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I haven’t seen anything more either.” My mother sighed. “You seem too blasé about that murder, Rachel. My God. A
roommate
of yours was murdered! And you were there! Help me. I’m feeling a generation gap.”
    I deflected the scrutiny. “You still sweeping those frogs out the condo door?”
    “No, we hardly see them anymore.”
    There was an excruciatingly long pause. “So how are you?” I asked. This was extortion.
    “You finally asked!” My mom meant it lovingly, but still it annoyed me.
    Back to Coffee Bar again: my new center of gravity. The man across from me at my long “antichic” linoleum tablelooked interesting, though a bit seedy, grinding numerous cigarettes into the ashtray as he sipped from his herbal tea. He had a zigzagging scar over his eyebrow; gray sideburns. I caught him ogling the two seventeen-ish girls in baby-doll dresses, braided pigtails, and patent leather shoes, particularly the girl with the D-cup chest. He saw me staring and probably thought I was coming on to him. He flashed his rotting teeth.
    I’d learned about rotting teeth from Stuart. I’d had it to here with him and had wanted the guys to show him the door. But they said that it wasn’t fair, he was paying his share: mateship bullshit going strong. I’m not saying all Aussie men wear slouched hats and burp their days away, but even the most sensitive Melbourne University philosophy major partakes in testosterone bonding; for a white male Australian to go against the two hundred-year strong societal grain is as inconceivable as a Savannah gent not opening a car door for a woman. My silver drop earrings went missing. Then my zoom-lens camera, my biggest purchase of the previous five years. I’d wanted the fucker out, but Colin and Phillip had tried to calm me down, suggesting that we try locking our individual doors. Then Stuart couldn’t steal money or sell our valuables.
    Ironically, I had to ask Stuart to pick my lock two weeks later when I dropped my keys on the St. Kilda pier, right into Port Phillip Bay. I couldn’t afford a locksmith and Stuart was most obliging, completing the job in ten seconds. I offered him a chunk of the Katz’s salami in the fridge as a thank you; my brother had sent the salami to me from the famous New York deli, subverting strictAussie customs regulations by filling in “Restaurant Souvenir” on the official green form taped to the box.
    Our sibling mega-joke,
the unexpected salami
. I’d wrapped one up in a Saks Fifth Avenue box for Frank’s graduation from the Rhode Island School of Design. Tit for tat, he’d managed to have room service deliver a half pound one to me while I attended a vacuum physics conference in Chicago, the week after Will and I announced our engagement.
    Stuart had eaten half the salami while I was at the pier. I could tell by his breath and the missing meat. But since he’d opened my door, I pretended I didn’t notice and made him salami and eggs the way my Uncle Barry had shown me years ago. “The Jewish bachelor’s caviar,” Uncle Barry always said. Stuart and I got to talking, and he acknowledged his heroin addiction indirectly, commenting on a funky street-type who was being interviewed about the Australian recession on the news.
    Stuart looking straight at me: “He’s skint ’cause he’s been shooting up for a year I’d say. My teeth looked liked that a year ago. You can tell by the teeth.” That’s how I came to learn that rotting teeth on a person dressed in cool-as-shit black is almost certainly a sign of heroin.
    Traveling for two years had wised me up a bit, though not in the way the Ganellis and the Levines viewed growth: i.e., a masters degree, professional job, good solid man, things to have nachus over, bragging rights, as Grandma Chaika would have said. And it wasn’t just heroin teeth. I knew tons of new stuff I couldn’t put on a résumé, tidbits like the names of three men at the helm of theAustralian Government who routinely