Tears rolled from his eyes. Ki ran over and plopped on his defenseless lap. John stopped laughing in a hurry. “Ooofl” he cried, looking at me with shining, wounded eyes as his bruised balls no doubt tried to climb back inside his body. “Kyra Devote!” Mattie cried, looking at John apprehensively. “I taggled my own quartermack,” Ki said proudly. John smiled feebly at her and staggered to his feet. “Yes,” he said. “You did. And the ref calls fifteen yards for squashing.”

“Are you okay, man?” George asked. He looked concerned, but his voice was grinning.

“I’m fine,” John said, and spun him the Frisbee. It wobbled feebly across the yard. “Go on, throw. Let’s see whatcha got.” The thunder rumbled louder, but the black clouds were all still west of us; the sky overhead remained a harmless humid blue. Birds still sang and crickets hummed in the grass. There was a heat-shimmer over the barbecue, and it would soon be time to slap on John’s New York steaks. The Frisbee still flew, red against the green of the grass and trees, the blue of the sky.

I was still in lust, but everything was still all right—men are in lust all over the world and damned near all of the time, and the icecaps don’t melt. But she danced, and everything changed. It was an old Don Henley song, one driven by a really nasty guitar riff. “Oh God, I love this one,” Mattie cried. The Frisbee came to her. She caught it, dropped it, stepped on it as if it were a hot red spot falling on a nightclub stage, and began to shake. She put her hands first behind her neck and then on her hips and then behind her back. She danced stand ins with the toes of her sneakers on the Frisbee. She danced without moving. She danced as they say in that song—like a wave on the ocean.

“The government bugged the men’s room in the local disco lounge, And all she wants to do is dance, dance…

keep the boys from selling all the weapons they can scrounge, And all she wants to do, all she wants to do is dance.”

Women are sexy when they dance—incredibly sexy—but that wasn’t what I reacted to, or how I reacted. The lust I was coping with, but this was more than lust, and not copeable. It was something that sucked the wind out of me and left me feeling utterly at her mercy. In that moment she was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, not a pretty woman in shorts and a middy top dancing in place on a Frisbee, but Venus revealed. She was everything I had missed during the last four years, when I’d been so badly off I didn’t know I was missing anything. She robbed me of any last defenses I might have had. The age difference didn’t matter. If I looked to people like my tongue was hanging out even when my mouth was shut, then so be it. If I lost my dignity, my pride, my sense of self, then so be it. Four years on my own had taught me there are worse things to lose.

How long did she stand there, dancing? I don’t know. Probably not long, not even a minute, and then she realized we were looking at her, rapt—because to some degree they all saw what I saw and felt what I felt. For that minute or however long it was, I don’t think any of us used much oxygen.

She stepped off the Frisbee, laughing and blushing at the same time, confused but not really uncomfortable. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I just…

I love that song.”

“All she wants to do is dance,” Rommie said.

“Yes, sometimes that’s all she wants,” Mattie said, and blushed harder than ever. “Excuse me, I have to use the facility.” She tossed me the Frisbee and then dashed for the trailer.

I took a deep breath, trying to steady myself back to reality, and saw John doing the same thing. George Kennedy was wearing a mildly stunned expression, as if someone had fed him a light sedative and it was finally taking effect.

Thunder rumbled. This time it did sound closer.

I skimmed the Frisbee to Rommie. “What do you think?”

“I think I’m in love,” he said, and then seemed to give himself a small mental shake—it was a thing you could see in his eyes. “I also think it’s time we got going on those steaks if we’re going to eat outside.

Want to help me?”

“Sure.”

“I will, too,” John said.

We walked back to the trailer, leaving George and Kyra to play toss.

Kyra was asking George if he had ever caught any crinimals. In the kitchen, Mattie was standing beside the open fridge and stacking steaks on a platter. “Thank God you guys came in. I was on the point of giving up and gobbling one of these just the way it is. They’re the most beautiful things I ever saw.”

“You’re the most beautiful thing I ever saw,” John said. He was being totally sincere, but the smile she gave him was distracted and a little bemused. I made a mental note to myself: never compliment a woman on her beauty when she has a couple of raw steaks in her hands. It just doesn’t turn the windmill somehow.

“How are you at barbecuing meat?” she asked me. “Tell the truth, because these are way too good to mess up.”

“I can hold my own.”

“Okay, you’re hired. John, you’re assisting. Rommie, help me do salads.”

“My pleasure.”

George and Ki had come around to the front of the trailer and were now sitting in lawn-chairs like a couple of old cronies at their London club. George was telling Ki how he had shot it out with Rolfe Nedeau and the Real Bad Gang on Lisbon Street in 1993.

“George, what’s happening to your nose?” John asked. “It’s getting so long.”

“Do you mind?” George asked. “I’m having a conversation here.”

“Mr. Kennedy has caught lots of crooked crinimals,” Kyra said. “He caught the Real Bad Gang and put them in Supermax.”

“Yes,” I said. “Mr. Kennedy also won an Academy Award for acting in a movie called Cool Hand Luke.”

“That’s absolutely correct,” George said. He raised his right hand and crossed the two fingers. “Me and Paul Newman. Just like that.”

“We have his pusgetti sauce,” Ki said gravely, and that got John laughing again. It didn’t hit me the same way, but laughter is catching; just watching John was enough to break me up after a few seconds. We were howling like a couple of fools as we slapped the steaks on the grill. It’s a wonder we didn’t burn our hands off. “Why are they laughing?” Ki asked George. “Because they’re foolish men with little tiny brains,” George said. “Now listen, Ki—I got them all except for the Human Headcase. He jumped into his car and I jumped into mine. The details of that chase are nothing for a little girl to hear—” George regaled her with them anyway while John and I stood grinning at each other across Mattie’s barbecue. “This is great, isn’t it?” John said, and I nodded. Mattie came out with corn wrapped in aluminum foil, followed by Rommie, who had a large salad bowl clasped in his arms and negotiated the steps carefully, trying to peer over the top of the bowl as he made his way down them. We sat at the picnic table, George and Rommie on one side, John and I flanking Mattie on the other. Ki sat at the head, perched on a stack of old magazines in a lawn-chair. Mattie tied a dishtowel around her neck, an indignity Ki submitted to only because (a) she was wearing new clothes, and (b) a dishtowel wasn’t a baby-bib, at least technically speaking. We ate hugely—salad, steak (and John was right, it really was the best I’d ever had), roasted corn on the cob, “strewberry snortcake” for dessert. By the time we’d gotten around to the snortcake, the thunderheads were noticeably closer and there was a hot, jerky breeze blowing around the yard. “Mattie, if I never eat a meal as good as this one again, I won’t be surprised,’’

Rommie said. “Thanks ever so much for having me.”

“Thank you,” she said. There were tears standing in her eyes. She took my hand on one side and John’s on the other. She squeezed both. “Thank you all. If you knew what things were like for Ki and me before this last week. .” She shook her head, gave John and me a final squeeze, and let go. “But that’s over.”