“Does your fiancé have his own apartment?” Hutchins asked.

“He lives with his mother,” Chris said stiffly. “Stewart says the lack of space on Sony makes property very valuable, and the marriage laws are bound to reflect that, but it doesn’t mean…”

“Gee, your fiancé sounds just like my old boyfriend,” Charmaine said, leaning over about as far as she could go. “I mean, there’s gotta be a romantic guy around somewhere.”

The waiter came back with the bottle of sake and four porcelain cups the size of soup bowls.

“ ’Scuse me, I gotta go get ready for my number.” She wriggled away between the tables.

“Now there’s a woman whose property value is in the high forties,” Hutchins said, pouring out the sake.

“My wife has large cups, too,” Okee said. Hutchins poured sake on the table. Chris bit her lip. “They are not painted and made of…” Okee stopped and searched for a word. His face was screwed up into that odd expression again. He looked like a newborn baby about to cry.

“Porcelain?” Chris said calmly, picking up the empty sake cup and handing it to Okee. “These cups are made of a kind of glazed clay called porcelain.”

“Porcelain,” he said, the two lines above his nose deepening. “My wife would like these cups.”

Chris passed the empty cup to Hutchins so he could fill it. Now he was the one with the odd expression, and she didn’t seem to be any better at interpreting his than Okee’s.

“Cups,” he said thoughtfully, and poured some more sake on the table.

“I didn’t know you were married, Mr. Okeefenokee,” Chris said, mopping up sake with her napkin.

“Yes,” he said, and his face screwed up again. He drank down his bowlful of sake in one swallowless gulp and set it in front of Hutchins. “My wife and I drink…”—he said an unpronounceable word with enough s’s in it to defeat Molly’s lisp—“out of cups like these. It is better than sake.”