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the tools away and went into the house to take a shower.  Everything hurt, every inch.
    The shower made him feel better.
    There were still things he needed from the store, and he didn’t feel like cooking dinner, but he didn’t know whether he was up to walking the mile into Brookville.  He decided he wasn’t and made a peanut butter sandwich and a cup of coffee in the kitchen.  While he ate standing up he thought about the waitress at the Lobster Pot.
    He had never been much of a success with women.  His girlfriend in college, who had dumped him after he dropped out.  Two whores:  one, in San Diego, had stolen his billfold and the other, in the Philippines, had given him the clap.  And Peggy. In thirty-five years, that had been it.
    Peggy had arguably been the worst disaster of the lot.  She had married him because she was tired of clerking in the Rite-Aid drugstore and had left him for a used truck salesman who was already paying alimony to two ex-wives.  He wished the guy luck, because Peggy’s idea of hot sex was a no-frills quickie twice a month.
    “Find one like our calendar girl.”
    Had it been him saying that?  It was his voice—he could even hear the words vibrating in his throat—but it took him a few seconds to place the reference.  Yes, of course.  The calendar on the closet door up on the third story.  Our calendar girl?
    He put his half-eaten sandwich down on the kitchen counter, his appetite gone.  Suddenly he didn’t care that his muscles felt like they were made of wood.  His mind was playing games with him.  He needed to be around people—he needed to get out of this house.  The walk into town would do him a world of good.
    And it did.  By the time he was halfway there his legs had loosened up enough to stop hurting.  By the time he reached the sole traffic light that marked the center of Greater Metropolitan Brookville, he had stopped being afraid.
    Even a village as small as this seemed to have seedy neighborhoods.  As you turned the corner, after the pharmacy and the bank, you were aware of a certain drop in caste—there was a video rental place and a bar and then the sidewalk abruptly stopped, as if the municipal planners had decided that enough was enough.
    Phil studied the sun-faded posters in the video store, most of them for movies he had never heard of and wouldn’t want to see:  Texas Chain-Saw Massacre II , The Summoning , Revenge of the Super Vixens , Portnoy Returns .  The sign on the door said “CLOSED,” and from the look of the place that might be a permanent condition.  Small wonder.
    The bar was better, if only because it was open for business.  There was a narrow horizontal band of window, edged in bright green, through which were visible a collection of house plants hanging suspended in green plastic pots.  The plants seemed like an attempt to capture a more upscale class of patrons, but they looked as if they badly needed watering so perhaps the gentry had stayed away.
    Phil was not generally a great frequenter of bars, but he had to go somewhere so he went inside.  The juke box was playing a prehistoric Neil Sadaka record— ”My heart, my heart, my heart’s in a whirl/I love I love I love my little Calendar Girl. . .” —which struck him as almost too promising an omen.  For the rest there were the customary tables, bar stools, neon signs above the mirrored bar advertising various brands of domestic beer.  There were lots of people, men and women, in all manner and conditions of life, dressed as if they had just come from work.  They looked like they belonged there.  This was a place for the locals.
    Well, at least for the time being, he was a local too.  He ordered a beer and looked around at the tables, but they all seemed to be occupied.  Sitting on a stool at the bar always made him feel self-conscious.
    “You just passing through?” the bartender asked him.  He was a big man, in his late sixties but undiminished, who looked as if