Even worse: she is still talking to me as if I’m a difficult maitre d’ and every smile she gives me is efficient and careful, the kind of smile you give to someone you have just met and on whom you are trying to make the right impression.

Or from whom you are trying to hide.

Is it wrong of me to feel an exultant, stomach-clearing relief when she tells me about her father?

He was in an accident, Charlie says. On the Pacific Coast Highway near Hurricane Point. It wasn’t that bad, and he’s basically O.K., but he lost a finger and the backseat contained a certain number of empty beer cans and, she says, boxes and boxes of balloons. Hundreds, thousands of balloons; he had been drinking and driving and inflating. His finger, she says. She finds this hard to articulate; she gasps it out. To me, though, it sounds like no big deal to lose one digit in a highway-speed smashup—to me it sounds like an opportunity to thank lucky stars—and I have to work fast to alter my relieved-face into one of sympathetic worry.

“No one else was hurt,” she says. “But he’s been put into some kind of therapeutic seclusion at a psychiatric hospital out there. I’ve gotten all this information from the police and from his intake person at the hospital, Miss Sharon, and Miss Sharon won’t let me see him or talk to him or anything. It’s been like this since Thursday, and it’s just been making me crazy.”

Thursday, I think. The day after I lost the K’plua. Ever since then I’ve been so wrapped up in my own problems I didn’t stop to think that Charlie might have had some of her own.

“His fin-ger,” she says again, stricken, her tongue snagging on the syllables.

Mentally I tally Charlie’s recent events: unkind Rat Burglar argument; hostile hard-on and smack in the face underscoring death threats against RB; theft of thesis by underhanded academic; unapologetic send-off into the night, braless; father’s accident and loss of digit. All in all, not a propitious set of circumstances under which to propose, but if I don’t do it now I don’t know if I’ll ever have the guts again. Besides, in a way that I hope is not sicko, seeing Charlie all kaleidoscoped with sadness like this makes me love her even more. It makes me want to protect her.

That’s part of the job description of a personal pulse, isn’t it?

With both arms I reach out, lasso Charlie, and pull her to me, her face slicking my neck with saltwater, her hair hot and fragrant as a rain-soaked garden. But it is an unsuccessful embrace. I have been demoted somehow—to some degree my access has been denied—and the embrace is out of proportion with the current level of intimacy. It has the unhappy feeling of door-to-door salesmanship, the uncertain plummet of solicitation, and Charlie shrinks minutely from it as if the victim of an overhug by someone she has just met. Or someone she does not trust.