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said. “She sat still this afternoon when you explained what the different birds were. She doesn’t have any particular interest in birds, you know. You wouldn’t like it if she pretended she couldn’t keep a crow straight from a swallow.”
    “I wasn’t putting her on that time,” he said. “Pretend to be a little interested, even if you aren’t,” the woman said.
    “I listen to this stuff night and day. How am I supposed to keep it all straight?” The man finished his drink and took a sip of his wife’s wine.
    The waitress came back to the table with the bill. There was a little piece of paper with “Stephanie Sykes” written on it. Edward looked surprised. He handed it to Nicole. Nicole read it and shook her head. She handed it to Lucy, seeming slightly embarrassed. “I am just a dishwasher,” the note said, “but I love Stephanie Sykes. I will treasure your ginger ale glass always.—Harry Woods.”
    Maureen read it over Lucy’s shoulder. “It must be the strangest feeling to be recognized. Especially if you don’t even know who’s watching you,” Maureen said.
    “Really,” Nicole said. “I mean, you have to think about it because there are a lot of guys like that guy Hinckley.”
    “Don’t even talk about it,” Lucy said.
    More fireworks exploded. Maureen laughed nervously. Hildonrubbed Lucy’s knee under the table, so hard that the top part of her body swayed. Maureen saw her moving, and Lucy looked down, pretending that she had been moving intentionally and that something was wrong with the seat of the chair.
    “Jodie Foster was so great in
Taxi Driver
,” Nicole said. “It’s too bad he couldn’t have picked somebody obscure to give her career a boost.”
    “That’s thinking business,” Edward said, raising his empty brandy snifter to Nicole.
    Nicole said, “It’s getting breezy. I wonder if we’re going to have a tornado.”
    “A tornado?” Edward said. “That isn’t likely. Of course, I guess people never expect a tornado. Do you really think they cause as much destruction as people make out?”
    “Are you crazy?” Maureen said. “Of course they do.”
    “There was that one in New England,” Nicole said. “That one in the early fifties in … Worcester. Sixty people died, and there’s no telling how many were hurt.”
    “Did your family have friends in Worcester?” Maureen said.
    “No,” Nicole said. “That was just one of the most damaging tornadoes, so it was the one that came to mind.”
    As they walked away from the table, Maureen said to Noonan, “Imagine that. She’d never heard of one of the presidential candidates and she knew about some tornado that hit New England before she was born. You’ve got to wonder what kind of an education kids are getting nowadays.”
    Noonan put his arm around her shoulder and squeezed. He was smiling ear to ear.
    “What?” Maureen said. “I’m being stuffy?”
    With his free hand, Noonan reached in his pants pocket. Noonan had stolen the ashtray.

7

    T HE newspaper assigned Myra DeVane to write the
Country Daze
story. There was no background information on any of the staff, so for most of the story she was going to have to rely on interviews. She wanted to do a good job, because she wanted to move on from Vermont to an important paper like the Boston
Globe
. She needed some more impressive press clips before she applied for a job like that though. If this group of people was anywhere near as interesting as their writing, it wasn’t going to be difficult to write a good story. The new publisher, whom she had spoken to in person, had about as much class as John Belushi, doing Samurai Swordsman. She couldn’t wait to see what the editor was like.
    On Monday she went to the
Country Daze
headquarters, a remodeled turn-of-the-century house off the main street. Tomato plants were staked on the front lawn. It had been recently painted, but the yard, with patches of burned grass and bushes in need of trimming, made it