Ben shrugged in the old lopsided way, ducking his head crookedly, like a fishing bird. He began to say something; but Sia was talking to the woman, and the slow, near-wordless pulse of her voice in the other room was beginning to wash Farrell gently back and forth, here and gone and here. With each lulling swing across the darkness, something he almost knew about her left him, the stone woman with the dog’s head last of all. Ben was saying, “So I thought you might as well be working at something you enjoyed.”

Farrell sat up and said with urgent clarity, “No, teeth. A purple in the back seat with teeth.” Then he blinked at Ben and asked abruptly, “What makes you think I enjoy teaching?” Ben did not answer. Farrell said, “I mean, I don’t not enjoy it. I dig anything I do well enough. All that stuff, those stupid little jobs, I just don’t want to start liking any of them more than enough. I like them stupid.”

Then Ben smiled suddenly and lingeringly, the comforting phosphorescence of suppressed delight flaring around him once more. Farrell said, “Now you’re thinking about my goddamn hat with the earflaps.”

“No, I’m thinking about your goddamn briefcase, and your goddamn incredible looseleaf notebook. And I’m thinking about how you could play, even then. I never did understand how that notebook could go with that music.”

“Didn’t you?” Farrell asked. “Funny.” He turned on his side, to Briseis’ considerable distress, and burrowed down in the quilt, resting his head on his arm. “Ah, lord, Ben, the music was the only thing that ever came naturally. Everything else I had to learn.”

Chapter 3

Nothing in Farrell’s considerable experience of frying eggs and hashbrowns had quite prepared him for Thumper’s. His work here was the opposite, the denial, the absolute negation of cooking: it consisted almost entirely of reheating dormant fruit pies, periodically adding water to the stewing vats of coffee, chili, and something orange, and filling red plastic baskets with sandy gobbets of fried rabbit, prepared in Fullerton in accordance with a secret recipe and delivered by truck twice a week.