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Anthony sent you instead."
    "Saint Anthony? You and Buzz are going to get along just great," Sam said softly, almost to himself.
    "Are we meeting Buzz?" she asked, feeling thestrangeness of the words, knowing that they assumed a bit too much, and were jumping the gun.
    "Um," Sam paused. "Sure. If you want to. If you don't have any plans tonight. After we drop off your fridge, you can come with me to Buzz's place. That sucker back there has to go up seven flights. Maybe you could help."
    He glanced at her stout legs. She noticed, and surprised him with a smile.
    "Musicto a tomboy's ear," she practically sang.
    Sam chuckled.
    Thus, two quickly became three. The agnostic, the believer, and the tomboy.
    3
    Donna looked down at her fingers as she sat in the spotless, spartan cab of Sam's pick-up. Her nails were clean and closely clipped, with no nail polish, unlike many of her acquaintances from the old neighborhood. She and Sam had already dropped off her refrigeratorin her folks' garage.
    This is a classy guy, she thought. Breeding was all over him: his walk, his casual preppy clothes, the way he pronounced his words. She was very sensitive to such things, having grown up in a working class neighborhood where few of her peers went to college. Oh, there were always the local community colleges, but these struck Donna as mere extensions of high school, placesto kill time before getting dead end jobs in local factories or retail establishments.
    She had related strongly to a movie that had come out recently, Working Girl, about a lower class Brooklyn girl who used cleverness and gumption to whittle her way into the professional world by posing as her high-class boss. It was not that Donna was ambitious for a professional career–she wasn't. She justwanted to improve herself, to marry and raise children in the suburbs somewhere, anywhere, where prosperity itself seemed to sprout like strong grass from excellently-watered lawns. She was a devout Catholic, and getting married and having children was her ideal.
    After high school, Donna had briefly attended community college in pursuit of a teaching degree. Her father, a plumber, had not beenable to help much with the expense, and she had been forced to cut back on classes and take a part-time job as a clerk at a small accounting firm on Madison Avenue in Lakewood. She was good with numbers, and conscientious, and was soon offered a full-time position, so she quit school altogether. Only five accountants worked at the firm, and the only one who showed any romantic interest in her wasmarried. And he wasn't Catholic.
    Donna was neither plain nor pretty. She had been asked out several times during her freshman and sophomore years of high school. After all, most guys were average-looking and there was something very approachable about Donna Beck. ( Beck was an Americanized version of Becci, which had been shortened by a bureaucrat on Ellis Island in the late 1800s…) She almostalways turned down the boys, unless she particularly liked them. The ones she did go out with only wanted to do what Donna called the Three Bad Things: Get Drunk, Have Sex, Do Drugs.
    Soon she developed a reputation as a prude, and the boys left her alone. Because she played sports, a rumor began that she was a lesbian. But Donna had turned down the lesbians, too, so the rumor died. By the endof high school, her classes, athletics, and a handful of wholesome friends kept her comfortably insulated from the Three Bad Things. After high school and the move to Rocky River, she lost touch with her friends.
    Were they really friends?
    Why had she said no so many times to the Three Bad Things? At first, she wasn't quite sure–her refusals came like violent bolts from her gut. Then, as everyonediscovers while growing up, she had to decide why she was saying no. She needed to adopt the Three Good Things and make them her own. She inwardly called them Sobriety, Chastity, and Clarity.
    She had also consulted often with her