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By Root 6772 0

actual groceries—peanut butter, bananas, bread. Later on, he drove into Hoboken to leave his Strat with his guitar man there and yielded to an impulse to dine at Maxwell’s and catch whatever act was playing. The staff at Maxwell’s treated him like a General MacArthur returning from Korea in defiant disgrace. Chicks kept leaning over him with their tits falling out of their little tops, some guy he didn’t know or had once known but long since forgotten kept him supplied with beer, and the local band that was playing, Tutsi Picnic, did not repel him. On the whole, he felt that his decision not to dive from the bridge in Washington had been a good one. Being free of the Berglunds was proving to be a milder and not at all unpleasant sort of death, a death without sting, a state of merely partial nonexistence in which he was able to go back to the apartment of a fortyish book editor (“huge, huge fan”) who’d cozied up to him while Tutsi Picnic played, wet his dick in her a few times, and then, in the morning, buy himself some crullers on his way back down Washington Street to move his truck before parking-meter hours commenced.

There was a message from Tim on his home phone and none from the Berglunds. He rewarded himself by playing guitar for four hours. The day was gloriously hot and loud with street life awakening from a long winter’s dormancy. His left fingertips, bare of calluses, were near the point of bleeding, but the underlying nerves, killed several decades earlier, were still helpfully dead. He drank a beer and went around the corner to his favorite gyro place, intending to have a snack and play some more. When he returned to his building, carrying meat, he found Patty sitting on the front steps.

She was wearing a linen skirt and a sleeveless blue blouse with sweat circles reaching nearly to her waist. Beside her was a large suitcase and a small pile of outer garments.

“Well, well, well,” he said.

“I’ve been evicted,” she said with a sad, meek smile. “Thanks to you.”

His dick, if no other part of him, was pleased with this ratification of its divining powers.

BAD NEWS

Jonathan and Jenna’s mother, Tamara, had hurt herself in Aspen. Trying to avoid collision with a hotdogging teenager, she’d crossed her skis and snapped two bones in her left leg, above the boot, and thereby disqualified herself from joining Jenna on Jenna’s January trip to ride horses in Patagonia. To Jenna, who’d witnessed Tamara’s wipeout and pursued the teenager and reported him while Jonathan attended to their fallen mother, the accident was just the latest entry in a long list of things going wrong in her life since her graduation from Duke the previous spring; but to Joey, who’d been talking to Jenna twice or thrice daily in recent weeks, the accident was a much-needed little gift from the gods—the breakthrough he’d been waiting two-plus years for. Jenna, after graduating, had moved to Manhattan to work for a famous party planner and try living with her almost-fiancé, Nick, but in September she’d rented her own apartment, and in November, yielding to relentless overt pressure from her family and to more subtle underminings from Joey, who’d made himself her Designated Understander, she declared her relationship with Nick null and void and unrevivable. By that point, she was taking a highish dose of Lexapro and had nothing in her life to look forward to except riding horses in Patagonia, which Nick had repeatedly promised to do with her and repeatedly postponed, citing his heavy work load at Goldman Sachs. It happened that Joey had ridden a horse or two, albeit clumsily, during his high-school summer in Montana. From the high volume of Jenna’s calls and texts to his cell phone, he already suspected that he’d been promoted to the status of transitional object, if not to potential full-on boyfriend, and his last doubts were dispelled when she invited him to share the luxurious Argentinean resort room that Tamara had booked before the accident. Since it further happened that Joey had business in nearby Paraguay and knew that he would probably