in her lungs
felt foreign and unhealthy. Amber, who smoked cigarettes occasionally,
dragged away with gusto, the little pothead. Art was following her
around with his eyes as though he were chained.

She served and poured; they ate and drank. The evening got blurry.
Willow told them about the chickadee and about playing _Cripple Creek_.

"Yeah," Art said. "He lives in a house behind his mother's. She's got
money, or the family does. Don't know much about Martin; he went to
private school, was only around summers. His father was a pilot. He
died about ten years ago."

"He plays banjo pretty well," Willow said.

"Yeah, I guess. How come you stopped playing the violin?"

Willow scratched one knee. "I love the old greats," she said. "I mean
they are great souls, but . . . "

"They weren't your soul," Art said.

"No. I mean, they are, but they aren't." She put her hands behind her
head into her hair and paused, spreading her arms out slowly, letting
long dark strands run through her fingers and fan across her shoulders.
She shook her head. "I didn't want to be stuck in that scene forever.
Doors were closing."

"Willow's father is a music prof," Amber said.

"My mother plays, too," Willow said. "A nice Jewish musical family with
perfect children who know how to get along."

"What's wrong with getting along?" Amber smiled meaningfully in Art's
direction.

"Maybe you could sing; you look a little like Joan Baez." Art was a
decent guy, really. And he had those shoulders. Willow's ears were
buzzing.

"I wish," she said.

"You got any Coltrane?" The guy was full of surprises.

"We do." She rose slowly and flipped through the albums that Amber had
borrowed from AhnRee. "Night music," she said, putting it on the
stereo. Amber was smiling broadly and wiggling her toes.

"Ice cream," she said. Willow remembered that she had to work in the
morning.

"Bedtime for me," she said. Amber promised to do the dishes.

"Great dinner," Art said.

She closed the porch door behind her and stepped out of her clothes,
feeling the cool night air on her skin. She stretched, reaching high
with her fingers, and then slid her hands appraisingly down her sides
and hips. This feeling of aloneness, this new sense of herself, wasn't
so bad. Whatever it was, it was real. She pulled a blue broadcloth
nightshirt over her head and lay in bed, drifting away from the muffled
tenor sax, out toward the trees and the summer night. The quiet