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tried to smile as she dragged herself from tavern to tavern and carried on an intimate study of bartenders' hands, an exercise perversely delicious in its secrecy, sadly exquisite in the singularity of its goal. As cocktails were assembled, she examined palms and wrists, her eyes measured the weight and warmth of them against her shoulders. As beers were drawn, she studied fingernails, felt them lightly scratching at her neck. She scrutinized forearms for antic, looping, roundly ardent gestures. She contemplated knuckles, imagined their wisps of down tickling her lips.
    But she did not see Sal Martucci's hands, nor, following arms upward to shoulders, faces, hair, did she see even the remotest recognizable trace of the man who'd stamped her with his image—an image gone forever except in her recalling. It was strange to think that his solid flesh could be altered, reinvented so much more easily than the ethereal impression he had made on her.
    After three bars—not even the beginnings of a dent in the number Key West offered—she was ready for her room, and darkness, and quiet. She pushed her way past elbows and glowing cigarettes toward the door; unwelcome bodies surged against her as she sought the open evening.
    But the street she emerged onto was, at that just-past-sunset hour, as loud and jostly as the saloons— was, in fact, a long extension of them. Neon mixed with dusk to produce a grainy, unnatural, and vaguely nauseating light. Drunks weaved and belched in strangers' faces. Motorcycles rumbled, brain-stunning bass thumped forth from convertibles. On feet that were chafed and blistered by the straps of her brand-new sandals, Angelina struggled back toward the quiet end of town. By the time she pushed open the picket gate of Coral Shores and slipped into the relative tranquility of its courtyard, all she wanted was a bath, some Band-Aids, and a pair of earplugs.
    She took a deep breath that smelled of jasmine and chlorine, and headed for the outside staircase that led up to her room.
    On the way, she once again saw Michael, now sitting on the little private patio that attached to his poolside cottage. He was dressed for evening, wearing a green silk shirt that shimmered softly in the failing light. His face gleamed too, seemed to give back some of the heat of the day.
    He said hello, and Angelina said, "I figured you'd be going out."
    "Nothing starts for me till ten, eleven," he said.
    Angelina nodded, tried to smile, then felt oddly incapable of continuing the conversation. Words wouldn't come, but nor did her feet want to carry her away.
    After a moment Michael said, "Are you all right?"
    Alcohol and emotional exhaustion converged on Angelina, moved together like big dark knobby clouds closing in from different quarters of the sky. Feeling safe behind the picket gate, feeling safe with Michael, she gave in and let the clouds roll over her. She shook her head.
    "Are you ill?"
    She shook her head again. Then she hiccupped.
    "Have you eaten?"
    "No," she said. "I haven't."
    "Would you like to? Shall we grab something?"
    She raised her head then, got her eyes to focus. Michael's sandy brows were drawn together, his chest leaned forward and his arms were poised as though to catch someone who was falling. "Why are you so kind?" she asked him.
    He blinked, he didn't answer. Though the answer, had he been able to frame it for himself, would have been that he was kind because in his deepest heart he hoped that it would be his kindness and not his green eyes and his stomach from the gym that would win him romance, that would make somebody love him.
    "Let me change my shoes," said Angelina.

7
    Paul Amaro got back home around nine o'clock that evening, and the first thing he felt upon opening the door was a small sharp hurt that his daughter hadn't run down to the entryway to greet him, that it was no longer the way it was when she was small, when the sight of her violet eyes and feel of her cool and carefree forehead would