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true. He hates showing up on TV, by the way. He does it because the firm tells him to. During the Packer trial I think he loved the publicity, but I don’t know that’s true anymore. Helen likes it. She always lets everyone know when he’s going to be on TV.”
    “Well, Helen. Sure.”
    It united them, their love for Jim. Bob took advantage of this to stand up and say he was going out to get some different food. “That spaghetti place still open?” he asked.
    “It is, yeah.”
    The streets were dark. He was always surprised how dark the night was outside the city. He drove to a small grocery store and bought two bottles of wine, which you could do in a grocery store in Maine. He bought the ones with screw tops. As he drove, not recognizing things the way he’d thought he would, he was careful not to go in the direction of his childhood home. Since his mother’s death (years ago, he had lost count of the years) he had not once gone past the house. He pulled up at a stop sign, turned right, and saw the old cemetery. On his left were wooden apartment buildings four stories high. He was nearing the center of town. He drove behind what had once been the main department store, Peck’s, before the mall was built across the river. When Bob was small, his clothes for school were bought in the boys’ department there. The memory was one of shame and excruciating self-consciousness: the salesman cuffing the bottom of his pants, once putting a tape measure right up the leg and to his crotch; red turtlenecks bought, also navy blue, his mother nodding. The building was empty now, its windows boarded up. He drove past where the bus station had been, where there had been coffee shops and magazine stores and bakeries. And suddenly a black man appeared, walking beneath a streetlamp. He was tall and graceful, his shirt loose-fitting, although perhaps there was a vest over it, Bob couldn’t tell. Wrapped around his shoulders was a scarf of black and white with tassels. “Hey, cool,” Bob said softly. “Another one.” And yet, Bob, who had lived for years in New York, Bob, who’d had a brief career there defending criminals of various colors and religions (until the stress of the courtroom forced him into appellate work), Bob, who believed in the magnificence of the Constitution and the rights of the people, all people, to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, Bob Burgess, after the tall man with the tasseled scarf turned down a side street of Shirley Falls—Bob thought, ever so fleetingly but he thought it: Just as long as there aren’t too many of them.
    He drove further and there was the familiar Antonio’s, the spaghetti cafeteria, tucked back behind the gas station. Bob stopped the car in the parking lot. On the glass door of Antonio’s was a sign in orange letters. He looked at the clock on the dashboard. Nine o’clock on a Saturday night and Antonio’s was closed. He unscrewed the top off a bottle of wine. How could he describe what he felt? The unfurling of an ache so poignant it was almost erotic, this longing, the inner silent gasp as though in the face of something unutterably beautiful, the desire to put his head down on the big loose lap of this town, Shirley Falls.
    He drove to a small grocery store, bought a package of frozen clam strips, and took them back to Susan’s.

    Abdikarim Ahmed stepped off the sidewalk and walked in the street so as not to be close to doorways where a person might linger in the darkness. He approached the home of his cousin and saw how the lightbulb over the door was—again—not lit. “Uncle,” voices called out to him, and he entered the apartment and continued down the hall to his room, where the walls were covered with Persian rugs; Haweeya had hung them when he moved in months ago. The colors of the wall rugs seemed to move as Abdikarim pressed his fingers hard against his forehead. Bad enough that the man arrested today was unknown to the village. (It was assumed he