She said the last line unemotionally. The word at the end was the most important in her life, the one that eventually razed everything, but she put no special emphasis on it. No verbal underlining or topspin.

“I’m not good with these terms, Lily. I’m sorry. Does that mean you could never have children?”

“I’m not sterile, no, but the doctors said with the kind of extensive scarring I have on my fallopian tubes, the chances of me ever conceiving are almost none.”

There was a silence thick as blood.

“Lincoln.”

“Lincoln.”

“And Rick.”

“There is no Rick. What I told you about Rick Aaron is based mostly on this guy Bryce I knew. He was in and out of my life for a long time. Do you want to ask questions now or can I go on? I’d prefer to tell you the whole thing first. I don’t think you’ll be confused after.”

“Go ahead. But I’d like to turn on the light. I want to see your face.”

“Please no! I can’t do this if we see each other. I’m afraid of your face. But your voice is so calm. How can you be so calm hearing this? That frightens me too.”

“Go on, Lily.”

“Okay. They told me in the hospital I was lucky to be alive. My parents drove up to get me and my mother started crying the moment she walked in the room and saw me.”

“Who are your parents? Their name is Vincent?”

“Laurie and Alan. My mother’s dead. She had Alzheimer’s disease and died not recognizing anyone. My father still works for a Ford dealership near Philadelphia. We have very little contact. I told Lincoln both of them were dead.”

“Does your father know about Lincoln?”

From blood to stone. Hot, alive, and tactile before, her silence now was cold and dead. It held. She snorted once, as if I’d made a small joke not worth a full laugh. Her answer was superb.

“The only people who know about Lincoln are the people who know Lily Aaron.”

“And Lily Vincent?”

“She was eaten by Lily Aaron in their one and only trip together across the U.S. I can still remember checking into a motel in Illinois and, without thinking, signing the register ‘Lily V.’ Then I stopped, put a period next to the V, like it was my middle initial, and wrote ‘Aaron’ after it. It’s easy to become another person. You only have to be willing to leave who you were at the door and walk away.”

“Was Lincoln with you on that trip?”

“Yes.”

“Go back and tell it from where you got sick in college.”

“I came out of the hospital and spent the summer at home recuperating. That was the year my mom started showing signs of Alzheimer’s. My father ignored both of us. He doesn’t like sickness and only came up to get me in New York that time because she insisted. The two of us sickies sat on the porch and watched Mom’s portable TV.

“One day when I was very down and blue, Bryce pulled up at our door and said everybody in New York missed me, so when was I coming back? It was such a compliment. I was so touched. In the end he turned out to be a King Shit, but Bryce also had a real, dangerous talent for knowing when and how to make the perfect gesture. Like driving all the way to Pennsylvania to see how I was. Do you know anyone like that? They’ll do ten terrible things, but know exactly when to do one nice one that’ll erase the others from your mind. It’s a nasty, interesting talent. But there’s something else I’ve thought about with that. A person can do ten bad things, then one good one and it’ll get you back into the hearts of people. But if you do the opposite – ten good things followed by one bad—you’re no longer trusted. If you’re bad, they remember the good. If you’re good, they remember the bad. Each man makes his own shipwreck, eh?

“Clever old Bryce joined Mom and me on the porch and even went down to the showroom the next day with Dad to check out the new models. What a laugh. Bryce didn’t give a damn about cars. He didn’t give a damn about anything but himself. I’d been a willing and convenient partner for him. I later found out he let one of his friends fuck me so long as they supplied him with dope. Nice boyfriend, huh? But most of it was my fault. At that point I should have told him to leave, then either transferred to some college nearby like Temple or dropped out altogether and changed my life.

“But I didn’t. I barely waited another week, threw my things in the car, and went back to New York to be with him. That was sophomore year. The only good things about junior year were my language classes and starting to work in a restaurant in the Village. I immediately realized how much more I liked that than acting. The smells of good food and seeing people happy… Sure, there are drunks and idiots sometimes, but rarely. People come to restaurants to relax and do things they never do at home. I love the way they dawdle over their liqueurs or have another cup of espresso even though it’s bad for them and will keep them awake half the night. How women go to the bathroom and come back all fresh and made-up again, ready for another few hours. How they go in there and chatter like teenage girls at a prom. I love that laughter. There’s so much laughter. Real ha-ha, or sexy, or totally surprised. I love men showing off for their women and the women letting them do it. People holding hands and people you’d never expect picking up the check. When they leave, men hold coats for their ladies and you know so many of them’ll go home and make love and talk or hold each other cozily after. That great cloud of good feeling that comes with a good meal and new perfume and a couple too many drinks. I love that.”

“Talk about yourself. Don’t tell me about restaurants.”

“I’m almost finished with college. Junior year was nothing but what I told you. Senior year I really thought I was getting myself together. Bryce and I split after I found out about his pimping me to his friend. I was way down on the drug intake too. Usually just some grass and a little coke if it was around, but nothing else. The people I’d thought for so long were fascinating and going places started sounding like old records I’d heard a thousand times before. It was then that I realized these guys spent all their energy talking and planning, but never doing. They were so petrified of failing that they didn’t dare take chances because they might flop and embarrass themselves. Since they were all like that, though, they were safe. But I’d reached the point where I wasn’t interested anymore in getting into the La Mamma troupe or Paul Morrissey’s new film, so their yakking turned me off. I spent more and more time at the restaurant learning whatever they’d teach me. It was like that great moment in life when you’re young but suddenly get an idea of what you want to do with the next forty years of your time. That was me; I’d sighted land. Know what I mean? Then the raisins came.”

“What do you mean?”

“That’s a famous line from Lincoln. We were watching a documentary on TV once and the announcer said in a very deep, impressive voice, ‘And then the rains came!’ Lincoln was four, I think. He turned to me and in as deep a voice as he could find, said very proudly, ‘Then the raisins came!’ He said so many great things like that when he was little. I wrote some of them down.

“Anyway, one fine day in March my father called to say Mom was dead and already buried. He hadn’t thought I’d want to make the trip down just for that. ‘Just for that’ was the exact phrase he used, the mean-spirited drunk. The truth was, he didn’t want to be bothered any more than he already had. That ended my relationship with my father. Never in a million years could I forgive him for doing that. I got there as soon as I could and stood at her grave apologizing for having let her down. I went back to the house and told my father he was a selfish, evil prick and the greatest last blessing Mom had had was to die from a disease that let her forget all the lousy things he’d done to her for thirty years.