“You busy?” Adam asked.

“No. Come on in.”

“I thought we might go out on the roof again and have a brew.”

“Crazy.”

The perfect host, he opened the window and snatched the bag, letting Adam go over the sill first.

They drank and made small talk and then suddenly they ran out of conversation and were ill at ease until Adam belched and glared.

“Goddammit,” he said, “I’m sorry. You and I can’t go around angry at one another, like a couple of little boys. We’re professionals. There are sick people depending on our ability to communicate.”

“I get mad and I shoot my mouth off,” Spurgeon said.

“Well, hell, you were right. I don’t like to use anybody’s soap—”

Spurgeon grinned. “I wouldn’t use yours on a bet.”

“—But the more I think about it the more I know that isn’t why I refused your soap,” he said softly.

Spurgeon just looked at him.

“I’ve never known a colored guy really well. When I was a kid in an Italian neighborhood in Pittsburgh, gangs of black kids used to come in and fight us. Up to now, that was the most genuine part of my inter-racial contact.”

Spurgeon still didn’t comment, and Silverstone reached for a fresh beer. “You’ve known a lot of whites?”

“In the past twelve years, man, I’ve been surrounded and outnumbered.”

They both looked out over the neighboring rooftops.

Robinson held something out and he reached for it, thinking it was a beer but discovering that it was a hand.

Which he shook.

Out of his first Blue Shield check he repaid the advance in salary he had gotten from the hospital the day he arrived, and when the second check came he went to a bank and opened a savings account. In Pittsburgh there was the old man, silent for the present but certain to speak up momentarily to plead a touch. He vowed to resist: my entire fortune for disaster, but not one cent for booze. Although he didn’t withdraw the money and begin to haunt the used-car lots, for the first time in his life he experienced a desire to be a reckless spender. He wanted to own a vehicle in which to park and wrestle with someone, perhaps Gaby Pender.

After six weeks he still hadn’t seen her. He had talked with her several times on the telephone, but he had refrained from asking her out, feeling impelled to go to Woodborough and increase his little hoard of cash.

When they did go out, he told himself, he would be able to afford to spend some money.

But on the other end of the line she became perceptively puzzled and increasingly cool with each call, and finally he decided he would have to tell her what he was doing with his off-duty time.

“But you’ll drop dead of exhaustion,” she said, horrified.

“I’m about ready to slow down.”

“Promise me you’ll take next weekend off.”

“I will if you’ll go out with me. Sunday night.”