“Rush-hour traffic,” Rina said.

“Ach,” Magda exclaimed. “I should have thought of that.”

“It was nothing,” Marta answered. “We rode in an air-conditioned car.” To her sister: “You were sleeping.”

“Just thinking with my closed eyes.”

“You were sleeping. I hear you snore.”

Decker interjected, “You know, I’m flagging a bit. Let’s eat.”

“This way,” Magda said. She glanced over her shoulder and caught Ginny’s joyous face, an expression that bespoke gratitude that things were going well for her mother. Despite her misgivings, Magda knew that Ginny had accomplished something extraordinary, giving Magda a tiny bit of solace from a time when fear and evil had been her constant companions. With wet eyes, she smiled at her daughter and mouthed the words “Thank you.”

45

There was ample technology out there for an affordable videophone, but we humans with our frailties and our fears and our bad hair days just weren’t ready for it. Case in point was my phone chat with Buck. The conversation went surprisingly well, mainly because he couldn’t see my pacing and my sweating and my clammy hands. He only heard my dead-pan ripostes to his sarcastic comments, making me appear witty and in control. He suggested a café; I mentioned Star$s; we settled on Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, on the Strip in West Hollywood.

As per my father’s request I had had a run-through using Kling-hoffner and a few others as my guinea pigs, and we discovered that a multitude of things could go wrong. Since the meeting with Buck wasn’t until Sunday at eleven, there was time to fine-tune. Still, as the hour approached, I felt butterflies in my stomach. The last time I felt this nervous was when I was in tenth grade about to make my entrance onstage in Guys and Dolls as a stand-in Adelaide for Helen Karp, who had come down with the flu. I had pulled that off. There was no reason I couldn’t pull this off as well.

I was early, but he was earlier. The place was decent in size for the typical coffee bar, and the table he had chosen was not the best for our purposes. But since it wasn’t that bad, I decided it was more prudent to stay put than to explain why I wanted to move. Buck was as thin as ever, but his complexion had improved from judicious sunbathing. There were still some remnants of acne, but his cheeks were much smoother. His dark hair was almost shorn, his brown eyes feigning indifference when he saw me. He wore jeans and a black muscle shirt, showing off thin arms with some sinewy muscles. He was reading the Sunday Times and had ordered an Ice-Blended, his cheeks hollowed as he sucked on a straw, wrapping his thick lips around the plastic, pressing down with force. It was so wonderful when I thought about all that glorious DNA.

I sat next to him. “You’re here early.”

He didn’t bother to put down the paper. “Am I?” A careless look at his watch. “I suppose I am. I’m hungry. You can get me a bagel.”