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need that’s come upon her. “Yes?” she asks.
    And as tiny as the pop of his eyebrows a few moments ago, there is a brief, quick lift of the corners of his mouth. A minute smile. “You know the answer to that,” he says.
    This is way short of what she needs at the moment. But they made love. He saved her and was gentle with her afterwards, not taking advantage of her vulnerability, not pushing for sex, ready to vanish from his own rooms if she wished and then from her life, but she asked him to stay and he held her and they madelove—beginning with the same impulse in both of them at the same moment—impossible even to say who started it—and he thinks her screams are charming when she comes—he said this just a few moments ago, when she was feeling embarrassed. So all this is enough. For now. This is enough.
    And in the present, Kelly abruptly rises from the side of the bed. She wants to shout something across the years, some denial to her stupid young self, wants to shout that aloud now. But she doesn’t. She struggles to stay silent, to stand perfectly still, and she succeeds. Of course she does. She’s not crazy.
    ∼
     
    Michael has not moved from the side of the bed as Laurie hums in the bathroom. He has stopped kissing Kelly on the Ash Wednesday morning when all that would happen between them truly began. He should start dressing for Laurie, but he is putting on a tuxedo now for Kelly. He steps from the master bedroom cedar closet in their Craftsman house on the Bayou Texar. They’ve moved in at last. The muted pitch to its gabled roof, the exposed but rounded and polished rafters, the redwood shingles: all this feels like him and he appreciates that Kelly has let the house be him inthese things, without his having to persuade her. She is presently campaigning for an Arkansas governor trying to be president who hasn’t got a rat’s-ass chance of the nomination, and later in the evening Michael will watch as Bill Clinton shakes Kelly’s hand with both his and he will watch how Clinton continues to hold that handshake for the longest time, even as the two of them talk on, and Michael will see her looking up into this man’s eyes and on the night when the man wins she will be curled up on their couch with Michael and she will weep and sing along:
Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow
. But now Michael steps out of the closet and he hates wearing this tuxedo and she knows it but he’s doing it for her—he simply pressed his lips tight together when she asked and he saw her eyes go to his lips and he knew she was seeing his feelings there and he knew she knew how he hates dressing up formally but how he’ll do it for her—and now he steps from the closet and she comes to him and looks up into his eyes and she holds his gaze for a moment, smiling faintly, and she straightens his tie. “Thank you,” she says. And no more needs to be said, and he is content. He thinks this is a moment when it is all good. As good as it can be between a man and a woman. He has quietly done this simple domestic thing on her behalf. She says two words to acknowledge that. They look at each other.His tie is straight, though such a thing isn’t important to him and even makes him oddly uncomfortable and she knows it and her little smile says to him she’s all right with his not caring about his tie but he will let it stay straight tonight for her, he’ll even stop before the mirror before he leaves the restroom at the fundraiser and he’ll straighten it himself, on her behalf. And he is not jealous of her joy at shaking Bill Clinton’s hand or of the man holding on too goddam long. He trusts Kelly. He trusts her instinctively and completely.
    And he stops his mind now, as Laurie’s hair dryer roars on the other side of the bathroom door. He stops and he is about to rise and dress in a suit of clothes even more alien to him than that tuxedo. And along the way in this memory he’s just had—in his lingering for just a