Do I feel less of a man now? thought Sam. Am I tamed and constricted by this handshake?

Katie’s face suggested he was still very much a man. He marvelled at how these two ordinary people could have created such a perfect exotic flower.

When she had spoken to him that first day on the bus, he had waited for the let-down. The bit when all the white girls who got the hots for him broached the subject of his race and his past. Katie had leaned over to him and said, ‘Can I ask you something real personal?’

He’d nodded, waiting for it. Would it be the tipi question? Say, did you ever really live in one of those pointy tents? Or maybe the other crappy one about some initiation rites they’d seen in westerns. That seemed to turn on some of the bimbos at the ski company, the ones he’d laid occasionally out of boredom and loneliness. He didn’t want Katie to be like that.

Please God, no. She had cleared her throat, and his heart had sunk in case this woman he felt he knew, was going to let it all slip away.

She’d looked serious, really studying his face. ‘You know the robot in Lost In Space? Were you frightened at the end of every show when he waved those arms around and hollered, Warning! Warning! Danger!’

Sam had looked across into her solemn eyes and held them with his own as long as he could without crashing the bus. ‘I used to shit my pants,’ he replied.

She had bloomed into a grateful smile and sat back in her seat. ‘There. I knew we were separated at birth.’

That was who he took that handshake for. That was why two years later he accepted the gift of the house from that man who shook his hand. Was he to deny his wife and children a comfortable life to keep his fragile pride intact? No sirree. Sometimes Sam Hunt felt like he didn’t have much to be proud about at all except his family. Fuck all that stuff about whose house it was.

He leaned forward and stabbed at a log with the brass poker that leaned against the stone chimney. The wood hissed back at him like a snake.