The Sparrow

Leaning back against his chair, he looked up at her with frank admiration. 'Madam. How could I resist an invitation like that?' he asked. And leaning forward, 'Will your husband be there?'

'Yes, dammit, but he's a very liberal and tolerant person,' Anne assured him, grinning. 'And he falls asleep early.'

The Edwardses' house was a square, sensible-looking structure, surrounded by a garden that, Emilio was delighted to see, mixed flowers with tomatoes and pumpkin vines, lettuces, carrot patches and pepper plants. Pulling off gardening gloves, George Edwards greeted him in the front yard and waved him in through the door. A good face, Emilio thought, full of humor and welcome. Anne's age, with a full head of silver hair but with the alarming leanness one associated with chronic HIV or toxic hyperthyroidism, or aging runners. Running was the most likely explanation. The man looked very fit. Not, Emilio thought, smiling inwardly, the sort to fall asleep early.

Anne was in the large, bright kitchen, working on dinner. Emilio recognized the smell instantly but it was a moment before he could put a name to it. When he did, he collapsed into a kitchen chair and moaned, 'Dios mio, bacalaitos!'

Anne laughed. 'And asopao. With tostones. And for dessert—'

'Forget the homework, dear lady. Run away with me,' Emilio pleaded.

'Tembleque!' she announced, triumphant, laughing but happy that she'd pleased a guest. 'A Puerto Rican friend of mine helped with the menu. There's a wonderful colmado on the west side. You can get yautia, batatas, yuca, amarillos—you name it.'

'You are probably unaware,' Emilio said, face sincere, eyes glowing, 'that there was a seventeenth-century Puerto Rican heretic who claimed that Jesus used the smell of bacalaitos to raise Lazarus from the dead. The bishop had him burned at the stake, but they waited until after dinner and he died a happy man.'

George, laughing, handed Sandoz and Anne frosty shallow-bowled glasses, froth floating on creamy liquid. 'Bacardi anejo,' Sandoz breathed, reverent. George raised his glass and they toasted Puerto Rico.

'So,' Anne said in a serious tone, delicate brows raised in polite interest, the soul of propriety but about to take a sip of her drink. 'What's celibacy like?'

'It's a bitch,' Emilio said with prompt honesty, and Anne exploded. He handed her a napkin to wipe her nose and, without waiting for her to recover, stood and created an earnest face to address a phantom crowd at an old- time Twelve Step meeting. 'Hello. My name is Emilio and though I can't remember it, my unempowered inner child might have been a codependent sex addict, so I rely on abstinence and put my trust in a Higher Power. You're dripping.'

'I am a highly skilled anatomist,' Anne declared with starchy dignity, dabbing at her blouse with the napkin, 'and I can explain the exact mechanism by which one blows a drink out one's nose.'

'Don't call her bluff,' George warned him. 'She can do it. Have you ever thought about a Twelve Step program for people who talk too much? You could call it On and On Anon.'

'Oh, God,' Anne groaned. 'The old ones are the best ones.'

'Jokes or husbands?' Emilio asked innocently.

And so the evening went.

When he next showed up for dinner, Anne met him at the door, put her hands on both sides of his face, rose on tiptoe and planted a chaste kiss on his forehead. 'The first time you're here, you are a guest,' she informed him, looking into his eyes. 'After that, my darling, you're family. Get your own damned beer.'

He took the long enjoyable walk to the Edwardses' house at least once a week after that. Sometimes he was the only guest. Often there were others: students, friends, neighbors, interesting strangers Anne or George had met and brought home. The conversation, about politics and religion and baseball and the wars in Kenya and Central Asia and whatever else caught Anne's interest, was raucous and funny, and the evenings ended with people calling out last jokes as they walked off into the night. The house became his cave—a home where a Jesuit was welcome and relaxed and off-duty, where he could soak up energy instead of being drained of it. It was the first real home Emilio Sandoz had ever had.

Sitting in their screened-in back porch, sipping drinks in the dusk, he learned that George was an engineer whose last job had involved life-support systems for underwater mining operations but whose career had spanned the technological distance from wooden slide rules to ILIAC RV and FORTRAN to neural nets, photonics and nanomachines. New to retirement, George had spent the early weeks of freedom cutting a swath through the old house, catching up on every small repair, taking curatorial pride in the smoothly working wooden window casings, the tuck-pointed brickwork, the tidiness of the workroom. He read stacks of books, eating them like popcorn. He enlarged the garden, built an arbor, organized the garage. He sank into pillowy contentment. He was bored brainless.

'Do you run?' he asked Sandoz, hopefully.

'I went out for cross-country in school.'

'Watch out, dear, he's trying to sucker you. The old fart's training for a marathon,' Anne said, the admiration in her eyes contradicting her tartness. 'We're going to have to rebuild his knees if he keeps this nonsense up. On the other hand, if he croaks doing roadwork, I'm going to be a tastefully rich widow. I believe very sincerely in overinsuring.'

Anne, he found out, was taking his course because she'd used medical Latin for years and was curious about the source language. She'd wanted to be a physician from the start but chickened out, afraid of the biochem, and so she began her career as a biological anthropologist. After finishing her Ph.D., she got work in Cleveland, teaching gross anatomy at Case Western Reserve. Years of working with med students in the gross lab did nothing to sustain her awe of the medical curriculum and so, at forty, she went back to school and wound up in emergency medicine, a specialty that required tolerance for chaos and a working knowledge of everything from neurosurgery to dermatology.

'I enjoy the violence,' she explained primly, handing him a napkin. 'Would you like me to explain about how that nose thing happens? The anatomy is really interesting. The epiglottis is like a little toilet bowl seat that covers the larynx—'

'Anne!' George yelled.

She stuck out her tongue. 'Anyway, emergency medicine is great stuff. In the space of an hour sometimes, you get a crushed chest, a gunshot wound to the head and a kid with a rash.'

'No children?' Emilio asked them one evening, to his own surprise.

'Nope. Turned out, we don't breed well in captivity,' George said, unembarrassed.

Anne laughed. 'Oh, God, Emilio. You'll love this. We used the rhythm method of birth control for years!' Her eyes bulged with disbelief. 'We thought it worked!' And they howled.

He loved Anne, trusted her from the beginning. As the weeks went by and his emotions became more tangled, he felt more strongly the need of her counsel and the conviction that it would be good. But disclosure was never easy for him; the fall semester was half over before, one night after he finished helping George clear up the dinner wreckage, he found the nerve to suggest a walk to Anne.

'Behave yourselves,' George ordered. 'I'm old, but I can shoot.'

'Relax, George,' Anne called over her shoulder, as they started down the driveway. 'I probably flunked the midterm. He's taking me out to break the news gently.'

They chatted amiably for the first block or two, Anne's hand on Emilio's arm, her silver head nearly level with his dark one. He started twice but stalled out, unable to find words. Amused, she sighed and said, 'Okay, tell me about her.'

Sandoz barked a laugh and ran a hand through his hair. 'Is it that obvious?'

'No,' she assured him, gentle now. 'It's just that I've seen you with a gorgeous young woman at the coffee shop on campus a few times, and I put two and two together. So. Tell me!'

He did. About Mendes's adamantine single-mindedness. Her accent, which he could mimic to perfection but could not identify. The hidalgo remark, so out of proportion to his mild attempt to soften the relationship. The