She got up, used the bathroom, and let in the King of Siam. Instead of hiding under the bed, the cat jumped up onto it. Jerry held out his hand. The Siamese sniffed it, then suffered himself to be scritched.

“We need a new wedding date,” Anna said. Spoken by a woman wearing bare skin, the words were more inspiring than they might have been otherwise.

Jerry nodded. “I’ve been thinking about that, too.”

“You have?” Anna sounded amazed.

“Uh-huh. How does the twenty-fourth of November sound? It’s the Sunday before Thanksgiving. If I remember straight, the sections I’m gonna teach this quarter are on Thursday and Friday, so I wouldn’t even need anybody to cover for me while we go on our honeymoon.”

For the first time since he’d come home, she kissed him instead of the other way around. He’d heard somewhere that the person who started a kiss was the one who really needed it. He didn’t know if he totally agreed with that, but it made more than a little sense.

When they broke apart, she said, “I love you! That’s just the day I was looking at myself! I checked with the temple. They had it open, so I booked it.”

“Good deal,” Jerry said. Anna was an even more half-assed Protestant than he was a Jew, so they’d planned a Jewish wedding. She made noises about converting. If she decided she wanted to go through with it, that was fine with him. If she didn’t, that was fine, too. He asked, “Can we still get Rabbi Burstein?”

“I called him. He’s free,” Anna answered. People who looked at Jerry, with his long hair and his beard, sometimes said he looked like a rabbinical student. People who looked at Shlomo Burstein, with his bald head and his long, tangled gray beard, said he looked like a rabbi. Jerry wasn’t so sure about that. He thought Rabbi Burstein looked more like God’s older brother.

“Then we’re good.” Jerry kissed her now. This one went on longer than the last one had. Down deep in his throat, he said, “I think we’re pretty good.” Stroking her was more fun than it was with the King of Siam.

“I should have told the cook at Tres Hermanos to put saltpeter on your rice and beans,” she said darkly. He knew she’d got that from Auntie Mame, because he’d found it there, too. He had no idea whether saltpeter did what people claimed it did. A moment later, she said, “Really?”

“I don’t know. Let’s find out,” he answered.

He managed it, too. That surprised him almost as much as it delighted him, at least until Anna said, “Once we’re married, you’d better not go away for months at a time. I’m not sure I’d live through the reunions.”