"We're dancing."

"That's not dancing."

"Yes, it is."

"No, it's not. This is dancing."

He reached out to Pajamae with both hands. She regarded his hands as alien objects.

"What?"

"Hold my hands."

"Why?"

"So we can dance."

"You hold hands when you dance?"

"Yes."

"You lie!"

"It's country-western swing dancing. The boy and girl actually hold hands."

She took his hands, and he pulled her in. He two-stepped a few paces then pushed her out and twirled her under his arm. He showed her several swing dance moves.

"Is this how old people dance?"

"It is."

Boo played country music on their phone then jumped in. Scott showed her all the moves he could recall. The girls giggled with joy. He loved that sound.

"I love it! A. Scott, I never knew you could dance."

He could.

A. Scott Fenney was a traditionalist when it came to dancing and grilling. Hands on. Charcoal was simple. Old-fashioned. Innocent. Gas was newfangled and fancy. Charcoal was art; gauging the heat from the color of the coals. Gas was science; four hundred degrees as shown on the thermometer. Anyone could do that. No skill was required. Charcoal harked back to the old days. To a simpler time and place. When life was slower. Less expensive. Less complicated. To a time when thirteen-year-old girls didn't wear G-strings and people didn't plot to blow up football stadiums.

He often longed for those times.

Which made him feel like his father. Longing for the good old days. Maybe not for the good old days his father's generation had harked back to-the fifties and sixties weren't so good for minorities and women-but for the good old days before being strip-searched to fly on a plane or before metal detectors at the school entrance or certainly before 9/11.

The afternoon temperature had not hit the upper fifties but instead the upper sixties. It had been a glorious Saturday. Scott sat on the back patio drinking his weekly beer, watching the sunset, and waiting for the coals to turn white. In his prior life, he had a back patio with a built-in grill that was something out of a "homes of the rich and famous" type magazine. He had often sat on the patio drinking a beer and looking out on the custom pool and the expanse of grass manicured by Mexicans; he could run a forty-yard dash from the patio to the back fence. Now his pool was smaller than the master bath at the mansion on Beverly Drive, he mowed his own grass, and he could spit over the back fence from where he sat. He studied the landscape a while and thought that perhaps in the spring he would plant crepe myrtles along the back fence. Yellow crepe myrtles.

"I love the captain," Boo said.

Scott sat in the middle of the couch, and the girls sat on either side of him. They ate hamburgers and baked beans and sweet potato fries off folding trays. Persuasion played on the small-screen television. He and Rebecca had never watched movies with Boo on Saturday night; Saturday night had been a work night for Rebecca, always diligently climbing the social ladder. Scott liked the two little women in his life. He had lost a wife and gained a daughter.

"Do other girls your age watch movies with their dads on Saturday night?"

"No," Boo said. "They go to parties."

"Do you girls want to go to parties?"

"With them? No."

"Are you happy at home with me?"

"We are."

Pajamae nodded then said, "Can we have malts now?"

"We can."

Boo paused the movie. They took their plates to the kitchen. The girls rinsed the plates and stacked the dishwasher while Scott made malts. He mixed vanilla ice cream, chocolate milk, vanilla extract, and malt in the blender. Chocolate milk rather than chocolate syrup was the key to a great chocolate malt. Pajamae tasted the result with a spoon.

"More ice cream, I think," she said.

Scott added more ice cream. The malt then met with her approval. He poured the malts, and they returned to the couch. Boo resumed the movie. Unrequited love was soon requited.

"Look at that girl run," Pajamae said. "She's not going to lose her man this time."

" 'I am in receipt of your proposal,' " Boo said. "Gosh, that's romantic."

Watching a romantic movie and drinking malts-that too was simple and innocent and old-fashioned. Like charcoal grilling and country-western swing dancing. The way life was supposed to be. The movie ended happily ever after.

Would his life?

Maybe it already had, and he just didn't know it. Maybe he had all a man could hope to have and then some. Maybe he had all he needed in life. Scott had tucked in the girls, and he now lay alone in bed. He had taken melatonin.

"God, please help me raise my girls without a mother. They are my life now. Thank you for giving them to me."

FIVE.

Sunday, 17 January 21 days before the Super Bowl "Thank you, God, for the Joint Terrorism Task Force keeping the Super Bowl safe from radical Islamist jihadists. And please help the liberal president understand that letting in Syrian refugees is a serious mistake and endangers the homeland."

Scott had run and returned home to a blood pressure test conducted by Boo and a green smoothie of kale, cucumbers, spinach, and wheatgrass concocted by Boo. He had then showered, shaved, and taken the girls to church.

Where they now sat.

He glanced around at the congregation. His gaze always seemed to fall on other fathers and their families, and always he felt a twinge of jealousy. He had never been jealous in his life; and why would he have been? The chips had always fallen his way. He had always had everything he wanted.

Now he just wanted to love and be loved.

He always spotted a few single mothers but seldom another single father. The children went to the mother in a divorce. Most divorced fathers lived without their children. So he felt fortunate that his lived with him. "You need her more than she needs me," Rebecca had said of Boo when she left him. He would live with his daughters but never with another woman; he had resigned himself to that harsh fact. What woman wanted to raise another woman's children, or in his case, two other women's children, and a black child to boot?

There was no such woman.

Few federal judges are single fathers; most are grandfathers. Their extended families offer them the sanctuary that the court cannot. Life on the federal bench is a lonely legal existence. Other lawyers offer fealty but not friendship. Other dads at school cannot be friends with a federal judge, a fellow dad who could put them in timeout for five to ten. It was like being buddies with an IRS agent, as Dan had said. They no longer ask you to play golf; golf is four hours when a man can let his guard down, talk openly to his buddies, maybe even boast about the latest greatest tax shelter which saved him tens of thousands in taxes-not something he'd want a federal judge to hear. Golfing with a state court judge is a different matter: he has no jurisdiction over income taxes and he needs the lawyer's money for his next campaign. Which is to say, a state court judge will file that information where the sun don't shine. Would a federal judge? Why take the chance? Better to fill out the foursome with a plaintiffs' lawyer. So Scott no longer played golf because Bobby, Louis, and Carlos did not play golf. And they had their own lives. Bobby had Karen and Little Scotty; Louis had William Shakespeare; Carlos had the gym and a commercial driver's license.

Scott had his daughters.

For five more years. Then they would leave him, go off to college and begin their own lives. Where would he be then? Alone. He would have no one. He would be a forty-five-year-old spinster. Boo's hand grasped his right hand, and Pajamae's his left. They both squeezed tight, as if they had heard his thoughts.

Thank you, God, for giving them to me.

He would take his girls over any woman. He had already made that choice. They were his life; and he would give his life for his daughters. Sitting in church that Sunday morning, he could not know that life would soon give him that opportunity.

"What do you got in leather?"

"Footballs."

Carlos frowned at the clerk; Scott smiled and looked for the girls. Their first stop upon entering Cowboys Stadium-after being patted down at the door-was the eighteen-thousand-square-foot pro shop. He found Boo and Pajamae trying on jerseys.

"I'm going for Dez," Pajamae said.

She wore a number eighty-eight jersey with "Bryant" across the back. Boo wore a number eleven with "Beasley" across the back.

"Who's Beasley?" Pajamae said.

"I don't know," Boo said.

"Then why do you want his jersey?"

"If you don't know who he is then no one knows who he is."

"So?"

"So no one's buying his jersey. That's got to make him feel bad. If I buy one, it'll make him feel better."

Pajamae blinked hard. "Are you serious?"

"I think so."

Scott had given the girls a budget: $100 each. He figured it was their only shot at the pro shop for at least another year. The jerseys cost $100.

"On the fifty-yard line, baby," Carlos said. "Cowboys versus Giants for the division title."

He and Louis high-fived. Three hundred forty dollars bought a seat on the fifty-yard line in the section nearest the field. But Ford Stevens had to pay $300,000 for the license for the eight seats, an up-front payment for the right to buy tickets for those seats. Scott had wanted to bring the girls to a game, but the only available tickets were through brokers and sold for $1,500 per seat and up. That price had dissuaded him, but apparently not many other Cowboys fans. The seats around them were filling up fast with fans wearing Cowboys caps and jerseys and toting $8 beers. Scott sat between Carlos and Louis on his left- "Big man, what'd you do yesterday?"

"Read Shakespeare. What did you do?"

"Drank Coronas and pumped iron at the gym."

"You mean, pumped iron then drank Coronas?"

"No, man. I drink beer before I work out. It's called carbo-loading."

Louis grunted. "Why do you work out so much?"

"I want bigger muscles."

"You've got big muscles."

"Gracias, big man. But the seoritas, they always want bigger."

-and Bobby on his right; he pointed at the big four-sided screen- "Technicians sit in a booth in the middle of that thing during the game, nine stories up. That'd be a long fall."

-and the girls sat on opposite sides of Karen so they could help with the baby. Little Scotty's eyes were wide at his surroundings, as were Big Scotty's. Cheerleaders dancing on the field to loud music, fire shooting from cannons, colorful lights flashing, the big screen pulsating with clips from prior games, bright advertisements for beer and cars, fans whooping and hollering-it was sensory overload. While at SMU, Scott had played several games at Texas Stadium, the Cowboys' old venue. It was utilitarian in design, a steel frame with seats and a field and no frills; it was only about football. But this stadium seemed more spectacle than football, more Barnum & Bailey than Vince Lombardi, more about merchandise and beer than the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. Jerry Jones, the owner of the Dallas Cowboys, had made football entertainment; the stadium was colloquially known as "Jerryworld."

"I need a Corona," Carlos said.

"I'll go with you," Louis said.

They stood. Louis wore slacks and a long-sleeve shirt; he looked like an off-duty pro wrestler. Carlos wore black leather boots and pants, a tight black tee shirt stretched tight on his muscular body that revealed his tattoos, and his black hair slicked back. He finished off the look with a wide silver bracelet on each wrist. He looked like a Mexican matador.

"We're going to the concession stand," Carlos said. "You guys want anything? Louis is buying."

Bobby: "Beer."

Scott: "Root beer."

Karen: "Coffee with cream."

Boo: "Margarita."

Carlos: "Funny."

"We want knowledge," Boo said.