Some hisses and pops followed, the way they often did on long-distance calls. Then the phone rang, once, twice. Someone picked it up. “Travel and Tourism, Anna McGowan.” She didn’t quite sound in the next room, but he understood her just fine.

“Anna, honey, it’s me, Jerry.”

“Jerry!” she squeaked. “Oh, my God! Where are you?”

“Right now, I’m on Midway.”

“Where the hell is that?”

“In the middle of the Pacific. The ship had some trouble, and they’re fixing it here. But my thing is done. They’ll fly me to Honolulu tomorrow, and I’ll be back in L.A. like midnight tomorrow night. It’s Hawaiian Airlines flight, uh,”—he had to check—“three six one. Can you pick me up?”

“I … guess so,” she said. Her voice firmed. “Yeah, I can do it. If I run on coffee and fumes Friday, then I do, that’s all. How are you?”

“I’m okay. I miss you. Have the Hughes people kept their promises?”

“Yes, they’ve been great.”

“Glad to hear it.” Jerry meant that. “Listen, babe, I gotta go—they don’t want us talking long. I’ll see you tomorrow night. Don’t forget to bring my keys, right? Love you!”

“Love you, too. I’ll remember. ’Bye.”

“’Bye.” He hung up.

Then he called his father. Hyman Stieglitz was an accountant, which meant he got very busy in the couple of months leading up to April 15, after which a lot of the air went out of his business. He answered the office phone right away: “Stieglitz Accounting and Tax Preparation.”

“Hey, Dad. It’s me. I’ll be back in town Friday.”

“Okay,” his father said, as if he’d driven down to San Diego for a couple of days. “Do I need to pick you up or anything?”

“No, it’s okay. Anna’s gonna do it.”

“All right.” His dad accepted that as casually as he said it. “Want to have dinner Saturday night?”

“How about Sunday? Let me have a little chance to sleep and get caught up on things.” Let me have a chance to screw myself silly.

He didn’t say it. Hyman Stieglitz heard it anyway. Even across several thousand miles of bad phone lines, he sounded amused as he answered, “However you want. Call me Sunday morning and we’ll figure out where. Did you get in enough work to make the trip worthwhile?”

“Dad, you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.” Jerry gave back the exact and literal truth.

“That’s good. And the money was pretty decent. So all right, then—I’ll see you Sunday.” His father might have been talking with a client, not a son. Well, they could have been bellowing at each other, old bull and young banging heads, the way they had when Jerry was seventeen. Polite near-indifference seemed more peaceable, if not exactly better.