“It’s Janet,” she said. “Rossi.” She turned her mouth away from the phone to cough. “I’m sorry if I was rude today. It’s hard for me to talk at work.”

“You weren’t too rude.”

“I hope this isn’t too late to call. You were up this late at the doughnut shop, so I guessed you were a night person.”

“A night person and a day person,” I said. She coughed again and I was going to make a little remark about it, but my sense of humor can get strange sometimes when I’m nervous-I’ve been told that more than once-so I held back. “Where do you work?” I asked her. What I kept myself from saying was, “In which mine?”

“The governor’s office.”

“I saw him on the TV at O’Casey’s last week.”

“He’s running again, so things are a little hectic.”

He should run, I almost said, because I had some kind of instinctive, bone-and-blood dislike for the man, even though he’d been a decent governor up to that point. He should start running at the door of the State House and not stop until he gets to Ixtapa, I had an urge to say. But I was holding on to my comic side with both arms by then.

She said, “I called to see if the dinner invitation is still good.”

“Let me check the calendar.” I picked up my August National Geographic and made the pages flap. “I have a Friday in 2006,” I said. “November.”

“You’re paying me back.”

“Or this coming Friday night. Nothing between, I’m sorry to say… except this Saturday night. Also good.”

There was a long pause then. It wasn’t health-related.

“I can be a little goofy this late,” I said.

“Are you on something?”

“Paint fumes.”

“Oh.”

“That was a joke. There’s a new Vietnamese restaurant on Newbury Street. Diem Bo. It’s a great place if you like that food. Noodles and so on. Shrimp. That coffee they make with all the milk and sugar in it.”