A head appeared above the trapdoor, a halo of hair shining darkly as if it were the focus of a full moon, and beneath it the face of a suntanned divinity. She anchored a long, slim leg on the floorboards and her skirt slithered upward, revealing a flash of silky brown thigh that slammed into my ventricles like a shot of digitalis. She favored me with a smile, polite and listless, as if we had last met an hour ago at the supermarket.

“Hi,” I said eloquently, my voice a husk of its former self, my mouth tasting thickly of glue. Did I speak loudly enough? Too loudly? Both?

“Hi,” she answered in perfect pitch.

“Nice to see you.”

“Yeah,” she said remotely, going to a bookcase.

“Perhaps you don’t remember me. I’m…”

“I know,” she said, and I was elated. She remembered me.

“When’d you get back?”

“An hour ago. I don’t know. Two or three.”

“Have a good time?”

“Yeah. It was a ball.”

A ball, was it? I hate that word. Visions of my love throbbing in Derek’s embrace was like a rain of blows from a bludgeon.

“Not really,” she went on, and I was delighted. Maybe, I thought with the desperation born of hope, everything went wrong—holidays are like that. Derek was a bore, he ran after other women, he was stoned, pissed, reeling from the day they left, impotent upon arrival.

“Derek had this bad cold,” she explained. Great. Colds can lead to influenza, gallop to pneumonia, scar a man for life. Or better yet, his brave young heart gives out, finds peace at last in an unmarked grave in an unplowed field along the road to Disney World.

“But he’s okay now?” I asked, hoping for the worst.

“Yeah,” she said, squinting through the darkness at the books. “For sure.”

For some reason her words jarred me back into reality, more or less. To ignore her relationship with Derek was unproductive.

I would simply have to take her away from him. How I didn’t know, but he was despite his seniority such a redundant asswipe, six feet of a fool, I felt I might have a shot at it.

Across the dark attic, she stood balanced on the bale of Cockeysville Clarions, playing a small flashlight along the volumes on an upper shelf, rising on the toes of one leg like a light-loined ornament, waving the other in the increasingly warm air.

“Hmmmmmm…” She frowned as she scanned the titles. She pulled a wide book from the shelf. “You think this thing’s worth anything?”

“What is it?”

“Who’s Who in America.”

“What do you mean? Worth reading?”

“Worth money. My father never gives me a fucking dime. All he ever gave me was a collection of whatchucallem, you know, that read the same backward or forward…?”

“Palindromes?”