Stormy nodded. “Tell him to make sure he watches the tape. And tell him he has forty-eight hours. Sundance is interested.”

Her eyes widened. “Really?”

Stormy grinned. “No.” He paused dramatically. “At least not yet.”

“We have a winner here, don’t we?”

“I think we do,” he said.

He worked late sorting through contracts. Joan had already left, so Stormy closed up the office and locked up. Roberta would be at her class by the time he got home, so on the way back, he pulled into the drive-thru lane at Burger King and ordered a Whopper, fries, and a chocolate shake. Roberta was constantly harping on him about his dietary habits, claiming that a person who ate the way he did didn’t deserve to be wealthy, as though it were his moral obligation to eat gourmet meals all the time, but he failed to see how the fact that his taste in food was different from hers made him a deserving candidate for poverty. Like most overweight people, she put far too much emphasis on food, considered it a much too important part of life. If she considered sex as important as eating and put as much effort into their lovemaking as she did deciding what she ate, they might still have a marriage.

Sex.

It had been what? A month? Two months? He wasn’t sure. They hadn’t done it in a while, that he knew.

He tried to remember the first girl he’d ever had. What was her name? Dawn? Donna? Something like that. Strange that he couldn’t recall. Weren’t you always supposed to remember your first? She’d been poor and dirty. He remembered that much. And that had been part of the allure. She was not like the perfectly scrubbed examples of femininity that were invited over to the house; she was different, wild, and he had liked that. She’d made him do things to her that he hadn’t even known about, and in that one summer he had learned everything about sex he had ever needed to know.

It had been all downhill from there.

He hadn’t thought of that girl in a long time, and he tried to recall what had happened, why they had broken up. It had probably been after the fire, after they’d moved, but he couldn’t remember for sure.

He sighed. It didn’t matter. He pulled up in front of the house, parked next to the ocotillo on the edge of the driveway. He sat for a moment in the car, staring through the windshield at the darkened windows of the house, and not for the first time, he wished that he had never gotten married, that he had never met Roberta.