“Naw,” Max stretches his leg on a stool. “It’s something like the Triangles.” The girl’s attention drifts to the stage, where Gus is warming up. “In any case, darling, they’re frauds.” He nuzzles the girl’s neck. She waves him off. He continues the tour, pointing to where the Snakehead hangs. “That’s the Snakehead I won in a card game with Steve Earle.”
“What’s a Snakehead?” the girl says.
“It’s like a classic Mustang, doll, only rarer and older.”
She is unimpressed. “It does seem faded and creaky, like old things do.”
Lorca, Sonny, and Max straighten on their stools. “Are you going to warm up?” Sonny says. “Or are you going to stand here playing tour guide?”
Someone has barred the men’s bathroom door shut. A line forms in the hallway.
“It’s been, like, fifteen minutes,” one of the men notifies Lorca.
Lorca knocks. A commotion inside, a dropped plastic thing, and a curse. Lorca pounds. The door unlatches and Alex, Aruna, and the friend appear. Alex pushes past his father into the hallway. The men who have been waiting shuffle inside. Alex leans over the bar and smiles for a drink. He taps out a beat on his thighs. Gus catches a cymbal in midgasp. Aruna reaches for his hand. Lorca sees that his son is skinny, not in a lean way but in the way Sonny alluded to in the car. He cannot remember the last time he had a meal with his son. He cannot remember the last time he saw Alex eat anything. The sun-colored fingertips, the mottled bruises on his son’s forearms. Alex’s shape comes into searing focus, as if Lorca’s eyes have taken sixteen years to adjust to new light.
10:50 P.M
Near the fountain at Rittenhouse Square Park, Sarina evaluates a display of pinwheels whirling in planets of green foam. “How much for the red?” she asks the man selling them.
“Five,” he says.
“Yikes. And the yellow?”
“Six.”
She narrows her eyes. “Why is the yellow more than the red?”
“Bigger,” he says.
Ben takes a seat on the edge of the fountain. Sarina will deliberate until she ultimately opts against buying a pinwheel. He innately knows her moods and tendencies the way you know on a flight, even with your eyes closed, that a plane is banking.
Sarina blows into the yellow pinwheel. The man says, “Every year they perform A Christmas Carol here in the square. Have you ever seen it?”
“Scrooge?”
“It’s about rich people being assholes. Every year, here, where the richest people in the city live.”
“Irony,” Sarina says.
“Do you think any of them realize what they’re watching?”
“I thought the richest people lived on the Main Line.” Sarina replaces the pinwheel. “I guess they can afford a five-dollar pinwheel.”
He sniffs. “My prices are market.”
Ben hurls one leg over the side of the fountain, then the other. The cold realization of the water pauses him. He tromps toward the other side.
“What’s he doing?” the pinwheel man says.
Sarina doesn’t answer but doffs her heels and leaps the wall. Knee-deep. She pushes through the cold water to catch up.
On the other side of the fountain, a woman wearing a sequined hat calls out, “Hello! I know you!” She waves to Ben, who lifts his hand in a half salutation.
“You do?” he says.
“I know you! You were my husband’s lawyer. Bill Evans. That’s my husband’s name. You helped him when he got hurt at work. A beam fell on his head. You got us a nice settlement. Oh, bless you. I do know you. I do.”
Ben is calf-deep in water. “How is Bill these days?”
“He’s good, yes.”
“Working?”
“Oh no,” she says.
“No,” Ben says.
“It’s tough.”
“I know.”
“Of course you do. Bless you.” She nods at Sarina. If she is surprised to see two adults wading through fountain water on a bitter night she doesn’t show it. “Bless you both.”
“Tell Bill hello,” Ben says.
“I will.” The woman wrenches something out of her bag, a wrapper or a slip of paper, beelines for a trash can where she reconsiders. She calls out, “He’ll be thrilled!”
They watch her leave the square.
“Bill Evans,” Ben says. He pretends to notice his pant legs. “Good heavens, I’m drenched!”
Sarina giggles.
Ben hurdles the wall of the fountain. He takes Sarina’s hand and helps her climb out. For a moment they are two people holding hands. He lets go.
“We can’t stand here cold and wet,” he says. “We should go somewhere and dry off.”
“And get a drink,” she adds, slipping into her shoes.
“I know just the place.”
“Good-bye!” Sarina calls to the pinwheel man.
“Good luck,” he says.
“Tell me about the girl with lice,” Ben says, as they walk out of the park onto Pine Street.
Pine Street maintains a long-standing race: how many apartments, houses, and stores can one street hold? There are no zoning restrictions: go! When each stoop or store window has a lamp on, the effect is akin to the afterhours daylight of a nuclear power plant. Sarina and Ben walk through this unnatural sunshine as she details the singing, the principal, Clare Kelly, the apples, the lice, the punch, the expulsion. She does not look at him while she talks. She already knows what she will see, so what’s the point? An open, happy mouth. Hazy, engaged eyes. Big deal.
Ben does not look at Sarina. He already knows what he will see. The line around her mouth that appears when she is intent on exposing injustice: the cockamamie price of pinwheels or unfairness toward one of her students. A girl in constant negotiation with her bangs. She giggled when he said, “Someone has drenched my pant leg!” Her laugh has always been the only ungoverned thing about her. He tries to elicit it as much as he can.
A bookstore on the corner is open. They hear tinkling music inside.
“Should we go in?” Ben says.
“Let’s.”
Inside, whatever is not wreathed is tinseled. A knitting older woman behind the counter regards them through reading glasses. “It’s right there,” she says, pointing to a display table stacked with books. On the cover, a dragon gives a thumbs-up. Sunshine the Dragon Joins the Circus! “You’re here for the launch, right?”
“We couldn’t wait,” Ben says.
“You and everybody else.” The woman motions behind them. Sarina and Ben turn around. No one is in the doorway.
“Would it bother you if we browsed?” Ben says.
“Very little bothers me.” The woman returns to her knitting.
The bookstore has three large rooms separated by archways. Sarina waits until Ben has chosen a book to sneak a glance at him; he does not like the edition and returns it, stalks through the archway to the other room and picks up another book, then, faking an errand to his right, sneaks a glance at Sarina.
“We’re closing soon,” the woman says.
“Give us a preview,” Ben says. “What’s the dragon do in this one?”
“No previews,” she says. The needles make plastic thwacking sounds.
“Scarf?” Ben guesses.
“Sweater,” she says. “For my cat.”
“Lucky cat,” Ben says.
“He runs away with the circus.”
“Your cat?” says Sarina.
“Sunshine the Dragon.”
“He does not,” Ben says.
“What would be my motivation to shit you? He sells popcorn and funnel cake. His dream is to become a trapeze artist but he’s a dragon so he’s too heavy. His weight would snap the trapeze.”
“Can’t he fly?” Ben says.
The woman approves. “Now you’re using your noggin.”