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day like today . . . I get out of breath.” She was quiet for a 31
    GILLIAN ROBERTS
    while, and I adjusted down to her rhythm of speech and waited in silence, as unnatural as that felt.
    “I thought this disease was a big nothing when I was warned.” Her breathing was audibly labored. She pulled hard and paused between sentences to refill her lungs. “I was wrong. It’s a big something.”
    I was having coffee with a woman being slowly asphyxiated, and I didn’t know how to respond. Yes, it was a big something, a huge, deadly something. But how could I say that without sounding fatuous? I nodded, and opened my mouth in the hopes that appropriate words would swim into it. They didn’t, so I shut it again, hoping instead that my dropped jaw had not signified my stupidity, but instead, sympathy and horror on her behalf.
    “I’m not dying, in case you think that.”
    “No. I . . . That’s good . . . I’m glad.” I wished I could rewind the tape and go back to standing outside her creamy front door. I wanted this first meeting not to count, as my students would put it. Second time through, I’d have a ready explanation for my presence, and wise words about bad lungs. And maybe even a handle on what I was doing here.
    She sipped coffee, then put down the cup. “I expected a man,”
    she said. “I spoke with a man.” She sounded as if we’d pulled a fast one, swapping an inferior product for the real thing.
    That didn’t endear me to her, but I wasn’t about to be sidetracked. I fired up my speech center again, and strengthened my backbone. “I work with Mr. Mackenzie,” I said. “We’re partners.”
    I was glad she had challenged me, because I get a kick saying things like that out loud.
    The soft noise of her breathing filled the room while she decided whether I was telling the truth, and even if so, whether she found me acceptable. “I suppose you’ll do,” she finally said.
    The incapacitated fragility, while real, barely covered a will of steel and a temperament to match it, and it was so forcible, I could almost see the metal shimmer through her skin, like an undercoat of armor.
    She cleared her throat. It seemed a major production number.
    Then she spoke again. “The problem is, my son is getting married.”
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    CLAIRE AND PRESENT DANGER
    I was sorely tempted to ask whether her son also considered his impending marriage a problem. He certainly hadn’t looked that way, taking his future bride’s hand, speaking in the plural about leaving. But Claire Fairchild had hired us, so I used my mouth to sip coffee, not speak. Java in the mouth, in lieu of foot.
    “Let me restate that. The problem is not the idea of marriage.”
    She paused, breathed in and out, and continued. In a way, it was nice. There was time to consider each sentence already spoken, and to plan the following one. It made for efficient, thoughtful and, most of all, meaningful, communication—or should have.
    “The problem is his fiancée,” she said.
    I nodded, waited, then had to prompt her because she apparently considered that enough. “And why is she a problem?”
    Claire Fairchild planted a blue-eyed permafrost stare on me. It was more efficient than the air-conditioning in lowering the temperature. “I don’t know who she is. Appeared from nowhere. Nobody knows her.”
    I was appalled, but not entirely surprised. This was traditional Philadelphia, the city of Who Are Your Parents? For the benefit of non-Philadelphians, the translation of Claire Fairchild’s so-called problem would be: Nobody in Philadelphia—nobody in the right echelons of Philadelphia families—knew this woman’s family.
    Therefore, nobody knew how to rank her, and nobody knew whether she could be given her social green card.
    But that attitude was an infamous part of the Philadelphia of long ago, when your ancestry mattered more than who you yourself were. Do not ask for whom the Liberty Bell rang. Those people were tone deaf.
    This was the