“Can you put me up for a bit?”

Ben turned back, leaning in the doorway. What is he listening for, what is it that has all his attention? “Since when do you ask?”

“Since it’s been seven years, and unemployed company with no plans is not a good thing. I’ll start looking for a job tomorrow, see about a place to live. Take me a few days.”

“It’ll take longer than that. You better bring all your stuff inside.”

“Jobs and parking spaces, remember?” Farrell said. “I always find something. Canneries, fry cook, hospital work, tend bar. Check out the zoo up in Barton Park. Fix motorcycles. Lay linoleum. Did I write you about that, how I got into the union? Ben, the people you let in your house to lay down your linoleum!”

Ben said, “I could probably get you a guitar class at the university in the fall. Not a master class or anything, but not Skip to My Lou either. It couldn’t be any worse than teaching out of the Happy Chicken Bodega on Avenue A.”

Farrell held out a hand to Briseis, who came and plopped her head in it and went to sleep herself. “I don’t even have a guitar anymore.”

“The Fernandez?” The Ben he remembered stared at him for just a moment, unprotected, always a little startled, and endlessly, maddeningly honest.

He said, “I traded it to the guy who made the lute for me. I had to be sure I was serious.”

“So you actually did something irrevocable.” Ben spoke softly, the fortress face expressionless again. Farrell heard Sia’s voice on the stairs, and under it a younger voice, muddy and sexless with pain.

“Suzy,” Ben said. “One of Sia’s clients, pays her by doing housework. Married to a surfing thug who thinks cancer’s contagious.”

“Is she really a psychiatrist, Sia?”

“Counselor. She has to call herself a counselor in this country.” The voices went into another room, and a door closed. Farrell asked, “Is that how you met? You never exactly said.”