"I am a highly skilled anatomist," Anne declared with starchy dignity, dabbing at her blouse with the napkin, "and I can explain the exact mechanism by which one blows a drink out one's nose."

"Don't call her bluff," George warned him. "She can do it. Have you ever thought about a Twelve Step program for people who talk too much? You could call it On and On Anon."

"Oh, God," Anne groaned. "The old ones are the best ones."

"Jokes or husbands?" Emilio asked innocently.

And so the evening went.

When he next showed up for dinner, Anne met him at the door, put her hands on both sides of his face, rose on tiptoe and planted a chaste kiss on his forehead. "The first time you're here, you are a guest," she informed him, looking into his eyes. "After that, my darling, you're family. Get your own damned beer."

He took the long enjoyable walk to the Edwardses' house at least once a week after that. Sometimes he was the only guest. Often there were others: students, friends, neighbors, interesting strangers Anne or George had met and brought home. The conversation, about politics and religion and baseball and the wars in Kenya and Central Asia and whatever else caught Anne's interest, was raucous and funny, and the evenings ended with people calling out last jokes as they walked off into the night. The house became his cave—a home where a Jesuit was welcome and relaxed and off-duty, where he could soak up energy instead of being drained of it. It was the first real home Emilio Sandoz had ever had.

Sitting in their screened-in back porch, sipping drinks in the dusk, he learned that George was an engineer whose last job had involved life-support systems for underwater mining operations but whose career had spanned the technological distance from wooden slide rules to ILIAC RV and FORTRAN to neural nets, photonics and nanomachines. New to retirement, George had spent the early weeks of freedom cutting a swath through the old house, catching up on every small repair, taking curatorial pride in the smoothly working wooden window casings, the tuck-pointed brickwork, the tidiness of the workroom. He read stacks of books, eating them like popcorn. He enlarged the garden, built an arbor, organized the garage. He sank into pillowy contentment. He was bored brainless.

"Do you run?" he asked Sandoz, hopefully.

"I went out for cross-country in school."

"Watch out, dear, he's trying to sucker you. The old fart's training for a marathon," Anne said, the admiration in her eyes contradicting her tartness. "We're going to have to rebuild his knees if he keeps this nonsense up. On the other hand, if he croaks doing roadwork, I'm going to be a tastefully rich widow. I believe very sincerely in overinsuring."

Anne, he found out, was taking his course because she'd used medical Latin for years and was curious about the source language. She'd wanted to be a physician from the start but chickened out, afraid of the biochem, and so she began her career as a biological anthropologist. After finishing her Ph.D., she got work in Cleveland, teaching gross anatomy at Case Western Reserve. Years of working with med students in the gross lab did nothing to sustain her awe of the medical curriculum and so, at forty, she went back to school and wound up in emergency medicine, a specialty that required tolerance for chaos and a working knowledge of everything from neurosurgery to dermatology.

"I enjoy the violence," she explained primly, handing him a napkin. "Would you like me to explain about how that nose thing happens? The anatomy is really interesting. The epiglottis is like a little toilet bowl seat that covers the larynx—"

"Anne!" George yelled.

She stuck out her tongue. "Anyway, emergency medicine is great stuff. In the space of an hour sometimes, you get a crushed chest, a gunshot wound to the head and a kid with a rash."

"No children?" Emilio asked them one evening, to his own surprise.

"Nope. Turned out, we don't breed well in captivity," George said, unembarrassed.

Anne laughed. "Oh, God, Emilio. You'll love this. We used the rhythm method of birth control for years!" Her eyes bulged with disbelief. "We thought it worked!" And they howled.

He loved Anne, trusted her from the beginning. As the weeks went by and his emotions became more tangled, he felt more strongly the need of her counsel and the conviction that it would be good. But disclosure was never easy for him; the fall semester was half over before, one night after he finished helping George clear up the dinner wreckage, he found the nerve to suggest a walk to Anne.

"Behave yourselves," George ordered. "I'm old, but I can shoot."

"Relax, George," Anne called over her shoulder, as they started down the driveway. "I probably flunked the midterm. He's taking me out to break the news gently."

They chatted amiably for the first block or two, Anne's hand on Emilio's arm, her silver head nearly level with his dark one. He started twice but stalled out, unable to find words. Amused, she sighed and said, "Okay, tell me about her."

Sandoz barked a laugh and ran a hand through his hair. "Is it that obvious?"

"No," she assured him, gentle now. "It's just that I've seen you with a gorgeous young woman at the coffee shop on campus a few times, and I put two and two together. So. Tell me!"

He did. About Mendes's adamantine single-mindedness. Her accent, which he could mimic to perfection but could not identify. The hidalgo remark, so out of proportion to his mild attempt to soften the relationship. The antagonism he sensed but could not understand. And finally, ending at the beginning, the almost physical jolt of meeting her. Not just an appreciation of her beauty or a plain glandular reaction but a sense of…knowing her already, somehow.

At the end of all this, Anne said, "Well, it's just a guess, but what occurs to me is that she's Sephardic."

He came abruptly to a halt and stood still, eyes closed. "Of course. A Jew, of Spanish ancestry." He looked at Anne. "She thinks my ancestors threw her ancestors out of Spain in 1492."

"It would explain a lot." She shrugged and they began to walk again. "Personally, I love the beard, darling, but it does make you look like central casting's idea of the Grand Inquisitor. You may be pushing a lot of her buttons."

Jungian archetypes work both ways, he realized. "Balkan," he said, after a while. "The accent could be Balkan."

Anne nodded. "Maybe. A lot of Sephardim ended up in the Balkans after the expulsion. She might be from Romania or Turkey. Or Bulgaria. Someplace like that." She whistled, remembering Bosnia. "I'll tell you something about the Balkans. If people there think they're going to forget a grudge, they write an epic poem and make the children recite it before bed. You're up against five hundred years of carefully preserved and very bad memories about imperial Catholic Spain."

The silence lasted a little too long to give credence to his next remark. "I only wanted to understand her better." Anne made a face that said, Oh, sure. Emilio went on doggedly. "The work we are doing is difficult enough. Hostility simply makes it harder."

Anne thought of an off-color comment. She didn't say it, but Emilio read it on her face and snorted, "Oh, grow up," and she giggled like a twelve-year-old who's just discovered smutty jokes. Anne took his arm then and they started back toward the house, listening to the sounds of the neighborhood buttoning up for the night. Dogs barked at them, the leaves rattled and whispered. A mother called out, "Heather! Bedtime! I'm not going to tell you again!"

"Heather. Haven't heard that one in years. Probably named after a grandmother." Anne suddenly stopped and Emilio turned back to look at her. "Shit, Emilio, I don't know—maybe God is as real for you as George and I are for each other…We were barely twenty when we got married, back before the Earth's crust cooled. And believe me, nobody gets through forty years together without noticing a few attractive alternatives along the way." He started to say something, but she held up her hand. "Wait. I intend to bestow upon you unsolicited advice, my darling. I know this will sound glib, but don't pretend you aren't feeling what you feel. That's how things slide into hell. Feelings are facts," she said, her voice a little hard, as she began to walk again. "Look straight at 'em and deal with 'em. Work it through, as honestly as you can. If God is anything like a middle-class white chick from the suburbs, which I admit is a long shot, it's what you do about what you feel that matters." They could see George now, sitting on the front stoop in a pool of light, waiting for them. Her voice was very soft. "Maybe God will love you more if you come back to Him with your whole heart later."