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Tony: certainly he had realized he was hiring an unconventional person, someone with a zigzagging past that slalomed his own. She had finished law school, flunked her exams the first time around, gotten sidetracked taking night courses in literature while keeping the books for a Boston electronics store for almost two years, then enrolled in a Harvard summer program she thought would teach her about new computer technology, which instead resulted in her retreat into the works of Jane Austen, followed by the rather unexpected promotion of Marshall to full professor at Benson College, their joyful decision to leave their apartment for a real house, followed by their having the good fortune to meet Tony Hembley at a friend’s summer wedding in the Adirondacks, where she spontaneously joined him at a rickety piano to accompany his accordion-played Cajun rendition of “Bosco Stomp.” More than half the guests were too drunk to understand what a weird spectacle was transpiring, though she and Tony had gotten it entirely: the inexplicable oddity of finding a soul mate in the unlikeliest place at the unlikeliest time, a kind of obligation, naturally, required of those thus blessed. “… Too stupid to pass the law boards,” she had said. “… So couldn’t imagine the rest of my life fastening suspenders to my pants and tying a noose with a rep tie. Just had to switch from Dean Witless to real estate,” he’d replied.
    The house Tony found for them was half an hour from Tony’s own house, twenty minutes from Marshall’s job. The first time she had gone to Hembley and Hembley (Tony’s little joke; he was the sole owner of the business, but he felt he should acknowledge he was aGemini) it had been as a client, the second as a buyer, the third as a prospective employee. “Why don’t you study and take the law boards a second time?” he’d said to her. “Why don’t you get rid of your trust-fund guilt and expand out of your parents’ converted garage?” she’d said. Checkmate: she passed the exam on her second try, then turned her attention to the next challenge and studied to become a real estate agent; he moved into a gargantuan church put up for auction by the Feds that sold far below market value. He had placed two gargoyles above the entranceway, painted the interior with richly pigmented Benjamin Moore historic colors, then written a long letter which was printed in the New York Times , indicting himself, as well as the system, for allowing people to take advantage, at the taxpayer’s expense, of expedient fire sales to unload properties following the collapse of the savings and loan industry. This resulted in his real estate business’s instant notoriety, plus the interest of a local congressman who took the occasion to speak for his constituents as being scandalized by the FDIC practices. The whole business became such a cause célèbre that the first day Sonja went to work for Tony, cameras recorded the employees’ entrance while TV reporters identified her as “a disaffected lawyer moving on to other things in the nineties.” The program ended with a close-up cut to the gargoyles, as a recording of Tony’s Cajun swing played in the background. Truth was, she was not so much disaffected as the repository for other people’s anxious desire to change their lives by moving from one place to another. Many clients appeared in extremis, the hysteria of selling and buying taking on a life of its own, people projecting wildly onto her so that she became their censorious parent, their skeptical employer, the devil himself if she questioned their financial stability. She forced Tony and the business out of her mind and walked upstairs to awaken Marshall.
    “What’s the matter?” he said sleepily, as she rubbed her hand across his shoulders.
    “Why should anything be the matter? I just thought you might want to get up and have some pancakes with me before I go off to work.”
    “Winter,” he