"Sure!" Kate said, and followed him to the floor, trying not to run.

Jim sat down and put the second plate to one side. "I'll just keep this for Kate," he said to Ethan, and began to eat under Ethan's baleful glare. "You should eat, Ethan. There's some great stuff on the table."

"Stay away from her," Ethan said.

Well now, Jim thought. It seemed that Ethan didn't know that Jim had recently been where no Ethan had gone before. He wondered why Dandy Mike was holding his fire. Probably hoping that it would get him a job. "That's her choice," he said.

"Stay away from her, goddamn it."

Jim smiled at him again, and it was about as friendly an expression as it had been before. "You're still married, aren't you, Ethan?" He watched with interest as Ethan's fair skin flushed right up to the roots of his hair. "You thinking you can have your cake and eat it, too? If so, you don't know your women." He took a ruminative bite of macaroni and cheese casserole, then added in a voice as patronizing and as patriarchal as he could make it, "But then, I never thought you did."

For a moment, he hoped he might have gone too far, but no. Ethan regrouped and gave him a contemptuous look. "Big talk from the man with the badge."

Oh. Right. He was in uniform. "Happy to take it off for the duration, Ethan," he said softly. "Just for you."

"Fuck you," Ethan said after a simmering moment, and stalked away.

"He doesn't appear to like you," said Pete Heiman, who was sitting next to Jim with Bernie's new barmaid, whose big blue eyes were even bigger and bluer than usual.

"He sure doesn't," she said. Her voice was light and breathy, perhaps consciously so, and her gaze was languishing. Jim looked at her and, as an experiment, tried to exercise the inner muscle that always used to come into play when he was faced with a pretty woman. Nothing. He was appreciative but not covetous. Interesting. But not as alarming as it had been.

He returned to his plate, his appetite good.

Meanwhile, out on the dance floor, Bobby Clark had joined Kate and Johnny. As his wheelchair rolled back and forth to the beat, Dinah danced around all three of them with Katya, who was in a backpack, waving a rattle. Mandy and Chick were down the circle a bit, Mac Devlin was doing his usual lumbering grizzly bear impression, and Bernie and Edith were jitterbugging, which was an interesting, though obviously not impossible, exercise to the beat of Native drums.

The drums beat once, twice, three times, each time harder and louder than the time before, and a cheer went up from the gymnasium floor when the last one struck. Kate handed Johnny over to Auntie Vi, from whom he would learn the smoothest moves, and went to the microphone set up at one side of the stage. "Hello the Park," she said.