"I'll fuck you under the table any day a the week." Frank laughed.

"You believe this old cocker?" Butler said to Stony.

Frank faked a punch. Butler ducked. "Bobby, I'm goin' home." He came behind the counter, flipped open a long rectangular covering over the keys on the cash register where the total receipts were registered. "Eighty-one fifty?" he squawked. "Whatta you doin' in here?"

Butler shrugged. "It's a slow day, Frank."

"Yesterday you had over two hundred!"

"So that was yesterday! You wamme to pull 'em in off the streets?"

Frank glared at his nephew, faked another punch. "I'll kill 'em someday. I'll kill 'em." He walked out from behind the counter. "I'll see you tomorrow, lock up nice." He left the store.

"Lock up nice, what the fuck does that mean?" Butler laughed to Stony. "He's on his way out, Stones, he doesn't have that many good years left. About two weeks I'd say offhand."

"I dig him." Stony chuckled.

"Yeah, he's O.K." Butler tilted his head back and massaged his throat with his fingertips. "So anyways, Annette's the one now, hey?"

Stony shrugged. "She ain't gonna be my main squeeze, if that's what you mean."

"Where's Cheri in your head?"

"Cheri who?"

"Three-Finger Annette," Butler announced, "da woman dat makes you fo'git da other woman."

"Hey, Butler." Stony winced. "Don't call her Three-Finger no more, O.K.?"

***

At the age of ten, Annette Palladino had developed full woman's breasts that, coupled with the fact that she started smoking cigarettes at eleven, sealed her fate at Saint Anne's School for Girls as a hoowah in the eyes of students and nuns alike. Other girls smoked too, but they didn't have tits as big as Annette's. When she lost two fingers to a paper-sorting machine on a class trip to a newspaper plant, the sisters smugly attributed it to God's evening the score. Also at eleven, the powers that be advertised Annette's calling by putting scarlet letters all over her face, in the form of severe acne. She had no friends among her classmates—the contempt was mutual. She ran with an older crowd, girls among whom she didn't stick out, so to speak. The only problem was that her body was about five years ahead of her mind and the track she ran on was a little too fast for a twelve-year-old. At fifteen she got knocked up by a twenty-year-old ex-con smack freak who told her she couldn't get pregnant if they did it standing up. Her mother sent her to a Catholic retreat for wayward girls to have the baby. It was a boy. She couldn't see it, name it or touch it. He was given away immediately to a couple in Florida with six kids. Their identities and address were verboten information. She returned home and stayed in her curtain-drawn room for eight months, eating canned ravioli, watching TV and lying in bed. When she finally emerged, she had gained sixty pounds—her complexion had gone from ruddy to death white and she had developed severe astigmatism. She hitched to Haight and Ash-bury streets, was informed she missed the party by about five years, got locked up on vagrancy and conspiracy to commit prostitution charges and celebrated her sweet sixteen in a detaining cell in a women's prison in Oakland. The court released her on the stipulation that she be sent home to her father in the Bronx. Her father shipped her off to a convent in the Hudson Valley to become a nun. She ran away from the convent after three days, fell in love with a bartender in Rhinebeck, New York, and lived with him in a farmhouse for a year. During that year, her skin cleared up, she lost seventy pounds, went back to school, got a high school diploma, discovered she had a mind and worked part-time with kids in a day-care center. But a year away from the city was about all she could take, so at seventeen she split from her boyfriend and returned to the Bronx, supporting herself by cocktail waitressing and every so often turning a few tricks. Even though she was the same age as Stony and his friends, she felt miles and years ahead of them and naturally gravitated to the bar owners, bartenders and older bouncers in the clubs where everybody hung out. She developed a crush on Stony because he reminded her of a younger version of Fred, her ex-boyfriend bartender, in Rhinebeck. The only problem was that Stony and his crowd related to her in a way reminiscent of the eleven-year-olds at Saint Anne's.