She answers it, says hesitantly, “Yes, he’s here.”

She gives the phone to Dennis with a frightened look.

“Hello?”

“Dennis, this is Ernie Klusinski.” One of Dennis’s long-lost colleague friends, now working for Aerojet in La Habra.

“Oh hi, Ernie. How are you?” Unnatural heartiness to his voice, he can tell.

“Fine. Listen, Dennis, we’ve heard over here about what happened at LSR today, and I was wondering if you wanted to come up and have lunch with me and my boss Sonja Adding, to sort of talk things over. Look into possibilities, you know, and see if you’re at all interested in what we’re doing here.” Pause. “If you’re interested, of course.”

“Oh I’m interested,” Dennis says, thinking fast. “Yeah, that’s real nice of you, Ernie, I appreciate it. Uh, one thing though”—he pauses, decides—“Lucy and I were thinking of taking a vacation up the coast. Given the opportunity, you know.” Ernie laughs at this feeble jest. “So maybe we can do it when I get back?”

“Oh sure, sure! No problem with that. Just give me a ring when you get back, and we’ll set it up. I’ve told Sonja about you, and she wants to meet you.”

“Yeah. That’d be nice. Thanks, Ernie.”

They hang up.

Still thinking hard, Dennis returns to the table. Stares at his plate, the casserole steaming gently.

“That was Ernie Klusinski?”

“Yeah, it was.” It’s been a strange day.

“And what did he want?”

Dennis gives her a lopsided grin. “He was head-hunting. Word has gotten around I was let go, and Ernie’s boss is interested in talking to me. Maybe hiring me.”

“But that’s wonderful!”

“Maybe. Aerojet has got those ground-based lasers, phase six of the BMD—I’d hate to get mixed up in that again.”

“Me too.”

“It’s a goddamned waste of time!” He shakes his head, returns to the topic at hand. “But they’re big, they have a lot of things going. If I could get into the right department…”

“You can find that out when you talk to them.”

“Yeah. But…” How to say it? He doesn’t understand it himself. “I don’t know … I don’t know if I want to get back into it! It’ll just be more of the same. More of the same.”

He doesn’t know what he feels. It’s nice to be wanted, real nice. But at the same time he feels a kind of despair, he feels trapped—this is his life, his work, he’ll never escape it. It’ll never end.

“You can figure that out after you talk to them.”

“Yeah. Oh. I told him we’d be off on vacation for a while.”

“I heard that.” Lucy smiles.