Now this fearsome figure stood framed in the doorway to his duplex. He wore neither shoes nor socks and his bare legs showed at the bottom of a dirty kitchen apron. He'd draped a diaper over his right shoulder. It was streaked- recently-with the oranges and greens and off-browns of strained baby food. He held his ten-month-old daughter Rachel in the crook of his left arm. She had somehow wriggled out of one of her pink baby booties, and just as Glitsky opened the door, she'd hooked it over his ear.

"Where's a camera when you really need one?" Hardy asked.

Frannie stepped forward. "Here, Abe. Let me hold her."

In what had become a largely unacknowledged weekly ritual, the Hardys' Wednesday Date Night was ending here again. Since Rachel's birth, Frannie couldn't seem to get enough of holding her. She was turning forty soon and their children were both teenagers. Maybe she and Dismas should have another baby. There was still time. Just. If Dismas wanted one, too. Which he did like he wanted cancer.

He couldn't decide if the visits to hold Rachel were a good thing because it satisfied Frannie's need to hold a baby, or a bad thing because it made her want one of her own even more, but either way, they'd been coming by now regularly enough that there was usually some kind of dessert waiting for them when they got there.

Glitsky shrugged the baby over to Frannie, immediately grabbed at the bootie.

"You ought to leave it," Hardy begged. "It's so you. And that pink goes just perfect with the puke on the diaper."

Glitsky glanced down at his shoulder. "That's not puke. Puke is eaten, regurgitated, expelled matter. This"-he touched the diaper-"is simply food that didn't quite get to the mouth."

"Guys! Guys!" Frannie whisked the diaper over to her own shoulder. She slipped the booty over Rachel's foot, then fixed each of the guys with a look. "Fascinating though these distinctions are, maybe we could leave them just for a minute."