Over all of her affirmations her fears flew up and perched like a murder of crows. It occurred to her that she didn’t have the slightest idea what she was going to wear. The freedom of single life had suddenly become a burden, a mixed blessing, herpes on the pope’s ring. Maybe she wouldn’t answer the phone when he called.

Travis finished eating and paid his bill, leaving her far too large a tip.

“See you tonight,” he said.

“You bet.” She smiled.

She watched him walk across the parking lot. He seemed to be talking to someone as he walked. Probably just singing. Guys did that right after they made a date, didn’t they? Maybe he was just a whacko?

For the hundredth time that morning she resisted the urge to call Robert and tell him to come home.

8

ROBERT

Robert loaded the last of the laundry baskets full of dishes into the bed of the pickup. The sight of a truckload of clean dishes did not raise his spirits nearly as much as he thought it would. He was still depressed. He was still heartbroken. And he was still hung over.

For a moment he thought that washing the dishes might have been a mistake. Having created a single bright spot, no matter how small, seemed to make the rest of his life look even more dismal by contrast. Maybe he should have just gone with the downward flow, like the pilot who pushes down the stick to pull out of an uncontrolled spin.

Secretly, Robert believed that if things got so bad that he couldn’t see his way out, something would come along and not only save him from disaster but improve his life overall. It was a skewed brand of faith that he had developed through years of watching television — where no problem was so great that it could not be surmounted by the last commercial break — and through two events in his own life.

As a boy in Ohio he had taken his first summer job at the local county fair, picking up trash on the midways. The job had been great fun for the first two weeks. He and the other boys on the cleanup crew spent their days wandering the midways using long sticks, with nails extending from one end, to spear paper cups and hot dog wrappers as if they were hunting lions on the Serengeti. They were paid in cash at the end of each day. The next day they spent their pay on games of chance and repeated rides on the Zipper, which was the beginning of Robert’s lifelong habit of exchanging money for dizziness and nausea.

The day after the fair ended, Robert and the boys were told to report to the livestock area of the fairgrounds. They arrived before dawn, wondering what they would do now that the colorful carny trailers and rides were gone and the midways were as barren as airport runways.

The man from the county met them outside the big exhibition barns with a dump truck, a pile of pitchforks, and some wheelbarrows. “Clean out those pens, boys. Load the manure on the truck,” he had said. Then he went away, leaving the boys unsupervised.

Robert had loaded only three forkfuls when he and the boys ran out of the barn gasping for breath, the odor of ammonia burning in their noses and lungs.

Again and again they tried to clean the stables only to be overcome by the stench. As they stood outside the barn, swearing and complaining, Robert noticed something sticking up out of the morning fog on the adjacent show ground. It looked like the head of a dragon.

It was beginning to get light, and the boys could hear banging and clanging and strange animal noises coming from the show ground. They stared into the fog, trying to make out the shapes moving there, glad for the distraction from their miserable task.

When the sun broke over the trees to the east of the fairgrounds, a scraggly man in blue work clothes walked out of the mist toward the barn. “Hey, you kids,” he shouted, and they all prepared to be admonished for standing around instead of working. “You want to work for the circus?”

The boys dropped their pitchforks as if they were red-hot rods of steel and ran to the man. The dragon had been a camel. The strange noises were the trumpeting of elephants. Under the mist a crew of men were unrolling the big top of the Clyde Beatty Circus.

Robert and the boys worked all morning beside the circus people, lacing together the bright-yellow canvas panels of the tent and fitting together giant sections of aluminum poles that would support the big top.

It was hot, sweaty, heavy work, and it was wonderful and exciting. When the poles lay out across the canvas, cables were hitched to a team of elephants and the poles were hoisted skyward. Robert thought his heart would burst with excitement. The canvas was connected by cables to a winch. The boys watched in awe as the big top rose up the poles like a great yellow dream.

It was only one day. But it was glorious, and Robert thought of it often — of the roustabouts who sipped from their hip flasks and called each other by the names of their home states or towns. “Kansas, bring that strut over here. New York, we need a sledge over here.” Robert thought of the thick-thighed women who walked the wire and flew on the trapeze. Their heavy makeup was grotesque up close but beautiful at a distance when they were flying through the air above the crowd.

That day was an adventure and a dream. It was one of the finest in Robert’s life. But what had impressed him was that it had come right when things seemed the most bleak, when everything had gone, literally, to shit.

The next time Robert’s life took a nosedive he was in Santa Barbara, and his salvation arrived in the form of a woman.

He had come to California with everything he owned packed into a Volkswagen Beetle, determined to pursue a dream that he thought would begin at the California border with music by the Beach Boys and a long, white beach full of shapely blondes dying for the company of a young photographer from Ohio. What he found was alienation and poverty.

Robert had chosen the prestigious photography school in Santa Barbara because it was reputed to be the best. As photographer for the high school yearbook he had gained a reputation as one of the best photographers in town, but in Santa Barbara he was just another teenager among hundreds of students who were, if anything, more skilled than he.

He took a job in a grocery store, stocking shelves from midnight to eight in the morning. He had to work full-time to pay his exorbitant tuition and rent, and soon he fell behind in his assignments. After two months he had to leave school to avoid flunking out.

He found himself in a strange town with no friends and barely enough money to survive. He started drinking beer every morning with the night crew in the parking lot. He drove home in a stupor and slept through the day until his next shift. With the added expense of alcohol, Robert had to hock his cameras to pay rent, and with them went his last hope for a future beyond stocking shelves.

One morning after his shift the manager called him into the office.

“Do you know anything about this?” The manager pointed to four jars of peanut butter that lay open on his desk. “These were returned by customers yesterday.” On the smooth surface of the peanut butter in each jar was etched, “Help, I’m trapped in Supermarket Hell!”

Robert stocked the glass aisle. There was no denying it. He had written the messages one night during his shift after drinking several bottles of cough medicine he had stolen from the shelves.

“Pick up your check on Friday,” the manager said.

He shuffled away, broke, unemployed, two thousand miles from home, a failure at nineteen. As he left the store, one of the cashiers, a pretty redhead about his age, who was coming in to open the store, stopped him.

“Your name is Robert, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” he said.

“You’re the photographer, aren’t you?”