Whispers From the Universe

By Propertius Press

The stories in Whispers from the Universe explore the connections between the real and unseen worlds. Where hidden miracles turn expectation on its head, and perception and reality collide with the unknowable. What do we really know about the physical world, and is physics more understandable than we think? What opportunities present themselves when we let down our guard and explore behind the obvious? In this second short story anthology collected and edited by Propertius Press, twenty-one authors give their answers to these questions, in surprising and uniquely talented ways.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Propertius Press
• Release date: Jun 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9780463020692

Propertius Press

Provocative, engaging literature for the discerning reader who enjoys discourse. These are books you'll talk about, share, and read multiple times. Propertius prints for the ages... for the love of books.

Book preview

Whispers from the Universe

Short Stories collected and edited by Propertius Press

Copyright (c) 2020 by Propertius Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

Cover and Interior design by Propertius Press

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, electronic, mechanical photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the copyright owners. This book is a work of fiction. As in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience; however, all names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously.

ISBN eBook: 9780463020692

Table of Contents

Point Masses,by Laura Goodman

Stranger on the Shore,by April Khaito

Above the Stairs,by Mariel Yovino

The Order of Things,by Glen Weissenberger

Katie’s Visions,by Mary Jo Rabe

Bladen,by Saket Badola

Two Truths and a Lie,by Lisa Godfrees

The Fly Mongrel,by Aelica Ingenthron Orsi

Pepper,by A. E. Russell

Smoke Signals,by Stephen Hebert

The Grim Face of Mars,by Nemo Martinez

The Stuff Dreams are Made Of,by Arnold Edwards

The Learning Place,by Jewel Hopson

The Pool Table,by Scott Pedersen

The North Window,by Judson Blake

Do Not Go Gently,by Shea Butler

The Art of Protest,by Margaret Karmazin

Blue Hummingbird,by Dennis McFadden

Pool Light,by Fionnuala Cook

Mona… Lisa,by K. L. Lord

Glimpses,by Terry Sanville

Meet the Authors

Point Masses

Laura Goodman

Summer, 1984

I: Fire Sale

He opens his eyes and sees her standing before him in profile, naked, stretching, hands kneading the night out of her back. There is something theatrical about her standing there at the window, dimly backlit by the early, summer morning light. He thinks of a movie, something Italian, in which women are posed before such morning windows, making them look resolute and pure and harmless in their secrets, as she looks now.

Wanting not to startle her, he rustles the sheets and breathes into a sigh, then says, Hannah, come back to bed.

Oh hello. She turns to face him. Though he can't see her features clearly, he hears in her voice that she must be smiling. And probably wondering, too, at his waking so early; mornings after his late nights at work, he rarely stirs before ten.

Go later, he says, touching her pillow. Come back here to where someone loves you. He palms wrinkles from the sheet on the vacant side and thinks he feels the last of her warmth there.

As she comes around the bed towards him her bare feet sound little slaps on the hardwood floor, and then she sits on the smoothed area of sheet and bends to kiss his forehead.

He knows she won't come back, but even this is nice. His fear, which flickers briefly, is always the same, that he might once ask too much and be refused. But despite that fear's persistence, just yesterday he was considering asking everything of her. Marriage. Not now, not today, maybe not even soon, but sometime. There is love between them, this he knows, his for her, hers for him.

She combs through his hair with her fingers, and says, I'm sorry I woke you.

He hears a tenderness in her voice that touches him, makes him think of rare and private treasures. I'm not. He sends both his hands up the ribs of her back, the way she likes. Come on back. Then you won't be sorry anymore. He knows he’s pushing it now.

But Dutch will be, and then I will be. Her voice remains low and kind. You know how hot today will get. She pulls away then, stands up, and bunches her bristly thick hair at the nape of her neck.

I know, he murmurs. Just thought I'd try. Can't fault a guy for trying. He thinks of the horse standing at the end of its paddock, stamping impatiently, leaning into the fence, head bobbing, waiting for the first sight of her. At that sight he'll nicker loudly, joyously, and begin his dance, the trotting back and forth, chin tucked into his chest, never still a second until she’s through the gate and inside the fence with him. He's seen the courting dance often enough to know that the big bay loves her much as he does, without reserve.

But it seems the horse's wordless claims on her are made so easily, forthrightly, and that she never questions them. There’s no fear of refusal eddying at the edges of equine love. One time she'd joked that, of course, her horse came before everything, that he'd built up a solid ten years of seniority. Never done a thing more hurtful to her than accidentally step on her foot, which was her fault, she'd said, for being in the way. For a while he'd been jealous of their attachment and then embarrassed about those feelings, but both had passed as the ease and the primacy of her and the horse’s commitment became something like inspiration to him.

How was last night? she asks. Slow, like you thought it would be?

So slow. He peers into the dark cavern of the bar where he works and smiles, then says, But actually, no. Had some interesting company to break it up a little. The interesting company, a woman, had come in early and sat at the service-end of his bar, drank down Salty Dogs like water and smoked a pack of cigarettes. Talked straight through till closing. Her name was Lorna, he says, and she will make a story for later.

Hannah, starting to turn away, stops and looks back. Check on that. We're due for one. She stands twisting her hair and smiles down at him. A good one?

For sure. At first the woman had seemed ordinary, anybody's wife or mother, with some crow's feet and grey-streaked hair in tight, probably perm-curls and no reticence about saying anything at all. But that would be only the story’s starting point. A very thirsty and hungry social worker from Chicago who didn't feel like being social. At least not with her own kind.

You ever tried it? he thinks of the woman coming back with when he wondered why she wasn't out running with her own conference crowd. Well, don't! she said, her laugh throaty and sincere. Don't ever spend twenty-four hours a day for three days with a bunch of social workers. He’d shot her his standard bartender wink and told her he’d remember that. Now he is remembering her.

Hannah has let her hair go to put her hands on her hips, striking a playful pose. Which kind of social worker was she?

Which kind?

The cute kind or the other?

He smiles broadly and fans his legs across the mattress, watching the sheet ripple over them. The other kind.

For the social worker’s Salty Dogs he’d mixed the vodka and grapefruit juice, giving the glass rims an extra turn in the salt, and talked social work and college degrees and the state of the world with her. Several times he lit her cigarettes, a thing he does for customers and their tips. A couple of times, on into the evening, he joined her, a thing he doesn't often do, lighting up one of his own, and they smoked together, a couple of buddies sharing an ashtray on a slow night in a bar. He sees himself, late in the shift, as he laid his palms against the bar and arched his back to stretch away the hours of standing.

You'd let me know, Hannah says and, through the sheet, catches hold of one of his toes, if a convention of the cute kind were in town, right?

I'd call right away.

The first night he and Hannah slept together, the night they met over a year ago, he thought for sure it was just one of those things, some one-nighter fun after a wedding party where they'd each known no one else. He thought that because the next morning he woke to find her up and out of bed in the dawn, fully clothed, prowling his room, hunting something. Car keys, she whispered. He figured she'd awakened sober, maybe embarrassed, and just wanted to get away from him. I have to go. He thought he was dreaming it, it seemed so surreal. Get home before it gets hot. Would she melt if she stayed, he wondered. I have a horse, she said as if that would explain everything, but then added, It's no fun to ride in the beating-down sun. Then she came over to the bed and, standing quietly, looked down at him, hands on her hips. You're younger than I thought last night. How old are you, Clark? Twenty-eight, he told her right out, then immediately wished he'd made himself five years older. But she only nodded.

He didn’t tell her that night that Clark was his last name and not his first.

He watches her now cross to the bathroom and close the door. Despite their year of familiarity and intimacy, she still, always, closes the bathroom door. Vestigial need for privacy, she used to say in her own defense, shutting the door; now she just shuts the door. He hauls himself up to sitting, tucks the sheet around his waist and reaches over to his jeans for cigarettes and the lighter. Out the window the sky is clear of clouds, and against it the sling-shot tree seems like a movie prop added from somewhere, so perfect and still are its leaves. Sometimes, in bed together, they imagine themselves tucked into an elastic sling attached to the tree, cocked taut by some global force, and wait to be flung to wherever they've decided to go: the top of Peru, Alaska in summer, the Norwegian fjords, places neither a bartender nor a florist has ever been.

Her sounds from the bathroom, the flush, the running water, the toothbrush on teeth, faint scraping of jars on a glass shelf, come out to him as he smokes and stares out the second story window. The room is large, with windows on three sides. No matter the time of day, there is always good light. Out the east window he see that the sun, not yet up, is already pushing its light, with its heat, into the morning; she’s right to go now in what coolness this day offers. He’ll sleep again after she leaves, he knows, and when he awakes much later, the sling-shot tree will be itself again, its leafy branchess absolutely still in mid-day heat.

Hannah hadn’t left a thing, not so much as a hairpin, that first night at his apartment, and he knew only her first name. His grandmother told him when he was little that if visitors left something behind it meant they wanted to come back, but Hannah left him nothing more than her name and what he thought he remembered, vaguely, might be the name of the street she lived on. So, two days after that night, he had to walk down the street he thought she'd named and look for a house where a florist who kept a horse might live. He went on no pretext at all, only on the truth that he wanted to see her again.

The second he saw it, he knew it was hers. In a neighborhood of newer up-scale brick ranch houses, it was an old two-story stone place set back on a huge green and well tended lot. There were beds and pots of flowers everywhere with a thriving vegetable garden to the side. In the front yard of the house stood a strange-looking forked tree. He’d never known anyone who lived in such a house; all his current friends lived in shared condos and furnished apartments and rental houses with parched, weedy yards.

Hey, Clark! Hello there! she called, coming around the outside of the house as he stood knocking at the front door. I'm around here. Got my horse staked in back.

With a big straw hat at the back of her head and wearing flowered shorts with a bright yellow halter-top that showed off her lovely shoulders and the sharp definition of her collarbones, she looked terrific I couldn't call because I... He didn't dare to say out loud that even though his fingers remembered the curve and weight of her breast in his hand, he hadn't known her last name to look it up in the phone book. I just wanted to say hi and… He looked around again, more closely, suddenly cautious that there might be a man somewhere there. I hope I'm not interrupting anything. He knew so little and craved knowledge of so much more. What would she do with the truth, he wondered, that he'd spent the last two days moving through a subterranean tunnel with no open end in sight, thinking about her and their floodlight night together. The memory of her was all he’d been able to see, white illuminated by black light. He didn't like it down in the darkness and didn't want to go back the way he'd come, back to a life cast in twilight. But, standing there in her yard in what seemed like her own private acre of sunshine, he could no more imagine getting any of that out in words than he could imagine vaulting onto a circus horse and galloping around the ring in front of her.

She cocked her head and her eyes were wide open in the shade of the hat. I was just thinking that I could use some help managing the horse, she said. Come on around.

The horse, he saw, needed no management whatsoever. It was quietly eating grass in a sunny section of the wide lawn, tethered to a tree by a long rope. Down behind him, three hundred yards, stood a small barn, in the same stone as the house, and a corral surrounding it.

That's Dutch. Hannah gestured to the grazing horse.

Nice-looking, he said, nodding.

You know horses, Clark?

Absolutely nothing. They laughed, the ice broken.

I didn't know anything at all when I got him, she said. He had to teach me everything.

In the shade of one of the three enormous backyard oaks, they settled on red and yellow-painted Adirondack chairs to drink cold beers and watch the horse graze.

Why'd you get a horse, if you didn't know anything about them? He was enjoying the shade, the beer and the easy feel of being there.

Got him in a fire sale.

What?

Mm. She smiled and shrugged. There used to be a stable down the street. She motioned in the opposite direction from which he'd come earlier. They boarded horses and gave riding lessons to all the little girls in this part of town. Then one night the barn caught fire and burned. She was talking to him but stared at the horse as she spoke. Mr. Weeks, the guy who ran it, was there in time to get some of the horses out. He ran them out of the barn and let them go. Then went back for more.

He imagined the smoky scene, terrified horses and one man trying to save them. Some died, though?

Yeah, a lot. Five or six. She looked down into her lap. It didn't smell so good around here for a long time.

Did you see it burn?

She shook her head. Slept through the whole thing. But when I woke up in the morning my room was smoky, and when I looked out the window there was a horse standing in my front yard. Under the tree. She looked up into the sky then, as if, he thought, to clear the smoke and smell from her memory.

Geeze. It was a gruesome story, hard to tell. He could see that in her face, heard it in the scratchiness of her voice. He thought to stop her, but she went on.

Mr. Weeks only leased the place, didn't own it, and he didn't have great insurance. She raised her eyebrows and looked across to the barn. He was finished.

Poor guy, he thought and studied the saved horse, tail swishing, quietly intent on the grass. He looked different to him now. So, the horse…

He liked me.

He laughed, not knowing if she meant the horse or the man, and swatted at the largest fly he'd ever seen when it landed on his arm.

It was sort of like keeping a stray dog, she said, except I paid a hundred dollars for him. That morning I put him in my barn there and fed him some grass clippings and carrots and patted his head. She was looking over to the horse, too, who was doing a fine job of mowing her grass. I'd never paid attention to a horse's eyes before, you know? He had such nice eyes, Dutch did. But he seemed so sad and, well… she paused, smiling, burned out. They laughed only a little.

Pretty big, as strays go, he said. Horses had always seemed gigantic to him, in a class with moose and elephants and Brahma bulls.

She nodded. It took me a couple of days to catch up with Mr. Weeks, to tell him where his horse was. All the survivors had scattered—some had gotten miles away. He watched her watch her toes wiggle inside her sandals and felt acute pangs of desire. Well, when I found him, old Leonard Weeks said, 'I got no place for horses now. Gimme a hundred bucks, lady, and you can keep him.' She swatted at the fly too.

Just like that? And you gave him the hundred bucks?

I did. She looked over, right at him then. Now, when I think about it, I don't think he was serious.

But you got the horse.

I did.

For several moments they sat looking at each other, then both turned towards the horse's sudden squeal. He was stamping furiously and biting at his side.

The horseflies are terrible this year, she said and pulled a pump can marked insecticide from under her chair. This'll get 'em!

He watched her spray the horse’s legs, his underbelly. When she was back in her chair and had taken a long pull on her beer, he asked, How long have you lived in this house?

Looking over his shoulder back towards the house, she said, Always, and smiled, as if in salute to it. It was my grandparents' house, and they raised me.

Amazed, he blurted, My grandma raised me! and heard himself sound like a little kid exclaiming over a birthday gift. He took a breath and then made his voice lower and more matter-of-fact, said, from when I was eight. His parents had died within weeks of each other, cancer and a car accident. He wondered about hers but didn’t ask, and she volunteered nothing.

Shoes tied, Hannah comes towards the bed. Again he thinks of the Italian movie, these frames of her approaching him. Her movements are fluid and sure, as if directed, and he wonders if there is any uncertainty in her life at all. Once he’d mentioned marriage, just joking, that they ought to get themselves hitched. It had been a frigid January night and they'd been playing gin rummy and drinking scotch late into the winter blackness. They’d both laughed at his joke, but then she followed by asking what he thought he’d get with an old bag of a wife like her. Why, everything! he'd boomed, exaggerating it, and made her laugh more.

But he does think of it sometimes, their marrying, not joking but never voicing it either. He thinks he could ask her, that he might. Every time it stops there, though, with the question that always comes next: What would Hannah be getting in that bargain? And its answer every time: A bartender who hasn't even turned thirty, with no more idea of what he wants to do or be than he had as a child playing in the dirt while his grandmother snapped beans on the porch. But his love, his desire for Hannah is concrete, a reality, the first he has known. In the moments he allows himself to think of asking her, he believes that their marriage would generate more realities, like a cell dividing and those two halves dividing again, then again. There is no denying that in this last year purpose, real purpose, has come into his life, and he can almost feel its healthy dividing and growing as he lives in tandem with the woman he loves.

He’s lighting a second cigarette when she comes out of the bathroom, naked still, her hair plaited in a braid that hangs half-way down her back. Oh, lady, he says, hearing his ragged voice, want for her flooding him.

She glances towards him on her way to the dresser. I can't believe you're still awake. What time did you get in?

He holds up three fingers and blows smoke high into the air and watches as she slips on underwear, fastens a bra, pulls up knee socks, tugs a t-shirt over her head and finally steps into her jeans. All these things he knows she can do in her sleep. Done it lots of times, she’s told him, especially in the dark of winter mornings. Now, she pulls on an old blue workshirt while moving towards the chair.

Slipping a foot into a sneaker, she looks over at him, pauses, and says, as she so often does, Clarksville, you gotta stop that, you know? But her voice carries no real conviction, and whenever she calls him Clarksville he knows she isn’t all that serious. Occasionally, sitting out in the back yard, she'll even smoke a cigarette with him.

He is trying to cut down though. It’s the job, he reasons, to himself and to her, that keeps him smoking: the waitresses lighting up in the lulls, customers puffing away over their drinks, the long hours of empty conversation and wiping water marks off the mahogany bar. He pictures the social worker, Lorna was her name, as she looked last night, boozy and confessional, but still in control, smoking a non-stop string of Marlboro Lights. There was a husband, and three children, she told him.

But you won't stop, will you? Hannah bends over to tie shoelaces, not even bothering to look at him for an answer.

And you should marry me, but you probably won't. There’s time for all that, he thinks as he watches her bent over her shoes. There’s time.

In the half-light of dawn she crosses the room to take the cigarette from him, tamps it out while he watches. Go back to sleep, she tells him. We can talk tonight. I'll be home by six. The greenhouse and florist shop are hers, too, more hand-me-downs from her grandparents. Or do you work?

I work, he says and considers calling in sick. When she bends to kiss him he smells hay and horse in the thin threads of the old workshirt. Have a good ride, he says, extending his neck to return her kiss. We’ll have tomorrow together. Matching days off for both of them.

She leaves the room soundlessly, as if she might think him already asleep.

When he finally told her that his last name, and not his first, was Clark, she’d looked embarrassed. Then, maybe to even up the honesty score, she told him she was forty. A damn good forty, he’d thought, momentarily broadsided by the spirit and passion of the lovemaking two nights before. He remembers looking at her then, at the tanned, freckled skin above her haltered breasts and into her unblinking eyes, and reaching down inside for breath. However old she was, he’d wanted her again then, and there, in the grass the color of her eyes. But he waited too long, looking at her, and lost the chance to tell her how good her forty years looked to him. He’d felt stupid and lost in that moment. And then she told him she had a twenty-two year old daughter.

It sounded like a parry to him, or her defense, and he’d come back with, So, am I supposed to say now, 'Please introduce me'? That was too harsh and he’d been immediately sorry, but hadn't been sure how to take it back. The only thing he knew right then was his craving for the slight, wiry, competent woman sitting with him and not for a twenty-two year old version of her somewhere.

No, no, she'd said quickly. I just wanted you to know, you know, what you've come into.

He’d taken that to mean that there was no man in her life, or at least not a single, special one, and that she was giving him a big, green flashing-go light.

After a moment he gets out of bed and goes to stand by the window that looks down into the back yard, waiting to see her again, to watch her on the way to the barn. Through the open window he hears her call the horse's name and hears the exultant answering whinny. He sees Dutch begin his dance and then sees Hannah materialize before them both, face to the horse, back to the house and him.

After the fire, the stable down the road was never rebuilt; instead, the sixteen acres on which it sat were subdivided into half-acre lots and sold, houses built. Just as Hannah's place is the only one like it in this end of town, her horse is the only one around. Large animals are a thing of the past in this neighborhood, zoned out of the area and to the far side of the reservoir. All except for the grandfathered-in Dutch, who gets to stay. He watches Hannah carry out a flake of hay and a bucket of brushes, and thinks, senority, the horse has lots of seniority.

He teases himself with the thought of bringing it up tomorrow, her day off and his, their getting married. Or not. He doesn’t know, is hesitant to give it real thought. What he does know is that after so many clueless years, keenly, painfully almost, he’s come to think he might finally know what he wants.

Watching her run the currycomb along the horse's back, he thinks of lighting another cigarette but hears an echo of her saying that he should stop smoking. Well, he tells himself, he could strike a deal. With himself. If she’d marry him, he’d do it, like that, cold turkey. And not even mention the deal to her. A signing bonus, a pledge, an honor.

II: Shifts

It must be some part other than his eyes that recognizes her before she gets all the way in the door, because when finally it registers who this is and he goes to flash her a smile, he finds one already working the width of his face.

Hey, there! Lorna calls out, saluting, striding like a colonel towards one of the high swivel chairs at his bar. Here you are, working again. She’s wearing different clothes, khaki slacks and a summer-weight navy sweater today, but her hair is the same, the tight curls. The lights in her dark eyes flicker, then flash.

He palms a cocktail napkin into place before her and stands back at attention, saying, Had your fill of social workers for another day? His hand floats above clean rocks glasses, ready at her signal, and his smile, he finds, is still living a life all its own.

Once settled into the padded vinyl of the high bar chair, the same one she set up shop in the night before, Lorna digs into her purse and pulls out a pack of Marlboro Lights, rattles it near her ear. And none of them care for smoking, either! She taps one out and lights up, then nods towards the bottles in the well in front of him. Salt one of those puppies for me, will you? I'm ready. She rakes fingers through her hair, drops her head backwards into a lolling neck roll and exhales smoke, all in a single movement. Then, her head snapping forward, she says, Plus, I'm really hungry! And just like that, she has snapped this dragging night into something like hyper-speed.

For no reason Clark, or anyone else, has been able to name, business has been crawlingly slow this week at Flaherty’s. So odd for this time in the summer, everyone there agrees, especially with a conference going on at the big hotel complex across the highway. Customers—wallets they all call them—have been scarce, making the hours of a shift stretch out and seem endless to servers and bartenders alike. Like last night, the first three hours of that shift distended themselves into deadly boredom. Times like that, most any animated, friendly face can ripple some life into a dead bar. From the minute this one came through the door at hour four, though, things changed. Her face charged up with spirit and force, her whole-body metabolism revving off some tap of hot-wired current, she seemed to be packing the power to change a life. Or at least the shift. He hadn’t been wrong.

So now, tonight, with her and her electric self again sitting on the other side of his bar, he thinks if she stays only long enough to throw back a couple of Dogs and smoke some cigarettes, have a sandwich or something, he’ll make it through his last few hours no problem. Shift salvation.

Kitchen still open? I'm so hungry! She looks past him and around the corner towards the dining room and kitchen, then around the bar itself. Gee, somebody die in here or something? Run off all your business?

You'd think so, he says, mixing her drink but watching her concentrate on the flowing vodka and juice. She stares at them so hard he thinks straws might pop out of her eyes to start sucking up the stuff before he’s through. People don't ask for these much anymore, you know. He sets it before her. The salt, I guess.

Only order them away from home. She shrugs, eyes still fixed. Traveler's reward. A pronouncement. It's bad, I know, but I love vodka and I like grapefruit juice, and salt too. Then, she looks up at him, her voice going small and sly, and says as she raises the glass in a toast, Can't hurt you away from home, can it?

Social worker-wife-mom, whatever, and however ordinary she looks, he finds this one a pretty salty dog herself. Last night, with her non-stop drinking and smoking and talking, she shot sparks into this dead bar, set fire to those stacked up dull, dry hours of his, and saw to it he’d gone home smiling. Now, on yet another slow night, here she is again, ready to pick up where they left off. But without last night’s shaky start.

He shook a Marguerite and drew a beer, placed them on the service pad, folded over the order slip, and said to the waiting waitress, Here you go, Jen.

Just don't know if I can handle this rush. Jen rolled her eyes as she centered the two drinks on the bar tray balanced on her other palm. She had only two tables, two people at each.

Give a yell if you can't keep up! he called after her, aware of the the woman drinking Salty Dogs watching them. He glanced over at her and shrugged.

So, how come you're here tending bar? the woman asked him.

Oh, just lucky, I guess, he said while doing a kind of push-up against the bar, two pumps to stretch out the stiffness in his back. It was his standard reply to that question.

Naw, really, she persisted. This your night job?

This is my job job, he told her and saw the half-resigned nod. He was used to customers asking him about himself; personal, probing, juicy things were what they always wanted to know in the moment, looking for details they could forget later. All part of it: a bartender's life was fair game for a night's entertainment. Wallets always seemed to think they were paying for it, and in a way, he guessed they were. The longer someone sat at his bar and the more the two of them talked, the deeper they probed and the bigger the tip got to be. Seemed fair: they paid in proportion: time and tidbits of his life in exchange for dollar bills. Along with, of course, the given that they were also paying him to listen to the facts or the fictions of their lives.

With another slow night going and the Salty Dog woman the lone person sitting barside, he leaned against the padded edge and asked her. So what do you do?

Social worker, she said. Here for the conference, nodding towards the door, in the direction of the Riviera Hotel across the highway. He thought she didn't sound altogether thrilled about that as she got quiet, smoked, and worked on her drink. After a few minutes, though, she tried again. Married?"

Married to Hannah, the social worker wanted to know. Hannah, who would no more sit on a barstool and make chit-chat with a bartender than heave a rock through the windowpanes of her own greenhouse. He knew she was home that minute, no doubt embedded midway through the biography she was reading. Fascinated by the lives of others, she explained once, because she hadn’t had much of one herself. That, he found fascinating, but when he probed for more she always went quiet.

No. At least not yet.

But in the works?

He looked at her sideways, raises his bartender eyebrows. We’ll see. This week, he knew, Hannah was deep into the musty life and clear-sighted thoughts of Jules Poincaré, mathematician and physicist. In an otherwise unexciting intro to physics course, something had snagged him in Poincaré's theories of point masses and perturbation and chaos, he told Hannah, and he’d never forgotten. She’d never heard of the guy. Tell me, she'd said, about this Poincaré and his theories. And so he had, out in the dusky coolness of the porch that night. He shared, and diagramed, his undergrad understanding of Poincaré's point masses theory: Three spatial objects whose movement is subject only to their mutual gravitational attractions. She’d listened intently, commented, questioned, an apt student. Clearly, the new information delighted her, and in that, she delighted him. A couple of days later, she came home with an ancient mildew-smelling library copy of a Poincaré biography and had been, for several days now, offering up random facts about the man himself and his work.

Who wouldn’t want to be married to someone who was beautiful, self-possessed and so damn smart she could be scary? He wanted right then to be home with her, rather than here playing bartender to a wallet. He wasn’t in the mood for this woman’s line of conversation. He wished she’d drink her drink, leave a decent tip and just be gone. Boredom was starting to look better than submitting to the recreational fieldwork of a vodka-swilling, salt-licking social worker.

He does one of his barside push-ups, looking at her now, and considers how easily Lorna has marched in to reclaim her place. Last night, dismissive at first he has to admit, he'd shot wide of the mark on this one. She’d proven to be worthy entertainment herself. Now he watches her take-no-prisoners approach to the vodka and appreciates it. You'd want to be on her side in a war, he’s thinking, under that command; you'd get through safe for sure, and have some fun to boot. Three kids, you said you've got? he says to her and pictures three crew-cut privates standing at attention, good little soldiers in her army.

He nods when somebody calls down an order from the other end of the bar and thinks of boot camp, a place he'll never see.

Yup, three’s the magic number at our house.

He nods. Kids by the book for her, count 'em, the old All American every-family number of three. Except it’s fewer now, he's read, by almost half a child. He sees them, the three Lorna-issue stair-steps, all with some spark of their own. He delivers beers and rings money into the register, and when he comes back down her way, he says right off, Two boys and a girl. Girl's in the middle.

Hey! Lorna smiles and looks less like the colonel. You're good! The little lines at the corners of her mouth soften with pleasure, the smile dimples her cheeks. Tracie's seventeen, Mike's twenty and Randy turns sixteen in a month.

In this moment she looks proud and unconditionally maternal in her pride. Even sitting in a tall leatherette chair bellied up to a bar, all this way from the burbs of Chicago, having just blitzed her first Salty Dog and smoked a cigarette so fast somebody might've thought she'd eaten it, when someone mentions her kids, she morphs back immediately to looking like their good mother. He drops a menu in front of her and leans back against the breakfront to watch her study it. Hungrily, aggressively. She'd led that Brownie troop and coached a couple seasons of peewee baseball, he can see it. Maybe had to bail the older boy out of jail once for getting caught smoking pot or shoplifting or something, made sure it was the last time. All there, it was visible in the streaks of grey through the curls, her extra ten pounds and the lines at the corners of her mouth and eyes. Twenty—that would have made you a child bride and mother, he says, another old bartender line, except that this time he means it. The body roundness and mother lines, yes, military might, intelligence too, but more, there is more, extra dimensions he can only begin to guess at. They shine through the eyes and sound in the rustle of her voice and crackling movements; he sees there is plenty left that survived diaper drills and birthday parties and parent-teacher conferences, all the marshaling of a domestic life. He wonders if her husband can keep up.

I'll have you know these bones turned forty last year, she says, patting her own cheek. In praise, or defiance.

He smiles and shakes his head, exaggerates disbelief, and reaches for a pad to take down her food order. They look at each other over the menu top, pause to smile and, in the dim light, he sees the full-color storyboard of her home-life, family, friends, work, the house and chores. And around, or under, or in the beating middle of it, there to supercharge it all, are the million glinting sparks of electricity. He’s fascinated, as he’d wound up being the night before, drawn like a child to fireflies, wondering how it is they light themselves up. In the background he hears Ry Cooder on guitar. The intricate fingering comes to him over the restaurant stereo system, one of his own tapes, and it sounds better to him than it ever has.

Couple of shrimp to start, she says to his pad, then looks up, head tilted. I'll have a steak too, she adds, and a baked potato,