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ravished. Now, where were we?”
    The lusty smile on his face was accompanied by a familiar chirruping in his trousers. I rolled my eyes, then drilled him with a look of pure exasperation.
    “Forgive me, Emily. I’ll only be a moment.” He dug his cell phone out of his pocket and flipped it open. “Miceli,” he said in his police inspector’s voice.
    Wasn’t this just typical? A handsome man in my bedroom and the only thing he can whip out of his trousers is his cell phone. I plucked his buttons off the rug and placed them in the ashtray on the desk as he made a string of comments like “I see” and “Yes,” ending with a definitive “I’ll need to get back to you.”
    “Bad news?” I asked, anticipating the worst.
    He stood up, his palms open in apology. “I can leave the job, but apparently I can’t escape the job. There’s been a break in the case I’ve been investigating. I have a raft of phone calls to make, and it will probably take me the rest of the night, which means…”
    No sex. Great. This was all my mother’s fault. She maintained that having my marriage annulled returned me to “virgin” status, so she was offering up a monthly novena that I’d remain in that state until I walked down the aisle again. I tried to explain that an annulment altered a woman’s marital status, not her anatomy, but she was having none of my argument. “If the marriage never happened, Emily, you never went to bed with Jack. That makes you a virgin. I’m mother to a twenty-nine-year-old virgin. Imagine.” The awe in her voice attested to the fact that, in this day and age, she considered this circumstance to be far more extraordinary than either the Immaculate Conception or the Virgin Birth.
    “I’m sorry, Emily. I signed up for this tour of yours and I intend to enjoy it. I promise that, after tonight, I’m all yours.”
    Sure, I thought. If my mother will stop praying long enough for it to happen.
     
    Facing the rest of the afternoon on my own, I decided to take care of some necessary escort duties before venturing out to find the nearest ATM. I dried and styled my hair, slipped into a long almond suede skirt and a short-sleeve ivory turtleneck sweater, pulled on short leather boots with decorative front lacings and side zippers, scooped up the file folders Ashley had given me, and began knocking on doors. “Maps, itineraries, and timetables,” I said as I made my deliveries. “The bus leaves at seven o’clock tomorrow morning, so be sure to have your luggage outside your door by five.”
    I saved Nana’s room for last. She answered the door on the first knock and stepped into the hall so as not to waken Tilly, who was stretched out on the bed and snoring like a Boeing 747. “I hope she quiets down tonight,” Nana said with some concern. “Your grampa used to snore loud like that until I did somethin’ about it.”
    “Did you sign him up for one of those sleep disorder studies?”
    “I moved into the guest bedroom. Worked real good. What’s this folder for?”
    I explained the contents of the folder and reiterated the information about the luggage and bus departure time for tomorrow morning. “So how are you and Tilly getting along?”
    “Would you believe she didn’t realize the man who won all the money on the first Survivor program is like your ex-husband?”
    I stiffened. The less Nana remembered about Jack, the better. “You mean, he’s an aspiring actor?”
    “Nope. I mean, he walked outta a closet too.”
    I made an empty gesture with my hand. Okay. So her terminology was a little off. Why quibble over a verb. “Really?”
    “Yup. Tilly calls it ‘gender imbalance,’ and she wrote a big anthropology paper once theorizin’ it happens ’cause a body chemistry. Caused a big stir. She says there’s gender imbalance in every culture, which means the root cause is biological ’stead a behavioral. And, listen to this, Emily, in one culture, folks with gender imbalance are given