Night Work

“Listen to what?”

“Advice. Amanda thought the girl—I ought to call her ‘y^oung woman,” but it’s hard to think of such a child that way. Amanda thought she was being abused by her husband and his family, and she wanted me to encourage Pramilla to get out before she found herself with a broken arm, or worse. When I heard the details of the story, I thought the ’or worse‘ all too likely. That file on bride burning is something I’ve been compiling for years, and when I saw the situation—a young bride far from her own support group, married over a year and not pregnant, with signs of escalating violence like the bruises on her arm where someone had grabbed her, hard—I became extremely concerned. I was right, but I wasn’t concerned enough. I should have dragged her out of that house. Or gone there and made a stink to let them know someone was watching. I will never forgive myself that I did not.“

“Roz, there’s a mountain of guilt out there if you want to crawl under it. And you’re not even sure it wasn’t an accident, are you? Those damn garments they wear, I should think they’re massively dangerous around open flame, all that loose silk waiting to catch on fire.”

An odd expression took over Roz’s features, memory wrestling with an unwillingness to relinquish the self- blame. “She didn’t like cooking over electricity. She told us that. They had to buy her a little kerosene stove because it was closer to what she was used to. She could cook squatting on the floor.”

Kate said nothing, merely meeting Roz’s eyes and nodding. The door behind them opened briefly and shut again; she became aware that the temporary silence in the outer office had given way again to voices and movement. The church members had returned from their dinner and were awaiting the next commands of their beloved leader.

She closed her notebook and clipped the pen over the cover. “I’ll make some calls, let whoever caught the case know that there’s some question about it. And I’ll try to have a look at the autopsy report myself.”

Roz opened her mouth—to object, Kate knew, to the proposed noncommittal investigation—but was cut short by the door again, this time with a voice asking if Roz was nearly finished, because if so, that call that Roz had been waiting for…

Kate took advantage of the interruption to make her escape, but she was followed out the door by Roz’s voice, calling, “Talk to Amanda, Kate. Hey, Jory? Give Kate Amanda Bonner’s phone number, would you? I’ll talk to you tomorrow, Kate—and thanks.”

Roz obviously intended for Kate to leap right onto the case’s back, may even have intended for Kate to phone Amanda Bonner from the office, but Kate was tired and hungry, so she went home.

Lee was in the kitchen making tantalizing smells to the sound of a classical guitar CD. Kate slipped up behind the cook’s back and put her arms around Lee, just holding her, until Lee remembered that something on the stove was about to become inedible (if not burst into flames) and she unwrapped Kate’s encircling arms, gently but firmly.

“Jon’s out again?” Kate asked, going to the cupboard for a couple of wineglasses.

“In and out. Sione has the night off, so they’re going to a movie.”

“Sione being…?”

“The dancer. From Song. Kate, you have been home this last week, you have heard about this.”

“The dancer, right.” The cause of Jon’s falsetto renditions of “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?” and other gems of the fifties and sixties. “How much longer is Song running?” she asked. It seemed a safe question, and relevant as well, particularly if it was a traveling show and the current love of Jon’s life was going off with it.

“Two and a half weeks, I think. Jon wants to know what night we want tickets for.”

“You want to go?”

“Sure. It sounds wild.”

“Okay. Well, the first part of the week should be safe, I’m not on call nights until Wednesday.”

“Monday or Tuesday, then. Would you mind if we made a group of it and asked Roz and Maj? I mentioned it to Roz the other day and she said she could easily have someone take her group session at the shelter, if it needs to be Monday. Or do you think we’ve seen too much of them lately?”

“Never too much, they’re good people,” said Kate easily. She did, in truth, think that they’d been seeing an awful lot of them recently, between one thing and another, but if it made Lee happy she could put up with it. She put the full glasses next to Lee’s spoon rest and stood behind her lover, wrapping her arms again around Lee’s waist. “What about dinner before, or after? There’s that good Chinese place not too far from there.”

“Great. You want garlic bread?”

“With Chinese?”

“With this minestrone, you fool. Tonight.”

“I’d rather have you.”

Lee turned in Kate’s arms and said, half purring, “You can have both, you know.”

“Not at the same time. Too messy. Beans and stuff all over the place.”

Lee drew back and pursed her lips in thought. “We could work on it.”

“I don’t want to work on anything, I’m taking the night off. When is Jon coming home?”

“Any minute,” Lee murmured regretfully into Kate’s hair.

“Then the garlic bread now,” Kate said briskly, and disentangled herself to go and set the table.

Jon did indeed come in a few minutes later, humming a tune Kate remembered from the long-ago summer her periods began—positively modern by Jon’s standards. At least he wasn’t singing out loud.

Still, she braced herself for the other symptom of Jon’s love life, which was an inability to talk about anything without dragging The One’s name into it. A complaint about the garbage cans would trigger the observation that “Bryce was into recycling before curbside bins came”; a comment about kung pao chicken would bring forth the information that “Jacksen’s allergic to chilis.”

So when Lee said to Jon that they were going to try for Song on Monday or Tuesday, Kate braced herself for Sione’s name in some form, but it didn’t come. Jon merely nodded and said that would be great, he was sure they’d love the show.

She looked at him closely, but could see no sign that the affair had run its course already. He seemed pleased with the soup, happy to talk about anything or nothing—indeed, he seemed content, a word that had never before applied to Jon Sampson, who, though he was not clinically bipolar, tended to the extremes in his moods. Finally Kate couldn’t stand it.

“So, Lee tells me you have a thing with one of the Song dancers.”

He beamed at her, a simple, uncomplicated look of delight. “Sione Kalefu. He’s so great. He’s talented, intelligent, he even has a sense of humor. And he’s flat-out, drop-dead gorgeous—like a young Polynesian Mick Jagger, if you can picture it.” Kate tried, and failed. “In fact, when I told him that, he said that yeah, he’d often thought that when he retired he’d run a gay bar and call it Memphis.”

Kate looked at him blankly, waiting for the explanation. Punch line, rather, judging by the expectant sparkle in his eyes.

“All right,” she said. “I give. Why ‘Memphis’?”

“What’s the first line of ‘Honky-Tonk Women’?”

Kate thought about it for a minute, and then felt her lips twitch. Jon threw back his head and laughed and Lee, who had heard this before, nonetheless snorted. “Oh, God, Jon, that’s terrible,” Kate protested, then began to laugh as well.

He cleared the dishes away, doing a bump-and-grind to the accompaniment of the nine-syllable phrase Jagger made out of “honky-tonk women,” then he grabbed up his coat and took himself and his suggestive lyrics out the door to his Polynesian paramour.

“Well,” pronounced Kate in the ensuing silence. “At least it’s a change from ‘Mrs. Brown you’ve got a loverly daughter’ in bad Cockney.”

“Or ‘It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to’ a la Lesley Gore.”

“Remember the time Bryce bought him those Timberland hiking shoes and we heard Nancy Sinatra for a week?”

“Oh, please don’t remind me. They’re all the sorts of songs that lodge in the back of your brain and circle around and around at three in the morning.”