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sprockets, which I liked just enough not to fix. A tomcat and his steady chewed each other’s faces in another booth. In the kitchen, the short-order cook listened to a ball game on a staticky radio. A clean-shaven mugg in suspenders and a bowtie flapped his jaw on the telephone in the wooden booth near the restrooms. His suitcase, open on the floor beside him, was full of brushes.
    Our waitress tossed the rag in his direction. “Hey! Phone’s for paying customers, you chiseler.”
    He covered the mouthpiece. “Aw, go soak your head. I’m doing business here.”
    “Well excuse me, Mr. Rockefeller, but we got other folks here, real paying customers, that might wanna make calls of their own.”
    “Yeah,” I said. “I’m expecting a call.”
    “You can soak it, too, rummy.” Someday soon I was going to revamp the place. Really I was. The shtick had been funny the first few decades.
    “Tell you what. My girl here”—by which I meant Molly—“is in the market for a new hairbrush. A mane like that takes a lot of attention. So give it a rest and after we’re done eating I’ll let her tell you all about it.”
    “That’s square?”
    “As a brick.”
    “Done.” He tossed the phone back on its hook, gathered up his case, and took a booth in the corner. He shouted over to Flo for a plate of hash browned potatoes.
    (“I’m not your girl,” Molly hissed. “Don’t order the hash browns,” I whispered.)
    “Where the hell are we?”
    “Welcome to my Magisterium, kid. My own humble corner of the Pleroma.”
    “Pleroma,” she said, rolling it around in her mouth as though she were knotting a cherry stem with her tongue. (A lesser bo might have gotten sidetracked, wondering if she could do that. But not yours truly. I’d been there while she shuffled through her memories and happened to know, for the record, that she could.) “I’ve heard that word before. My mom went on a New Age kick for about ten years. I never had any patience for that crap.”
    She hugged herself. Shivered. Surveyed the greasy spoon again. Then she said, like a wrestler crying uncle, “I guess it wasn’t crap.”
    “Sure it was. But Pleroma’s an old word. Know any Greek? To regular lugs like me and you, it means the totality of the divine realm.”
    “Then what the hell is a Magisterium?”
    “An angel’s home away from home. The Pleroma is the totality. The superset. Magisteria are the subsets.” Eat your heart out, Bertrand Russell. “We all have one. Even you. Your own little slice of the divine. If it helps, think of it as a gussied-up memory palace.”
    Flametop ran a fingertip along the counter. It must have come back sticky, because her face twisted in a little moue of distaste. Flo probably missed some syrup when she cleared the plate, and certainly didn’t care.
    Molly said, “This place isn’t divine. It’s a shithole.”
    “Hey!” The cook growled through the order window. The words came out slurred because he had to force them past the cigar stub planted in the corner of his mouth. “You don’t like it you can take a hike, princess.”
    Everybody paused to look at her. The waitress, the guys in the corner, even the roundheels. I gestured at the empty stool beside me and said, quietly, “Park the body.”
    She took a paper napkin from the dispenser and spread it over the stool before sitting down. Even then she took care not to lean on the counter. Yeah. Definitely cashmere.
    “Is everybody here like you?” she asked.
    “Nah. This place don’t exist in the mundane realm anymore. But I thought it was swell, so I lifted its impression, rebuilt it in the Pleroma.”
    “Why, for fuck’s sake, would you do that?”
    “Why are you so obsessed with an apartment that no longer exists?”
    “You two gonna order something, or you just taking up space?” Flo pulled a paper pad from her apron and a pencil from behind one ear. She glared at us, pencil tip poised above the pad like a cat watching a mouse