Read Orientation for Free Online

I would have to shoot the animal. That’s the only choice, really.” She turned to him. “Isn’t it?”
    He was still smiling, but blinking rapidly. “This man is a killer. He’ll kill again. He has vowed to kill again.” He leveled a finger at her. “You have to stop him from killing again.”
    She shook her head. “I know, but I can’t point a gun at a human being and shoot him. I just can’t do it.” She brightened. “Say, we’re both in this scenario, aren’t we? Why don’t I hand the gun to you?” She batted her eyes. “You’d kill him for me, wouldn’t you?”
    His smile widened for one second and settled into a thin line.
    “All right,” he said, shifting in his chair. “What’s your favorite breed of dog?”
    She hesitated. She had no favorite breed. She didn’t like dogs, and she was about to tell him this when he snapped his fingers.
    “Favorite breed,” he said. “Come on, come on.”
    She selected a breed at random.
    “Okay,” he said. “Okay.” He cleared a spot on the table. Near the wine bottle, a yellow Lab pup mewled adorably, gnawing on a bedroom slipper. Slouched against the candlestick, a man watched indifferently. He was, of course, a child killer, slack-jawed and cruel, with cracked lips and stains on his pants and evil in his black, greasy heart. He was the Last Child Killer. Shoot him, and all children would be safe, but let him live and he would somehow breed and multiply. Shoot the dog, and beloved Labs everywhere would vanish, never to return. Her blind date elaborated on the dire hypothetical consequences, his hands slicing the air and disturbing the candle flame. A fat moth thudded against the window glass next to his head. She watched the moth, the guttering flame, the sheen of flop sweat on her blind date’s forehead.
    And then dessert arrived.
    It was the house specialty. They called it Cuore Inverno—a ball of hazelnut gelato inside a dark chocolate shell, drizzled with syrup of pomegranate and positioned within an immense cut-glass goblet dolloped with crème fraîche and dotted with champagne grapes. This was why she had suggested meeting at this café. She picked up her spoon and leaned forward. The man across from her had fallen silent. “Of course, it’s just a game,” he was saying now. “No biggie.”
    “Right,” she said, gazing into the goblet before her. She gave the ball a sharp whack with the flat of her spoon. Ice cream oozed sweetly from the wound, and she pried into it.
    “It’s just interesting,” he was saying. “What people would do, I mean.”
    She put the spoon into her mouth, sucked on it, and swallowed. She closed her eyes and groaned: “Oh. My. God.” They had figured out a way to keep the gelato cold and soft while encasing it in hard chocolate. She’d been hungry all week, coming off the stomach flu. She had starved herself all day, looking forward to this evening, and it was worth it.
    The man across from her touched his spoon on the table, then left it alone. “Well,” he said. He looked around the café, then back at her. “This was nice,” he said. “Wasn’t it?” She didn’t answer. He watched his blind date work intently on the dessert, watched her finish it, chattering all the while about their dinner together, speaking of it in the past tense, as if this evening had already entered their common memory, as if it had become the story they would tell their friends—the story that he imagined they would both look back upon and laugh about, years from now.
    IV.
    She was buried on a sun-dappled slope of lawn at the edge of the cemetery grounds, near a thin stand of cypress trees. There were five men present: her husband, her grown son, the mortician from the funeral home, the limousine driver, and a Catholic priest recommended by the cemetery people. They all wore dark suits and ties, even the priest, for some reason. And they all had on sunglasses that glinted in the midafternoon sun. They could have been