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with, to cancel. When I asked him if he was all right, he said he was just going home to sleep. I told him I was sure there was some mistake about Miranda, that I’d phone her husband myself if that’s what he wanted. He said, “No, wait, I’ll think of something,” and left me feeling irrelevant, superfluous, as he often did.
    My mind needed a rest. I went to see a movie with John Goodman in it, because John Goodman was in it, and spoke to no one except the woman in the ticket booth. Afterward I wandered in a department store in Triangle Square without knowing what I was looking for. I ignored the sales associates, as they like to call themselves, and hoped they thought I was a mean and shifty shoplifter.
    Later, I walked a couple blocks down the street, headed for a coffeehouse with pretensions of hippiebeatdom. Alongside me, slick-looking cars swept along the boulevard, their cloth tops down, the music up, the drivers busy with gum and lush with new spring tans and expensive sunglasses.
    The walls in the coffeehouse were painted black and jazz was playing. I ordered a blend of something African with a dollop of whipped cream and went to sit at one of the round blue tables. Across the room a single, skinny, morose man with a gold ear cuff and a pointy beard turned pages in a worn New Yorker . He humped the pages over with a long finger, whish-pause, whish-pause, regular in the rhythm, as though he were a speed reader with the knack down pat.
    On the chair next to me was a thin book with ornate letters on front: SCPJ . I opened it and saw it was the literary journal from Cal State Fullerton, and it was all poems. I read a few. I don’t know much about poetry, but it seemed good, and I read about deer and candles and things I hadn’t thought about in a long time. The caffeine and silence eventually brought me around.
    â€œI tried phoning you earlier,” I said to Joe, reaching him about ten that night.
    â€œI was out with Jennifer.”
    â€œOh.”
    â€œShe needed to talk about David. His college, like that. We hadn’t made plans, you and me.”
    â€œWhere’d you go?” I asked.
    â€œAre you jealous?”
    â€œOf course not.”
    â€œYou are.”
    â€œI understand you have to talk to her about stuff. Where’d you go to eat? New place?”
    â€œI tried you at four,” he said.
    â€œNobody’s ever home.”
    â€œIt seems that way, doesn’t it?”
    â€œI didn’t see a message,” I said.
    â€œThere’s a strain in your voice.”
    â€œI just wanted to tell you something. My brother came to see me. Nathan. He’s living here now.”
    â€œYou didn’t know that?”
    â€œOur family’s a little different.”
    â€œAre you all right? You sound depressed.”
    â€œI think the victim in Carbon Canyon could be my ex-sister-in-law.”
    â€œNo way.”
    â€œBullshit, no way. Listen to this,” I said, and then I told him about Nathan seeing Miranda while he was still married, while she was still married, and when I did, it felt like a betrayal to them both. But I pressed on. I told him about the discrepancies in what the pathologist said and with what I knew about Miranda: the pregnancy, the presumed age. For some reason, I held back about the breast implants. Nathan hadn’t directly answered yes, that she had had them, but I thought I read it in his eyes. I held back because I didn’t like to talk to men about women having surgery on themselves. It’s too easy to joke. And who knows, I may have a lift and tuck someday myself, even though I currently disapproved. I wondered if it was Nathan who encouraged her to do it.
    â€œYou just said it doesn’t add up.”
    â€œBut what’s her car doing out there, then? Joe, I’m sure that body in the canyon is Miranda Robertson. It’s got to be.”
    â€œYou want me to come over?”
    â€œNo. What good