“Fred,” I called, “come look at this E-mail from Haley. It’s wonderful.”

He came in, buttoning his shirt. I moved out of the chair so he could sit in front of the computer, but I leaned over him while he read.

“Can you believe that?” I asked when I thought he had had time to get the gist of the message.

He scrolled down. “She sounds excited.”

“Of course she’s excited, Fred. They’re going to be blessed by the pope. Isn’t that wonderful?”

“But Haley’s a Protestant, and Philip’s Jewish.”

“Damn it, Fred. It’s the pope.” I reached down and unplugged the computer. “Go to work.”

“Why? What’s the matter, honey?”

“You,” I said, pointing, “are as blank as that computer screen. Just go to work.”

“What’s wrong with you, Patricia Anne?”

But he was talking to my back. I went into the bedroom and shut the door. Hard. How had the two of us, as different as we were, managed to live together in relative peace for over forty years?

“Because you adore each other,” Mitzi Phizer said a half-hour later when I posed the question to her. She had seen me going through the gate with Woofer and called for me to wait, that she wanted to walk with us. “He’s your anchor, and you’re his imagination.”

“But the pope, Mitzi! Can you imagine anybody not being excited about meeting the pope?”

Mitzi laughed. And then like Sophia on The Golden Girls, said, “Picture this. The Vatican, 2001. Two old ladies from Alabama stand in the crowd for hours. The door to a balcony opens. A figure dressed in white, the pope, steps out, waves to the crowd. The women feel faint; they are blessed, ecstatic. They float back to their hotel, where their husbands say, yes, they just watched it on TV. The pope must have cut himself shaving. He had a Band-Aid on his chin.”

I giggled. “That’s exactly what Fred and Arthur would do, isn’t it?”

“Absolutely. And then they would take us somewhere great for lunch.”

“So we’d come out ahead any way you look at it.”

“The way I look at it, we would.”

We stopped for Woofer to mark a telephone pole.

“How’s Luke?” Mitzi asked. “Did you have any trouble getting him home yesterday?”

“No. He was still pretty weak last night, though. We’re supposed to go up to Steele today to look in Holden Crawford’s house to see if we can find any clues as to Virginia’s whereabouts.”

“Any recent developments?”

It was amazing how much had happened that I hadn’t told Mitzi. Four blocks worth of talking. And that didn’t include the cameo.

As we stopped in front of her driveway, Mitzi shook her head.