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wouldn’t matter.”
    A man in a black pea coat, shoulders hunched
and head buried in a shapeless hat, trudged past them, outside the
glass. He was so close it startled Ken when he slogged past, almost
ankle-deep in water, sending up heavy sprays of brown water that
nearly reached his knees. For a moment, Ken wondered if it was the
same man they’d passed on the way to the restaurant, the one that
Rose had screamed about. What the devil was that poor man doing out
there?
    He moved relentlessly north against the
current, and an old pick-up truck passed him in the middle lane,
going the other way. The water boiled around its slowly turning
tires, the wavelets already touching the top of the hubcaps.
    “I don’t know what to say, Rose.” It was the
only honest thing he could come up with.
    “Uh-huh.”
    “There was a lot going on. A lot you don’t
understand.”
    She gave him a bland and meaningless smile
and put out her hands as if she was weighing something in each one.
She let the left hand dip down. “Explaining yourself,” she said,
then let the right one dip, “Making excuses.” Then she spread them
into a shrug. “I’ve never been real good at telling those
apart.”
    “I know,” he said, and
heard the anger in his own voice. “I know . It’s just–”
    There was a
tremendous thwack on the glass above Rose’s head. She said “Shit!” and flinched
away, ducking down and covering her head. Ken jumped up and reared
back, almost overturning his chair. He looked up to see a dirty
white mass the size of a human head smashed against the glass. It
held there for a moment, then slid down the entire length of the
window and plunged into the brown water on the sidewalk with a
thick, ugly splash.
    “A bird,” said a gruff voice. Ken spun around
to see the scientist woman standing right behind him, frowning
deeply at the streak of blood and mud on the window. “It was a
bird.”
    “Yeah,” he said. “I see that.”
    Genelle was hovering. “That’s been happening
all day,” she fretted. “This rain is screwing up the poor things.
Or maybe it’s just the wind, I don’t know.”
    “I’m not that hungry,” Rose said. She pushed
away the salad she had barely touched. “Can we go?”
    Ken nodded, glanced at the
check, and peeled a set of bills from his modest roll. “Same here,”
he said, with a glance at the scientist-woman. What as her name?
Armstrong? Armitage? Arm… something . Why did she keep staring at him like
that? “Let’s go home.”
    Rose froze half out of her chair. “Uh,” she
said, and stood up much more slowly. “About that…”
    “About what?”
    “Home,” she said, and
grimaced. “At least, your home.” She looked at him, then at their
observers, and pitched her voice very low. There was more challenge
and less certainty in it this time. “I really, really don’t want to go up there
with… with that…”
    “Maggie,” he said stonily. “You mean
Maggie.”
    “Yeah. It’s …it’s weird, Dad. This whole
thing creeps me out. So I was thinking I could just get a hotel
room down here somewhere, in a nice part of town and everything, so
you wouldn’t have to worry. Nothing scummy, but –”
    “That wasn’t the deal.” he said firmly. He
felt as if he had swallowed a stone.
    “I know,” she said hastily. “I know.” They
were standing at the table now, but not moving toward the door.
Genelle tried to give him change but he shook his head.
    “Keep it,” he said.
    She thanked him and moved away fast. Rose was
back to staring at the storm.
    “You talk about me walking
out on you,” he said. “Abandoning you.” He
didn’t care if the others were listening now or not. “Here’s a
chance to change that. But you won’t even stay in the same house
with me.”
    “It’s not you ,” she said, but he
didn’t believe one word of it. “It’s that – JESUS! What the
hell is that?” She
stepped to the window and put a hand against the glass.
    A roughly