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me want to rifle through her drawers, check out her medicine cabinet, look for her journals. That’s what I always do first at parties.”
    She is too shocked to respond.
    He laughs. “I’m kidding.” He holds out his hand. “You’re Bess Gray. My name’s Rory. Rory McMillan.”
    “You’re the fiddler?”
    “That’s me.”
    “How did you know who I was?”
    “I was here earlier. Gabrielle pointed you out. I was just suddenly really sick from something I ate that I had to run outside for some fresh air.”
    “Oh no. I—” and then she sees his face. “You’re kidding again.”
    “Sorry. I actually saw you leave your own party so I walked out to find you.”
    “I see.”
    “Now you don’t know what to believe. Sorry about that. I did like your invite. It made me want to meet you. That’s the truth.”
    A high-pitched cackle and a drunken snort erupt nearby. Bess uses the interruption to put the focus back on him. “You’re Irish.”
    “Now wait. Is that my lying that gave it away, or my accent? Careful now.”
    “Your accent.”
    “Then you’re good. I haven’t lived in Ireland for almost thirty years.”
    “I hear a lot of accents in my line of work. Plus Gabrielle told me.”
    As if summoned, Gabrielle appears around the bend behind two other women. She seems drunk and unsteady.
    “Gabrielle!” Bess calls out. “Gabrielle, report to me please.”
    “Hey!” she says, seeing Rory as she approaches. She kisses him on the cheek. “Glad you could come. You two have met?” She exaggerates a wink to Bess. Her hoop earring is caught in the long end of a brightly colored silk scarf wrapped stylishly around her Afro puff. Bess fixes it for her. “Rory, my new friend,” Gabrielle continues, “did I tell you what I do for a living?”
    “Say you don’t want to know,” says Bess.
    “No,” says Rory with a grin. “And I absolutely don’t want to know.”
    Bess sneezes loudly into her hands, hyper aware that every box of tissue she owns is on the other side of her apartment. “Will you excuse me?” she says.
    She collects herself and drinks, and now that she and Rory are both mixed in with the crowd in her living room, she watches him from afar.
    “He’s got a great ass, doesn’t he?” whispers Gabrielle behind her. She must have seen Bess looking. “Go talk to him.” She slaps Bess’s ass and saunters off.
    Rory is talking to three women who are pressing their hands to their chests, laughing a little too widely, keeping their eyes on him when they sip from their drinks. She can’t walk into that. But he sees her looking and smiles and motions for her to come over. He makes room for her in their circle.
    “That’s funny,” he says to her, pointing to a framed cartoon on her shelf. “I like your sense of humor.” It shows two frogs on lily pads in a scenic pond beneath a pedestrian bridge. One of the frogs is looking straight ahead, smiling, posing seductively; the other one is looking at the poser with tired, bored eyes. “You’re wasting your time,” the caption reads. “Monet only paints the lilies.”
    “My dad gave me that,” Bess says. “He used to leave me funny cartoons on my pillow before I went to sleep so I’d have good dreams.” The frog cartoon was one of the last things he gave her before he died.
    “So,” says one of the more inebriated women among them. “Rory was just telling us about his grandmother who saw the Virgin Mary in a bowl of her own gazpacho.”
    “Really,” says Bess, turning to Rory. Her voice sounds sprightly now that it’s emanating from a smile. “Gazpacho? That’s not Irish.”
    “Which is why no one in the history of Ireland had ever discovered the Virgin before. They’d been so focused on potatoes.”
    “So potatoes don’t excite virgins, I take it?”
    “ ’Tis a known fact.”
    She’s doing it! She’s engaging in repartee with a handsome straight man and she isn’t terrified of what to say next. In fact, she feels