Blue Moon Café. All neon by night is exciting to Juliana, but blue neon most.

The earliest neon in Juliana’s life. When she’d been a young girl.

That café, too: Blue Moon.

Ridiculous, of course. Juliana isn’t a sentimental person, Juliana knows better.

Really, she hasn’t time to stop for a drink. She has the (secret) ice pick with her of course, but she no longer has any wish to use it.

Her old life, her life then—she has finished that life.

She is with Patrick now. She is pregnant now.

Still, since moving into their new home a few blocks away, Juliana has been curious about the Blue Moon Café. You wonder if a place like this is an authentic bar, an old neighborhood tavern refurbished, or if it’s a shallow, improvised place selling endive salads, sautéed tofu, kale smoothies, sparkling water, a few wines and novelty beers, no hard liquor.

If the atmosphere inside is high-polished hardwood floor or old scuffed tile, linoleum. If there’s dim lighting, but not candlelight. Bright or shadowy, just enough neon, not overbright.

In a proper bar there’s a balance between bright and overbright.

There’s another bar, or tavern, on the Delaware River, a mile or so away, that has intrigued Juliana, but (of course) she has never investigated it. To do so would mean going miles out of her way.

The Blue Moon Café is on her way. Driving home on Front Street.

Juliana recalls having heard, something had happened to a woman in that other tavern recently. Nineteen years old, disappeared.

Not the Blue Moon Café, however.

In the street, Juliana has paused, car engine idling. The interior of the café appears to be dim, smoky. Yes there is a bar, just visible. Working-class place, neighborhood tavern, unlike the Blue Moon Café in her hometown, which was located in a strip mall on a state highway at the edge of town. And smaller than that café and not crowded, though (she’s thinking) it’s a weekday evening, still early. By eleven p.m. the air will be dense in the Blue Moon, thrilling.

By eleven p.m. she will be asleep. Her days begin early, before dawn in this season. Her work is erratically scheduled, unlike Patrick’s; he is a full-time attorney in a suburban firm across the river, Juliana works part-time at the State of New Jersey Legal Aid office.

Both Patrick and Juliana have law degrees from the same law school: Rutgers-Newark.

He has the full-time job, a strong promise of permanent employment. Juliana has something lesser, but she has no complaints.

Parking on Front Street would be difficult in any case, vehicles on both sides of the narrow street, no parking lot (that she can see) beside or behind the Blue Moon Café.

Driving on. She isn’t tempted. Buoyed by happiness, like one borne along by a swift current, unable to register where she is and who she is and why—as when she wakes from troubled dreams to take solace in the knowledge that she is finally with a man, a companion, who adores her without needing to know her.