It wasn’t till he turned into their street that he thought of Corey—saw him, saw his face the way it was when he was curled up asleep with all the animation gone out of his features and his hair splayed over the pillow and the one corner of the blanket he held gripped in his hand as if afraid somebody would take it away from him—and came back to himself. “Jesus, do you realize how late it is?”

Mrs. Pierzynski was waiting for them in the vestibule with her coat and hat on and a look of pure outrage on her face. “Do you know what time it is?” she demanded, and he did know because he’d looked at the clock on the dash when he thought of Corey and located himself in the instant. It was after twelve. Well after.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “We were . . .” He was searching for an excuse, but there was nothing he could give her short of death and dismemberment that would even begin to mollify her, and the truth of it, the essence of what they’d experienced—the trip they’d been on—would have been lost on this haggard red-faced pathetically ordinary woman who wouldn’t have known transcendence if it swooped her up on angels’ wings and sailed her high out over the glittering crest of the universe.

“That number you gave me? The emergency number? I must’ve rung that number ten times and nobody answered, so you tell me—”

Joanie was there now, Joanie the efficient, Joanie the politic, Joanie the peacemaker. “Forgive us, Mrs. Pierzynski, but we had an emergency—it was my husband, we had to take him to the emergency room because of something he ate, bad fish the doctor said, but thank God he’s all right now, and I don’t know what to say but forgive us, please, and here”—snapping open her purse and counting out bills, too many bills, into the woman’s outthrust hand—“I hope this’ll help.”

A moment of constrained silence. The three of them there in the vestibule under the sick yellow overhead light. Outside, the grip of the night and the cold. “Some people,” the woman said, her voice tight with anger, “have to be at work first thing Monday morning—tomorrow morning if you want to know, and I’m sorry for your trouble, but I mean, you couldn’t even call?”

Then the door flung open on a fume of cold and the woman was gone and he looked at Joanie and gave a shrug, which was comical, so very comical, and they both broke down in giggles. He helped her out of her coat. She kicked off her shoes. And then he put an arm around her waist and led her off to bed.

Chapter 2

2.