Tommy Eggers slammed out the door then, heading somewhere fast with a transistor radio in one hand and a can of soda in the other, and they both paused to watch him hurtle off the porch and jog on down the drive past the sauntering sax player and his companion. Almost in sync, they both took a long swallow of beer, everything raw and exposed on the cusp of that admission.

“Speaking of lost, Lori’s still up in that tree. I don’t know what she’s on this morning, maybe nothing, and maybe it’s only the aftereffects of last night, but as Charlie would say, ‘She is out there.’”

As soon as she’d started in on the monkey routine at breakfast, she saw how much it embarrassed him in front of the others and just kept it up and kept it up, scratching under her arms and shuffling through the dining room and out the front door, chittering urk, urk, urk just to irritate him, until suddenly she broke away, bolted for the nearest of the maples lining the drive and hoisted herself up into its branches. And what did he do? He followed her like a supplicant and stood there beneath the tree, shading his eyes to peer up at her and trying to be a good sport, all in fun, and so what if Flora Lu was in mourning? It was only a monkey, after all—the laboratories of America were full of them.

He watched her settle back against the trunk, her legs straddling a branch twenty feet up, the soles of her feet like big pale moths batting at the leaves, her face high-flown and remote. The robe had fallen open and he saw that she was wearing panties and camisole only, no bra, and that stirred him despite himself. “Very funny,” he said, bracing himself against the trunk. “Now come on down before you break your neck. Let’s go do something—like a ride, you want to take a ride? We could go out in the country—”

“We are out in the country.”

“You know what I mean. We’ve got the whole day ahead of us. Let’s get away from all this”—he gestured to the house, the circus tent, the strangers wandering across the grounds like the remnants of lost tribes—“and go someplace, just the two of us.”

“No, you come up here. Be a monkey with me.”

“I don’t want to play games. I’m tired of games. Last night, you . . . I was afraid you were going to hurt yourself, okay? If you want to know, my nerves are shot. So come down out of there. Now.”

In response, she rattled the branches and thrashed her feet as if she were about to lose her balance.

“Come down,” he repeated.

“No, you come up.”