“I’ll know where to reach you.” I pocketed his card, got to my feet, a bit unsteadily after all those olives. “But I don’t think so,” I said.

TWENTY
GOOD-BYE AGAIN

She lived in a small crooked house of mud-chinked timbers, set in a sea of melted snow.

She introduced me to her grandmother, whose faded eyes and uncompromisingly tight lips were breached by a piddling mustache that seemed to grow out of her nose. The old lady shifted her raddled raw bones under the prim Mother Hubbard and looked at me as if seeking grounds for a lawsuit; she didn’t even say howdy. Nor did she offer the usual amenities of parting as her granddaughter and I (with uncivil celerity, I must admit) hied out of that stunted house.

The yellow eye of a flashlight led me through the sentinel trees, across the stubbled fields to a hulking barn. Together we shouldered open the wide door and she with a chatelaine gesture bade me enter.

Horses pranced and snorted in a row of stalls that smelled bittersweetly of hay and horseshit. On the far end, beyond the skittish beasts, was the tack room, only one corner of which housed stable gear. The rest held the genteel imprimatur of Dawnette’s other self.

Along one wall was a spavined divan and a lamp with a beaded shade connected by a snaky wire to the only electrical outlet, across the room and far away, above the tack bench.

“Cozy,” I said.

“Yeah,” she agreed. “Now, you interested in a little uppin’ and downin’…?”

“What?” If I understood her correctly, the invitation called for some small, oblique preamble. Which was not Dawnette’s way.

“…innin’ and outin’?” she went on. “What do you say?”