She said, “Your partner, she didn’t seem all that pleased, either.”

“She wasn’t. It was all up to her, we’d have made the phone call and gone home by now.”

She nodded and took another sip of the beer. She shook her head slightly. “Simone,” she said, “sometimes I don’t understand that girl.”

“What’s to understand?” I said.

“All that hate,” she said. “You know?”

“There’s a lot to hate out there,” I said.

“I know,” she said. “Believe me, I know. Seems there’s so much, you got to kind of pick and choose. Earn what you hate, I guess. Simone, now, she just hate everything. And sometimes...”

“What?”

“Sometimes, I think she hate cause she don’t know what else to do with herself. I mean, me, I got good reason to hate what I hate, believe me. But her, I’m not so sure she’s...”

“Earned it?”

She nodded. “Exactly.”

I thought about that. I couldn’t see much to argue with. I’ve learned more about the capacity to hate than anything else since I started doing this work.

She drank some more beer. “Seems to me, the world going to give you plenty to be angry about, either way. Getting a chip on your shoulder before you’ve even seen how bad it can be, what the world can do to you when it really sets its mind to it... seems to me, that’s just foolish thinking.”

“Damn straight,” I said and held up my can. She smiled, a small one, and glanced her can off mine, and I realized what part of me had known since I’d first seen her photograph: I liked her.

She finished her beer a minute or so later and went to bed with a small wave behind her as she entered the bedroom.

The night passed slowly and I shifted in my seat a lot, paced a bit back and forth, stared at my car. Angie was home now, taking another few steps in that grotesque dance of pain she called a marriage. A harsh word, a slap or two, a few screamed accusations, and on to bed until the next day. Love. I wondered again why she was with him, what possessed a person of her quality and judgment to put up with such shit, but before I slipped completely into the realms of the self-righteous, my palm rested on my abdomen, on the patch of scar tissue, which always reminded me of the price of love in its least idealized form.

Thank you, father.

Sitting in the quiet of the dark living room, I also remembered my own marriage, which had lasted about a minute and a half. Angie and Phil at least had a sense of dedication to the love between them, however twisted that love might be, which Renee and I never had. The only thing our marriage had taught me about love was that it ends. And looking out at the empty street from Simone Angeline’s window seat, it occurred to me that one of the reasons I’m successful at the work I do is that come three o’clock in the morning, when most of the world is asleep, I’m still up doing my job because I don’t have any place better to be