“You reading my mind again?”

I shrugged. “Trying to.”

“It did scare me when I thought about it afterward. Why I didn’t think about Robin telling you—which she can never resist. Why I spaced out on the whole thing.” Glenna took off her black pumps. “This morning, on the bus, somebody was playing the guitar and singing ‘In My Life.’ I’ve heard that song a hundred times. But today—today, it’s like I finally got it—how pale my past seems when I think about us now. I don’t know. Maybe I invited Rick to remind myself that I had a life before my memory’s completely filled with you. Maybe it was to push you away, but not too far, because one thing I’m sure about is how much I want you to be mine and how much I want to be yours. Okay?”

“Better than okay.”

She kissed me. “Did you hear about the vote?”

“It was on the radio. Tough break.”

“There’s worse news,” she said. “Was the bust in Riverdale on the radio?”

“The raid on the abortion clinic in the apartment?”

“A luxury apartment on Arlington Avenue for God’s sake. The doctor doing it was Andy Westrich, a friend from P and S. Andy phoned Palmer from jail. His bail’s five thousand dollars, and Palmer’s paying it.”

“What happened to Andy’s dough? The radio said he was operating on two dozen women a day at four hundred dollars apiece.”

“Andy’s not what you’d call a master criminal. Palmer said he had forty-seven thousand dollars in a savings account, but the cops searched the apartment and impounded his bank book as evidence.”

I’d been stroking her calf as we talked, and Glenna exhumed her burlap shoulder bag from under a pile of her clothes.

“I got you a present,” she said, removing a three-pack of Trojans from her bag. “Gordo, I’m going to switch to a lower-dosage pill. My tits are sore. I think the estrogen and progesterone are too high. Till I do, you have to wear one of these.”

“You know how to put one on?”

“I’m going to be a doctor, aren’t I?”

“They teach that in med school?”

“You’re expected to learn it along the way,” she replied, dipping her hand back into her bag. “And I got you another present. At a shop in Albany.”

She took out a Picasso drawing in a silver frame—a nude, just the lovely curve of her right hip and her rounded buttocks. I’d seen the drawing before, but it was still astonishing that such an erotic image could be created with four simple lines. I looked up to thank Glenna, but she was already over at the rubber tree, taking her reflex hammer out of her lab jacket. She came back, handed me the hammer, then held a nail for me to tap into the wall.

“There,” she said, straightening the frame on the nail and standing back.

“She looks familiar. Do I know her?”

“Very funny. Now all she needs is a name.”