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picks up a pepper shaker and starts turning it over in her hand. She’s more introspective tonight than I’ve ever seen her, which means she’s being quiet for fifteen, twenty seconds at a time. “But whatever I do to myself I keep bouncing back from.”
    I dwell on that a minute. She reaches over and taps my hand once with her fingers. “For a year I spent all my energy trying to make somebody else happy,” she says. “And there was no way. James is brilliant, but he’s burdened, and he’s too focused inward to let any light out.”
    “How the hell did you wind up with him anyway?”
    “I don’t know. But I still miss him. As destructive as that was.”
    “You miss banging your head against the wall?”
    “I guess I do.”
    “Maybe that’s where I come in.”
    Her eyes get wide and she opens her mouth, laughs a little. “Maybe. Hey, I create or I destroy, you know that.” She shakes her head. “Yeah, I wanna make somebody happy. Maybe you. I guess I need that.”
    I feel a little better suddenly.
    “You’re a good guy, Jay.”
    I nod slowly. “Yeah. Whatever that means.”
    And then we’re quiet for a while, looking out the window. They’ve got the oldies station playing in here, and the Supremes come on. “My father’s favorite group,” she says.
    “Really?”
    “Yeah. He always listens to stuff like this, and the Temptations and the Beatles. And Springsteen’s old songs.” She really brightens all of a sudden, a broad smile and wider eyes. “Man, we’d drive to the shore sometimes, in the dead of winter even. They’d sing all the way down the Parkway, my parents, and we’d sit on the boardwalk, out of the wind, and think about summer. This is when I was little. We’d make castles out of snow and sand, freezing our asses off, then get coffee and french fries from McDonald’s.”
    “Wow,” I say, and I feel happier, too, seeing her that way suddenly. But I don’t have memories like that. Not that I can remember.
    “My father loves this stuff,” she says, and she bites her lip and grins right at me. “I know all the songs, man. Big part of my life. The good part.”
    “But it didn’t last?” I hate to ask that, because it may bring her down, but part of me likes to hear about parents crashing. That’s something I can compare to my own life.
    “Part of it lasted,” she says. “We still have that connection.But my father has too many frustrations, being the low man at work and all, and he never learned how to deal with it. So he’d get drunk and smack my mother. Not all the time. But enough.”
    She reaches across and slides her hand against mine, so some of the fingertips are touching. The warmth goes up my arms. “And you?” she says.
    “What?”
    “You know. Where the hell do your parents get off abandoning you?”
    I shake my head. “It ain’t like that.”
    “Oh, no?”
    I let out a major exhale. “Nah. I don’t know. From what I can piece together—you hear this shit from both of them, never straight, just bitching about the other one, but you gotta figure there’s some truth in it, right? They got married right out of high school and they’re both drinking all the time and taking risks. She’s doing drugs, he’s screwing around with other women, there’s lots of arguments over everything. Some days it’s great, but it’s never realistic. I come along. We move all the time; they screw the landlords out of rent; they can’t hold jobs. My father gets big ideas about the lottery and starts going to Atlantic City and betting at Shorty’s on football and basketball and anything. Sometimes he wins big, but … you know. She gets the hell out of here when she can’t take it anymore. But she’s got a kid, right? You just take off? Like my father’s going to just straighten up and take care of me?”
    “He did, though.”
    I nod and look away. “Yeah. He did an okay job. He tried, I’ll give him that much. Screw it. It’s behind me. I’m living for now,