From this point forward, Regina would bow to the gods of arbitrariness, kneel to whim, capitulate to kismet.
         From this point: after years (two to seven, depending how you calculated their separations) of not being sure if he wanted to be married, teetering on the fence for so long it seemed he was stuck there, Hugo got unstuck. “I’ve got to do something,” Hugo said, and left.
         And this one: two philodendrons had been sitting in identical pots in the southeast window since the day she and Hugo moved into the apartment. She had watered the plant on the left and then the plant on the right, every other Saturday, same water, same clear plastic measuring cup, left, right. Now the left one was dead and the right one thrived. And Hugo called, more than once, wondering if he’d made a mistake. “How would you know?” Regina asked. And, and, and: she broke a tooth on the crust of a piece of French bread; her next door neighbor’s apartment was robbed; her sister’s eight-year-old daughter Maya was diagnosed with a rare kind of brain tumor. “The worst kind,” Laurie emphasized, as if you couldn’t guess that from its name: diffusely infiltrative brain stem glioma.
          So that was that. Or that was the same as that, might just as easily be one thing as another: her tooth still whole, her own apartment with its brand new stereo and television ransacked, her nephew or uncle or a stranger taken ill.
          She went to her boss and told the most flagrant lie of her life: her grandmother was dying and she needed an indefinite leave of absence to tend to family matters. She packed a suitcase and headed out of Green Bay on US-41. Her plan was to remain without destination, to simply head down the map, away. Yet when she saw the first signs for St. Louis she had to admit that this might have been a notion hovering just outside her consciousness (since leaving? since Chicago?), because in St. Louis lived a man who had flirted extravagantly with her at the most recent regional sales meeting in Minneapolis. She stopped at a motel in Collinsville, Illinois, feeling a slight but keen disappointment at her mind’s trickery mixed with a distinct pleasure that she’d driven close to 500 miles without incident. She had a glass of the house white with her grilled chicken at the expensive steakhouse adjoining the motel. She raised the glass and re-entrusted herself to chance – she hadn’t committed to any course of action, after all. She could be in Alabama by the next night, or Ohio – states to which she was confident she had had no inclination or affiliation.
          Before bed, she wrote to Maya on a postcard of The Arch. On the top she printed, “Q. Why did the elephant cross the road?” She turned the card upside-down: “A. It was the chicken’s day off. Ha!”

          “Are you having a breakdown?” Hugo had asked when she told him of her not-plan. She tried to remember the lyrics from the Paul Simon song, but she couldn’t get past “breakdowns come and breakdowns go.”
          “It’s just a road trip, Hugo.”
          “You don’t even like to drive.”
          Not with you in the car, she thought. Hugo was an alarmist. Minimum speed limits had been created with people like him in mind.
          “Never mind,” he said. “I just can’t wrap my head around your not knowing where you’re headed.”
          “That’s the point. I’m turning over a new leaf.”
          “What new leaf? What’s wrong with the old leaf? You’re perfect.”
          “Just leave it be, okay? I’ll be fine. I am fine.” Was she angry? Her voice sounded angry. Why had she even told him? Because she thought he’d understand? Out of habit? So he wouldn’t worry?
          “I think I should come over.”
          “No!” He had started this. He had set things in motion and she was determined to keep them in motion.
          “Well, maybe you should call Laurie.”
          “Okay.”
          “Promise?”
          This was too much. He had no right.
          “Will you at least call me when you get back?”
          “Hugo! Stop.”
          After they hung up, Regina drove her car a mile away, leaving it in the busy parking lot of a 24-hour grocery store. She ran back to the apartment, turned off all the lights. She hadn’t had the locks changed for the very reason that Hugo wasn’t the type to let himself in. Let him think she’d already left. She didn’t want to imagine what would happen if he came to her now, asking to return. It humiliated her, thinking of all the pep talks she’d given Hugo about their marriage, how indulgent she’d been of his habitual vacillation, how she’d treated his ambivalence like a lingering illness, something a person would recover from, like mono. She refused to be that woman any longer, a woman who believed that anything was meant to be. She sat at the kitchen table in the dark, listening. Twice she heard deliberate, medium-build footsteps approaching: one set retreated, one set passed her door, either, neither, or both belonging to Hugo.

          Poor Hugo. It’s good he has a mother who dotes on him, because everyone else – older sister, younger brother, and friends, both male and female – thinks he’s made a terrible blunder in leaving Regina. He’s developed eczema behind his knees and a twitch in his right eye. That he can’t remember the name of the auto repair shop, the dry cleaner, and the good Thai place drives him crazy. He’s still doing fine at work, better than fine, really, because he’s spending all his time there, but he’s ambivalent about the job. In fact, evidence now points to his having frequently mistaken self-doubt and qualms about a career in public policy for misgivings about his marriage. His mother mails him care packages from the other side of the city – black cotton dress socks, coupons, saltwater taffy, throat lozenges, zinc tablets, emery boards – but of course these fail to comfort. He couldn’t have imagined that getting off the fence would provide no discernible relief, no diminishment of his second-guessing. It’s our considered opinion that he should have had a dog at some point in his life. Isn’t that how a person learns to love whole-heartedly? Regina grew up with dogs. She claimed that Blackie, a beagle, had been her best friend from grades two through ten, and Hugo had smirked inwardly, uncomprehending. Remember when you had that violent case of food poisoning from the red curry at Thai Bon, how Regina sat next to you on the bathroom floor all night, lightly stroking the back of your neck with two cool fingers, murmuring soothing nonsense as you retched and moaned? Remember how she helped pack your books, even as you were leaving her, taking care to keep them in alphabetical order? Maybe it isn’t too late, Hugo. Get thee to the Humane Society.

          By morning St. Louis felt plenty arbitrary – the result of waking in a musty, dim motel room, tasting unfamiliar tap water as she swallowed her vitamins, watching unfamiliar newscasters deliver the day’s top stories. She was very nearly gratified to discover that the Camry had been stolen from the motel parking lot. She had never been interviewed by a police officer before.
          Sherwood was the flirting man’s name. He remembered who she was almost immediately and he was quite gracious on the phone, telling her he’d rearrange his appointments and get to the motel as soon as possible.
          Sherwood drove a sturdy maroon Oldsmobile. He was unfamiliar with the highway, which was under construction. “I don’t get to this side of the river much,” he explained. His knuckles actually did turn white and Regina sat quietly.
          “Shit!” he said when a gravel chip struck the center of the windshield.
          Otherwise, he was silent, too. She hadn’t completely remembered what he looked like, except for his penetrating dark brown eyes and dark hair and an overall impression of handsomeness. His eyes were darting now and the skin on his face hung a bit loosely, giving him a chipmunky aspect.
          She thought she’d reached him at work, but he hadn’t shaved in perhaps a few days and his khakis and denim shirt were rumpled. Since he hadn’t questioned her story of “just passing through the area,” she was reluctant to inquire about his situation. “Almost home,” he said, and indeed his fingers had loosened their death grip on the steering wheel.
          “Does it make sense to you,” she asked, “that the five cars most frequently stolen are all over ten years old?” This fact had been passed on by Sergeant Ames. “I mean, Ronald Reagan was president when we bought that car.” She winced at the errant we.
          “Anti-theft devices,” he said.
          “What?”
          “Newer cars are harder to steal.”
          It seemed obvious now that he’d said it. He yanked the steering wheel to the right and swerved into the curb. He reached beneath the seat. “Voila!” he announced, producing a steering wheel lock.
          But a conversation regarding auto theft did not ensue. She tried to recall something they had talked about in Minneapolis, some common ground. She wasn’t particularly concerned with the silence or even his apparent seediness – not as concerned as she would have been at home, before. You had to take fortune on its own terms. His apartment smelled like overripe bananas and burnt toast. He put her suitcase in front of the couch, in the place where a coffee table might be expected. She stood beside it, as though it marked her place. He sat down at the kitchen table and rearranged a stack of file folders. There were six empty bowls on the floor.
          “Sergeant Ames doubted I’d ever see my car again.”
          “You probably don’t want to see your car again.” He tipped his chair back and crossed his ankles.
          “Why?”
          The phone rang. She was impressed he didn’t topple. He sprang to his feet and the chair landed safely too.
          “Not again,” he said into the phone. He slapped the wall, hard, then listened. “Alright. Alright. I’m on my way.” He hung up. “I’ve got kind of an emergency going on, you know? So, Regina, help yourself to whatever you can find. Just sit tight, okay?”

          The refrigerator door was packed with condiments including three kinds of mustard, Major Grey’s Chutney and cranberry lime chutney, raspberry preserves, apple butter, sweet pickle relish, hot salsa, mild tomatillo salsa, and cocktail sauce. Yet aside from a couple of packages of store-brand cheese, the shelves held only an opened box of baking powder and a twelve-pack of Diet Coke and a six-pack of India Pale Ale. Two cupboards were completely bare except for three cans of tuna, though there were plenty of pans and plates and utensils. It was as though someone had come through and taken all the real food, boxing up the crackers and cereal and bacon and eggs and orange juice and six hungry cats. The presence of both mayonnaise and Miracle Whip strongly suggested the presence of another person. Or perhaps Sherwood had simply just moved in and the condiments belonged to the previous tenants. She felt bad for him in any case.
          She headed to the bathroom for more clues, but she never reached the medicine cabinet. For around the light switch and above the sink and on the wall beside the murky shower stall, patches of hair clippings were affixed to the tile on side-by-side strips of double-stick tape – at least a dozen four-inch squares of hair! She couldn’t read the expression on her face in the small rectangular mirror that hung on the wall of hair. Disbelief, surely. And she felt less sad, too, although a threadbare towel always gave her a pang.
          Retreating to the kitchen, she poured a Diet Coke over dusty tasting ice cubes and sat at the kitchen table watching the neighbor boys play basketball in the playground across the alley. The phone and answering machine sat on a dented metal TV table and she flinched every time the phone rang and the improbably ornate cuckoo clock hung over the sink went off. Despite the officer’s warning she still half-expected the police to call with word that her car had been found. Instead, someone entreated Sherwood to consolidate his credit card bills. An angry-voiced fellow named Marv had burned a CD that would jangle Sherwood’s scrotum. A woman, crying, said she’d just heard about Del, she’d try back later. Perhaps beer was a beverage more appropriate to the occasion.
          She considered leaving. But that was just her old self talking. This, it appeared, was what happenstance looked like: herself sitting in a near-stranger’s apartment wondering about the six empty bowls on the floor, resisting the temptation to do something about the ants swarming a butter dish on the counter, watching junior high boys bang their hands against the rim, a few inches separating them from a solid dunk. She opened another beer and ate a hunk of medium cheddar.

          Poor Sherwood. As Regina has begun to suspect, Sherwood has lost his job. Oh, the perils of middle management. Though he’s pleasant enough, he doesn’t command attention. How he caught Regina’s eye, we can’t say. When costs need to be cut he is always deemed the most dispensable. Until recently, he’d been the kind of guy who shaved and showered before perusing the want ads. Who kept his interview suit cleaned and pressed and at the ready. But he has sunk into lethargy. He stopped buying food for himself, and then he forgot to buy cat food, and then the strays he’d taken in over the fall and winter wandered elsewhere. He’ll have another job soon, yet that will hardly be a blessing if doesn’t start learning from experience. He needs to recognize that his work persona is too bland, his boyfriend persona too peculiar. He could be the always wears bow ties to work or who decorates his office with excessive amounts of hockey memorabilia. Even clean-shaven and cleaned-up his other personal habits tend to drive away even the most stalwart of single women. Heads up, Ray – you scare them! If you can’t bear to discard the detritus of your physical self, you could at least keep your hair trimmings in a pillowcase, tucked up on a high closet shelf. Note to self: the medicine cabinet is no place to store mustard jars filled with fingernail clippings. We sometimes want to shake you!

          Hugo had inspected Regina’s own nearly bare cupboards when they had just begun dating. He shook his head at her collection of freeze-dried and frozen foods. He braceleted her skinny wrist with his thumb and forefinger.
          “I am going to feed you,” he promised. “And I’m going to feed you well.”
          Soon she was going to his apartment nearly every night, with Hugo creating culinary masterpieces in the tiny kitchen. That the food processor was balanced on a kitchen chair because there was no counter space and that only two of the four burners on the electric stove got hot proved no impediment to his preparation of succulent curries, empanadas, crepes, and dumplings.
          He would stand on his miniature balcony waiting for her car to appear, then race downstairs before she could reach the buzzer. “You’re here! You’re here!” Hugo had been a man who was unafraid to jump up and down in delight.
          Yet they’d slid into cohabitation, and then marriage – an idea they’d been tinkering with for a year made legal when their slow times at work coincided one spring. They took their vows at city hall and a supersaver honeymoon in Montreal. Maybe that had been the mistake; maybe Hugo had never actually decided to be married to begin with. The memory of his grin as he opened the door to greet her was so painful. Yet who could stand to not recall the face of love?

          A fist pounded on the downstairs door. Then footsteps drilled up the stairs and a man burst in, did a cartoon double-take at her presence. His eyes clicked from her face to the two empty beer bottles to the can of Diet Coke and back to her face. She had the idea that he could taste the sour inside of her mouth. Here it was then: the next thing.
          “I’m Sherwood’s brother.” He snapped his lighter five times before it ignited. He poked his cigarette at her. “You?”
          “I’m the – ” Fool, stranger, traveller? There didn’t seem to be a single word that would adequately explain her presence. “Guest,” she said, “I’m visiting Sherwood.”
          The man dropped his cigarette pack and lighter on the table. “You know where he is?” He opened the refrigerator and grabbed a beer.
          “No.”
          “Well fuck all.” He slapped his palm hard against the side of the refrigerator. He didn’t look much like Sherwood, and everything about him – face, body, and handsomeness – was more solid. His thick black hair was flecked with silver and closely shorn, hugging his skull.
          She picked up the lighter, flicked it. The lighter ignited on the first try. “Is there something wrong?”
          “You could say that, what with my baby brother overdosed and comatose and my other brother gone missing and – ”
          Sherwood had said emergency lightly, implying mishap and inconvenience. Hadn’t he? “Missing?” she asked.
          “He left the hospital around noon. No one’s seen him since.” The clock, right then, cuckooed, six times. “What time’d he leave here?”
          “Around eleven.” She felt her cheeks flush.
          He jerked open the refrigerator again, condiment bottles rattling in the door. He looked inside and slammed it back shut. “Shit. It figures.” He glared at her. “Do you want something to eat?”
          “Yes,” she said, “I am hungry.”
          “Follow me,” he said. Then, softening his tone a bit, he added, “I know a place.”
          The beers and sitting for so long had made her knees wobbly. And now that they were heading out of Sherwood’s apartment she realized she’d had to pee for some time. But it was too late for that because the brother was holding open the passenger door of a rusty old Subaru wagon.

          After he started the car she asked him what his name was. “Raymond. I live in Kansas City, but I grew up here, with Sherwood. But you knew that – that we were local boys?”
          “Mmmm.”
          “Where are you from?”
          “Green Bay.”
          He whistled. “Green fucking Bay. What do you know.” He pulled sharply into a parking lot. “This is where we’re eating.”

          Georgio’s was the kind of restaurant her parents had favored for special occasions: elegant and candlelit, with oak beamed ceilings and thick, white, linen napkins, presided over by dapper, septuagenarian waiters in starched white aprons proffering complimentary antipasto plates and breadsticks.
          There were two martinis on the table when she returned from the restroom. “Do you think we should have left a note for Sherwood?”
          “Probably.” Raymond’s nose was a bit flattened at the bridge. His eyes were navy blue. “So what’s your story?”
          “What is it to you?” She heard herself mimicking his bluntness.
          “Tell me and I’ll buy you a steak.” He smiled then and she’d never seen anything like it – the light his smile made. His eyes got bluer and his face opened. All the hardness, the cynicism she’d already gotten used to, was gone.
          “I get the steak no matter what the story is?”
          Another smile. “Sure. I know if it’s about a woman and Sherwood there’s gonna be a punch line.”
          “I met him at a conference in Minneapolis.”
          “You fuck him?”
          “No!” She blushed, hearing how childish her denial sounded. “I don’t really know him. I’m just passing through.”
          “Passing through.” He tried that on, frowned. “You really shouldn’t have come.”
          When the smile vanished his face was cold, she felt cold. She understood that Raymond was trying to tell her something, but the only thing that mattered to her at that moment was making him smile again. “And miss out on a steak with you?”
          He frowned though. “Ach. Sherwood’s the nice one. What’s your name anyway?”
          “Regina.”
          “I like that.” Again the smile.
          “So you’re a bad guy?”
          “Pretty bad.”
          “How so?
          “One second, please.” He gave the waiter their order: two filet mignon medium rare, baked potatoes, steamed broccoli, and another round of Bombay Sapphire martinis. “How so, she asks. Well, it’s like this.” He fastened his eyes on her face. “As hungry as I am, having not eaten anything today except a package of powdered donuts at around 8 a.m., and as tired and strung out as I am from driving all day after hearing about Del, what I most want to do is leave, now, take you back to Sherwood’s, and fuck you in his bed. And you know, I could fall in love with you tonight, could make you believe it, but my heart can’t be trusted.”
          She shivered, as though caught in a draft. She was barely surprised that at that very moment Raymond’s phone rang.
          “I’ve got dinner going here,” he told the caller. He listened. “Well, that is a situation. Let me check in at the hospital and get back to you.”
          “Excuse me.” He stepped away from the table. A cowlick on the crown of Raymond’s head swirled counterclockwise. As he dialed, Regina considered calling Laurie. But she couldn’t think of one thing she could say that was worthy of her sister’s attention. I’m having a strange adventure, any change in the tumor? I’ve never once been fucked in my entire life? I’m so tired of feeling empty?
          Worse than having nothing to say was listening to Maya when Laurie put her on the phone. Her niece had always been a big planner – “just like you” Laurie had said in happier times. Since practically the moment she started talking, conversations with Maya had been filled with the future. Regina had expected that this would change post-chemo, post shitty prognosis, but it hadn’t: when you visit, at Christmas, next summer. “Doesn’t she understand?” Regina asked Laurie the last time they’d spoken.
          “Of course she understands,” snapped Laurie. “She’s bald and puffy and she feels like hell.”
          “Then how, why?”
          “She thinks she’s a special case. She’s convinced she’s Little Miss One-in-Ten.”
          “What do you think?”
          “I think you’re a coward.”
          Something crashed in the background and Laurie hung up. This was a familiar refrain. Until recently, Laurie would have been referring to Regina’s absolutely criminal case of denial regarding Hugo, or how egregiously she was hiding her light under the bushel of her appallingly mediocre job. Now, however, the matter at hand was Regina’s putting off committing to a date to come see them. Maya’s headaches had started just a month after her last visit, eleven months ago.
          She was a coward, wasn’t she? Maybe she could admit to that.

          “No change,” Raymond said, snapping his phone shut. “I can put you in a cab back to Sherwood’s or you’re welcome to come with me.” He gulped down the dregs of both martinis and threw a pair of fifties on the table. “Unless you want to stay and eat.”
          She gave him a little curtsy. “I’m with you.”
          “This isn’t going to be pretty,” he said. They were driving down a wide, nearly deserted thoroughfare. The martinis had made her groggy. She wondered how many streets there were like this in the world, streets that had once been important and bustling and were now host to boarded up buildings and fly-by-night enterprises.
          “The situation, you mean?”
          “Right. My friend Ronny’s brother died. Not even forty – heart attack.”
          “I’m sorry. That’s terrible.”
          “I don’t know about terrible. The problem is Nathan weighed over 400 pounds and they can’t get him out of his apartment.”
          “But there are people who do that, right? Professionals?”
          “Usually the funeral home would send out a couple of guys. Although in this case, two guys wouldn’t be able to manage anyway, and they’ve only got one guy because all the professionals in the city are apparently dealing with a multi-fatality accident out on 40.”
          “So what happens now?”
          “Well, Ronny doesn’t want to leave his brother sitting there dead in his chair but he doesn’t want to hang out there all night with the body either. And if Nathan did sit there overnight he’d stiffen that way and things would get even trickier. So we’re going to help the guy from the funeral home get Nathan into the hearse.”
          This, too, seemed terrible, but Regina refrained from saying so.
          “What a day,” Raymond declared. “Got to think the stars are in some kind of daffy alignment.”
          “Is your brother going to be okay?” she asked shyly.
          “Define okay.”

          Poor Raymond. With his trustable face and stunning smile, his hapless, damaged brothers, and his Boy Scoutish desire to do good, he often flounders, beset by his desires, assailed by requests for assistance. And it’s true that he seems to come across an unusual number of people clamoring for help. It makes him mad that he disappoints people, especially after bothering to warn them. However, we question whether he’s really as bad as he tells Regina he is. That’s an awfully reductive way of looking at it, isn’t it – being torn between wanting to care for her and wanting to seduce her? Sounds to us like your problem is the human condition. We doubt you’d be happy if things were otherwise: no more damsels in distress; no more Sherwood calling for advice regarding missing cats, first date etiquette, and wardrobe choices for casual Fridays – “Is a denim shirt too casual?”; no more Del presenting you with brilliant etchings pulsating with Blakesian visions in exchange for money wired for bus fare home, no more long distance phone calls instigating transcontinental road trips or dark nights of the soul. What would your life be like without Sherwood and his difficulties with the mundane, without Del and his struggles with the sublime? Have you ever thought of that, Raymond? Don’t be a chump.

          The sulfuric yellow curtains in the apartment were pulled closed, yet flimsy enough to admit the last of the day’s light, filtered a poisonous yellow. Perhaps the curtains and the light wouldn’t have made such an impression if in the very same room a 420-pound dead man wasn’t sitting in a black leather recliner. The window was what a person would naturally look at if she had backed herself against the room’s far wall and was averting her eyes from an enormous corpse.
          Some kind of jazz played on the stereo, discordant trombone and trumpet notes blown from the bottom of a well.
          Ronny, Raymond, one of Nathan’s neighbors, and the guy from the funeral home gathered beside the recliner. Each took a limb and eased him – though eased couldn’t be the right word, the way his weight shook the floor when he landed – onto a sheet. One of the men muttered, “Sorry.” They kept their eyes down. Their faces were the color of margarine.
          They labored, inching across the room. The neighbor flicked on the overhead light. The apartment was elegant despite its boxiness and standard issue beige carpeting: French Impressionist framed prints on the wall, a vase bursting with magenta tulips on the dining table. They had to heave Nathan’s body onto his side to drag him through the door. His shirt came untucked. Ronny cradled his brother’s head in his hands as they hefted him over the threshold. “Shit, oh shit-shit-shit,” he said.
          The sideboard held a collection of carved wooden animal figurines – a bear standing up on its hind legs, a giraffe, some kind of antelope, and several elephants. Maya knew 117 elephant jokes at last count. Her laugh was a throaty chuckle that was funnier than any of the punchlines. What time is it when an elephant sits on your fence? Time to buy a new fence. Hugo should have bought a new fence. Could she forgive him? Regina knew her snit was unbecoming. As if fate would be chagrined by her stamping her little foot and calling no fair. Soon she would go to her sister, sit with her as she faced down the terror of randomly replicating cells, sit with Maya and her defiant optimism.
          She heard the men grunting, a long groan, then, “Okay, I’ve got him,” just before the slam of a car door.

          Poor Ronny. Many have tried to save someone they loved and failed, but few have wrestled with the corpse of a loved one. Nevertheless, we see positive things in store for Ronny. Though he’ll carry regret for the rest of his life, it will be a less virulent form than when Nathan was alive. He had been appalled by the fact of his brother’s immenseness and by his own disgust, and from these, at least, he has been released. And Nathan has left him everything. His estate includes a substantial stock portfolio – Nathan was a shrewd investor – a two-year-old Lexus LX, and more than a few quite fine antiques. His brother’s money will make it easier for him to do the right thing – how much lighter he’ll feel without the wet sand burden of his law school student loans. Meanwhile, Ronny, you should look hard for evidence that your brother was a happy man. He did, after all, travel to five continents during his twenties, and he built a solid career of importing olive oil. Fresh bread and fresh flowers and the intricate grain of wood and the sound of the human voice in song provided him with inestimable pleasure. Listen, really listen, to the CDs in the CD changer. Convince yourself that the Finding Forrester soundtrack was on as he died, playing his favorite track, #8, “Over the Rainbow” sung by Israel Kamakawiwo'ole, who, like himself, was an obese, gentle man who died at 38. Convince yourself, and we’ll never tell you otherwise.

          And finally, for what it’s worth, we’d also like to mention that Hugo regularly poured the dregs of his coffee into the left philodendron. Some things that look like chance, Regina, aren’t.

          Regina stopped a few yards away from the men as they stood at the curb watching the hearse pull away, a ceremony of disappearing taillights. She swayed. Gravity seemed to be pulling her this way and that. No one in the world who loved her knew where she was. The men talked softly and shook hands. She thought, this is what it means to swoon.
          No sooner had the others dispersed when Raymond’s cell phone rang again. An agitated woman’s voice came from the phone he held a few inches away from his head. After she’d spoken for a couple of minutes, seemingly without a breath, he brought the phone to his lips. “Okay. Done. See you in a few.”
          His tight lips suggested a reluctance to explain. “My friend Donna is having some trouble with her brother.”
          “Trouble?”
          “He keeps coming around, talking crazy, and trying to get money off her. Right now he’s on the porch and he won’t leave and she has to go to work.”
          “Can’t she call the police?”
          Another look. “I’ll take care of it. It’s a ten-minute thing.” He cracked his knuckles. “You must be done for.” The poor man’s Mr. Fix-it. What a gallant!
          “Are weapons going to be involved?”
          “Weapons?” He laughed and his smile lingered. “Right. I forgot, you’re from Green Bay.” Which didn’t answer her question. “Where to?” he asked.
          She felt shimmery with fatigue, hunger. She couldn’t quite believe her choice mattered, this choice anyway. If the next car that passed was white she would ask him to stop by Ray’s for her stuff and take her to a motel. If the next car was red she would... But what kind of bargain was she trying to make for herself? A pair of headlights approached from the left.
          “Look out, would you?” Raymond grabbed at her hair. She had stepped off the curb into the street. Her scalp stung. He didn’t release the hank of hair he held in his fist. She closed her eyes, tried to steady herself. Just then she was awash, a great swell of feeling cresting. Was she the wave or the wall?