I was so sick of being in my car, sick of even the idea of driving around to find a place to stow it and me for the night. But at least it was familiar, though the rest of me was in a storage shed across from the El Rancho Motel. After almost an hour of wasting gas I drove back there, parked the car beside my shed, and sat looking out the windshield at cars going by, thinking how I should really break down and rent another room at the El Rancho across the street, one with a TV that worked, just lie on the bed in front of it and watch hour after hour of whatever trash came on. When I got hungry I’d pick up the phone and have something delivered. I’d write checks I couldn’t afford to write; I wouldn’t go to work; I wouldn’t leave that bed and that room until Connie Walsh called me to move back into my house.

That’s how I felt. But back into what really? Cleaning people’s houses and offices? Chain-watching movies on the VCR? Waiting for my husband to come back? Lying to my family?

I lit a cigarette and blew the smoke out the window. In the program, they’d tell you at these times in life to HALT. If you’re Hungry, Angry, Lonely, or Tired—any of these—you should slow down and watch your step. I happened to be all four, I knew it, and the last thing I felt like doing was facing the B.E.A.S.T. in the air and recognizing the enemy voice in my head so I could start accusing it of fucking malice.

My foot throbbed. I leaned back against the door and propped it on the passenger’s seat. The Arabic woman had done a good job wrapping it up, I had to admit that, but how come I didn’t explain the situation to her when I was back in the house? This is what I was wondering just as a San Mateo County Sheriff’s Department car pulled off the street into the lot, its long radio antenna swaying, Lester Burdon lifting his hand off the steering wheel to wave hello.

He left his engine running and walked over to my window and I swung my leg off the seat and sat up. There were sweat stains under his arms, and his gold star hung away from his shirt. “I’m sorry about the coffee, Kathy, I got a call on a domestic. Did you wait long?”

“Just an hour or two.”

“I am sorry, I—”

“I’m kidding. Forget it, I drove around.” I hoped I didn’t sound as happy as I felt seeing him now. “Still want coffee?”

“Yes.” He had both hands on the door, looking right at me with that dark look again, a wanting, I thought, definitely a wanting. I glanced down at my hands on the steering wheel.

“You mind riding in a patrol car?”

“Only if you’re not busting me.”

He smiled and I parked the Bonneville behind the truck stop between two eighteen-wheelers. I hop-walked to Lester’s cruiser and when I slid in and pulled the door shut he asked about my foot, his face hard and soft at the same time. I told him about waking up this morning on Bisgrove Street, about the carpenters and the piece of roof in my yard. Lester started to shake his head and get that long-eyed look for me I didn’t want, so I told him again how Connie Walsh promised to have me back home by the weekend and now I had someone I could celebrate with. I felt a little too naked putting it that way, and Lester didn’t say anything back, just put his cruiser into gear and pulled out of the truck lot heading west.

I looked at the black radio set into the console, the green and orange scanner lights. There was a shotgun clipped under the dashboard, and I glanced over at Lester behind the wheel. He was shaking his head.

“Does your lawyer know you’re sleeping in your car?”

“She thinks I’m with friends. That’s what she wants to think anyway.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean there’s a limit to how much she wants to help, that’s all; she has her limits.”

He drove onto the Cabrillo Highway and went quiet a minute. “There’s no one you can stay with, Kathy?”

I shrugged, my face heating up. “You don’t meet a lot of people cleaning houses, I guess.”

I felt his eyes on me. I squinted out at the bright ocean. My foot ached and I wanted my sunglasses. We passed a few cars and I watched the drivers hold their heads still, glancing down at their speedometers and keeping their eyes on the road, only looking up once we’d pulled away.

“You ever get used to that?” I said.

“What?”

I nodded out the window at the slowing traffic. “People you don’t know being scared of you.”

“You really think they’re scared?”

“Scared enough to mind their P’s and Q’s.”

Lester turned off Cabrillo into the lot of a hot dog and ice cream shack on the beach. There were picnic tables on both sides of it and in back, and five or six teenage boys and girls sat at one near the order window. Their arms, legs, and faces were tanned or sunburned. When they saw Lester get out of the car they looked away like he was the fourteenth cop they’d seen in the past ten minutes, and I liked being on the other end of that look. I could smell cooked hot dogs, the cigarette smoke of the teenagers, somebody’s tanning lotion. The girl working behind the window told Lester they didn’t have coffee so he said two Cokes would be fine, but then he looked over at me to check and I smiled at him.

In the shadow behind the shack Les carried our drinks while I hopped through the cigarette butts in the sand. We sat at a weathered picnic table, and way ahead of us the Pacific Ocean seemed to be pulling out into low tide, its waves coming in long and small before they finally broke. Out on the water was a blue-gray cloud bank, the kind that usually came in as a fog, and the sky around it was a haze. Lester sat next to me on the bench facing the beach and for a while we just looked out at the water. I drank from my Coke and turned to him enough to take in his profile, his deep-set brown eyes, the small nose and badly trimmed mustache. Again, there was this gentleness to him, this quiet.

“How did you ever end up in that uniform, Lester?”

“Les.” He glanced at me and smiled.

“Les.” I was smiling too, but like a flirt, I thought. Like I wasn’t really interested in the answer to my question.

“I was planning on being a teacher, actually.”

“That’s what you look like. I mean, that’s what you seem like to me.” I wanted to light a cigarette, but didn’t want the taste in my mouth, not right now. “So then how come you’re a boy in blue?”

He shook his head and looked down at the old tabletop, at a plank where someone had carved two breasts with X-shaped nipples. “My wife was pregnant. The academy was cheaper than graduate school, the guaranteed job afterwards. That kind of thing.”

“You like it?”

“Mostly.”

“Mostly?”

He smiled at me, but his eyes had gone soft and he suddenly seemed too tender so I looked straight ahead again, at the cloud bank that had moved closer in just the past few minutes, the haze around it too. The beach sand wasn’t as bright as before, and I caught the smell of seaweed. “Fog’s coming in,” I said. I could feel him still looking at me. I drank from my Coke until the ice slid to my teeth.

“Kathy?”

“Yeah?”

“I’d like to ask you something personal, if I could.”

“All right, get it over with.” I was kidding him again but I couldn’t look at him so kept my eyes on the green water, on the haze it seemed to make.

“Why is your husband not with you any longer?”

I watched a low wave ride all the way into the beach, and just before it broke, I felt I was rooting for it, hoping it wouldn’t. “I wanted kids and he didn’t. I don’t know, I think if he really wanted me, he would have wanted them too, you know?”

Lester put his hand over mine on the table. It was warm and heavy. “He’s a fool.”

I looked down at his hand. “Have you been watching me, Officer Burdon?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

“It is?”

“That you didn’t lie.”

He took a breath. “I haven’t stopped thinking of you since the eviction, Kathy.” I looked at him now. His voice was quiet, but there was something like boldness in his eyes. My right foot ached but our knees were touching. He lowered his eyes, but then, as if he’d made himself do it, he looked back at me, his brown eyes not bold anymore. He reminded me of me. He squeezed my hand and I suddenly felt so close to him that kissing him didn’t even feel like a forward movement. His mustache was prickly and soft against my upper lip and I let my mouth open and I tasted his sweet Coke. I held his back and he held mine and the kiss went on for a long time, it seemed, until we finally took a breath and pulled apart and the fog was floating in close to the beach and it was getting hard to see the water. I looked at him, at his small straight nose, his lower lip beneath his mustache, his shaved chin. When I got to his eyes that were taking me in so completely, my mouth felt funny so I focused on his gold star badge, his name etched on the tag beneath it, and I wanted to run my fingertips over the letters. The temperature had dropped and I had goose pimples on my arms and legs.