Lyle Dimmick was a permanently sunburned housepainter who’d come here from Odessa, Texas, because of a woman. He’d found her, lost her, got her back, and lost her again when she ran back to Odessa with some guy she met in a neighborhood pub, an Irish pipefitter who decided he’d always been a cowpoke at heart.

Ed Donnegan owned almost every three-decker on my block, save for my own, and every ten years, he got around to painting them, and every time he did, he hired a single painter for as long as it took to paint them all, rain, snow or shine.

Lyle wore a ten-gallon hat and a red handkerchief around his neck and black wrap-around Gargoyle sunglasses that took up half of his small, pinched face. Those sunglasses, he said, seemed like something a city boy would wear, and they were his only concession to living in a god-awful world of Yankees who had no appreciation for God’s three great gifts to mankind—Jack Daniel’s, the horse, and, of course, Waylon.

I stuck my head in between the shade and the screen and saw that his back was to me as he painted the house next door. The music was so loud he’d never hear me, so I pulled down the window instead, then stumbled up and pulled down all the others in the bedroom, and reduced Waylon to just another tinny voice ringing in my head. Then I crawled back into bed and closed my eyes and prayed for quiet.

Which meant nothing to Angie.

She woke me shortly after ten by bouncing around the apartment making coffee, opening windows to another fresh autumn day, and rattling through my refrigerator, as Waylon or Merle or Hank Jr. poured back through my screens.

When that didn’t rouse me from bed, she opened the bedroom door and said, “Get up.”

“Go away.” I pulled the covers over my head.

“Get up, ya baby. I’m bored. Now.”

I threw a pillow at her and she ducked and it arced over her head and shattered something in the kitchen.

She said, “You weren’t fond of those dishes, I hope.”

I stood and wrapped the sheet around my waist to cover my glow-in-the-dark Marvin the Martian boxer shorts and stumbled out into the kitchen.

Angie stood in the middle of the room, coffee cup held in both hands, a few broken plates on the floor and sink.

“Coffee?” she said.

I found a broom, began sweeping up the mess. Angie put her cup on the table, bent by me with a dustpan.

I said, “You’re still a bit unclear on this sleep concept, aren’t you?”

“Overrated.” She scooped up some glass and dumped it in the wastebasket.

“How would you know? You’ve never tried it.”

“Patrick,” she said, dumping another load of glass, “it’s not my fault you stayed out until the wee hours drinking with your little friends.”

My little friends.

“How do you know I was out drinking with anybody?”