“I’m going out,” Denise said. “You stop me and I’ll have all the more reason. You said it, I didn’t. All the more reason to feel sorry for myself. Right? You’ll be responsible for it, you sneaky son of a bitch.”

“I’ve changed my mind,” Ryan said. “I don’t give a shit what you feel, you’re going to bed.”

He grabbed her, pinning her arms to her body, and dragged her, twisting against him, into the bedroom.

Denise stopped fighting. She said, “All right, leave me alone.” She stood by the double bed, weaving slightly.

“Get undressed,” Ryan said.

Denise looked at him, closing one eye. “Now we’re horny, huh? I’ve been wondering when it was coming. All the times you’ve been here, I was thinking, I don’t know, maybe he doesn’t have any balls. Is that your problem, Ryan? No balls, huh?”

He left the room as she spoke, crossed the small hallway to the bathroom, and looked in the medicine cabinet for aspirin. There was a small bottle of Excedrin. He had to go to the kitchen for a glass of water. When he came back to the bedroom, Denise had her slacks off and was pulling the navy-blue sweater over her head. Ryan looked at her compact little can in the white panties. Good thighs, slender; but very pale. She needed sunlight on her and clean air. Ryan thought of Florida again, the second time that day, this time seeing the two of them, tan, walking along a sundown empty beach.

“Fucking sweater,” Denise said, inside the navy-blue folds. It was caught on her bracelet. She pulled the sweater free, dropping it, and was looking at him again. Ryan handed her two Excedrin tablets and the glass of water. She took them without a word and handed the glass back to him, staring again with her glazed expression.

“I’m gonna stay here tonight,” Ryan said.

“Uh-huh.” She was unbuttoning her blouse now, working down from the top.

“I’ll be in the other room.”

“You’re not going to sleep with me?”

He moved to the bed and pulled the madras spread and sheet from the pillows. “No, but I’ll tuck you in,” Ryan said.

“Was that tuck you said?”

“Be nice, okay? Get in bed.”

“How nice? Hey, Ryan…”

When he looked at her she opened her blouse to show her breasts for a moment and let the blouse fall closed again. They were small breasts, but good ones.

“What do you say, Ryan, you want to fuck?”

He walked around the foot of the bed to the door.

“Hey, I thought you were gonna tuck me in.” She pulled the blouse off, hooked her thumbs in the waist of the panties, and pushed them down. When she tried to step out, she stumbled against the bed. Ryan watched her from the doorway.

Denise rolled onto the bed. She settled on her back, on top of the madras cover, her legs apart, the panties caught on one ankle. As she looked at him now, with a contrived expression, eyes half-closed, she raised up on her elbows and spread her legs a little more.

“Come on, Ryan honey. You and God Honey, you know everything, don’t you? You prick. Come on, you sneaky little prick, let’s see if you’re any good.” She moved her hips up and down, twice.

Ryan moved to the side of the bed. “Lift up your can.”

“Like this?” She arched her back, raising her pelvis toward him. “You want some of that?”

Ryan pulled the spread and sheet to the foot of the bed and brought them back, letting the covers settle over her. He went out, closing the door. In the living room, as he sat down and reached for a cigarette, he heard her call him. Hey, Ryan, repeating it several times. He heard her call him a rotten motherfucker and heard her voice, sounds, but not the words clearly. Finally there was silence.

During the night he thought about Denise and would see her body again, the way she had showed it to him, her private nakedness that he had had to imagine before. He wasn’t worried about Denise now. That was a funny thing; he had a good feeling about her. She wasn’t down in a hole, depressed; she was mad, and that was something he felt he could handle. What he thought about most of the night, when he’d wake up sitting in the canvas chair with his feet on the edge of the low table, was Mr. Perez. Mr. Perez in his hotel suite. Mr. Perez speaking in his quiet, deceptive tone. Mr. Perez, shit, standing on this thing immobile, like a dead weight, and the bayou hillbilly helping him hold it down.

How did you go about pushing Mr. Perez, or faking him out? Leave him standing there with nothing.

In the morning, he heard Denise get up and go into the bathroom. She came out and went back to the bedroom. When she appeared she was wearing a raincoat, barefoot, her hands deep in the pockets of the coat.

“It’s cold in here.” Her voice was subdued: someone who had come out of a sickroom.

Ryan looked over. “How’re you doing?”

“I can’t find the Excedrin.”

“Oh, it’s in the kitchen. I’ll get it.”

He rose, pushing out of the chair and arching the stiffness from his neck. She was already in the kitchen, standing at the sink with the water running, her back to him as he came in.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“You mean, for trying to seduce me?”

“I remembered-when I woke up I remembered things I said… what I did. I’m very sorry.”

“How do you feel otherwise?”

“Otherwise, shitty. I’ll thank you for one thing,” Denise said, “not letting me have any more last night. Beyond that, I’m not sure we have anything to talk about.”

Ryan turned her around by the shoulders, seeing her eyes briefly, before she looked away.

“We have quite a bit to talk about, after you have some breakfast.”

“Just coffee.”

“All right, just coffee,” Ryan said. “I’m not going to argue with you. I’m not going to try and force you to believe or do anything I say. But I’m going to ask you to listen to me. After that, if you want us to be friends again, fine. If you don’t, okay, that’s that. But you’re not allowed to think of something else while I’m talking, or what you’d like to say, or interrupt with some smartass remark. All right?”

Denise shrugged. She didn’t seem to care.

She didn’t want Ryan to look at her. She was tired and felt sick. She stood at the counter smoking cigarettes and sipped the coffee getting cold, staring at it while he talked to her in a quiet tone. She liked the sound of his voice and at another time would want to believe him, but right now it didn’t matter. She looked awful and felt awful and didn’t want to be here.

Not today but tomorrow she could walk in her mother’s house with a happy-daughter smile and say, “Hi, Mom, I’m home.” Her mother would let Denise kiss her cheek. They would sit down in the kitchen to have a nice cup of coffee with real cream. She would think of all the things she could tell her mother to try to be close to her as a person and not simply a daughter. She could say, “Mom, I’ve been drunk for three years,” saving Bobby Lear till later, and for a moment her mother would stare at her. Then her mother would say, “How could you do that to me?” Or she might say it was impossible because no one in the family drank. Or she might pretend not to have heard. Or she would be saved and protected by an act of God: the telephone or a neighbor at the door, and her mother would come back in the kitchen with a letter from Denise’s brother, Don, who worked for National Cash Register in Dayton, and show her Polaroids of Don and Joanne and their three boys, Scott, Skip, and June Bug doing “soooo big” with his arms raised over his head.

She could give up and let herself melt into her mother’s life and wear a dress on Sunday and sit with her mother’s friends in the maple living room and compare Edison bills and watch TV, the new Oral Roberts who no longer healed people, and, in the evenings, watch Name That Tune and Let’s Make a Deal. She would run into boys on the street she had known in high school. Her mother would say all the nice boys were married and had good positions with State Farm and John Deere and the bank or mixing prescriptions. Two of them would be on the County Board of Commissioners. Her mother would find one, though, who had not married. Harold something, a long German name that was on the Edison Company centennial farm plaque hanging in the new annex of the courthouse.