“You’ve been happy with him up to now. Don’t let this one stupid night ruin everything.”

But it wasn’t just one night. He’d been bored and resentful for a while now. I wasn’t saying that Pancho and Lefty happened because he’d wanted to punish me for being distracted or inattentive or unavailable. Or not exactly because of that. But you could draw a line from one thing to the other.

Anita said, “I don’t suppose he’s called you.”

I said he hadn’t. “That’s not a good sign,” my mom said. “You don’t want to let this drag out too long.”

“How about we talk about somebody else’s personal business for a change?”

My mom shook her head. “Not mine. I don’t have any.”

“How come, Mom? Why aren’t you out there finding yourself some no-good man you can make excuses for?”

“I already did,” she said crisply. “And I don’t need another. I don’t have to settle for some grown-up baby. I can take care of myself.”

“And I guess I can’t,” I said. I meant it to come out sarcastic, but I saw the truth of it in their faces. It wasn’t really that Aaron was such a great catch; they just thought I couldn’t do any better.

Pretty much by accident, I found a video of Mathias giving a poetry reading. Not the famous one, the last one, but new to me at least.

I was killing time online. I had plenty of time to kill these days, since I was an underemployed single girl. I’m still not sure how I got from puppy videos to poetry. A few stops in between at a cowboy love song I thought I remembered better than I did, and somebody’s Twitter feed and who was the guy playing saxophone on what looked like a subway platform? It had a melancholy urban vibe, and the next run of videos were jazz performers in dark and smoky clubs, and I wasn’t paying much attention until the camera cut to an empty stage. Then Mathias stepped into the small circle of light.

He was young here, or at least, younger than other pictures I’d seen. Every time I saw a photo of him, I had to decide all over again what I thought of his looks, if he was handsome or freakish or both. In this film clip he was a skinny kid wearing a white T-shirt and jeans. His black hair was cut short and he kept his eyes down. Nervous, you’d think, from the way his body jerked, stiff-shouldered, as he stood and rummaged through his pages, but when he started reading, suddenly and without introduction, his voice boomed:

Who is the Lord’s anointed, the crazy holy man

shouting on the street corner. His eyes

are wiggling loose. His tongue is black in the furnace of