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"A fight about what?"

"About nothing. Howard wanted to take her to Singapore, and Oom didn't want to go."

Fon regards the squid skeptically. "Why wouldn't she want to go?"

"How would I know? He'd helped her get a passport. He said she never argued about getting the passport, just about using it."

"Right. She didn't want to go to Singapore."

"You saw him. You saw how upset he was."

"I saw how fast he took you out, too."

Rose surprises herself by bringing a flat hand down on the tabletop with a crack that snaps every head in the bar toward her. Fon jerks back a few inches, blinking. "We didn't do anything," Rose says. "Not for months. He just wanted to talk. He bought me out and took me to dinner and talked, and then he gave me money and I went home. You should know, I was always home before you got there. It was eight or nine months before we even kissed each other. We just talked."

"Talked about what? About Oom?" This is the first time Fon has ever gotten angry at Rose. "What is there to say about Oom for all those months? 'Oh, no, she's gone. I looked everywhere. I miss her. I don't know why she left.' How long did that take? Five seconds? And she was pretty, Oom was, but nobody would call her interesting. So what was there to talk about all that time?"

"What's wrong with you?"

"I don't like it, that's all." Fon snatches another piece of squid as though she expects the paper towel to be yanked away at any moment. "How do we know what happened to her? She's here one night and then she's gone forever."

"They fought," Rose says patiently. "She didn't want to see him. So she didn't come back to the bar. She went someplace where he wouldn't find her."

"He loves Oom so much and then, bang, he loves you."

Rose looks away and sees rainwater seeping in beneath the curtained doorway. Drunk men will slip and fall later. She draws a slow, long breath. "One more time. Oom left him. What's he supposed to do, cry for the rest of his life?"

"There's something wrong with men who fall in love with prostitutes," Fon says. "They're missing something."

Rose feels a worm of unease in her gut, but she says, "Maybe he doesn't think of me just as a prostitute. Maybe he thinks of me as a person."

Fon starts to say something but shakes her head. "Up to you. Just be careful, that's all. I don't want to have to nurse you through a broken heart."

"Howard can't break my heart."

Fon studies the squid as she shreds it between her fingers. "You even let him change your name."

"Rose is better. Farang men can remember Rose. Nobody remembered Kwan."

"So what?" Fon says. "They just came in and asked, 'Where's the tall girl?' That worked, didn't it? We always knew who they meant."

"Not the same." Rose rummages through her purse and pulls out a pack of cigarettes. "Anyway, what do you care?"

"What do I care?" Fon places her greasy fingertips, widely spread, in the center of her chest. "We're supposed to be friends."

"We are," Rose says, reaching over and taking Fon's wrist, tugging the hand off her chest and stroking her own cheek with it, leaning against it and smelling the squid. "You're the best friend I ever had."

"That's not fair," Fon says, pulling her hand away.

"What's not fair?" Rose lights her cigarette.

"Going all sweet like that. I'm serious. I don't want you getting hurt. What do you really know about him?"

"I know a lot about him."

"Where he's from," Fon says, "if it's true. What he does for a living, if it's true. What he wants with you, if it's true. You don't know whether anything is true."

"I know a lot more about Howard than I do about the strangers I go with every night."

"You think."

"Fon." Rose closes her eyes and leans on her friend's shoulder. "I don't want to go with different men all the time. I hate it. I don't want to have customers staring at me while I'm dancing, wondering what I'll let them do to me in bed, or how much hair I have down there, or whether I'm wearing a padded bra. I don't want to smile at men I hoped I'd never see again. I don't want to watch men flipping coins to see who gets me. I don't want to lie to everybody about working here a month or two when it's been almost two years. I want to tell the truth to somebody, and I want to tell the truth all the time. And I don't want to remember any more names."

Fon plucks the forgotten cigarette from Rose's hand and knocks the ash onto the floor, then takes a deep drag. "So," she says. "What does he want with you?"

Rose says, "He wants to marry me."

Fon puts a forearm on the table and rests her forehead on it.

Rose lays a hand on Fon's hair. "It'll be fine. He'll take care of me. I won't have to work like this."

Without lifting her head, Fon says, "What about the dowry?"

"He understands about the dowry. He's going to-"

"Why?" Fon demands. "Why does he understand about the dowry? Farang don't know about dowries."

On the other side of the curtain, the sound of the rain doubles. "I explained it to him."

"He didn't learn about it by promising to marry any other-"

"Stop." Rose listens to the rain hammering down, wishing it were so loud that she and Fon couldn't hear each other. "We talked about it. He's going to give my parents more money than they ever thought they'd get." She caresses Fon's hair. "Fon. He's going to take care of Mai. Of my sister. He says he'll frighten my father so much that my father won't even think about doing anything bad."

"He'll even take care of your sister," Fon says as the lights go out, plunging the bar into blackness, and the music stops dead. Fon says, "He's thought of everything."

When she asks herself later whether she should have known that something was wrong, she remembers a hundred things. Inconsistencies in some of the things he told her. The friends, big, fit men very much like himself, but taciturn and reserved, whom she instinctively disliked. The occasional flashes of anger over things most Thais would have laughed off.

One evening in the hotel room, she had drawn a house, just an ordinary village house. It was a daydream in pencil. Like half the girls she knew, she was hoping that she could build a new house for her parents and her brothers and sisters someday, but her imagination went no further than the kind of house she'd grown up in.

She'd been sitting at the desk, hunched over a piece of hotel stationery. Her lap was full of bits of pink eraser, from the messy, rubbed-looking spot in the house wall where she'd placed a second window, which she thought was a daring innovation. Still, the house would have fit into any Isaan village without attracting a glance: a single room raised a meter above the ground, a door in the center of one wall, a few steps leading up.

She had run out of ideas, so she'd put a sun in the corner of the sky and was drawing a dog under the house when she felt him behind her.

"For your mom and dad?" Howard asked over her shoulder.

"Maybe," she said, suddenly shy. She covered the sketch with her hand, but he slid the hand aside.

"Scoot," he said. "It's a big chair."

Rose shifted sideways, and Howard perched himself on the edge of the seat. He took the pencil from her hand, moving so fast she barely saw it, and began to make bold, heavy strokes, ruler-straight. She watched as the house got bigger, saw a second room appear, and then Howard sketched a big central window, four times the size of the one she'd drawn and all one big pane, like the windows in the hotel. Finally he tilted his head, studied the page for a moment, and added a modern roof, raised in the center, instead of the flat pitch of corrugated iron she'd visualized.

It was a real house.

"Room," she half whispered. "Mai can have a room."