“Do you ever look back, Les?”

“All the time.” He smiled. “That’s my problem, Kathy—I’m sentimental about my fuckups.”

“Me too.” I smiled and picked up my glass, felt the cool weight of it in my hand. He touched it with his and I kept my eyes on him as I raised the wine to my lips and tasted what I hadn’t even let myself smell in three years. For a second, I had the thought there was still time to spit it out, but if there was an enemy voice in my head it was the one that would keep this from me, the swallowing, the dry heat spreading out in my chest; it was such a familiar taste and feeling inside me, almost like it’d never left, that I suddenly felt more like my true self than I had in I didn’t know how long.

“So far so good?” Les said.

“Yes.” I sipped once more, then put my glass back down, holding the stem lightly with my fingers. “Tell me more about you, Les.”

Our food came then. Lester topped off our glasses and I knew, according to the rationally recovered, I should be looking at this whole dinner as the B.E.A.S.T., nothing more than a Boozing opportunity with an Enemy voice in my head that I had to now Accuse of malice while my reasoning powers started giving me reminders of my Self-worth leading me to Treasure my sobriety and then successfully abstain. But there was no Enemy Voice in my head, I told myself. If there was, it would already be ordering a second bottle, which I didn’t feel the need for at all. So there was nothing to accuse of malice. And I didn’t feel like accusing anyone of anything anyway, not tonight. I was even feeling all right about the Arab family living in my house, the kind-faced woman who’d wrapped my foot, the people who had agreed to sell back to the county. Between bites and sips, Lester told me about his mother and father divorcing when he was twelve and his brother was nine, how his father, who was a customs officer, used to visit once a week until he got another job in Texas and the two boys only saw him twice a year when they had to go on a fifteen-hour bus trip to do it. He said his mother was a looker with long brown hair and high cheekbones and this quiet way about her that drew men right in. She was a typist at a lumber company and once word got out she was divorced, Lester and his brother were watching men come to the door for her almost every night. I sipped my wine. My face felt warm. I loved watching him as he talked, the way the candlelight showed the dips in his cheeks, made his crooked mustache look as thick as straw, his eyes deep and dark.

“That’s why,” I said.

“What?”

“You had to protect your mother, so now you protect the peace.”

“You think it’s that simple?”

“Nope.” I smiled. “But I wish it was. I wish everything were that simple.” I looked out the window to see where we were and my own candlelit reflection looked back. On the other side was night and all the lights of San Francisco spread out below. I drank the rest of the wine from my glass and I couldn’t remember the last time I felt so free of all the shit that pulled at me like the gravity of two planets. I was feeling some of the wine, but not much. I’d eaten half of my baked potato and chicken. I looked back at Les and I could see he’d been staring at me.

“Let’s go dancing, Lester.”

“What about your foot?”

“Shit, I forgot about that.” I laughed.

WE RODE QUIETLY together. The Bayshore Freeway was lit up with orange streetlights, and Lester drove with his warm hand on mine and I was thinking about Nick, him and me driving west in the new Bonneville, driving all day and night. I took in Lester’s dimly lit profile. “Sometimes I think husbands and wives, maybe they’re just meant to get each other farther down the road, you know? Almost like it doesn’t really matter whether or not they stick around for the final act. Is that a sad way to look at it?”

“Depends on your situation, I suppose.”

“What’s your situation, Les? You haven’t breathed a word about it.”

Lester flicked on his indicator, glanced in the rearview mirror, then steered into the exit lane. I could feel myself sort of go still while I waited for him to speak. He took the off-ramp, pulled his hand from mine to downshift, and kept it there.

“My situation is my wife thinks I’m working overnight patrol till tomorrow morning. I guess that’s pretty presumptuous of me, isn’t it?”

“Is that really your situation?”

Les didn’t answer. We rode by the shopping center, the display windows partially lit, the dark parking lot empty. Les pulled up to my door at the Eureka Motor Lodge, and he turned off the headlights but kept the engine running.

“I married my best friend, Kathy, that’s my situation. We have a son and a daughter, but for seven of the last nine years I haven’t wanted to give her more than a hug or a peck on the cheek.”

The light from the walkway was catching the side of Lester’s face, lighting up only one half of it and making his cheekbone stand out more, his mustache, and I thought I knew what he might look like as an old man; handsome, sad, and quiet.

“Do you still love her?”

“Like a sister. I don’t have one, but I feel like I do.”

“What about her?”

“It’s not the same for her.” He was looking out the windshield at the door to my room. “I understand if you don’t want me to spend the night—and I’m not telling you this to make you feel obligated—but I’m not going home anyway. I do need to think.”

I thought of Nick, the way his face looked the morning he left, like he was sure he was killing me by leaving. Lester almost had that same look now and I started to feel mad about it, but then he turned to me as if I’d just told him what I was thinking and he said if it were only him and Carol, he’d be gone, but it wasn’t; it was his kids, his daughter Bethany, his son Nate. “I’m sorry, Kathy. I don’t mean to dump any of this at your feet.” He got out of the car, opened my door, and helped me out. The engine was still running. I wrapped my arms around his neck and kissed him. “Turn the damn thing off and come inside.”

That night we held each other under the covers, and he asked me question after question about myself, how I’d ended up in that small hillside house in Corona, what my life had been like until then, and I told him about growing up in Saugus with its shitty strip of neon car dealerships, Italian and Chinese restaurants and tanning parlors, shopping malls, my father’s small linen delivery business, how, when I was little, I would ride with him on his Saturday-morning runs delivering aprons and tablecloths to restaurants, drinking too many Shirley Temples along the way until I was giddy and my father smoked Garcia y Vegas while he drove and listened to ball games on the radio and sometimes I’d feel sick but I wouldn’t tell him because he hardly ever spoke to me, and I didn’t want to spoil my chances.

I snuggled in close and pulled my leg up over his. His skin smelled good, like the ground somehow. I didn’t talk about my first husband or Nick, and I didn’t mention rehab again, or that it was my brother Frank who’d found me in my apartment, the white snake wriggled so deep inside me I was classified a suicide risk as soon as Frank and Jeannie admitted me. I didn’t mention any of this, and Les seemed content for now to hear of me only as a young girl, though he got quiet after that, and I wasn’t sure if it was because of the girl I’d told him about, or maybe his own daughter at home. I fell asleep with my cheek on his chest, and sometime during the night we woke up making love.

THE NEXT DAY, Thursday, he went home to his family and I spent the morning doing my laundry at the shopping-center Laundromat. I was still hopping on my good foot, but the other was feeling better, and after a lunch of cold Szechuan food in my room I soaked both feet in the bath. By the middle of the afternoon, I worked up the courage to call Connie Walsh’s office. Gary said again she was out but that they were making progress on the house. His voice sounded different to me, not as businesslike.