody told us anyone
was coming,’ she said tersely.

‘Let’s go seek a fish fry,’ said Sarah, and happily took Edward’s arm.
‘Let’s do,’ said Edward, sounding to my ear like a southern gent in a corny old film.
We piled into the Ford Escort, no longer by the black car and with only one small silver scratch, and drove
around a little haphazardly, passing the stadium, whereupon Sarah said, ‘So here’s where all the Catholics gather
and pray for the Packers to win.’ We wound up at a supper club called Lombardino’s, which over the bar had a
sign that read BETTER TO OUTLIVE AN ELF THAN OUTDRINK A DWARF. There were drawings of Vince
Lombardi on the napkins and placemats and even the teacups; to my surprise, I had to tell Sarah and Edward
what a supper club even was.
‘We’re from the East,’ said Edward. ‘They don’t have them out there.’
‘They don’t?’ This seemed unimaginable to me.
‘I mean,buy tales of pirates money, there are steak houses, but they’re not the same. We love supper clubs but without really knowing what
constitutes one. We kind of get it, but we always like to hear the exact definition from someone who grew up out
here,’ said Sarah.
Always. Out here. So this was a thing they did, a tourist’s game. ‘Well, a supper club is just, well,runescape money, it’s got these
carrots and radishes in a glass of ice like this,’ I began lamely, with no words coming, just a sense of the obvious.
It was like describing my arms. ‘And there’s always steak, and fish on Fridays, and fried potatoes of some sort.
There’s whiskey sours and Bloody Marys and Chubby Marys, and supper, but there’s no real club. I mean,mabinogi money, there
aren’t members or anything.’
‘What’s a Chubby Mary?’ This was Edward and Sarah practically simultaneously.
‘It’s a Bloody Mary with a chub sticking out of it.’
‘A chub?’
‘A fish. It’s dead. It’s small. At first you see its head just poking up through the ice cubes, but believe me, the
whole thing is there.’
Edward and Sarah were sitting across the table from me, grinning as if I were the most adorable child. My face
heated up in response to what I felt was mockery. For a second I wanted to stab myself.
‘They’re probably in the back, giving everything a quick parboil then tanning it with a torch,’ said Sarah.
‘Sarah thinks nothing is really cooked anymore, just toned with a butane lighter.’
‘Sometimes that’s true.’ Sarah shrugged.
‘We often blowtorched the weeds at home by hand,mabinogi gold,’ I said. ‘But that’s organic weed control’not cooking.’
‘No, it’s not. Cooking.’ Sarah smiled briefly again as if I were still just the cutest thing but no longer what she
was looking for in this job.
Edward took his wineglass and toasted Sarah. ‘Happy birthday,’ he said.
‘Thank you.’
‘It’s your birthday?’ I asked.
‘Yes, well, in all the rush of events, who can even care!’
I was tempted to ask how old she was, but then I remembered I already knew. Instead I said, ‘So, you’re a
Capricorn!’
‘Yeah,’ she said tiredly.
‘Like Jesus!’ I said. Having a Jewish mother, I was still inclined to think of Jesus not as the messiah but as, like,
?49 312163 3

‘No,runescape money, actually this year I’ve been part of a program that does deer-condom distribution.’
‘Excellent!’ I was working on a laugh that was more than my usual pleased grunt, but all I had right now was a
kind of blast that culminated in a bleat.
We continued walking on the edge of the icy road, past a stand of birches that in the distance looked like my
mother’s cigarettes stubbed out in the dirt, barely smoked. My brother’s boy’s life seemed lonely and hard to me.
He still had one snaggletooth that poked out of his smile. This was because there had been only enough
orthodontia money for one of us, so it went to the daughter, whose looks would matter (wasted on me! a
smileless girl I felt sure no man would ever desire’not deeply). I got the braces. He got the chores. The
expectations that he help my dad around the farm were so much greater than any that had been laid upon me, and
so I could see his life was a little harder than mine, though he was a good-looking boy, bright in a general way,
and with many friends. As a young kid his plans were entrepreneurial. Once, years ago, he’d drawn up a design
for a hotel chain,rs money, and believing his greatest competitor would be the Holiday Inn, he decided to name it in an
opposing,runescape money, competitive spirit: Normal Night Out. The Normal Night Out Hotel.
He had, however, the same loneliness in him that I did, though he had always been my mother’s favorite. Where
had that gotten him’ My mother’s love was useless.
We pushed past the gate at the far end of our property and walked down one of the old half-frozen cow paths
terraced slightly with old roots and stones to form steps. A small fly buzzed past my ear, then vanished. I had
never seen a fly before at Christmas, and I swatted at it, feeling, as we had been taught to feel in Art 102, the
surrealism of two familiar things placed unexpectedly side by side. That would be the future.
We hiked down past the copse of sycamore and oak (as children, animating some dormant urban fear, we had
witlessly shrieked, ‘The copse! The copse!’ and raced through the underbrush, thrilled by our own concocted,
dreadless terror). Now Robert and I weaved among the piss elms toward the old fish hatchery, which in winters
of the past we would have skated on; it was a former nineteenth-century mill pond that had long ago lost its falls,
though the old paddle wheel still leaned against a tree, coated with squirrel shucks. Sometimes we’d tobogganed
down the snowy trail all the way to the hatchery, where now there was no snow at all, just the matted hard grass
and dirt and the dried, icing stalks of angelica and milkweed and bee balm. My brother liked to fish at the
hatchery sometimes, even in winter, sometimes even in the stream, even if the fish were really now just trash
fish, and even though it was stupid to ice fish in a stream. But summers down this path I had always liked, and
when the gnats weren’t bad I had sometimes accompanied him, sat in the waist-high widgeon grass beside him,
the place pink with coneflowers, telling him the plot of, say, a Sam Peckinpah movie I’d never seen but had read
about once in a syndicated article in theDellacrosse Sunday Star. Crickets the size of your thumb would sing
their sweet monotony from the brush. Sometimes there was a butterfly so perfect and beautiful, it was like a
part y barrette you wanted to clip in your hair. Above and around us green leaves would flash wet with sunsetting
light. In this verdant cove I recounted the entire plot of Straw Dogs.
But bugs were the thing that drove us back.Flies as big as raping ducks! we used to say. Mosquitoes with tiger-
striped bodies and the feathery beards of an iris, their wings and legs the dun wisps of an unbarbered boy, their
spindly legs the tendrils of an orchid, the blades of a gnome’s sleigh. Their awfulness and flight obsessed me,
concentrated my revulsion: suspended like mobiles, or diving like jets,buy warcraft gold, they were sinisterly contrapted; they
craved color; they were caught in the saddest animal script there was. Once I whacked Robert’s back, seeing a
giant one there, and killed five, all bloody beneath his shirt.

the more obscene jokes were saved for the ginseng farmers. But I remember once in seventh grade, our
homeroom teacher had gone around the class and asked us what our fathers did. When she got to Eileen Reilly,
Eileen turned red and said, ‘I would rather not say.’ This astounded me, for her father was a handsome, charming
salesman at Home Savings Shoes on Main Street’Stan the Shoe Man,buy maple mesos, my mother affectionately called him. But
his daughter had absorbed some disappointment’his, or her mother’s’and did not want to speak of how he earned
his living.
Perhaps that was the moment I learned this as a source of personal shame, or observed the possibility of it.
‘So your classes then,’ said my father. ‘Sit down on this lovely Christmas morning and tell your old dad about
the ones you took and the ones you’re going to take when you go back. How did that philosophy class go?’
‘Did you know that Alexander the Great left all his money to Aristotle?’ I asked brightly.
‘That’s how he got his name,’ said my father. ‘Aristotle gave it to him! Before that he was just Alexander the
Fine.’
‘Bo! Sheesh.’ My mother shook her head.
A sizzling sound came from the griddle, where she was pouring oil. We had an old-style stove, with the griddle
built in. You had to clean it with rags and paper towels, or pry it out with a barbecue fork and go at it with steel
wool and water. The hot latke mix steaming into the air now smelled good to me and helped cover up the
kitchen’s perennially faint reek of mice. My mother was stirring regular pancake batter as well.
‘It’s OK to sit while you help,’ said my mother to me, ‘but remember these latkes aren’t hamburgers. Don’t cup
them into thick shapes.’
I ignored her and continued with my fat latkes and my dad.
‘Next term?’ he asked.
‘I’ve registered for another literature survey’Brit Lit from 1830 to 1930′Intro to Sufism, Intro to Wine Tasting, a
music appreciation course titled Soundtracks to War Movies, and a geology course called Dating Rocks.’ The
Sufism did not throw him.
‘Dating rocks?’
‘I need to learn!’ I said, laughing.
‘Don’t let them kiss you,’ he said, not smiling. The random assortment of my courses lacked the sound of serious
direction. I’d left out my PE requirement,runescape money, which I was filling with a double-listed humanities and Pilates course
called The Perverse Body/The Neutral Pelvis. I didn’t want to provoke him.
Still, I murmured, as if in self-pity, ‘They don’t kiss. That’s why they’re called rocks.’
‘Wine tasting?’ He raised his eyebrows. It had the sound of a father not getting his money’s worth.
‘I need a gut course, to make the others go better,’ I said. ‘I didn’t really have one this past semester, and things
were too intense.’
‘But aren’t you underage?’
‘Technically, I guess. But it’s for a course,maplestory mesos, so I guess they let you.’
‘Will you make dean’s list again?’ asked my mother.
‘Possibly,’ I said.
‘Well,cheap star trek credits, you have to be careful which dean,’ said my father. ‘You don’t want to get on the wrong list!’
‘Besides, I’m going to be working next semester.’
‘You got a job?’

the more obscene jokes were saved for the ginseng farmers. But I remember once in seventh grade,final fantasy power leveling, our
homeroom teacher had gone around the class and asked us what our fathers did. When she got to Eileen Reilly,
Eileen turned red and said, ‘I would rather not say.’ This astounded me, for her father was a handsome, charming
salesman at Home Savings Shoes on Main Street’Stan the Shoe Man,swg credits, my mother affectionately called him. But
his daughter had absorbed some disappointment’his, or her mother’s’and did not want to speak of how he earned
his living.
Perhaps that was the moment I learned this as a source of personal shame, or observed the possibility of it.
‘So your classes then,’ said my father. ‘Sit down on this lovely Christmas morning and tell your old dad about
the ones you took and the ones you’re going to take when you go back. How did that philosophy class go?’
‘Did you know that Alexander the Great left all his money to Aristotle?’ I asked brightly.
‘That’s how he got his name,’ said my father. ‘Aristotle gave it to him! Before that he was just Alexander the
Fine.’
‘Bo! Sheesh.’ My mother shook her head.
A sizzling sound came from the griddle, where she was pouring oil. We had an old-style stove, with the griddle
built in. You had to clean it with rags and paper towels, or pry it out with a barbecue fork and go at it with steel
wool and water. The hot latke mix steaming into the air now smelled good to me and helped cover up the
kitchen’s perennially faint reek of mice. My mother was stirring regular pancake batter as well.
‘It’s OK to sit while you help,’ said my mother to me, ‘but remember these latkes aren’t hamburgers. Don’t cup
them into thick shapes.’
I ignored her and continued with my fat latkes and my dad.
‘Next term?’ he asked.
‘I’ve registered for another literature survey’Brit Lit from 1830 to 1930′Intro to Sufism, Intro to Wine Tasting, a
music appreciation course titled Soundtracks to War Movies,runescape money, and a geology course called Dating Rocks.’ The
Sufism did not throw him.
‘Dating rocks?’
‘I need to learn!’ I said, laughing.
‘Don’t let them kiss you,’ he said, not smiling. The random assortment of my courses lacked the sound of serious
direction. I’d left out my PE requirement, which I was filling with a double-listed humanities and Pilates course
called The Perverse Body/The Neutral Pelvis. I didn’t want to provoke him.
Still, I murmured, as if in self-pity, ‘They don’t kiss. That’s why they’re called rocks.’
‘Wine tasting?’ He raised his eyebrows. It had the sound of a father not getting his money’s worth.
‘I need a gut course, to make the others go better,cheap ffxi gil,’ I said. ‘I didn’t really have one this past semester, and things
were too intense.’
‘But aren’t you underage?’
‘Technically, I guess. But it’s for a course, so I guess they let you.’
‘Will you make dean’s list again?’ asked my mother.
‘Possibly,’ I said.
‘Well, you have to be careful which dean,’ said my father. ‘You don’t want to get on the wrong list!’
‘Besides, I’m going to be working next semester.’
‘You got a job?’

noisily next to the Perkins sign; the air was picking up wind and snow. The probation officer walked to his car
and got in but did not start it. Amber’s face was completely lit up. I saw that she was fantastically in love with
him. She was not concentrating on any of us, and something about this provoked Sarah.
‘Well,’ she said, studying Amber with an artificial smile.
‘Yes, well,’ said Amber.
‘All right then,’ said Letitia.
‘Can I give you some advice, Amber?’ Sarah asked, standing there,runescape money, as Letitia clutched Amber even tighter.
Letitia was ecstatic to have a white birth mother in tow, one with a little white bun in the oven, and did not want
a rival agency to get ahold of her. Or so Sarah would say later. The windbreakered parole officer gave a wave
and drove off.
‘What?’ Amber said to Sarah, but to me she smiled and said, ‘He was definitely following me.’
‘When I was your age, I had some rebellious ideas,’ Sarah continued her unsolicited advice to Amber. ‘I got in
trouble now and again, here and there, but I realized it was because I was doing things I wasn’t any good at.
Look at this.’ She tapped Amber’s electronic bracelet with a gloved index finger. ‘You’re eighteen. Don’t sell
drugs. You’re no good at it. Do something you’re good at.’
Sarah meant this tough-love speech compassionately, I could see,buy eve online isk, but Amber’s face flushed with insult, then
hardened. ‘That’s what I’m trying to do,’ she said indignantly, and tore herself from Letitia’s grip, walked over
to what was apparently Letitia’s car, and got in on the passenger’s side.
Baby, it’s scold outside, Murph would have said if she were there.
‘We’ll talk later,’ Letitia called to Sarah, waving good-bye and hurrying off to Amber. Perkins’s flag was
whipping loudly in the snowy wind.
‘Well,’ said Sarah as we both got into her car. ‘That was, for all intents and purposes, a complete disaster.’
She started up the engine. ‘You know?’ she continued. ‘I always do the wrong thing. I do the wrong thing so
much that the times I actually do the right thing stand out so brightly in my memory that I forget I always do the
wrong thing.’
We rode home mostly in silence, Sarah offering me gum, then cough drops, both of which I took, thanking her.
When I glanced over at her,wow power leveling, driving without her sunglasses, her scarf wrapped now around her head like a
babushka, she seemed watery, far away, lost in thought, and I wondered how a nice, attractive girl’for I’d
thought I had glimpsed on the way up the girl I imagined she once was, her face still and thoughtful, her hair in
the sun ablaze with light’how a girl like that became a lonely woman with a yarny shmatte on her head, became
?19 312163 3
this, whatever it was. After a childhood of hungering to be an adult, my hunger had passed. Unexpected fates had
begun to catch my notice. These middle-aged women seemed very tired to me, as if hope had been wrung out of
them and replaced with a deathly, walking sort of sleep.
Sarah’s cell phone played the beginning to ‘Eine kleine Nachtmusik,buy final fantasy gil,’ its vigorous twang not unlike a harpsichord