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We all stared at her.

“Yeah?” Ruby squinted. “What about my cats?”

“Take them,” Jane said.

“Yeah?” Ruby seemed to be warming to the idea.

She looked at me. I shrugged.

“Okay, Sal,” she said, “we’ll do it. Put your money away though. We’re fine.”

Sal grudgingly put his wallet back in his pocket. He contemplated us for a few moments longer then grunted his good-byes and walked heavily down the stairs.

“I think he’s got a problem with his wife,” I told Ruby after we heard the door close behind him.

“Yeah,” she sighed and tilted her head, “he usually does. He’s desperately in love with her. He’s always telling me he never should have married someone he was that much in love with. Which is ridiculous.”

Ruby frowned now, clearly miffed with this notion. I tended to side with Sal on the matter though I didn’t volunteer this opinion. I’d been desperately in love with Ava and it had led to fifteen years of torture. I was crazy for Ruby now, but it was different. A little saner. Thinking about her didn’t make my heart stammer with doubt.

Jane announced it was time for her to head back to Manhattan. She rose from her stool, stretched her arms out, then unceremoniously bent at the waist, put her palms on the floor next to her feet and wiggled her butt.

“Stop that!” Ruby exclaimed. Jane ignored her.

“She’s always stretching in public,” Ruby said, turning to me. “It’s embarrassing and disgusting.”

I didn’t think it was either of these things, but I was a little surprised when, continuing the display, Jane suddenly propped her foot against the wall, at the same height as her head, then leaned forward, draping her torso along the extended leg. Ruby protested a bit more and finally Jane, her muscular kinks evidently dispensed with, began putting on her many layers of sweaters, coats, and scarves. She wrapped the final scarf, a brown thing with pink polka dots, around her head, draping it under her chin. She looked like a demented Russian farm girl.

After extracting a promise that Ruby and I would in fact go stay in a motel, Jane bid us farewell and descended the creaky stairs. At last, I was alone with my girl.

I folded her into my arms, nestling my face into her dark hair that smelled of cigarette smoke and salt.

“Wanna go to a motel, baby?” I said into her ear.

“Yes,” she said in a soft voice.

“What about that place in Sheepshead Bay? You know, that weird little motel we passed by the other night?”

I felt her body stiffen.

“No,” she said, pulling away from me

“Why, it’s a dive?”

“No,” she said again.

“What’s the matter?” I looked down into her gray eyes. They’d turned black. Something I’d said had touched a nerve.

“What is it?” I asked, worried now.

“Nothing, just some history I have with that place. I don’t want to go there.”

“What do you mean, history? What, you stayed there with some other guy?” I was joking but she winced and I saw it was true.

“Oh,” I said, feeling like a balloon someone had stabbed a fork into.

“We’ll go somewhere else,” I said quickly. “Don’t worry.”

She still seemed frozen though and I hated it. Hated that she had memories of another man. Memories that still meant too much to be spoken of. She’d mentioned an FBI guy she’d met when she’d saved that racehorse nine months earlier. She’d told me she’d had something going with the guy but she never mentioned how it ended or why. I’d tried to turn a blind eye to the whole thing. After all, I was technically still married and my unbalanced wife was calling me fifteen times a day. But the way Ruby had winced indicated that there was still a live wire there someplace. Hopefully I could diffuse it soon.

I scooped her back into my arms and held her until I felt the stiffness leave her body.

RUBY MURPHY

11.

Counting Horses

Someday I may actually have to break down and learn how to drive. It’s getting frustrating to have to take car services every time I need to get somewhere beyond biking distance. It’s just that cars seem like bad magic to me. I don’t entirely understand how they