Fun With Problems

Charm City

AT A RECITAL one autumn evening Frank Bower heard Mahler's Song of the Earth, performed by four young singers. The part that moved him most was the faux Chinese poetry that ended in the poet's rapture. Bower's enjoyment was shadowed by anxiety and some distant unremembered grief. He was transfixed by the singer, a young Korean woman who performed with closed eyes in the posture of a supplicant. "Abschied," she sang. Rapture in spite of all. The music caused him some emotional confusion.

At the close of the movement the singer held her pose as though she herself did not recognize that the song was over. Bower's gaze settled on a tall woman in a leather coat who appeared to be looking straight at him. Whatever it was she saw so preoccupied her that she did not trouble to applaud after the last movement. He thought she must be a friend of his wife's whom he might have met once and forgotten. When he left the auditorium Bower wandered into the museum's restaurant, a pleasingly simple room all lines and light, done in the futuristic severity of twenty years before. It had one glass wall transparent to the autumnal garden. Outside there were ivy and pines and leaves on the barren earth. It was growing dark but he could make out the shape of a metal structure and hear the sound of falling water. Bower was a technical writer for a software systems company in Towson who had briefly taught classics at Hopkins. He was naturally discontented with his work as with other things.

At the cafeteria counter he bought a mini-bottle of cabernet along with cheese and slices of apple. He took a table by the window and sat until it cast him his own reflection. He loved music. Mahler's bittersweet notes echoed in his mind's ear, taking their own direction, producing unvoiced melodies. Abschied. It was a Thursday night and the museum was open until eight.

Finally the wine made him hungry. He put his glasses and jacket on and prepared to go. About to rise, he realized there was a woman standing over his table. She was handsome, long-faced. The phrase "terrible gray eyes," read somewhere, occurred to him. She was forty-five or so, tall and well built. She wore a leather jacket fragrant with the rich piquant smell of hide. It was the woman he had locked eyes with in the auditorium.

"What would you say," the woman asked, "if I proposed to buy you a drink?"

He stared. Surely he must know her. She was laughing at his astonishment.

"Don't strange women often offer to buy you drinks?" She set down the tray she was holding and put wine and another glass before him.

"That's very kind of you," Bower said. "How can I say no?"

"I hope you won't. May I sit down?"

He rose from his chair to invite her. When she was seated across from him, he waited for her to speak. She looked comfortable there, sipping her own wine.

"But we know each other," Bower asked her, "don't we?"

"They say it's a small world."

He thought her smile ambiguous. Maybe a little complacent and remote. Friend or foe? He laughed to please her, though he was troubled and embarrassed.

"I'm sorry," he said. He was trying to make her sudden presence more amenable to reason. "I can't remember where we met. I'm still trying to place you."

"What if I don't place? What if I'm a complete stranger?"

It stopped him. She was not young or trying to appear so. She seemed cultivated, not at all vulgar. In the tweed skirt that decorously showed her figure and the dashing leather jacket, she aroused his dormant lust to capture. At the same time, he noticed she wore a wedding ring.

"Will you tell me your name?"

He experienced a certain vague caution. He thought she might have seen that in his eyes, because she laughed at him again. She took a business card from her smart designer bag that identified her simply as Margaret Cerwin, M.D. No specialty was indicated. As she went to buy them another wine, Frank considered her smile. It was intriguing.

"What sort of physician are you?"

"Guess."

"Might you be a psychiatrist?"

"Very good," she said.

How had he guessed right? It might have been the knowing smile, distant yet confiding. The restrained availability was ever so slightly chilling. They talked about the concert. As they chatted she conveyed a warm familiarity with Mahler's music and with music in general. She also communicated, discreetly, a certain fascination with Bower.

"I'm very curious about you," she told him, "my friend."

He wanted to ask her how he could be her friend, but out of some polite instinct decided not to. In fact, he was at a loss for what to say next.

"Really?" he finally asked. "I'm not much of a mystery." But he allowed himself to suppose she saw him that way. He was, he knew, a rather handsome fellow, or at least a distinguished-looking one. He sometimes felt the charge of a woman's awareness. And everyone was a mystery. He felt unable to focus his thoughts, something akin to panic. Still, her manner encouraged him toward adventure. All at once he thought that whatever her coming to him might mean, he ought to live it out with her. At least for a while.

"You're wondering why I accosted you," she said. "I'll tell you why."

Her stare held him bound and silent.

"Life is short," she said. "At least it seems that way to me now. When I see someone who attracts me I try to meet them. I try to see what they have to say."

"Oh," he said. After a moment he asked her, "How do you choose people?"

"You mean, why you? Because you looked interesting. I watched you listening. I may be a psychiatrist, but I'm a physiognomist too."

"Really?"

She smiled and looked away for a moment, then locked on him again. A humorous double take. It was a small felicity but dazzling. Her eyes shone, long-l ashed, seeming barely to contain their own light.

"No. Not really. I don't think there are real physiognomists anymore. Maybe in China."

"You're always a step ahead of me."

"Am I? It's because I'm leading." Her artful arrogance was irritating, but the faint sting was sweet. "Actually, I prefer to be led."

Her smile troubled him. It was somehow familiar, secretive, imperturbable, maybe a little frosty. What it reminded him of, he realized, was the expression portrayed on very early Greek statuary.

"I need a ride," she said.

In the end, they left together, passing through the monumental entrance hall. On the way out they went by a bronze horseman rising from the saddle, brandishing a saber. The plate on its pedestal read ONE OF STUART'S VIRGINIANS. It was a tribute to wealthy, Confederately sympathetic old Baltimore.

They walked across the chill, darkened parking lot to his gray Camry. Bower opened the passenger door for her. He started the car and they sat looking straight ahead, past the vapor of their breath, visible against the headlights beyond the icing windshield. Bower put his seat belt on, and after a moment she did the same.

"Where to?" he asked.

She told him she had taken a taxi to the museum and she lived downtown. He drove them slowly out of the lot. They had driven a block south when he was aware of her fidgeting.

"You're going to think I'm insane," she declared.

He hastened to assure her. "No, no." In fact he experienced a little more anxiety about what might be coming.

"Going up to you as I did. I'm restless tonight."

"I suppose," Bower said, "I am too."

"I don't think I want to go home."

"Oh," said Bower.

"We could drive into the country a bit. To the hills. Or over the bridge."

"Let's take the bridge."

Bower had a house on the bay front of the Eastern Shore where he and his wife were planning to spend the weekend. He had not thought to go there, setting out from the museum. Nor even when he suggested the bridge. Now it occurred to him as a wanton possibility.

They put the lights of the city behind them and drove through icy rain. By the time they were on Route 13 the rain had stopped and the night sky was clearing. A wind from the ocean was driving rain clouds east across the bay to show a slivered late-October moon, unaccountably bright. There were stars.

"Oh," the woman, Margaret, exclaimed, "horns to the east."

"Excuse me?"

"Horns to the east. Haven't you heard it? Don't you know what it means?" Her questions seemed almost urgent. He was perplexed.

"No."

She laughed and recited,

Horns to the east,

Soon be increased.

Horns to the west,

Soon be at rest.

"Don't know?" she asked after a few seconds. "Can't you guess?"

"I don't think so," Bower said, wondering.

"Horns to the east," she said, "the waxing moon. Horns to the west, waning moon."

It took him a moment or two.

"Ah."

She mimicked him. "Ah! Ah is right."

"Did you make it up?" He got no answer. So he observed, "A Halloween moon."

"Just what I was thinking," she said.

When they turned off the highway she put an arm across the back of the seat.

"I wonder," she said playfully, "if we're going somewhere." He glanced at her and in the extraordinary light of the crescent moon saw again the archaic smile. "Where are we going?"

She, he thought, was the one who wanted to be led. He considered wildly, decided nothing. Then he said, "I have a house near Calverton."

"Really?"

"Yes, I do."

"I see. Could that be where we're going?"

"If you want to."

He was encouraged by her silence. Twenty minutes after they had passed through the decorous empty streets of old Chesterfield he pulled over to the shoulder. The road was wooded on both sides and it was possible to make out the POSTED signs on the near tree trunks. Then the persistent storm closed over the moonlit sky and it began to rain hard again.

"I have to make a call. Do you mind?"

"Certainly not."

He called his wife in Roland Park while Margaret sat stiffly beside him, listening equably, it seemed. He had not gotten out to make the call because of the rain. He looked into the dark dripping pine woods — anywhere but at his passenger — and declared to his wife he would be late. Offering no reason. When she asked for one he was reckless, a little unhinged by possibility.

"I felt out of sorts. I went for a drive in the country."

His wife asked if he was certain he was all right. He told her that, as far as that went, he was fine. When he turned to Margaret on the car seat beside him, he saw her bent forward, hands across her eyes as if in remorse or simply seeing no evil. He experienced another moment's panic. The wrong woman!

"Do you," he asked, "do you need to call anyone? I mean, to make a call?"

She shook her head and said nothing for the remainder of the ride. Shortly, they turned off onto a dirt road and followed its turns and doglegs past a few mailboxes at the head of dark driveways. The houses that showed lights were deep in the woods, far from the roadway. Overhead, the horned moon had appeared again, visible through bare wind-driven branches.

They parked in the clearing around Bower's house. Once out of the car they faced the salt-sour-scented gale off the bay. In the darkness they could hear its waves crashing against the unprotected shore. The house was shingled and square, a dignified practical house, unadorned except for a weathervane on the roof. It was impossible to see what the weathervane represented.

She had folded her arms and turned away from the wind. From her posture, Bower thought she seemed a little hesitant and subdued.

"Very nice," she said.

Bower pulled his own collar up against the chill. Now he was thrilled by his own impulsiveness and the stormy night sky, clearing again. Finally it seemed he was leading. He conducted them inside, his steadying hand lightly touching the sheath of leather that encased her. Bower turned on a lamp and raised the thermostat. Then, as she watched, he laid a fire and started it. His guest kept her coat on.

"Aren't you afraid of the house watch?"

"House watch? Not out here. A little more wine?" he asked her. "Madder music?"

The look she gave him was steady and flat, unamused. A little puzzled, slightly ashamed of his fit of brio, he went into the kitchen and opened a bottle of St. Emilion. He carried it out on a tray and poured for them.

"The good stuff this time," he said. She took a glass, but her look made him feel fat-witted and overcheery. "Like it?" he asked.

She only nodded without drinking. Suddenly it seemed the burden of discourse was his. She was looking, a little sadly, around the room.

"All these beautiful things," she said.

There were beautiful things in the room for people who knew how to look for them. Bower's wife collected early-American paintings and furniture. He had grown to appreciate them too. To keep the play of the evening alive, he began to give Margaret the tour.

The house itself was old, not quite Colonial but early nineteenth century. The front door opened directly on the living room, as it sometimes does in old houses. In that room stood a Mennonite chest with a sunburst painted on its front. The wall above it displayed a Kentucky quilt. The fireplace was equipped with fittings of old wrought iron. A table and chairs in a recessed dining area had the imperfect symmetry of rough joinery. Three of the wall paintings were genuine American primitives, and one was an attributed Robert Feke. Outside his computer workspace hung a later painting, a gloomy nightscape his wife thought might be an Albert Pinkham Ryder, but it lacked a provenance.

Margaret followed Bower's exposition of the room. She seemed to display little interest. From time to time she sipped the wine he had poured for her. Though the house had warmed, she kept her coat on.

"It's all very nice," she said, distantly polite.

"My wife has the eye," he said, as though Margaret were a casual guest and not the object of a particular seduction.

"Your wife? Isn't she afraid to leave all this out in the country? Isn't she afraid of losing what she has? Her house? Your attentions?"

Bower was very uncomfortable at having to explain his wife's personal qualities, but Margaret seemed to think she had a right to ask questions.

"What's here isn't all that valuable."

He watched Margaret set her empty wine glass on a place mat, sparing the finish of a dark mahogany table. A moment after setting it down, she touched the table's surface with two fingers and brought them away quickly, as if she were repelled by the dust on it.

"Oh," said Margaret, "I see." She looked around the room again. "What's her name? Would I like her?"

"I think so. Yes. I suppose. Her name is Jane."

"Jane. I'll bet I would."

"Please," Bower said, "take your coat off."

"I suppose she comes here with you?"

"Most weekends." He was growing impatient with her. "Is that some sort of problem?"

The look she gave him was again level, dead-eyed and stone-cold. He had rankled her. The antic animation of the last hours had somehow drained away.

"This isn't right," she said after a moment. "It would be wrong." She appeared suddenly stricken. "Another woman's bed!"

"What?" Though Bower knew her not at all, he thought there was a serious chance she might be joking.

"We can't," she said with surprising firmness.

"Oh."

"No, Frank. Sorry."

Bower was extremely disappointed. But edging his interior horizon, on a different quarter, appeared the faraway contours of relief. He tried to swallow the humiliation.

"You're a mercurial character. Aren't you?"

"Yes, I am," she said.

"I see."

"And here we are," she said. Suddenly she laughed, and for a moment she was lively and humorous again. "Out in the sticks. Don't you believe it's a woman's privilege to change her mind?"

"Oh, come on, Margaret." He was unsettled by her laughter and the cliché. She showed the expression he had learned to dread. The smile.

Driving her home was an embarrassment. He thought of switching on the car radio but decided it might only make things worse. Music would be irony. A stranger's voice would sound like mocking witness.

When they were back in the city, heading downtown along St. Paul Street, she told him brusquely that she lived in the Belvedere. It was an old hotel near the Washington Monument that had faded and then turned condo.

Margaret offered no goodbyes when they pulled up before the tastefully renovated entrance. They parted in the welter of Bower's shamed silence. Setting out for his own house in Roland Park, he kept his eyes on the road. As a result, he failed to see her climb into one of the cabs that always waited in front of the gay bar and club catty-corner to the Belvedere.

In the cab, Margaret made a call to her daughter. She was fatigued from the drive and irritable.

"Clean up, my dear."

Arriving, she found that Cordelia had cleaned up, after a fashion. At least there were no dishes in the sink. Nor was there — aside from a couple of withered apples, a moldering box of take-out rice, and a baby's bottle containing milk of indeterminate freshness — any food in the refrigerator.

"Christ, don't you eat?" Margaret asked.

"Yeah, I eat," Cordelia said, pouting. "How about you?"

Margaret inspected her.

"You don't look well."

"Oh, thanks," Cordelia said.

In Cordelia's room, Margaret found her grandson, diaper unchanged, lying uncomfortably with twisted covers and looking as though he had cried himself to sleep. As she stood there, the child awakened and whimpered.

"Wash that child and change him. How can you be so irresponsible?"

"All right, all right," Cordelia whined. Except for the petulant inflection, Cordelia had a cultivated voice like her mother's. In the bedroom, the baby cried savagely.

"Happy now?" asked Cordelia. She went into her room and slammed the door. Margaret took her sleek coat off and hung it carefully. Then she eased herself onto the living room sofa, took off her sensible shoes and put her feet up. She lay with her eyes closed, listening to the sounds from the next room, where Cordelia was alternately muttering to herself and crooning to the baby. After the child had been quiet for a while Cordelia came out, wearing her bomber jacket with its tombstone patch, ready to hit the street.

"Don't you think his eyes look odd?" Margaret said without rising.

"But he has beautiful eyes," Cordelia told her mother. "Angel eyes."

"You're slamming meth, aren't you, dear?"

Cordelia marched toward the apartment door, then turned in rage. Her mother cut off any reply.

"I've tried to persuade you. Your teeth will fall out. You'll age."

"Thanks again, Slim."

"I don't want to sit by and watch you lose your looks." She sat up to address her daughter. "And your mind. Tweakers are the most boring people. Who taught you to fix?"

"I knew how."

"No, baby. I'm sure it was Donny."

Cordelia opened the apartment door and started out.

"Just a moment, dearest. Where to? Leaving mother to babysit? Mother had a tough day."

"Really? Ball some poor dude?"

Margaret raised a despairing hand and waved off the insult. Leaving, Cordelia slammed the door, her second slammed door of their brief evening. Margaret brooded for a while and then decided to call Cordelia's dearest friend. Some people actually called him Slash, but to Margaret he had always been just Donny.

"Hey, Donny." She tried to keep her voice low for the infant's sake. "How's tricks?"

"Yo, Slim," Donny said cautiously.

"Could it be that you've just instructed my baby in the art of slamming?"

"No way. She's a big girl. Either way, see what I'm saying, she gets more independent."

"Are you hearing me, Donno? Don't you dare treat Cordy like some skeeza. I'm cross."

"I hear you," Donny admitted.

"Good. Because if you ever turn my daughter out, I think I'll kill you."

"You are paranoid," Slash told her as firmly as possible. "You're, like, saying things."

Margaret paused to let him reflect on how thin the joke was.

"On a happier note," she said, "I have a joint for us. I've identified this awful man. House full of good things. So be here tomorrow midmorning and don't be hammered. Or is that a vain hope and it has to drop without you?"

"I'm there."

"Okay, and bring my daughter back here. I can't spend all day babysitting. I have a meet with the Smiling Lascar tomorrow."

The man Margaret called the Smiling Lascar was a South Asian pharmacist in Bethesda with whom she could trade in pseudoephedrine. Victor moved it out to some country cousins in West Virginia who cooked it into pseudo-crystal for distribution by bike clubs around the upper South. Victor's overextended family was basically a criminal enterprise, and through him Margaret could maintain a phantom presence from the D.C. suburbs to the remotest hollow and never consort with ruffians.

She did undertake a little discreet consorting, though. Exploiting the average psychopath's lack of social confidence, she was able to reach out past Donny to his own network and had already stolen a number of his supporters out from under him. Their shabby world was often exhilarating — the commerce in ginseng and bear livers, actual moonshine from traditional stills, marijuana, arms and ammunition, cars, speed, motorcycles. Donny's associates seemed to think they rightfully owned all motorcycles, as the Masai thought they owned all cattle. These men, she thought, were irreplaceable, the sons of the pioneers. She even had a certain secret fondness for Slash and understood her daughter's attraction. Still, she considered him needy.

"So you'll take care of that, no? And you'll bring a rental truck and plates? And you want gray coveralls or some neutral color."

"You got it, Slim," said Donny Slash.

"And you'll bring Cordy over here? And you'll show up? Scout's honor? Because this thing needs to be tomorrow."

"I'll come over too, yeah. I haven't seen much of Little Jimmy."

It was annoying the way he constantly referred to the baby as Littlejimmy, as though it were all one snively word. He had got Cordelia doing it. He had not seen much of the child because Margaret had various means of keeping him away.

"No, you haven't," she said.

"I mean, hey. This is my child here."

"Certainly, Donny," Margaret told him. "If you say so."

And that was that, and so, she thought, to bed. But no, the phone began its song and dance, and she had Kimmie on the line. Kimmie was Margaret's schoolgirl chum and former patient.

"Oh, Kimmie," she said. "It's so late."

Kimmie was a professor of composition at a small women's college in New England and a published poet. Margaret had been visiting with her on a business and shopping trip to the Northeast.

"Margaret!" Kimmie said breathlessly. "Did you take my car? My car is utterly gone. Vanished from the driveway."

"We discussed this, Kimmie."

"We did?"

"We certainly did. I borrowed it to drive to the train. I left it at the station. How can you not remember?"

She and Kimmie had planned to shop for early-American art and antiques along New York Route 22. Arriving, Margaret had found her friend, who was seriously bipolar, in a state approaching raving mania. To punish her, Margaret had taken Kimmie's battered '65 Ford Mustang and driven it to D.C. in partial payment to the Smiling Lascar.

"At the station? But I'm stranded. I'm marooned, you see, and I can't…"

"It's autumn break, Kimmie. You don't need to go anywhere." In the end, she had simply to insist. Kimmie had forgotten about the loan as a result of her medication. Or of not taking it. Or something. After a while she pressed the red button on Kimmie and switched the phone off. Then she checked on young Jim and went to bed.

It was midmorning when Cordelia and Slash arrived. Margaret looked them over in their bib overalls and work shirts. Cordelia's getup fit badly. She wore a Depression-style gray tweed cap turned backward.

"You're late. I hope you brought everything?" Then she performed a stylized double take. "By the way, your mustache is rat-like," she told Donny. "What have you done to it?"

Donny Slash, who had come in wearing a suave, cheery smile, lost his composure. He was always trying to impress Margaret favorably. But Margaret's secret attraction to him was a gratuitous grace over which he had no control at all.

"Whattya mean, Slim?"

"Never mind."

Cordelia giggled. The twisted relationship between her mother and Slash amused her.

"I've identified this awful man," Margaret explained. She meant she had acquired bits and pieces of the Bowers' life and documents from an addicted antiques runner who had become aware of Mrs. Bower's collection. The man saw the Bowers regularly at auctions. On the day after Margaret's return from Kimmie's, the runner had spotted Bower at the museum and called her. Although Margaret had actually been a psychiatrist, her name was not Cerwin.

"By the way, Cordy, are you whacked, my darling?" She turned on Donny, who fidgeted and blinked under Margaret's fierce glance. Blinking was his shot at showing an honest countenance.

"Fuck no!" Cordelia said.

"Fuck no? Because your lips are purple. And your friend!" She addressed Donny with a humorless smile. "You're whacked also. And you smell of beer. You're drunk. You've both been up all night slamming crystal. God bless us and save us!"

"No, man," said Donny. "We're cool. We're down."

"Cool? How cool you're cool, you moron!"

"Hey, Slim, man," Donny said, repentant, "it's all good."

"Do you know what this means?" Margaret asked. "It means we'll have to call Desirée." Desirée was a Haitian girl who often minded the baby. "I'll have to cancel the Lascar. I'll have to expose my posterior on the open road. You can't drive." She turned on Cordelia. "Cordy can't drive. She has warrants. Oh, God," she moaned, "the two of you."

"Don't let her come!" Cordelia implored Donny. "It's such a drag when she comes."

"Yeah, sure," Slash said.

"Well, it is," said Cordelia savagely. "Mother." She pronounced the word with the irony of the street.

"Shame on you," Margaret said. "And take off that stupid hat."

It was close to noon when they arrived in Calverton and parked on the road a few yards up from the Bowers' house. Margaret looked as chic as a middle-aged woman in white coveralls ever could, but she was annoyed at the delays.

"Check it out."

Slash started out of the truck.

"Not you," Margaret told him. "Cordy."

Cordy returned to say that the coast was clear.

"No system?" Slash asked.

Margaret laughed bitterly, snorted. "He didn't set it. People like him often don't."

They drove up to the house.

"Even if they'd set the system," said Donny, "I coulda disarmed it."

"Yes, you're wonderful, Slash," Margaret said. She addressed him as Slash only to torment him. "Now check the weathervane." She indicated the metal instrument on the roof. It had the form of a killer whale and was handsomely wrought.

"Nice," said Donny.

"Nice. So can you?"

"Sort of a hassle. But yeah." He turned and looked down the wooded driveway behind them. "Think it's cool?" From somewhere in the middle distance they heard the whine of a chain saw. Someone cutting firewood. Cordelia, without her bomber jacket or tweed cap, was jumping up and down out of high spirits and to keep warm.

"Let it go," Margaret told him. "Maybe we can take it when we're weathervane shopping. Open the door, please."

"Deadbolt?"

"He didn't use two keys."

Slash tried and failed to open the door with a credit card. Then he applied the Halligan bar his cousins had stolen from a West Virginia state police car. The door, lopsidedly, fell open.

"Open fuckin' sesame! Perfecto Garcia!"

Margaret brushed past him and the couple followed her. Inside, they put on their rubber gloves and took up items as Margaret directed. As she watched through a window, they carried furniture and bric-a-brac outside and stashed it in the rental truck on padded mover's quilts.

"Doucement," Margaret advised them. "Gently."

After their exertions her two assistants both began to tremble with cold and the drug.

"Let's go," Cordelia whined. She had begun jumping again, in the Bowers' living room, and was working herself into a state. "Let's go before some asshole comes. Like joggers or…"

Donny, annoyed, grabbed her arm to hush her and discourage her bouncing. Cold as it was, they watched Margaret unbutton her leather coat and take a pearl-handled straight razor from one of the pockets and hasten into the bathroom. Very shortly she emerged. Her face was contorted with what appeared to be rage.

"Let's go, Slash," Cordelia said, pulling him toward the door.

They stood just outside the crippled, half-open door. They could hear Margaret screaming inside, the smash of glass and crockery, the rending of cloth.

"What?" he demanded. "What the fuck?"

"You've never seen her do this before? This is like her signature mode." She moved from the door with an expression of pity and distaste. "Oh, Jesus, I hate it."

"Does what? What's she doing?"

"You'll find out."

Slash stepped inside and came out again.

"Jeez," he said, "she's cuttin' it up pretty good. She's wired. Bad."

Cordelia shook her head and sighed impatiently.

"Yeah, she's like loot and pillage."

He and Cordelia stood shivering, watching the driveway, until Margaret appeared. She looked quite composed, if a little unsteady and breathing audibly. Donny and Cordelia said nothing.

"Okay," Margaret said. "Tout finis. Let's roll."

They had driven the truck only a few miles along the highway when Donny saw a flashing bluey in his rearview mirror. A startling burst of siren rose and fell. Cordelia, crouching behind the seats, cursed and moaned.

"What?" Donny asked Margaret.

"Were you speeding?"

"No way."

"Well, pull over." She turned back to Cordelia. "Relax, dear. We'll survive."

The cruiser that had pulled them over belonged to the town cops. There was only one of them, quite a young man. He wore cheap sunglasses, so Margaret could not be sure how stupid he was.

"I only wear handcuffs when I'm being fucked," Margaret whispered. She was joking to encourage them. The cop got out and stood just to the rear of the driver's side door, looking in at Cordelia.

"License and registration," he told Donny. Donny had a forged but well-made Virginia driver's license. The cop gave them all the once-over and stepped back and away to read the documents. He did not return them. From her side, Margaret leaned across Slash to address the young policeman.

"A problem, officer?"

He looked at her without apparent expression.

"Where you all coming from?"

"From Princeton, New Jersey," Margaret declared. "Actually, we're on our way home."

"Where to?"

"Across the bay. I have a house in Fredericksburg."

"What about you, sir?" the cop asked Slash.

"Little Creek, Virginia. See, we're driving her. Moving some furniture." He was blinking stupidly in all directions. Margaret gave him an elbow.

"Didn't take Ninety-five?"

"Thirteen is so much more pleasant," said Margaret. "Sometimes faster, too."

The cop turned on Cordelia in her lair behind the seats.

"That true?"

"Yes, it is," Cordelia answered, sounding like her mother.

"This lady your mom?"

"Yes, she is."

"You family too?" the officer asked Donny.

"No," Donny said. He showed the officer his top-of-the-line smile. "Hired help."

"That right?" he asked the ladies.

"Well, yes," Margaret answered a bit impatiently. After a moment the officer handed Donny the registration and license.

"Have a nice day, ma'am." He took a last glance at Donny Slash. "Drive carefully, sir."

When the cop had vanished from sight, Donny and Cordelia whooped with joy.

"Oh, Moms! You're like so great!" She was, in the end, her mother's greatest admirer.

"Hey, Slim," Donny yelled. "You're awesome, man."

He took one hand off the wheel to offer Margaret a high-five. She condescended to return it.

"Everybody loves you when you're somebody else," she explained.