"Stop it."

"Gotcha. Well, I'm going to tell you how it's going to work." She placed her implacable hand on the metal bar, ready to push open the doors and sprint. "If you want me to be the director, I have final say. That's how it works. What play we do, whom we cast, how we stage it, what I cut. I decide." She nodded in Fred and Leroy's direction. "No devil's advocate arguments from the peanut gallery."

"Fine. Decide."

"I'm going to torture you and give you what you want. Much Ado About Nothing. Betrayal, shame, humiliation. In spring. I'll see you." She blew him a teasing kiss and ran down the hall in her Frye boots. Ran. From Pingry to Stop&Shop was 5.2 miles and twelve minutes if she made all the lights and there was no traffic. She made no lights, and there was a mob of traffic. She made it in nine minutes anyway.

He wasn't there.

Granted, it was 1:20 and perhaps he had come and gone, but then it was 1:30, then 1:40 and he wasn't there. Larissa bought some steak for dinner, potatoes, frozen corn, peanut b.u.t.tera"1:50a"cereal, coffee, sugar, tea, dry dog fooda"1:55a"and then reluctantly went to stand in the express line and listened to a heavy, sour woman (perhaps Fred's spouse?) behind her say, "Looks like you have more than twelve items there, dearie." And Larissa said, "All righty, I'll play." Normally, she wouldn't have done it, but this is what happened when small inflammations festered into giant sores. "Let's count together. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelvea"look at that! Exactly twelve." Larissa gave the embarra.s.sed woman a cold stare. "Unless of course, you want to count each of the steaks as a separate piece. But we might have to count your six English m.u.f.fins individually, and then where would we be?"

The woman mumbled something about the sign saying TWELVE OR LESS.

"Yes, and I've got one of those. Twelve. See?" Harrumphing to the cashier, Larissa pushed her items down the conveyor belt.

"Cash back?"

"No," Larissa barked to the register girl. "Just the receipt, please."

Still steaming, she bagged, paid and without a backward glance of smug contemptuous self-satisfaction pushed her cart outside. She was almost at her car when a voice behind her said, "Boy, you really showed her."

She whirled around, swirled around like a tornado on boots, and in front of her Kai stood, looking worn and pale, unshaven, scraggly, unwell and sad, holding a coffee and a brown paper bag in his hands.

"Hey," she said, her heart thumping, her voice shaking a little. d.a.m.n! Larissa hated that old witch even more for forcing her to be unlikeable when he was nearby. "Everything okay?" What to say? What to say! "Haven't seen you in a while."

"YeahaI hada" He bowed his head. "I know," he said, without looking up. "You have time to grab a bite?"

It was 2:07. Larissa had exactly seven minutes to grab a bite, and then she stood a thirty percent chance of being five minutes late to pick up Michelangelo. She wished that once, just oncea "Hang on," she said. "Let me call my friend." While he waited, Larissa called Donna, whose kids were walkers, asking her to please keep Michelangelo for ten minutes because she was running "a tiny bit" behind. Though she and Larissa had spoken barely two words the whole year, Donna was gracious. She and her own kids were headed to the playground. Could she take Michelangelo with them? "Oh, he'd love that. Thank you so much. I owe you onea"

Larissa turned to Kai. She stood dumbly in the parking lot, and her steak in the Jersey sun was going to reach room temperature, oh, in say, fifteen minutes, just long enough for her to get home and throw it out.

"Did you already eat?" he said, holding his brown bag in his hands. "We can split my sushi if you want."

"No," she said. "I'm okay." It was unseemly to say she was starving. As if she had uncontrollable appet.i.tes. She stayed composed in front of him, the way she was with everyone, the line lady and Leroy notwithstanding.

They had nowhere to go but her car. So they went and sat in her car.

"Is everything okay?" she said, turning on the engine and staring ahead at her comforting tombstones. Was it her imagination, or had some new ones popped up? She could swear there were more gray markers in the ground than last week.

"It's fine," he said curtly. After a silence that seemed to Larissa like someone stopping playing the piano because he couldn't figure out what the next note was, Kai continued, "You knowa"everything is not fine, but I really can't talk about it, soa"

"I understand." She wanted to tell him that Brian and Gary already mentioned a funeral, but there was no good way of explaining her reasons for dropping by his dealership when he wasn't there, and talking about him to not one but two men. She was silent because she herself couldn't figure out what the next note was.

"Everything okay at work?"

"I guess. Monday's my day off," he said, taking a gulp of coffee, then another, and staring at his open and untouched container of sushi.

Who had died? Was it his mother? He looked pale enough for it to be his mother. A friend of his? He had mentioned that he had to leave Hawaii because of stuff. Could this have something to do with that? Larissa was idly curious, slightly concerned, but mostly shamelessly relieved that he was back. A funeral in Hawaii seemed a long dry spell away from her current pool of calm water.

"How's the weather been here?"

Talk about small talk. "It's been pretty good," she replied. "A little chilly. It rained all weekend. What about Hawaii?"

"Same old, same old," he said. "Never changes. Eighty. Sunny. Windy in the afternoon."

"Sounds fantastic."

"I guess."

Oh, so now he didn't want to chit-chat even about the weather. They sat. The music played low, Alice Cooper, the Ramones.

Could she here deny the story that is printed in her blood? Leonato says to Friar Francis in Much Ado. Love conquered all, despite one's best intentions. What a lesson it would be for her young charges. Larissa had to go. She didn't want Michelangelo to worry.

"I just wanted to say I'm sorry." What she wanted was to touch him.

"For what?"

She said nothing. He said nothing. Then he groaned, in small restrained anguish. "Larissa," Kai said. The way he said it, her name had a din to it, like a song of the summer swallows, something deep that rolled off his tongue.

The name was a caress. Larissa, he caressed her with her own name. The rest of what he said was insignificant.

"It's not that I don't want to tell you. But trust me that the story is worse and more tawdry than you imagine, and there will be nothing for you to feel but pity, and the reason I don't want to tell you is because I don't particularly want your pity. Can you understand?" He didn't look away from her as he spoke. "It will seem like I'm trying to manipulate you with tragedy. And I don't want to do that."

"I understand. Don't worry. Justatake care of yourself."

"I might eventually tell you," he said.

"Eventually? Why not now, said the undertaker."

Kai half smiled, half didn't. "Funny. But I won't ever feel like telling you." He looked wretched when he said it.

"Does it have anything to do with why you left Hawaii in the first place?"

"Everything." He took his empty can, his uneaten sushi, opened the door. "Nice to see you again," he said.

"Yes, you too."

That was positively breaking the courtesy barrier! Larissa thought as she drove to pick up Michelangelo, the fingers gripping the wheel trembling from the tension.

7.

Explanation of the Navigation

Next morning at 9:30 the phone rang. She was getting ready to drive to Pingry and debated not picking up, but the caller ID said, "MADISON JAGUAR DEALER". With all due haste she picked up.

"Larissa?" Kai said. Again!

"Yes, h.e.l.lo," she said. It set her blood coursing, his calling her house, like breaking and entering.

"Um, Brian just told me that your navigation system is in," he said. There was an amused glint to his voice. "Now, correct me if I'm wrong but I didn't know you needed a navigation system."

"I didn't think I did," said Larissa. "But it turns out I do."

"Do you remember me trying to sell it to you?"

"Yes. But I didn't know I needed it then."

"I see. Okey-dokey. When can you bring in the Jag so we can install it?"

"When is good?" She had to order twenty-five copies of the play and write up the audition notice. That would take some time, probably most of the morning.

"Now is good."

"Now?" Not twenty-four hours as director and already the play was interfering adversely in her life! She should've never accepted. Oh, h.e.l.l. She would call Ezra, make nice, ask Sheila to order the books, and she'd write the casting notice this afternoon. What was one more day? "Yes, okay," she said to Kai in an even voice. "I'll bring it in."

"Thirty minutes?"

In twenty-eight Larissa was at the dealership. She brought her car to the back, walked through the service door, filled out some paperwork, signed on the dotted line, gave her credit card (what would Jared say when he found out that she bought a navigation system she didn't need for $2900?) and took her receipt.

"Nav will be ready this afternoon," said Brian. "You want one of my guys to give you a ride home?"

"No, that's okay, I'm fine today," Larissa said, keeping it succinct, her face impa.s.sive like her voice. She smiled.

Brian didn't even glance at her. She liked hiding behind the polite words. Everything so smooth, normal, even keel, not a prob, nothing to see here, folks, just pa.s.sing through, like all wives who have work done on their cars. She strolled through the dealership, smiled at the idle business office guys, barely acknowledged Crystal, the snippy receptionist, and made her way to Kai's desk, where he was looking into a computer, drinking coffee and on the phone. Nodding to her, he pointed to the chair in front of him. She perched and waited. He was on the phone five minutes or more, searching for a car for a prospective client. The phone rang for him half a dozen times. The receptionist walked over to mouth to him there was another phone call waiting and he pantomimed to her to take a message. When he hung up, he faced her. "How you doing?"

"I'm good. You?"

"Busy like a bee. Dropped off your car?"

"Yep. Brian said it'd be ready this afternoon."

"For sure."

"If you're too busy, Brian said he can have one of his guys give me a ride homea"

Kai shook his head. "I am one of his guys." He grinned. "You ready?" He was less pale today. He took his keys. "I'll be back in ten," he called out to the business office crew, who were gawking at them in a way Larissa didn't appreciate.

"It's not you," Kai said. "They just love giving me a hard time." He led her outside and around the corner. "I'm parked over here. They keep torturing me that I never give the men a ride home."

"Is that true?"

Outside was warm and sunny. It was promising to be a good spring. The Ducati was parked on the side of the white building.

"Perhaps," he replied with a shrug. "I admit I don't often have men on the back of my bike behind me."

She looked at it. He looked at her.

"We're going on the bike?"

"It's the only wheels I got." He looked her over. She was wearing jeans, boots, a leather jacket. She was certainly dressed for the bike. He hopped on first, handing her his helmet. "You take it. I only have the one."

It felt too loose on her head, and she couldn't get the strap under her chin to close. Kai had to climb off the bike to help her. Adjusting the helmet with both hands, he put his fingers under her chin to clip the buckle shut. His face, tilted close and near her chin, was clean-shaven, smiley, friendly. His breath smelled of coffee. "It's going to mess up your hair," he said. "But you don't mind, right? You hardly think about hair."

"Har-de-har-har."

He was back on the bike. "Hop on, and hold on," he said. "That's the most important thing."

"The hopping, or the holding?"

"The holding."

She hopped on, like onto a horse, one leg over, the other in the stirrup. She'd never been on a horse or a bike. She wanted to ask him what she was supposed to hold on to; nothing to hold on to but the rider and his brown leather. Larissa grabbed the sides of Kai's jacket. Her knees were flanking his denim-clad legs. It was weird, too close, inappropriate. She would never hop on the back of Gary's bike, or Brian's, with his unwashed hair.

"You gotta hold on," Kai yelled to her, revving up the engine. "Once I push off, you'll go flying if you don't grab on tighter."

"Well, don't push off, okay? Go very slow."

He pulled out onto Main Street and zoomed down the road. "Go slower!" she squealed, the wind whipping her hair under the helmet. She wasn't sure he could hear her.

"If I go any slower," he yelled back, "we'll lose our balance and fall off."

"G.o.d, why does it seem like a jet plane?" she said when he had stopped at a red light.

"All right, peanut the speed demon. I'll walk the bike to your house." He revved the idling engine. "Tell me where you live again."

She directed him as best she could with the road over his shoulder. She smelled the leather of his jacket. Not wanting him to ride through Summit where the owner of the Summit Diner and Ricky's Candy knew her, where all the gas station attendants, candy sellers, ice cream makers, shoe purveyors, dry cleaners could wave hi to her strapped to the back of a black and lava-bright Ducati Sportcla.s.sic, Larissa took him instead on a roundabout route, down Route 24 service road, avoiding town. She wasn't doing anything wrong, and yet she didn't want to ride through Summit with his helmet on her head. Because there was no difference in the appearance of things between wrong and right. Both looked exactly the same. A young man in a leather jacket and jeans, whizzing through a small suburban almost greening town on his flame Ducati, while a long-haired woman of a certain age, married with three children, a possible member of the Women's Junior League of New Jersey, was astride the back of his bike, both hands gripping his waist, her face close to his back, close to his jacket.

On the open road, he accelerated. She gasped for breath. For a moment Larissa saw herself from the heavens, from the blue sky, saw herself as the birds saw her, on the back of a bike behind a young man, her hair in a swirl, riding fast, near fresh April. The sensation of speed, unable to catch her breath, of danger, of exhilaration, of fear mingled with spring and sunshine, of the undeniable life-yell of Wow, made her miss her right turn on Summit and in a mile, or three, she had to nudge him to turn around. Another blazing moment behind his back.

Finally Kai turned onto Bellevue, coasted down the gentle slope, and Larissa saw herself once again as she was, not as she wished she might be, because he pulled into the driveway of her gray, black-shuttered house.

"You all right?" He eased to a stop behind her Escalade.

She got off the bike, took off his helmet. "Sure," she said, her face flushed from the speed, the wind.