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Jason reached out, crushed the thing in the ashtray and said, “Hey, thanks, dude—even though it really wasn’t a cigarette but just the
fag
end of one.”
    And then Paula was there, her fourth plate of the evening mounded high with angel hair, three-bean salad, and wedges of fruit in five different colors. “So what was that all about? Your cigarette?”
    Jason ignored her, forking up spaghetti. He took a long swig of his beer and shrugged. “Yeah, whatever,” he said finally. “One more fascist doing his job.”
    â€œDon’t be like that,” she said, using the heel of her bread to round up stray morsels on her plate.
    â€œLike what?”
    â€œYou know what I mean. I don’t have to lecture you.”
    â€œYeah?” He let his eyes droop. “So what do you call this then?”
    She sighed and looked away, and that sigh really irritated him, rankled him, made him feel like flipping the table over and sailing a few plates through the window. He was drunk. Or three-quarters drunk anyway. Then her lips were moving again. “Everybody in the world doesn’t necessarily enjoy breathing through a tube of incinerated tobacco, you know,” she said. “People are into health.”
    â€œWho? You maybe. But the rest of them just want to be a pain in the ass. They just want to abrogate my rights in a public place”—abrogate, now where did that come from?—“and then rub my nose in it.” The thought soured him even more, and when he caught the waitperson pussyfooting by out of the corner of his eye he snapped his fingers with as much pure malice as he could manage. “Hey, dude, another beer here, huh? I mean, when you get a chance.”
    It was then that Zinny Bauer made her appearance. She stalked through the door like something crossbred in an experimental laboratory, so rangy and hollow-eyed and fleshless she looked as if she’d been pasted onto her bones. There was a guy with her—her trainer or husband or whatever—and he was right out of an X-Men cartoon, all head and shoulders and great big beefy biceps. Jason recognized them from Houston—he’d flown down to watch Paula compete in the Houston Ironman, only to see her hit the wall in the run and finish sixth in the women’s while Zinny Bauer, the Amazing Bone Woman, took an easy first. And here they were, Zinny and Klaus—or Olaf or whoever—here in the Pasta Bowl, carbo-loading like anybody else. His beer came, cold and dependable, green in the bottle, pale amber in the glass, and he downed it in two gulps. “Hey, Paula,” he said, and he couldn’t keep the quick sharp stab of joy out of his voice—he was happy suddenly and he didn’t know why. “Hey, Paula, you see who’s here?”
    The thing that upset her was that he’d lied to her, the way her father used to lie to her mother, the same way—casually, almost as a reflex. It wasn’t his birthday at all. He’d just said that to get her out because he was drunk and he didn’t care if she had to compete the day after tomorrow and needed her rest and peace and quiet and absolutely no stimulation whatever. He was selfish, that was all, selfish and unthinking. And then there was the business with the cigarette—he knew as well as anybody in the state that there was an ordinance against smoking in public places as of January last, and still he had to push the limits like some cocky immaturechip-on-the-shoulder surfer. Which is exactly what he was. But all that was forgivable—it was the Zinny Bauer business she just couldn’t understand.
    Paula wasn’t even supposed to be there. She was supposed to be at home, making up a batch of flapjacks and penne with cheese sauce and lying inert on the couch with the remote control. This was the night before the night before the event, a time to fuel up her tanks and veg out. But because of him,