“Yes, I do,” I said. “Want to know what you think.”

“Raf’s like me. I mean, he’s not anything but roach for leaving you behind, but otherwise he’s just wobbly and can’t trust what he thinks or sees. He’s not running from you, he’s just running.”

Whenever Raf came to mind these days, I felt Sunday- morning stuff—queasy, hungover, sore from the bones out. Sometimes I wished he’d never happened.

After the train station and dropping Raf’s boxes, we drove onto the Loop and off, into a city of malls, plazas, department stores, garages, all expensive-looking and pin-neat.

“I’m about to change your life,” Raymond said, as I followed him into a place called MicroBytes.

In here were cool gray plastic and beige Plexiglas and books that looked plump and promising but were written in math.

“I’m buying you a computer, Paige, what they call a laptop? It’s a kind you carry around, size of a briefcase, and there’s programs that go with it that’ll teach you what to do.”

“Raymond, I can’t let you. Thanks, but, between Pru and Luisa . . .”

“Aw, the hell with ’em. Pru’s fine, and I been fightin’ with her all day anyway. And I left Luisa everything—the ranch, our daughter, the VCR. She’s got a new boyfriend she has to impress—our lawyer. Says she needs it all. I don’t mind. Hell, I like paring down. You know what else?”

“What?”

“It’s a wide old world,” Raymond said, and sighed.

On the round dining table now were the machine, a printer, printout sheets, a half-dozen manuals, program boxes, a mouse and textured mouse pad, black-ink ribbons, a power bar and surge suppressor, unopened plastic-wrapped packets of floppy disks. All like a question I hadn’t heard myself ask.

Pru and Raymond took me out into their night, which included dinner at the Camellia, a pink place off the Eastex Freeway; ale for me and Pru at a jazz club called Lapaz; drinks in a dance cellar.

There Raymond hauled me onto the amber-lit floor. He pressed a hand in the small of my back and moved me around with all the strength he’d got from carrying bricks or steel or house parts around in the sun for so many years. “The best feeling,” he told my right ear, “is when you don’t give a fuck. Lately, I don’t.”

“You’ve got Raf in there moving your mouth,” I said.

Pru and I decided to walk over to the Palm. We cut through an alley behind Stonewall Elementary. Coming the other way was a man in a suit and fedora, his arm around his young son.

As we got close, Pru nudged me. “Watch,” she said.

She unbuttoned her top and flapped open the right side, baring her breast entirely.