I find someone who starts to make my life feel livable again. Therefore, of course, a way is devised so that I cannot have her, not because she doesn’t care for me, not because she loves somebody else, but because of something for which there is no remedy. Can’t happen. No way around it. She could throw herself at my feet and I would still have to turn my back on her.

“Nice going,” I bitterly addressed the fates aloud, and the waiter, arriving with my cup of beef broth, misunderstood and told me it had been no problem. “Brought you a nice hot dry towel, too, from the kitchen.” I received both benisons gratefully.

I took a sip of the consommé. It was as strong and hot as I needed it to be. It didn’t improve my spirits, but it gave me a small physical lift.

Reflexively I said aloud, as I always did when some little thing in life went my way, “Thanks, Linney.” It was a habit that had been honestly born and was nowhere near as pious or precious as it might seem. When I found a steel mouthpiece I thought I’d lost, when my fuel tank was reading empty and a gas station materialized on a desolate mountain road, when I was fifteen minutes late for the last train out of Elkhart and I got to the station and discovered the train had been delayed a half hour, I found myself automatically saying, “Thanks, Linney.” I refused to give credit to anything so deformed as my supposed luck. So it had to be Linney.

I had another sip and began to think about what in the last hour I had just lost, and what I had gained.

By the time I rose from the table and went to my room to change out of the wet clothes I’d foolishly been sitting in, I thought maybe I understood things better.

“Thanks, Linney,” I murmured.

Chapter 30

30

A Labor of Love

So here I was, in a house at the end of a street that went no farther than where I stood, saying hello to my Gail.

“I made us some coffee, if you’d like it,” she said, heading to the kitchen.

I told her I was fine.

She spun neatly back to me. “Oh, that’s right, I told you about my coffee. Or was it written on the wall in the men’s locker room? Men have no sense of discretion.”

“Gail, I think we should get right to work. I only have until seven.”