Once More with Feeling

To Mark, once more and always

And in the turning lane

Someone’s stalled again

— The Weakerthans, One Great City!

Winter

One

Goodwill

Max Binder’s many friends tend to exaggerate the dozens of half-full glasses — and some of them considerably less than quarter-full, it’s been pointed out by a couple of the more sour and dill-picklish ones — that he has eagerly poured one into another until presto, not only is the glass full but it runneth right over. But for Max, hope is not merely a feathered thing, a bird, or an equation for water and glass. Hope is where he lives, where he hangs his hat and unbuckles his belt.

At the moment, hope is a place called Arrivals where he notices that, once again, the girl’s flight has been delayed. He buys a newspaper and a coffee and settles down to read and sip his way through another empty, irrationally heated half hour. In the time he’s waited he’s already greeted a university colleague and waved to a Magnolia Street neighbour. Hi there stranger, are you coming or going? Just meeting someone. Ha, thought you were sneaking off on us, Binder. Nope, you know how I’d miss you. Yup, yup, take care.

It’s a city with only two degrees of separation, according to the old chestnut. The idea of those couple of variant degrees is what the inhabitants want to believe about themselves, and like all fond myths it’s mostly true. Not the separations so much as the connections, the way strangers meet up at weddings or funerals, at summer festivals or fall suppers, waiting at the bus stop or in line at the movies. Your face is so familiar, where do I know you from? Didn’t you used to go to Ridgehaven High? Were you ever a Girl Guide? Let’s see, do you know the Binders, the Tergussons, the Boychuks? Yes? I thought so. Small world, eh, small world.

The truth is Max has never visited the airport without running into someone he knows, however tangentially. It’s not a cliché; it’s where the cliché comes from, his mother used to say, as if there exists a repository of truths so original they can’t possibly be squandered.

Is an airport such a place? Max wonders. A temporary place, a place of such transience that everything is always new again.

Apart from going away to university, he’s lived here all his life, so he’s used to running into friends and acquaintances at the convenience store or the bank machine. He has one of those perennially familiar faces — warm, well-used, kindly — people always think they know him. But more and more lately, all the long-time-no-see faces from his past seem to parade by him: a classmate from North Point High, one of his mother’s mahjong-playing cronies, a dad from his son’s long ago soccer team, a kid he went to summer camp with, a girl he once had a crush on, a customer from when his parents still owned the shoe store. Max Binder — This is Your Life!

Now, from across the terminal a sprightly old fellow hails him. The fellow saunters over to pass the time of day and Max recognizes the man whose name he can never remember because of his mother’s ironic habit of referring to him as Grace of God, on account of his vast wealth and the resulting perception among his coterie that God had been rooting for him from the start. And on account of his having grown up in the North End like the Binders — practically neighbours, his mother insisted — but where Max’s father made a living, more or less, the other man made a fortune. Good luck to him, Minnie Binder always said. We should all be so lucky. The man had God on his side, was her point. It was as simple as that.

Today Grace of God, natty in his leisure wear and Panama hat, is setting forth to winter in Florida but stops to shoot the breeze with Max and share a meandering joke about winning — or perhaps failing to win — the lottery. There’s this old Jew haranguing God. ‘I’m so poor, I’m so luckless. Grant me a favour, just this once let me win the lottery,’ he begins. Grace of God — who, famously, won a bundle on the Extra with his very first ticket — chortles on. If the man has a flaw, it’s his inability to deadpan. He guffaws his way through the punchline, playfully punches Max on the arm, and waves goodbye. Max is stymied.

Poor, luckless, favour, lottery. And then what?

He gives up and returns to his paper but the news he has purchased is not good: prospective flooding this spring, another missing woman, a fatal collision out on the highway. Two confirmed dead but the driver of the Hydro truck seems to have escaped unharmed.

Hydro truck drivers lead charmed lives, he thinks. Must be all that electricity whirring through the muscle and flex of their high-wire lives. He’s still thinking about the effect of positive ions on the goofy good fortunes of union workers when he notices that the girl’s plane has arrived. Flight AC 732 from Toronto, reads the screen, the flight status changing directly from Delayed to Disembarking, without appearing to pause at the grounded equanimity of Arrived. In his haste, he overturns the last of his coffee and accidentally tosses his newspaper onto a moving baggage carousel where it revolves grandly for a couple of turns.

The girl’s journey has been beset by difficulties, so many and of such varied complexity that by the time she appears at the gate — late, bedraggled, tearful — Max is perversely certain that her visit will be a riotous success. He hastens toward her but she thrusts a travel sickness bag at him and sprints for the ladies’ room. Dreamily tossing the sealed bag from one hand to the other, Max admires her grace, her speed, her unerring instinct for intuiting the whereabouts of washroom facilities in foreign cities.

When the girl emerges, he sees that she has scrubbed her face and dried her eyes, but her colour remains poor, a grey pallor of fatigue patching the brown skin. Beneath the airline blanket that she clutches about her shoulders, he glimpses a black skirt and white blouse that, in cut and colour, imply a crispness sadly lacking in their present incarnation. Indeed, the shirt is badly stained about the collar and a fairly important button — from Max’s somewhat bashful perspective — is missing. The skirt, too, is awry, its ragged hemline guiding the eye down a pair of bare legs that end in clattery white sandals.

Where’s your coat, darling? he asks. He advances, arms outstretched, but she backs away, appalled.

Max takes rapid inventory, comes to a decision. Oh, this? He tosses the travel sickness bag into a nearby receptacle, not noticing that it’s been allocated for glass and aluminum only, and tucks the girl’s hand firmly under his arm.

Let’s go find your suitcase, darling. He hauls her off to Carousel 3 where they watch the river of other folks’ luggage gradually diminish to a trickle of oddly shaped bags and duct-taped boxes. After a while even these misfits are claimed. Max and the girl stand before the empty baggage carousel, watching it revolve until, somewhere in the depths of the airport’s baggage handling facility, a switch is thrown and the conveyor belt hitches and stops.

Max, who had been temporarily hypnotized by the soothing rhythm of moving luggage, comes to himself with a start. Whoops, he says. Looks like we have a claim to file.

Undaunted, he turns and strides toward the Baggage Services counter and almost makes it when he is halted in his tracks. Somewhere between a stifled wail and a whimper — it’s the first articulate sound he’s heard from the girl, and it is such a hopeless small cry, such a hiccup into the whirling void, that he swivels, the over-polished granite of the airport walkway shrieking in sympathy.

Who, if I cried out, among the hierarchy of angels would hear me? Max kneels beside the girl. She has slid to the floor as if disconsolation has rendered her boneless and is weeping into her cupped hands. All he can see is the top of her small head, the hair clipped close to her skull. He puts an arm around her shoulders and tries to recall the rest of Rilke’s elegy. It’s only a distraction, a way to forestall the pity that runs through him as marrow through bone. He’s just gotten to the part where every angel is terrible and the poet is trying to restrain himself from the luring call of dark sobbing. But he’s in no mood to admire the high-spirited romp of life chasing art, a dog and its tail. The girl is bereft — she is a broom-swept heap of sadness and goosepimply flesh and all that has gone awry between home and here. So many borders to cross, so many forms to fill out, so many boxes to tick, so much blamelessness to declare.

There, there, darling, he murmurs. He’s not used to soft-hearted girls, being the father of two hard-hearted boys and the husband of a woman who prides herself on being a tough cookie, not the weepy sort. Even his mother, a widow of twenty years, is a fighter with plenty of snap left in her garters. His professional experience has made him wary of mishandling young women, but the girl is such a forlorn bundle of unclaimed despair that he throws caution to the winds, comes down firmly on the side of what the heck, and puts his other arm around her.

Oh, but there is nothing to her. Skin and bones! Beneath the threadbare fabric of the airline blanket and the girl’s thin cotton shirt, he can feel the row of bumps that is her spine, and the bump bump bump of what is knocking against it. She’s shivering with cold, so he wraps his winter coat around her. Vast and cumbersome, the coat envelops her once, twice, three times. It is a coat that has swallowed a girl and, for a moment, he is tickled at the sight.

The girl looks up and catches him laughing. Unexpectedly, she laughs too. That’s better, sweetheart, says Max. He’s feeling flustered, though. He can’t keep addressing her by these endearments, and in the flurry and dismay of their first meeting he has somehow forgotten to introduce himself.

You know who I am, don’t you? he asks. And you must be Pat.

* * *

Maggie always maintained that she’d been hoodwinked by those World Vision hucksters. When the door-to-door salesman came around with his full-colour pamphlets and his talk of mere pennies a day to feed a hungry child, his slippery, glittering words, a pen tucked behind his ear ready to be whipped out at a moment’s notice, she fell for it.

Choose your country, he said, unrolling a map of the world coloured in the strident shades of national emergency. Any continent you like — Africa! Asia! South America! There are needy children everywhere.

Maggie closed her eyes and stabbed her finger down and around. When she opened them again she saw that her finger had landed on a red-for-danger blood splatter.

Ah, Zambia, the gentleman said, apparently delighted. Wells! Irrigation systems! Schools!

Yes, all right, she said. But I want a girl.

The travelling salesman looked startled, as if she was accusing him of being a child slaver, a trafficker in human souls. Girls, boys, he started to say, triangling his arms in a God-bothering gesture. All children are precious, all children are —

Yes, indeed, she interrupted him. But I already have two of the other kind and I want to see if girls are any better.

He was a professional, that man, and looked only slightly shocked for slightly longer than the blink of an incredulous eye, and then he said, Ye-es, well, why not ma’am, and he thought it could be arranged, by jingo. And please sign here, and here, and initial on this page, and right there at the bottom, thatagirl.

Hence Pat. Pat Ngunga came to the Binders in the form of a blurry headshot and a nine-digit registration number, along with a magnetized photo frame into which Maggie inserted the photo. Then she stuck Pat on the refrigerator.

Would’ve thought you’d have chosen a girl, Max said when he came home that night, the mail fanned out in one hand, the other hand yanking at the refrigerator door in search of a snack to steady him for the long ride out over the hungry plains of six o’clock.

"She is a girl, Maggie snapped. Her name’s Pat." Her blood fizzed through her veins, every nerve shorting.

Max looked at his wife. She had curly auburn hair (curls: genuine; colour: natural but enhanced) that she wore piled on top of her head and secured in place with whatever was handy (hair clips, pencils, bobby pins, chopsticks). Complicated, bright eyes, eyebrows like a couple of Spanish virgulillas so that she often looked like a comically troubled child when she was merely thinking deeply, a wide mouth and a general air of flashing energy that veered toward exasperation but could simmer down to natural good humour if circumstances were conducive.

She tapped the photograph, Look! Obediently, Max looked at the photograph inside the magnetized frame on the refrigerator door. Greetings From Your World Vision Child. She could be a girl. With cropped hair and deep-set eyes and a gamine, unisex smile. Maggie cut him a look but Max wisely said nothing on the understanding, strenuously earned, that it was better to be happy than right, or married than burn, or happily rustling through a refrigerator in search of German potato salad than arguing with your wife. But by the time the Binders received their September plea for extra funds necessary to a successful school year for your World Vision child, Maggie was distraught.

It was as plain to her as the enclosed snapshot of young Pat Ngunga sprawled in the front yard of the family dwelling that the longed-for daughter was a son. Maggie blamed God (instinctively), World Vision (peripherally), Pat (predominantly).

Come now, Maggie. How could the kid possibly know he’s been pretending to be a girl inside a photo frame on our refrigerator all these months? Max chided. Or she, he hastily amended.

Max, the sole inhabitant of the tiny principality of Hope, still believed that Pat could be a girl, but Maggie was an honorary citizen of a town called Unconvinced. She’s a boy, she repeated. "A boy called Pat."

A boy called Pat. And Maggie was the Patsy who’d fallen for it. Oh those were dark days.

I knew you were a girl, says Max. I knew it. My wife went through a period of, of despondency but — He breaks off, uncertain of his ground. Pat, who has had no reason to suspect that she is not a girl, remains silent on the subject of her disputed gender.

They’re driving east to the Goodwill Store on Ellice in the old family Pontiac to procure a winter jacket and boots. It’s February, and the poor girl has come too far to freeze to death in a foreign land. Max cranks up the heat and laughs to see her small frame engulfed in his voluminous coat.

Thank you, Mr. Macks, she says.

Just Max, Max says. He used to request the same of his students. Call me Max, he’d say, but only the bravest or the most precocious would oblige, and the rest would call him Prof or Dr. Binder or even Sir (the rural kids), although most studiously avoided addressing him at all. She doesn’t look brave, though all he can see beneath the swaddling folds of his winter coat are her thin wrists and her thin neck and her compact, elegant head that at times looks like it’s been poured from some liquid metal and at other times droops sleepily, her skin clouding, turning matte, as exhaustion swoops in. She rouses herself to gaze out the window as the unfamiliar landscape plays out its continuous, repetitive loop: cloud, bird, building, boy. Cloud.

He asks her about her journey and she turns sideways to address him.

Mr. Macks, it was a boon, she says. My thanks.

A boon! He is delighted.

Pat nods with emphasis. So much emphasis, in fact, that it engages not merely her head on its long question mark of a neck, but her shoulders too, and even her hands. Because I have never travelled by jet airliner before, Mr. Macks. It was very tight and hot in the airplane, and I did not feel well. But Father Michael says, ‘What is the good of remaining on the ground when we have been given wings to fly?’

Well, why not? he thinks. For a moment he lets himself imagine the winged nature of airline travel, as well as the enigmatic spectre of Father Michael, with whom he had conducted a somewhat terse correspondence on the subject of Pat and what Father Michael persisted in calling Pat’s Voyage Broad. After some cogitation, Max decided that Father Michael must have meant abroad, but when Pat replies, he becomes less sure.

You see, says Pat, Father Michael, says travel broadens a person. When my mother says she does not want me to come to Canada, Father Michael says to her, ‘Mrs. Ngunga, do you want your daughter to remain narrow as a row of beans or would you prefer her to return to us broadened by all this travel she will be doing?’

So that’s how the old — So that’s how Father Michael talked your mother into letting you visit us! he exclaims.

My mother, she said: ‘Father Michael, I would prefer my daughters to remain narrow,’ Pat says with a sigh.

And how many daughters does your mother have? Max is aware that he should know the answer, but he is charmed by the girl’s air of quaint submission to the Word according to Father Michael, or at least what he imagines the good Father to represent: a gaunt man on a stick, a scarecrow.

We are five now. Once we were seven but two are late.

Oh, how sad.

Yes, my father is often sad. He looks at us and shakes his head. ‘Oh girls,’ he says, ‘how am I to marry you all off?’

Startled, Max glances at the girl but she appears to share her father’s view, shaking her head sadly at the economic rigours of patrimonial responsibility. And you, Mr. Macks? How many daughters do you have to marry off?

I’m a lucky man, Pat. I have no daughters at all. But he doesn’t feel lucky. Sitting beside her, he longs for what he’s never even known he’s been missing. A girl of his own, a little Pat-a-cake. Well, well.

That is lucky, Pat agrees. My father would be most envious of your lot in life, Mr. Macks.

Max laughs. He doesn’t want Sams and Lazar to come as a shock so he tells her about his sons. There is Sams, he explains, and then there is Lazar. As always he falters, at a loss to apprehend his boys.

They drive past the last of the airport hotels owned by Grace of God. Back in the day, that hotel was the site of some shady dealings. Max hooks his thumb over his shoulder and assumes the voice of a tour guide but trails off when he remembers the charges: solicitation, along with drug trafficking and bare-knuckle cage fighting. For an establishment with such an imaginatively criminal past, the Airport Inn is a bland-enough place now, newly renovated and catering mostly to business conferences and trade shows, although a neon sign that reads Automatic Off-Track blinks on and off in a second-floor window. It looks like one of those video horse-racing places he’s heard about. Max thinks of himself as a lucky sort of fellow, but he’s never placed a bet on a horse or a dime in a slot machine. Why is that? Something tugs at his memory, some joke he’s lost the thread of. Poor, luckless, favour, lottery. He could swear he’s heard it before but still can’t remember the punchline. Ah, shoot! When he gets home he’ll ask Maggie. She’ll know.

Up ahead a level crossing looms. Max, who swears he has a sense for these things, feels in his bones that a train is approaching. He floors it, the Pontiac jumping forward so that they jolt across the tracks seconds before the light turns red and the boom descends. The freight is nowhere in sight, but it’s out there, Max knows, clattering down the tracks toward him.

Ha! He punches the steering wheel in delight and turns onto Route 90. They’re driving through an industrial area of warehouses and storage lockers and half-abandoned strip malls, many of the buildings already in receivership. It’s a grey flannel day, rumpled and ill-fitting. The only splashes of colour are the Day-Glo orange and fluorescent yellow banners draped over buildings — Liquidation Sale! Clearance Sale! Moving Sale! — and the maple leaf pennants snapping above a used car lot. He notices that the snow banks on either side of the road have shrunk to grimy honeycombs oozing slurries of dirty water beneath a winter’s weight of traffic exhaust and pollution.

It’s not usually this bad, he tells her. When the sun comes out —

But she interrupts him. Her small head is canted toward the sky. Something is falling in flurries, spinning earthwards on wind currents and downdraughts. Are these the wings of which Father Michael spoke?

She rolls down her window and puts out her hand.

Maggie, who was about to turn forty, claimed that the Christmas card from their World Vision brat was snarky. When Max asked how, she hit the flat of her hand against her forehead and drew her brows together as if to mime, Jesus who is this fool? But in the end she just snapped: February. She meant that the card had arrived much too late to have had any effect on the Binders’ Christmas celebrations, always conflicted occasions anyway on account of Max’s divided loyalties and Maggie’s ongoing grudge against God, not to mention his son.

You’d think a Valentine’s Day card would be more to the point, she said. Or something for Easter. But no, there it is, ‘Seasons Greetings from Your World Vision Child in Zambia.’

Perhaps Pat didn’t send the card, exactly, he felt compelled to point out.

"Perhaps there’s no such person as Pat, said Lazar, lifting his eyes from whatever Xanadu of the dispersed mind he was currently scrolling through. Perhaps Pat is just a front for a Russian mafia–owned offshore pharmaceutical company."

Max was struck by his younger son’s eyes which, he suddenly realized, he hadn’t glimpsed for months because they were always narrowed over a screen. Lazar’s eyes were roughly the same as he remembered them — colour: blue; shape: eye-shaped; size: in this case enlarged by devilish advocacy — but he looked for too long and somehow got entangled in the spokes of the boy’s dreamy irises. Lazar swerved his eyes back to his unfolding, palm-held universe and his father felt bereft. For something to say, he asked about Pat.

Seems to be thriving, actually, Maggie said. Whole bloody village of Nakonde seems to be thriving. Ever since the Mission brought in the water system and Mr. Mwenyi returned from his pig management course. So hooray! And since our Christmas card was two months late, they saved postage by tossing in his report card early, so that was a bonus.

Oh-ho, how’s young Pat doing this term? Max asked in the appeasing tone that he’d not yet learned was an elbow to the ribs of Maggie’s composure.

Not too bad for a Third-World, fifth child, only son of struggling subsistence farmers, and a damn sight better than either of your sons are doing. Let’s see — he ‘excels’ in language and health studies, whatever they are, and achieves ‘good to excellent’ marks in everything else with the exception of art. And, if the crappy sketch of what I suspect was some sort of hut-type dwelling was anything to go by, I’m not sure I agree with the optimistic conviction that he ‘could do better.’

Still think it’s a girl, said Lazar. Or at least a girl bot. He smiled without bothering to raise his head.

Well, there you go, his mother replied. The oracle has spoken. The Oracle of Angry Birds has had his say. But she managed to tousle his head before he escaped the room and the beaky peck of her love.

The woman at the Goodwill Store, at first undecided, has thrown in her lot with young Pat.

When the two shuffle through the door — Max half-­carrying the girl, whose stockingless, sandalled feet are awfully cold; a combination of shock and freezing temperatures, not to mention the Pontiac’s dodgy heater — she stares at them from over her bifocals for a long Geez Louise moment. Something or someone is being nastily interfered with, the Goodwill lady seems to be thinking, and she is uncertain whether her own good nature is the victim.

But Max immediately stumbles over a rack of dresses, setting the wire hangers clattering, and his helpless clumsiness mollifies her.

Zambia! she exclaims. Well, well. Must be hot in Asia this time of year, poor child.

Pat stares at the rows of jackets and winter coats, their weight dragging at the flimsy hangers. Sweaters flap their woollen arms out of bins as winter boots march off into the distance, measuring the length of the store in their stride. Over the pervasive smell of disinfectant there is the strident note of what is not quite concealed. Pat sniffs, sneezes.

Her feet, which have been tingling unpleasantly, turn red and cramp in agony. Pat tries not to mind. Mr. Macks has been so kind to her, and Father Michael has charged her with being of good cheer, no matter where she finds herself. Where she finds herself is in Hell. Her feet are the fiery coals of everlasting damnation, and the pins and needles of the Lord’s displeasure are radiating through her toes, her ankles, her heels. Pat stumbles to a chair and hunches there, watching Mr. Macks and Mrs. Goodwill hold up winter coats to their chests and say, Hmm? and Too puffy! and Just a slip of a girl, so . . .

I wish my wife was here, Mr. Macks says. She’s the shopper in this family. Mrs. Goodwill looks at him pityingly, as if to say, Really, your wife is a remarkable shopper? How extraordinary! Then Mr. Macks tells the woman about his wife’s really extraordinary shopping talent, but their voices are far away because now the pain is a hornet that stings and stings. No, Pat has had hornet stings before and they have always subsided, but this agony shows no signs of abatement. On the contrary, it increases with each breath.

Oh! she thinks. Oh Mama! Oh Father Michael! Oh wings seen for the first time!

Mr. Macks and Mrs. Goodwill have finally found a mutually agreed-upon winter coat. Look Pat, says Mr. Macks, and he holds the navy jacket to his chin and prances comically for a moment.

Mrs. Goodwill laughs. Pat would laugh too, if she could. She is not crying, quite, but her eyes are bulging with refused tears. There is no mistaking it.

Oh, he says. You don’t like it. The jacket, he means. It’s true, she doesn’t like the jacket but why would she cry about a jacket? No, it is —

It’s her feet! exclaims Mrs. Goodwill suddenly. Her feet are beginning to unthaw.

No such word, Mr. Macks begins to say, but catches himself. What have I done? he wails instead.

After that, things get better. Mr. Macks wrings his hands the way she has often seen men wring their hands in the village, poor fellows, but Mrs. Goodwill knows what to do. She brings a towel and rubs at Pat’s feet, first gently and then firmly. Feeling floods back (more pain), and then warmth. Mrs. Goodwill brings Pat a pair of thick socks and hiking boots that fit. Also jeans and a sweater. Mr. Macks kneels on one knee before her to zip her into her new jacket and she is all set.

Oh my, she thinks, catching sight of herself in a full-length mirror. Who is this somebody? Her eyes are bright and so wide that she can see the white rim all around the irises. She narrows her eyes and straightens her spine, hangs tough. She hardly recognizes the fierce traveller who stands before her in hiking boots and navy jacket. Also, she has never worn so many clothes before. In fact she feels tighter and itchier than she has ever felt before, even in the jet airliner.

Mr. Macks sees her struggling to breathe and says, Out, my girl, go stand outside while we ring this lot up. You need to try out your new duds.

She pushes open the door and gulps in the cold outdoor air. From the bottom of her heart she thanks him: Mr. Macks. He is the kindest man she has ever met. Not as wise as Father Michael, perhaps, but kinder. She wants to thank Mrs. Goodwill but can’t bring herself to return to the odorous, wool-stuffy store. Instead, she offers up a prayer of thanks to the goodness and willingness of Mrs. Goodwill.

Pat stands in the cold in her new coat and boots. Such a coat and such boots of which even that remarkable shopper, Mrs. Macks, would approve. It is a day in late February, flipped inside out, cold side against her skin. For a moment the weather exactly coincides with her protection against it. It has taken thirty-five hours of travel and strife but she is finally, perfectly comfortable.

The snow is falling faster now. Harder and faster. Pat looks up into a sky of flying wings.

Maggie had Sams when she was ludicrously young. He’d been a mistake but a good one.

What’s a good mistake? Lazar asked the first time he heard the story.

It’s something you don’t even remember regretting, she’d told him, although the truth was she did remember, vividly. She could hear Lazar turning that one around in his eight-year-old head and before he could offer his own examples of a life lived on the Édith Piaf plan (no regrets about punching Sams or sneaking cookies or disobeying Imee, no regrets at all) she said, You have to know you made a mistake, though.

Come here, kid, called Max from the other room where he was watching a college basketball game. A good mistake is like a good foul, which is basically any foul that prevents the other team from making a basket. Together they watched a player who had just gotten fouled by an aggressive point guard line up on the free throw line.

Swish, said Lazar. And then a moment later, Double swish.

Them’s the breaks, kid, Max told his son.

D’you think that guy regrets his mistake? Lazar asked.

Damn straight, Max said, watching the coach yank the point guard from the court.

That had been more than six years ago but Maggie was still thinking about that point guard and his misjudged foul. "There’s no such thing as a morally good foul, Mags, it’s all just strategy," Max told her when she brought up the game a little while after, but too long after, apparently, to convince him of her sudden interest in basketball stats. The truth was that Maggie was interested in statistics by then, if only to calculate the ratio of free throws to fouls in her maternal standings.

Sams must have been about eleven because he’d just started compiling the first of his lists: A Select Guide to Cigarettes in the Movies. She remembered him sitting quietly on the living room sofa, absorbed in the black-and-white movies he loved, taking notes on cigarettes: hand holds and brandishings, the amount of smoke generated and the way the cigarettes were extinguished. The method used. He watched Double Indemnity five times because in the final scene Edward G. Robinson lights a match for Fred MacMurray by flipping the tip with his thumbnail. It was a good trick, but in the end Sams had to exclude the movie from his list. It was about lighting cigarettes, he explained, rather than smoking them. He was strict but fair. For hours after watching Gilda or La Dolce Vita or Casablanca, he’d scribble cigarette notes, his head bent so low over the page that a dark brown lock of hair touched the paper.

The truth was that Sams was the best mistake Maggie had ever made. Sometimes, as she stood in the doorway, watching the light from those old movies play across his features, she wondered how the hell she’d gotten so good at free throws. So lucky. But how much longer could her luck hold out, given that the average free throw percentage was right around 75 percent, at least in a league game, which left the other 25 percent in which a person could foul out to no avail? In a game like that you might trade the chance of giving up a couple of points for getting two free throws and still not make a goddamn basket.

Disaster strikes when they return to the car.

Perhaps it would be more accurate to say, ‘Disaster struck when they returned to the car,’ says Mr. Macks, because it happened while they were in that blasted store. But while he is working on her tenses he sees that he has wounded her feelings and, supremely kind man that he is, he says, Not to worry, dear. How were you to know? and Who’s to say? and We’ll sort this out in the morning.

What happened is that someone — Some Godless rogue, Father Michael would have said — jimmied open the passenger door of Mr. Macks’s superb automobile and snatched Pat’s travel purse from where she had carelessly left it, heaped on the passenger seat. In her defence: she was jet-lagged, confused, hungry, cold, out of her element, entranced by wings. On the other hand: she should have known better. Her mama had made her that travel purse; it was just large enough to contain her passport, her return ticket, and a single Citibank Zambia traveller’s cheque in the amount of ten scraped-together, penny-pinching dollars.

To buy a birthday present for Mrs. Macks, Pat tells Max. Something wonderful. In fact, Father Michael had said Something useful, but although she has been in the city little more than an hour, Pat has had occasion to measure the useful (coat, boots) against the wonderful (wings), and she has made her choice.

Max smiles. He can’t help himself, although he would certainly like to. The girl is a whole bowl of trouble: delayed flights, lost luggage, tears, frostbite. And now