“Tell Sassafrass I love her . . . I can’t exist without her . . . my life has no meaning; I am drowning in loneliness. Please tell Sassafrass I need her.”

Sassafrass was amazed. “You mean he said all that?”

Cypress was livid. “You stupid ninny, Mitch didn’t say nothing but ‘tell Sassafrass to get her ass home.’ Then he hung up the phone; I didn’t even get a chance to curse his black ass.”

Sassafrass bit her lip and made attempts to ignore Mitch’s abrupt and cursory request for her presence. She got up to go somewhere else to think and discover some way to get that feeling back, when Leroy and Mitch were one person and no wants existed in her world. Sassafrass approached Leroy, still gentle in his slumber. She heard the music, same as the windy thrusts of their encounter on the roof: one horn beckoning, soothing, and the sounds became very old, familiar and easing like dudes on a corner hankering for a strange and rolling woman. The music echoed hot and dusky; almost blues, but cradled in possible sunlight. Sassafrass was weaving one thin willow by the sea over Leroy, and she felt herself go home. She left with the music; kissing Leroy’s fingers, humming Mitch’s tune.

Sassafrass jumped out of the back of the rose-printed pickup right in front of her house. Some mystical hippies had given her a ride from outside Salinas, when the bus got a flat tire. And as she made her way, awkward and giggling, toward the door, she blurted, “Well now. Somebody’s swept the porch and weeded the shrubs, the windows are washed. Mitch! Mitch . . . who you got livin’ here?” Sassafrass was a heap of tears and moans, thinking Mitch called her all the way back to L.A. just to hurt her feelings and show her any old woman could do what she’d been doing, and oh, shit . . . why didn’t she listen to Cypress? Mitch came through the front door, horn in hand, and stood loosely by the rope of flowering Judas. Sassafrass had always loved him to stand right there; the plants whirled up the side of the house, just like her mother’s twined all through the back kitchen in Charleston. Mitch was just smiling and happy.

“Sassafrass, you came all this way here to stand outside in fronta all these Latinos and put all our nonbusiness right here in the street? ’Fore you was always cryin’ ’cause I didn’t help you do nothin’; now you bawlin’ ’cause I done it already. Will ya get your trip aligned? Babee, listen . . .”