“Not to be critical,” I told her, “but if we’d gone to the gate we came in by, we’d have missed the crowds.”

There was a pause before she said, “I was hoping we might find Mick.”

“The place is a warren. We could pass him a dozen times in the next ten minutes and never know it.”

“Ah, but he would,” said Frances harshly. There was a fierce, fruitless rev from the throttle. “Have you noticed many of these here tonight?”

“What if he’s gotten into trouble?”

“In other words, what if he hasn’t come to us because he can’t?” She turned the trike into the mouth of an alley and, to my surprise, killed the engine. Her shoulders rose and fell with her breathing. Finally she said, “We do all want to survive. I’ve been doing it for a long time, in difficult circumstances, and I’ve done it by suspecting everyone unfailingly. I’m afraid it’s a habit now.”

Her habits didn’t account for why we’d stopped here. “Does that mean that you don’t think Mick Skinner is in league with the devil?”

She twisted to look at me. Her eyes didn’t look focused. “Of course I do. I told you, it’s a habit.” She turned away again.

After a moment I said, “If you’ll open the shell, I’ll get some food. The stall’s right there; I’ll be in sight the whole time.”

She didn’t answer, but she groped for and pulled the lever that popped the shell. I scrambled out past her as best I could.

The smell and sound and sight of chicken frying was a swooning sensual overload; I wondered, for an instant, if that was how a caress seemed to most people. I was suddenly vague and giddy with hunger. I had always worked that way: not needing to eat all day, until I needed it desperately, like an engine that runs smoothly through a tank of alcohol and stops without warning when it’s gone. What string of adjectives had Frances hung on me, earlier? Strong, resistant to disease and poisons… She could have added cheap to operate, and rarely needs refueling. I bought chicken (“Picante,” the old woman warned, her hands fluttering, her accent terrible, “picante”) and fried potatoes and okra and buttermilk biscuits and two long bottles of homemade pear nectar. I tucked the bottles under my arm and juggled the hot paper-wrapped parcels back to the trike.

Frances sat where I’d left her, but her wrists were crossed over the instrument panel, and her forehead was pillowed on them. Her hair had fallen forward to sweep and scatter across her near forearm. Relaxed, that arm looked surprisingly thin, and the pointed bones in her elbow seemed frail and vulnerable. Out of character.

Sometimes wisdom arrives first in the pit of your stomach. That was where I felt it then, a little slippery twist. Of course it was out of character. That wasn’t Frances’s arm.

I already knew that this body didn’t belong to Frances; but now I really knew it, all the many-sided shape of it. There was no relation here between the shell and the spirit, no way to judge from outside, except by the crude language of action and expression, what the person inside was. The body I was looking at was the life story, in fading ink, of a person I’d never met.