Passman was painfully reminded of yet one more lousy card she’d been dealt in life. No matter how much weight she had put on over the years, her breasts were elusive. Their fat cells dodged any opportunity for growth and development and always had. She suspected that when, as a young girl, she had tried to be a boy, that part of the programming never got deleted when she later returned to her proper gender.

It was unbearably humiliating in eighth-grade health class to watch the films on menstruation, the female outline on the screen developing right before Passman’s eyes, the breasts rounding, the pear-shaped muscular uterus discharging its menses in little hatch-marks flowing through the mature female outline, then out of it, on the screen.

All the other girls could relate. Passman could not. She could have gotten by in life without a bra, had she been honest about it. Her periods were more like commas, brief pauses each month that exacerbated her hypoglycemia and made her very cranky.

Passman was still staring, lost in tortured memories of puberty. Meaney smiled like a jack-o’-lantern and stretched provocatively. Passman came to. She quickly averted her gaze.

“I sure wish he’d hurry up,” Passman said again, this time with more emphasis.

“It ain’t so bad in here,” Meaney said in her twangy drawl. “I recognize your voice. Hear you all the time when I’m in the vincinity, riding through. Channels one, two and three, know ’em by heart. Four-sixty point one hundred megs, 460.200, 460.325. I always thought you had a nice voice.”

“Thank you,” Passman said.

“So, what’d you do?”

Passman thought it wise to send out a warning.

“Beat the shit out of some guy,” she answered. “I lost control and should’ve held back a little more than I did. Huge son of a bitch. Had it coming.”

Meaney nodded. “Mine had it coming, too, fucking son of a bitch. I’m sitting in the bar minding my own business, you know, after a long day on the road, I mean long. He comes over to my table, this big ole trashy fucker in a cowboy hat. I recognized him.” She nodded. “And he recognized me.” She nodded again. “He was in his personal car this night. Nineteen ninety-two Chevy Dually, lowered, loaded, four-fifty-four, aluminum wheels, tinted windows, air ride, all the hitches.

“It was in the lot and he asked if I liked it. I said I did. He asked what I drove. I told him a Mack. He asked if I’d ever drove a Peterbilt. I said I’d driven all there was. He asked if I’d ever had a blowout in a Peterbilt. I said I hadn’t. He asked if I wanted to. I said, Why would I? And he yanked down his zipper, so I threw him up against his Chevy Dually.

“Then I musta really gone at him because he looked like hamburger, a bunch of broke bones, teeth everywhere but in his mouth, most of his hair yanked out, ear tore off. What I hate about someone pissing me off like that is later on I can’t remember a thing. I guess I must have a spell of some sort, like an epilepick.”