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signal to watch for, and some Fridays (not every) just when she says, “Back over to you, Bill,” she gives a little twitch of a smile and then her full-kilowatt blast right behind it. Wouldn’t see the twitch if you weren’t looking for it. That little gesture is for me, to say that she is thinking about me and loves me, right there with the camera and half the town eyeing her. I bend close to the TV every Friday to watch, and if she does it, I shout like I have just won the state lottery.
    Right now she’s moving in slow motion, doing White Crane Spreads Wings. She is half-naked as she practices, wearing blue sweatpants, her hair still wet from the shower. She told me once that she is locating her internal self, her centeredness, that tai chi means “the grand ultimate fist.” I wonder at this, how she finds her center by making her insides a fist. She grew up with a father who lost jobs the way other people lose car keys, and a mother convicted eighteen times for shoplifting. I would make my innards a fist, too, I think.
    I watch her in the dark, lit by the blue of the TV, her nakedness in the cold light, her slow movements like storm clouds in a nature film. She hates the TV, but right now it renders her beautiful. After finishing with Fair Lady Works at Shuttles, she sits on the bed beside my knees, points the remote at the wall behind me, and turns off the tube, a decent bank shot. She clicks on the light. We are about to talk.
    â€œWe need to talk,” she says. From atop her computer she lifts one of the green ledger books she uses in her investment management course, opens it across the bed.
    â€œHere’s the plan, Reed. If we move out of here, into some student ghetto until I graduate, then we pay out three hundred a month that we aren’t paying now.”
    I nod, look at her. “Three hundred in the hole. Okay.”
    â€œBut—” She kneels across from me. “If we’re near campus, we cut out my commuting costs, and you are closer to town. We don’t have to drive Sugar anywhere at all, and we don’t have to pay for his food. Conservatively, this saves us maybe a hundred and fifty.”
    â€œBut still in the hole,” I tell her.
    â€œRight, but what do we get for our hundred and fifty? We get us, honey. We get to be with each other, instead of tiptoeing around and acting polite and making sure we have on our bathrobes.”
    As she says this, I look down at the rows of credits and debits written in blue ink in her neat hand, then upward, at the way the wet tips of her hair sway and lightly brush her nipples. All in all, it’s a convincing argument.
    â€œI’ve lived here a long time, Lyndsey. Eleven years is a long time.”
    She takes my hands, knee walks over her own ledger book as she moves forward to straddle my thighs.
    â€œListen,” she whispers, “you aren’t doing him any good by staying here. He needs to find something else. His own life, maybe, instead of just tagging along with yours. You don’t have to stay.”
    â€œYeah, but what’s wrong with staying? We have privacy.”
    â€œI would just like a little normalcy for once, Reed.”
    I start to speak, then we both jump as Sugar detonates another pipe bomb from the backyard. Orange light bursts against the curtain a half second before the explosion rattles my keys on the dresser. The shards of soup can clatter on the driveway. Lyndsey closes her eyes, draws steady breaths through her nose. I squeeze her hand.
    â€œLet me think about it,” I say.
    She nods. “Better think hard.”
how we met
    Friday nights at the Hen House and all-you-can-eat crab legs. Snow crab legs, and Sugar wanted to eat them in the snow, in February, and Lyndsey was our waitress ten Fridays running, and slowly became a shared joke, a persistent glance, a nudge in the ribs from Sugar. We were two men just off from work (well, me), tired, doughy enough