He looked at me with worried eyes while teetering backward and to his left, moving toward a late-model Cadillac. In the few seconds it took Montana to sashay up to me, the businessman was in his car.

“What did you say to him?” I asked the bar girl.

The Cadillac engine roared to life.

“That you were my boyfriend.” She took my left hand and swung it from side to side like a country girl might after a barn dance. “You here to collect on that forty dollars?”

The Caddy and its businessman were gone. The lot seemed preternaturally quiet, the last spasms of love spent.

“Donata Delphine,” I said.

“You give her forty dollars?”

“I haven’t met her yet.”

“Yet?”

“There’s a few questions of mine that she might could answer.”

“What kinda questions?” She was still holding my hand gently. I liked that.

“Montana,” I said as a request.

“You remember my name at least.”

“I need to know about Delphine. I’ll gladly give you four more twenties if you can point me in the right direction.”

“Is that what you thinka me? Like I’m just some whore that wants to get paid?”

Two of the cars in the lot started almost simultaneously. As the automobiles pulled away two young women walked past us. They didn’t speak because they could see that we were still in the negotiation phase of our relationship.

Montana was staring into my eyes, searching for the answer to her question.

“What do you want from me?” I asked.

She considered a moment and then said, “I want you to give me somethin’. Something special.”

I frowned, trying to decipher this request.

“And not money and not no kiss or nuthin’,” she said. “Somethin’ that’s gonna mean somethin’ to both me and you.”

From my shirt pocket I took a WRENS-L business card and a cartridge pen. I wrote a number on the back of the card, then waved the stiff paper around until the blue-black ink dried. I gave this handwritten promise to her.

“What’s this?”

“Two things,” I said. “First, it’s my business. You call the number on the front and you can get to me almost any day. That’s during business hours. If I’m not there someone’ll take the message and I’ll get back to you quickly.”

Montana was about to say something snide but she stopped when I held up a daunting forefinger.

“On the back of the card is another number. That’s my private answering service. You can reach me at that number twenty-four hours a day. If it’s an emergency just say so and they will call me direct. Leave a message as long as your arm. They will write down every word.”

I think it was the message length that got to Montana. She wanted a connection that she could rely on and that was it.

“What if I called you right now?”