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     Temple has no intention of remarrying after the messy civil divorce that left her without custody of her two children.  Then she meets Q, who thinks no woman could ever look twice at him.  Q looks more than twice at Temple, though.  He makes her laugh and sometimes makes her forget her lost children.

     And Temple has a way of making Q forget how children point when they see him coming, and women cross the street.  She makes him admit out loud that he's the best builder in the county.  She makes him dream of having children of his own.  With her.

     But Temple's civil divorce covers only "till death do us part," while her religious vows to Charles were forever.

     Should she tell Q?  He's not of her faith.  He doesn't need to know she believes that even their children won't belong to him in the hereafter.  Does he?

            Temple couldn’t have told you the name of the restaurant that Saturday night, just that it was next on her alphabetical list. Murphy’s Corner was a jumble of tables and booths crowded into what used to be a twostory house with mirror walls to make it look bigger than it was. The place had table service in three separate add-ons, as well as a busy takeout corner and a counter with a huge samovar, presided over by the man everybody called Murph.

            Temple first caught the big man looking at her by way of a mirror. His pinched eyes were such a pale blue beneath the bill of his Red Sox cap, she thought at first he must be blind. Then he blinked and looked down at his half-empty bowl of soup. The second time she caught him staring at her, he grimaced, and his weathered skin reddened.

            His heavy, lowering brows, balanced by a jutting red beard, made his face seem crowded and caved-in. His mouth was so recessed, she wondered what it would be like to kiss him.

            Hunched over on the stool, with his huge shoulders bunched up to his ears, he looked like a ruddy Sasquatch trying to camouflage himself in damp, stained plaid flannel. Tufts of curls protruded over a khaki T-shirt, visible at his throat, and the stubble on the back of his thick neck ran down and disappeared under his collar.

            Temple didn’t need to catch him staring a third time. She could feel his eyes on her. She turned sideways to her table, stretching her long legs from beneath her clingy black silk, letting her golden hair fall forward and sweep across the bulge of her breasts. She crossed her ankles and lightly tapped her black and gold platforms to the music vibrating in her bones.

            Men always wanted what they couldn’t have.

            Temple dipped a finger into her mug of cream soda and languidly sucked it clean, performing for the man, presenting herself like a specimen on a microscope’s stage. She could taste his rising passion, mingled with the fear of rejection—of humiliation—that kept him glued to his stool, furtively stealing glimpses.

            He was right to be afraid. Temple never let her game go any farther than this.

            But if he did manage to find the courage, she’d make an exception for him and try not to be cruel. She could imagine the first little girl who’d called him a vicious name—stupid, ugly, an animal. His massive calves bulged above the gouged leather of his mud-caked boots. He looked like a costumed bear.

            Temple easily read his lips in the mirror as he ordered another drink. The man sitting to his right leaned over and made some remark but got no reaction, not even an angry look. Temple wondered whether the big man was deaf, like herself.

            Tempting the taciturn bear from his hibernation, his fearful reserve, appealed somehow. Temple stood up, defining her profile for him, pretending to search her tiny purse for something, shifting her weight to let the light play off her draped curves.

            He didn’t pause in his rhythmic feeding. Green and scarlet serpentine tattoos on his hairy forearms flashed beneath rolled-up sleeves each time he raised a disinterested spoon. But his eyes betrayed him.

            Temple slipped her purse over her shoulder and drifted close along the row of stools on her way to the ladies room, trolling her scent, luring him with her gently undulating walk.

            There were grease stains on the thighs of his jeans, and his rear pocket was white around the shape of his wallet. No ring on his left hand. Below the dusty, matted hair on the back of his hand, his fingers were oddly hairless, his knuckles, scabbed and crusty.

            From across the room, she glanced back one last time and caught him fullface. He looked down and away, smoothing his beard with his flat-nailed fingers.

            On the way to the bathroom, Temple smiled, savoring the heat of his wanting her.

            Lots of men wanted her, more or less. She’d seen them huddled together in twos and threes, deciding who’d get to make the first pass. These were the confident ones, the self-assured, the self-absorbed. They wanted her, but once she rejected them, they didn’t usually try twice, let alone three times.

            Three times was her benchmark. She wouldn’t even talk to anyone who hadn’t approached her at least three times.

            Her mother had turned her father down eighteen times before their first date. He proposed every day after that for four long years. He always told Temple, “Only two things are important: God and the Family”—emphasizing with his broad-chested body. He’d have said it in heroic couplets if he could have. It wasn’t just a platitude with him. He almost died of grief when Temple’s mother abandoned him.

            Somewhere, Temple thought, there’s a man who’ll love me enough to want to die.

            But she’d rarely met anyone who was even willing to suffer so much as her scorn. She freshened her makeup, checked her watch, waited another five minutes, then headed back out.

            She glanced at the counter. He was gone.

            Humph.

            She didn’t often let vanity cloud her judgment of men. The intensity of her disappointment surprised her.

            Then she spotted him, sitting at the table where her half-full glass still stood before an empty chair. He’d taken off his hat, but he was as intent as ever on his drink. Well, she thought, for a man like him, I’d count this little ploy as one. She took his former seat at the counter and ordered a piece of chocolate cheesecake. From there she could watch the bear man in the mirror, seeing him as he’d formerly viewed her.

            His ugliness fascinated her. His bulbous cheeks gave his face a Santa Claus cheeriness that was at odds with his concentrated scowl. From beneath the ledge of bone that formed his Neanderthal forehead, his eyes flitted like a child’s, checking to see if his mother’s watching.

            She arched her back. His gaze was almost tangible enough to rub against, like a cat.

            A hot, foul breath rained onto Temple’s right ear. She turned toward it, and the man beside her bent closer. In the mirror, she’d noticed him talking, but she hadn’t bothered to watch what he was saying. He was so close now, she couldn’t see his mouth. He laid his hand heavily on her wrist, and she snatched her hand away.

            The man tumbled drunkenly off balance. He disgusted her. She slid away from him, onto the next stool, not deigning to look, even obliquely through the mirror, at him.

            Murph took a step in her direction and muttered something through tight lips. Temple couldn’t decipher the words, but the drunk backed off. She could feel her heart beating. Gradually it slowed. She paid for the pie she’d ordered, and the rush was over.

            Temple took her dessert to a table from which she could see the hulking bear-man. He was no longer trying to hide his interest. What was he looking for? Some reaction in her to what had just happened? Was he concerned for her safety? If she’d needed to feel safe, she’d have stayed at home.

            But surprises made her angry. She seldom ran into drunks in restaurants that served only beer and wine. But the drunk had reminded her of her limitations. She hadn’t noticed his growing ardor. She’d been concentrating on the big man, whose eyes, as clear as ice, stared unabashedly now. When he blinked, it was as if the electricity had flickered. Temple didn’t blink. She opened her mouth and enveloped her fork, drawing the sweet pastry off with her lips. His eyes followed the arc of her hand down to her plate and then slid slowly back to her face.

            Without faltering, he picked up her soda, which she’d left behind, and drank it down in one gulp. He looked into the glass, as if to be certain he’d downed it all, and the ghost of a triumphant smile crept onto his lips.

            There was something violating and preemptive in his taking possession of what had once been hers. Something daring. Two, she thought. There would not be a three.

            Hunting was always risky or it wouldn’t be sporting, but she liked to think she wasn’t foolhardy, that she knew her game’s predilections, that she knew when to take cover. She wasn’t looking for real danger, only thrills.

            Temple rose without finishing her pie, grabbed her bag, and strode resolutely past the man, toward the exit. As she swept by, he put his hands on the table and seemed to be trying to stand up, but she shot him a disinterested look, and he turned away before she had to change it to one of scathing disdain.

            Once outside, Temple slowed, pulled her loose hair back from her face into a tight knot, breathed deeply of the drizzly autumn night, and, with a last sigh as Temple, morphed back into Mary Jane Bell.

♥

            Q Kauffmann looked straight ahead, his teeth clenched, his face bricked up, long after the golden woman was gone.

            When would he ever learn that romance wasn’t for him?

            Little children cried and hid in their mothers’ skirts. Women crossed the street when they saw him coming. Men avoided kidding him about his looks.

            Q left Murph’s without speaking to anyone. Alone, inside his truck, he leaned his misshapen forehead on the steering wheel. It was a while before he could face going home alone.

♥

            Mary Jane didn’t want the Sunday morning’s huge conference of the Church to end. Her pocket sagged, full of hard knots of wadded blue tissue. Her face felt tight, as if she’d just scrubbed it with soap. On the big screens hanging from the ceiling of Worcester’s Centrum, she thought she could see tears standing in President Hinckley’s eyes, too, as he blessed the tri-regional gathering of the faithful. His words, repeated in sign below, bored through her. Her throat ached, and her heart was brimming.

            The thrum of seven thousand voices raised together rumbled through her: “The Spirit of God, Like a Fire Is Burning.” Around her, a hundred pairs of hands around her signed the century-old lyrics that, like the national anthem, had everyone in the arena on their feet. A closing prayer petitioned that Father in Heaven would grant the righteous desires in the hearts of the Saints present.

            It didn’t seem that Mary Jane’s righteous desire would be granted today, but she was resigned, almost soothed. Before the meeting began, she’d ranged around the enormous enclosure, scanning faces in the crowd that had gathered from all over New England.

            She’d hoped for more than just a guarded, distant glimpse of her own daughters, such as she sometimes got after driving two hours from Springfield, Massachusetts, to their school in Nashua, New Hampshire. Two weeks ago, she’d flouted the odious restraining order yet again and left a message for Isolde and Gwyneth, under a loosened brick just outside the school fence, where Isolde could reach it without leaving the grounds.

            In the note, She told Izzy the conference would be announced in the Boston Globe. Izzy should innocently show the paper to her father and plead to go. It might be as much as another decade before a prophet visited again. If Charles wouldn’t bring the girls himself, they could arrange for a ride with members by calling their bishop. His number was in the phone book.

            Mary Jane instructed Izzy to sit in the fourth section from the front, on the left as you face the stand, but only if she could manage it without causing suspicion.

            The following week, when Mary Jane checked what they called their “mailbox,” she found notes from both girls.

            “I love you, Mommy.” Signed “GWYNETH BELL,” as if Mary Jane might not recognize her daughter from just her first name. The signature letters were huge and uneven. Isolde had obviously guided her sister’s hand for only the first four words. Mary Jane imagined her younger daughter pulling away. “I can do it. I can do it.” Gwyn was only in kindergarten, but Izzy, now in sixth grade, reported that a year of pre-school had made Gwyn fiercely independent.

            Izzy wrote, “I’ll try to get to conference, but Dad’s still touchy about the Church.”

            It had been two years since the messy civil divorce. But until the Church issued a “cancellation of sealing,” Mary Jane was still married “for time and all eternity” to Charles and they’d be a family forever. But the court had issued a restraining order, and since then, Charles had done everything possible to shut Mary Jane out of her children’s lives. He refused even to acknowledge her except through his lawyer. He ridiculed her offer of child support, calling it “a pitiful ruse” to get access. Dismissing Izzy’s embarrassed protests that she was too old for a baby-sitter, he still insisted that his new wife walk the girls to school and back, in case Mary Jane tried to intercept them, or even see them from a distance. He was doing his best to poison them against her and against the Church, but his efforts seemed to be having the opposite effect—making Mary Jane and the Church all the more attractive to them, a sort of forbidden-fruit reaction.

            Charles would expect Mary Jane to be at the conference, but she had to keep trying. He might relent. Evidently this wasn’t that time. Probably because of what Temple had done the night before. The thoughts she’d entertained. The vain desires.

            Every Sunday morning Mary Jane promised herself she’d never do that again. By Tuesday she couldn’t see what was so awful about just going to a restaurant. She didn’t drink, after all. There wasn’t even any secondhand smoke to inhale. She dressed modestly, almost bundled—not even anything sleeveless. It wasn’t her fault that men lusted after her. By Friday she’d convinced herself that after working hard all week, she deserved a break from her lonely routine, from her isolation, from the inadequate meals she cooked for herself. By Saturday she saw no reason why she shouldn’t try to meet new friends. She was an adult, and she was legally divorced. She might even stumble onto a missionary opportunity. But she always ranged far enough away from home that she wasn’t likely to run into people who knew her from church.

            A crowd was pooling around the prophet and his dark-suited cadre—two apostles, the area representative, an assortment of stake presidents, patriarchs, bishops, mission presidents, and what appeared to be a handful of security people. Parents pushed their small children forward to be touched, to have their hands shaken, to have a memorable word spoken to them by the prophet. The parents, if not their little ones, would remember the experience for the rest of their lives.

            Mary Jane remembered seeing President Kimball in Largo, Maryland, when she was only eight years old, a week after she was baptized. He told her she should always make her father as happy with her as he was that day.

            Her father literally beamed, as if to illustrate the prophet’s pronouncement. Mary Jane thought her father hadn’t looked that happy since her mother left them.

            It was her mother, though, that Mary Jane most wanted to make happy that day—make her happy enough that she’d want to come back from wherever she’d gone. The trouble was, her mother didn’t care to be made happy.

            Mary Jane, however, wanted to show her pleasure at everything her children did, but they didn’t seem to have the same craving for her approval as she’d had for her absent mother’s. They didn’t tell her nearly enough, and she was constantly surprised when she discovered each new and terrifying thing they tried. Gwyn was young; she had an excuse, but Izzy’s notes sometimes seemed to Mary Jane like telegrams from an explorer at the stationary center of the galaxy, where some kind of perverse relativity made them age at twice or three times the rate she expected. She worried she wouldn’t recognize them when she saw them again. If she saw them again.

            She was still methodically scanning faces, but with fading hope. The people at both ends of Mary Jane’s row had moved out into the aisles as the crowd milling past them thinned.

            Mary Jane turned at the touch of a hand on her arm and was immediately fused in an exuberant hug.

            “Tina! You’re back!” she squealed when they finally broke apart. In a frenzied burst of church activity, designed to numb her mind after the divorce, Mary Jane had introduced Tina to the church. They’d written one another often that first semester Tina spent at the Y. But as Tina’s social life expanded, her letters came less frequently, filled with apologies for neglecting her beloved mentor, until, inevitably, they stopped.

            “I leave in January,” Tina said, surprising Mary Jane by signing at the same time. Tina hadn’t been able to sign last time they’d seen one another.

            Mary Jane recognized the gleeful smile. “A mission call?”

            Tina nodded. “A signing mission. Guess where.”

            Mary Jane had no idea. Did they have signing missions outside the U.S.? “Russia?”

            Tina laughed. “Close. Georgia. Atlanta.”

            “I’m thrilled for you.” She hadn’t thought of Tina in months. “You look so happy.”

            “You’ll never believe who I ran into.”

            Mary Jane’s stomach tightened automatically. “Charles?”

            “Close.” Tina moved to let someone pass down the aisle. “His mother.”

            “Florence?”

            Tina nodded. “She showed me pictures of the girls. They look just like— Just beautiful.”

            Florence used to post pictures of her twenty-three grandchildren on a home page that Mary Jane could access at the library. Then suddenly Izzy and Gwyn’s pictures disappeared. Charles’ doing, no doubt. “What did she tell you about them?”

            Mary Jane saw her friend’s face sober in an instant. “Just that they were ten and five now.” There was an awkward lull. “I should have asked her more.”

            Mary Jane shrugged. “Where did you see her?”

            “At the temple.” Tina didn’t sign the words—the equivalent of muttering, hoping Mary Jane would misunderstand. It would have been Tina’s first time going to temple, to receive her own endowment. She obviously hadn’t thought to invite—

             “Who went with you?” Mary Jane hoped the catch in her throat wasn’t audible.

            “My mother’s sister.” The joy turned back on in Tina’s eyes, as if a circuit breaker had been restored. “Didn’t I tell you? She joined while I was at school. You and I will have to go together as soon as I get back. You and I will have to go, too. By that time the Boston temple should be built.”

            Mary Jane only smiled. Tina hadn’t thought to invite her to D.C., and she evidently didn’t feel the need to apologize. They’d grown worlds apart. They wouldn’t write while she was gone, and the next time they accidentally met, Tina would probably have a husband and three children. Mary Jane had lost hundreds of friends since she went deaf the year after Izzy was born. Some people simply didn’t know how to deal with the “tragedy.” For others, it was just too awkward to phone her, and nobody wrote letters anymore, it seemed. E-mail was the thing now, she heard, but she wasn’t plugged in to that.

            Mary Jane glanced over Tina’s shoulder. For an instant, she thought her heart had stopped.

            Tina turned.  Nothing but a sister waving up at them from the floor below. She had two girls with her.

            “I thought—” Mary Jane said, putting her hands in her pockets. “I was wrong.” It wasn’t Izzy and Gwyn.

            A shadow passed over Tina’s features, and Mary Jane immediately regretted making yet another reference to her lost children. It wasn’t a loss people knew how to deal with. There were no comfortable Hallmark sentiments for such occasions. “Well,” Tina said. “My ride’s waiting. Good to see you.” Another hug, and Tina was gone—leaving Mary Jane to wonder how such a strong friendship could have slipped. How no one seemed to stick to her anymore. Look at Charles. Look at Izzy and Gwyn.

            Mary Jane watched in silence, as the hall slowly cleared out. She had virtually no hope left of finding her girls, but the small fellowships she’d shared today were some small comfort. Other people were worse off, she told herself. Everyone had his or her private wounds and dreariness, their hidden lives beyond closed doors. Their secret selves. Their Temples.

            A pacifier lay on the floor. Someone would cry all the way home over that.

            A souvenir program covered with purple crayon scrawls was left behind and spoiled by a shoe print.

            A long-legged boy strode up the ranks of seats, high-stepping over the backs, racing his sister who stumbled up the shallow concrete stairs.

♥

            Q tapped a brick with the butt of his trowel and checked it with his plumb rule again. Now the line was out the other way. Q sighed. He’d been working all day, but he might as well have stayed at home for all the good he’d done, muttering and growling to himself.

            Sly was on the roof singing love songs. Full-throated, he usually sang all day. Blues, country-western, rock, gospel—it was all music to him. Pounding work songs for when the sun got hot. Opera—but only with people who’d known him forever. And often, late in the day, he’d indulge in these dreamy, sensuous, yearning love songs.

            If Q had a wife like Philemina at home, he might have something to sing about, too. If anybody’d ever looked twice at him, Q might be the one working himself up for his nightly homecoming and spending all his money on silk teddies and parochial schools for six little ones.

            But nobody’d ever looked twice at Q. At least, not in that way. He’d made a blame fool of himself last night, thinking that’s what the golden woman was doing.

            He pointed up yet another stubborn brick. The only thing that kept him from quitting was that Sly had shown up with the Tromblay boy. Q pried the brick loose again from the mortar with a sucking sound, stabbed his trowel into the mud pan, and took his smoldering misery for a walk.

            The sky was a roiling, plush pink as the sun went down. It was time to think about turning on the spotlights. Instead, Q climbed the ladder. Maybe he could keep Sly from singing by making him talk.

            “Hey.” He sat down on the roof.

            “Getting dark,” Sly responded. “Morris promised we’d have power to the spots tonight.”

            “Hmm,” Q said. He could hear the new electrician still rattling around in the cavernous house below. Q had resisted telling the man not to bore such big holes in the struts, but it hadn’t been easy. A state license didn’t guarantee he was any good, but Sly said the man knew his business.

            “Then we can get rid of that tone-deaf generator.” Sly’s hammer punctuated his talk the way it accompanied his songs. “D’ja hear? There’s a cold front coming down from Canada.”

            Q nodded. They watched the weather every day now, racing to get the outside work done before winter set in. Q toed a roof tile. He’d wanted slate, with copper flashing. But this was his first house. He was spread pretty thin—both in money and time. He was working too fast. And he worried that he wasn’t doing his absolute best here after ten hours a day on a road crew. It hadn’t been so hard when daylight lasted longer. Q let his eyes wander over the rapidly coloring trees that nearly hid the house from the washboard dirt road at the foot of the still unpaved driveway.

            Q loved heights. He’d had his eye on this ridge plot ever since high school. He’d grown more ambitious and more sophisticated with his dream floor plan over the years, but he’d yet to find a better site. In the back of his mind he kept thinking he’d buy the house back one day—his first house, like the family homestead—so he resented every compromise he had to make, like the roof. He refused to work on it himself.

            “Ya gonna sit there till the stars come out, big guy?” Sly prodded.

            Q levered himself up. “Okay, boss,” he chided Sly and swung himself out onto the ladder. Down below, the Tromblay boy sat chugging a soda by the truck’s tailgate.

            Sly looked down, too. “You’re the one paying him, not me.”

            Q winced. Since before they were half grown, they’d planned to build this house together. But then Sly let his mother talk him into taking chemistry at MIT, while Q took carpentry with Uncle Ralph and masonry with his dad, and was doing drywall and interiors with Sly’s father. Sly finally came back to earth and joined his father’s business after only a year of lab work for some New Jersey outfit. “Couldn’t sing there,” was all he said. Then he found Mina, and that was the end of any spare cash.

            “Sing that Fun-ick-u-lee song, will ya?” Q said as he descended to the ground. If Sly wouldn’t stop singing, at least Q wouldn’t be have to listen to the words.

            “What am I, a request line?” Sly laughed, throwing his head back, his black eyes flashing. He bellowed the words in time with his hammer, “Fenicule, fenicula!” and segued into an Italian aria.

            Q turned on the generator and the lights. He pounded some nails out of a dusty cement form and tossed the boards on a heap. The clatter punctuated a glance that sent the Tromblay boy shambling back to work without a word having to be spoken.

            The boy was related to Q in some convoluted way that their mothers had explained and Q hadn’t followed and wasn’t about to ask to have repeated. It was enough recommendation that the boy had learned under Uncle Ralph, who’d been taught by Q’s grandfather. Q often found his grandfather’s initials scrawled on the beams of old houses, when he pulled out the lathplaster construction on a winter remodeling job.

            Q hunched back over his bricks, carefully raking the cement from the grooves with a grapevine jointer. He’d had to settle for a silvered black and gray-flashed, red brick, not the medium gray with white accents that he could just imagine catching the hilltop sunlight. He tried not to think about it. He laid the next line of brick more easily, mulling over his family’s long tradition of building solid homes in these hills. His own initials would be found one day by his grand . . . nephews.

            Q sighed.

            She was beautiful, that golden woman. He kept thinking he should recognize her from the movies. He wasn’t the only one in Murph’s staring at her. He thought some of the other guys might have been working up the courage to ask for an autograph. Then he caught her looking at him in the mirror. Not that horrified look that made him turn away. Nor the frank curiosity of a child, which he tolerated the way a mother tolerates a toddler’s pokes and pinches.

            No. Her look was something like he imagined his own must be, gauging and cataloging other people’s reactions to what they were seeing. But, of course, she should be flattered by the appreciative glances Q saw directed her way. Flattered even by the jealous peeks of the women.

            Had she noticed that girl in the corner, talking too loud, too insistently, trying to position herself between her date and the golden woman? Q sympathized with the girl’s desperation all the more because he understood her date’s lewd longing. Q’s own longing, however, was not lewd. He wanted to marry the golden woman.

            Far from undressing her with his eyes, he imagined her clothed in white satin. She might hate his idealizing her as much as the other men’s debasing, but for Q there was no in-between, no equality, no casual flirtation, no possibility of mutual desire. Women were utterly unattainable.

            He sometimes wondered how much of an effort it was for his own mother to love him.

            But if the golden woman could just see his house. He’d shaped it first in his mind. Then he saved the money—one dollar after another—until he had the land. All alone, he reverently turned the first shovelful of dirt. Brick by brick, board by board, he was transforming a heap of hardware and a hole in the ground into a luxury mansion.

            If she only knew what he could create, she’d have to respect him. She could be happy living in that house. Their children could be happy.

            Last night at Murph’s he’d been dreaming about their conversations, fantasizing his proposal, their marriage, their eldest son’s wedding, a monthlong vacation on a sunny cruise ship. Then that disgusting drunk next to him at the counter ruined everything with his coarse remark, loud enough for everybody in the room to hear. Q wanted to shove the filthy-minded old lecher off his stool, but the lady was watching, and her calm said she was above insults. With a gut-wrenching effort, he tried to ignore the abuse for her sake. He continued to eat, refused to react, even though his insides were churning with indignation for her. She was totally serene. Amazed at her poise, her control and assurance, he was thinking how alike they were in having to bear with indignities and affronts. He wished he could always act like her, ignoring sneering people who judged only the surface, not caring to know the heart. A woman like her would never lie awake nights replaying the day’s humiliations, plotting impossible revenge, and cursing fate.

            She acted as if she hadn’t heard. She simply checked her purse and strolled out of the room, as unhurried as a summer breeze. When she turned and caught Q staring after her across the room, he looked away. She must have thought he was no better than the other oglers, as he self-consciously stroked his beard in a futile effort to hide his misshapen face. When he looked again she was gone. He guessed she must have slipped out the back way. He felt her loss like the end of a beautiful song he’d never hear sung again. He wanted somehow to linger in her resonance. He moved to sit opposite where her scent still lingered, imagining himself waiting there for her to rejoin him.

            Then she froze him by her magical reappearance. He scowled. He blanched. He couldn’t find a resting-place for his eyes. They were drawn compulsively to her. But she didn’t flinch. For a panicky moment he thought she was going to sit back down there. She’d be looking straight at him. He’d have to say something.

            But then she passed him by and he could breath again.

            He was stunned, though, when she sat down at the counter, right next to that drunken pig. She was a cool one. How could she ignore what the man had said about her before?

            Then the imbecile touched her, and she cringed.

            Q’s enormous hands crashed palm down onto the table. He was half out of his seat. He felt everyone in the room turn expectantly toward him at the sound. But she simply whorled away from the drunk in a fluid, dance-like motion that left the man off balance, foolishly clutching at the air. Murph called out Q’s name, warning him not to interfere, and Q reluctantly sat back down. At the same time Murph took a protective step between the woman and the drunk, and said, with a forced chuckle, “When you fall off your stool, Jerry, it’s time to go home.”

            The drunk let out a stream of unimaginative expletives under his breath, but he staggered off, and the incident was over in seconds.

            In a moment, the golden woman was once more as unperturbed as the Buddha. She glided with her cheesecake to a nearby table and seductively parted her shimmering lips.

            Mesmerized by her compelling gaze, her silky movements, her perfect composure, Q could feel his own pulse pounding in his forehead. He was conscious of every contorted feature of his own hideous face. But she didn’t turn away in disgust. He knew it was irrational, but he was convinced that if he looked away the vision would disappear again.

            Murph’s place suddenly felt overheated. Q imagined that downy cheek, fresh under his fingertips. A bead of sweat rolled down his neck. Her fork glittered, as did the fiery opal on her right hand, her incandescent hair, her mahogany eyes.

            He reached for his drink and tossed it down. It tasted strange.

            Strawberries. Her drink. A sheepish half-smile. He could feel the heat rising to his face. She’d think he was a fool.

            She opened her mouth as if about to speak.

            Then she reached for her purse.

            Q looked away. He couldn’t force himself to look at her again, not even when she paused as she squeezed past him. He pulled his feet under his chair, hunched into his shoulders, like a turtle, trying to become invisible.

            She swept on, and when this third act ended, the curtain fell as well. He should have turned around. He should have spoken up. He should have said, “Can I buy you a another drink?” He should have said, “Can I walk you to your car?” Should have said, “Do you have to go so soon?” No matter how banal, he should have stopped her. Said anything.

            Sly’s new song was slow and sad, again: “Oh, Shenandoah, I love your daughter.”

            Q looked at his work. It seemed some machine must have laid these tiers. He ached all over, but not from exertion.