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but she’d already turned around and was rushing away from me.
    When I returned from the bathroom, Rex was alone at the booth, talking into his recorder. He clicked it off, stuck it in his bag, and made room for me. There were two shots at the table, one in front of my glass and one in front of his. “What’s this?” I asked, sitting down.
    â€œA treat.” He was grinning. I knew we’d both be drunk very soon. And what the hell. I thought of poor Ella’s teary eyes and lifted the shot to my mouth. Rex did the same. “They seem like good people, your student and her boyfriend, but they left rather quickly,” he said after we’d downed them.
    â€œHusband,” I said.
    â€œA little young for that.”
    â€œFor what?”
    â€œFor making up their minds already, don’t you think?”
    â€œI don’t know.”
    â€œIt’s a big decision.”
    â€œEither way,” I said, “I don’t like him.”
    â€œYou just met him, Rachel.” He was surprised and maybe a little defensive. I got a sense of what our arguments might be like if he lived here and we fell in love. “You’re right,” I said.
    â€œYou can’t judge a guy in a couple minutes,” he continued.
    â€œYou’re right,” I said again. And then I couldn’t stop myself, “Come on, Rex, didn’t the bat-guy freak you out?”
    He shook his head.
    â€œJust a little bit? Just a tiny little bit?” I held two barely separated fingers between our faces.
    He held my fingers, my whole hand, and brought it down to the table, leaving his hand on top of mine. “It’s not the people who work with bats or who study them, it’s the bats themselves that scare all fuck out of me.”
    â€œIt’s charming,” I said, “that you’re afraid of them and unafraid to let me know you’re afraid. I like that.” I was feeling the shot already and letting the words tumble from my mouth.
    â€œListen, Rachel,” he said. “I felt like we were on a first date yesterday.” His voice was soft. “I haven’t felt like that, interviewing poets. It’s work, you know. You ask them questions; they tell you what you want to hear. It wasn’t like that with you.”
    â€œI didn’t tell you what you wanted to hear?”
    He smiled.
    â€œWhat part didn’t you like?”
    â€œYou know what I mean.”
    I finished the cider with one long swallow and set the glass down. I smiled back at him. Rex looked at my smile, my mouth, then at the glass. “I’m still thirsty,” he said. “You?”
    â€œDidn’t you say earlier that I was daring?”
    He returned from the bar with cider and dark beer and wanted to talk. There were parts of his life back home he wanted me to know about. He mentioned his new girlfriend, his fourteen-year-old daughter who was just now beginning to hate him, who brooded and got tattoos, who pierced her lip and chin and forehead; and his baby boy, Blake—what words he knew, how the boy clung to Rex’s shoulder when it rained. He talked about the farm, how he met his new girlfriend, how she was their nearest neighbor, acres and acres away, what fate was, how he didn’t know she was a redhead until she removed her funny hat.
    I was the kind of woman a man could do that with; he could be honest about whom he loved, that he didn’t love me, and still I might let him in. Rex was perceptive. He knew this, I could tell—it was in his gestures. While he talked about his life there, his farm, his girlfriend, he leaned closer and closer to me, hand on my knee, on my thigh. And while he talked about his life there, I listened and moved closer to him as well, letting his hand move up my leg. Still, I pictured the baby, Blake, with horribly pink skin, riding a fat gray pig like a horse. I pictured the girlfriend’s red hair spilling out over her thin