“ ’Scuse me,” Charmaine said. She had put on her headdress, which consisted of giant red-lacquered chopsticks stuck at various angles into her brass-colored topknot. If she bent over Hutchins like she’d been doing before, she would do herself an injury. “Can I borrow Mr. Fenokee for a minute? The girls in the show all want to meet him.”

Okee took another incredibly large swallow of sake and followed her through the crowd.

“Don’t you think we should go with him?” Chris said, watching the bobbing red headdress work its way through the crowd.

“He’ll be all right. How did you know he was talking about the sake cups and not Charmaine’s, um, selling points?”

She reached for her cup of sake. “Just because they were the first thing that sprang to your mind…”

He put his hand over hers. “I’m serious. How did you know for sure he was talking about the sake cups?”

“Because he asked me at breakfast what the coffee cups were called, and I told him they were cups, so I knew he knew the word, and he doesn’t seem to be able to absorb more than one meaning of a word.”

His grip tightened on her hand. “Give me an example,” he said urgently.

“All right. Yesterday at breakfast we had rolls, and he asked me what they were called. When I told him, he took two of them and went out and gave them to Molly and Bets. ‘Here roll,’ he said, and Bets said, ‘We asked if you could get us a role. In the alien movie. Not this kind of roll,’ and threw it at him.”

“A regular Shirley Temple. Did you try to explain what a role in a movie was?”

“Yes, I told him there were two words that sounded like roll and that Bets meant an acting job in a movie, but I could tell he didn’t understand. He started nodding and smiling the way he always does when I tell him he’s got to stop buying things.”