The downside to doing the electrical work with Tony was that we worked until Tony said it was time to quit and sometimes we worked until well after sunset and I was left to face my fear of darkness alone. I was safe enough walking to my car as I always waited for Tony to leave with me so that I would not have to walk alone; but I was spooked during the drive home alone and while walking, or rather sprinting, from my car to the house. During the drive home I drove with the interior light on in the car and the radio playing to give myself a false sense of security. Once home I would sprint from the car to the door of the house and on up the stairs until I reached the safety of my apartment with a basting of sweat pouring from my pores and my heart racing like a stock-car engine.

And Sarah, poor Sarah, was forced to stay at home all day. She had missed too much of the school year already and would have to make the entire year up the following Fall. On top of that I still needed to create a new identity for her so that she could go to school without drawing the attention of nosy school teachers that would bring the authorities down on me. I hadn’t given that problem a lot of thought but I figured we had until the start of the next school year to solve our problem. I knew that I would have to obtain the birth certificate of a mentally handicapped child or a child who was missing or who had died young. Some solution would present itself; I had heard that illegal aliens did it all the time. In the meantime I provided Sarah with an ample supply of children’s books and some young adult books. She was a voracious reader and I had a hard time keeping up with her appetite. I often stopped at used bookstores and thrift stores during my lunch hour to find books for her to read. When she returned to school she might be behind her piers in some subjects but she would be the best reader in her class.

And Sarah seemed happy in her role as homemaker; too happy perhaps. She had learned to cook well enough, in the brief time she had spent in the kitchen with Melanie, and she had a warm meal waiting fro me at the end of every hard day of work. She was only seven; but she had learned to make a variety of incredible dishes. She made stuffed shells in tomato sauce, lasagna that would make any Italian chef proud, stuffed peppers, manicotti, chicken parmesan (we couldn’t afford veal), and spaghetti and meatballs that tasted better than Catherine had ever made. And she would accompany each entrée with a side of baked potato, or mashed potato with chives or gravy, or French fries, and always another vegetable such as green beans or Brussels-sprouts, or thick stalks of asparagus covered in a butter sauce (despite the fact that she hated these green vegetables herself). And she would pack lunches for me every workday; thick sandwiches piled with turkey and ham and Swiss cheese or provolone and mustard and mayonnaise, or corned beef on rye with mustard, and always a little bag of chips and a soda with a little note in the bag reminding me to pick something up from the grocery on the way home, and a reminder of how much she loved me or telling me that I was the “best daddy in the whole world” which made me want to work even harder to actually live up to her accolades.

In addition to cooking Sarah also took care of the laundry and the housekeeping as well. Our apartment may not have been much to brag about, but it was always spotless. She kept the bathroom so clean that I hated to bathe for fear of leaving such filthy black dirt and grime, as I inevitably would, in such a pristine tub because I would leave it smeared with large black hand-prints and a film of the filthiest slime, the result of my labor; crawling through soot filled attics and dusty basements.

In the evenings Sarah and I resorted to old habits watching old black and white movies together on the living-room sofa wrapped in blankets. Or sometimes when we grew bored with television we would both read. Since Sarah spent most of her free time during the day reading by springtime she had moved well beyond the basic children’s books of her age group and preferred reading the classics, revised for children to accommodate a less refined vocabulary, while I read the latest fiction by John Updyke or Alice Monroe or Andre Dubus or Nadine Gordimer.

On Friday or Saturday nights Amber would stop by, telling her husband, who after a while had called off his private detective, that she was spending the evening with Melanie or with her sister and we would order pizza and play board games until Sarah grew tired and fell asleep. Then Amber and I would slip into my bed and copulate like wild animals.

Afterwards I would fantasize aloud about her leaving her husband and coming to live with me, a sour subject for her to be sure because she knew that she would never do so. She couldn’t bear to leave her children and she couldn’t imagine raising them in my pathetic apartment or on my pathetic income. She was reluctant, too, to give up the lush house that she and her husband had built and that she had poured so much sweat into. She had no reservations at all about continuing our affair indefinitely though. She said that we were so sexually simpatico that she couldn’t imagine giving me up.

If it were to come down to making a choice between leaving her entire family behind or letting go of me, she said, that I would be her hands down choice. I doubted this was true, but beggars couldn’t be choosers, and I owed her so much, and I so looked forward to our evenings together.

Amber prided herself in being a great lover and she seemed to go overboard trying to prove that she was the worlds best. She did things that I could not have imagined, drawing on my body like a straw to a milkshake; reducing me to a puddle of sweat. During those short nights she used up all of the stamina that I had saved from the time she had last left me. And still there was something missing, a void that she discarded in her wake. And so, as was the norm, she would leave me to my cold and lonely bed at two o’clock or so in the morning, to stare at my ceiling longing for her warm body to be next to mine.

Sometimes, after she had fulfilled her weekend stripping obligations, Melanie would stop by to see Sarah and I, occasionally accompanied by Amber or by her new guardian Christopher (a large handsome black man of whom I must admit I was a bit jealous), or sometimes Melanie simply came alone. When Melanie came alone, after Sarah fell asleep, we would talk for hours. We often flirted with each other as well but ultimately we would turn our backs on the attraction that we could not help but to feel for one another. I didn’t see myself as attractive and I didn’t understand her attraction to me. I was much older than she was, and I didn’t think that I looked very appealing at all in my black beard and mustache. But I often wondered how it would have been to have her as a lover; her warm Beautiful body next to mine for an entire night instead of the empty bed that I would have to endure after making love to Amber. But alas I could not betray Amber and I didn’t dare ask Melanie to do such a thing causing damage to their friendship.

But the more I talked to Melanie the closer we became and the more I entrusted her with the girth of my story; my having been accused of killing my wife and our ensuing flight. I half expected her to be appalled and to think me guilty, but I felt the need to confide in another adult and Amber, with her short visits, had become less a confidant than I would have thought or hoped. She rarely even called by winter’s end. She simply showed up to be serviced once a week as though I were her stud bull. But Melanie surprised me with her understanding and acceptance of me.

“I know people and I can tell that you wouldn’t hurt anyone unless you were provoked.”

“You mean like when I was your security.”