our concern?” she said. Jimmy wondered if she was drunk, the way she chose her words. He’d learn soon enough that it was just her. Then, at least. The way she was then. She said, “I felt sorry for him because of the look in his eye, because he looked forsaken.”

“What’s your name?” he said.

“Lucky,” she said.

Jimmy pulled the ribbon on the white-and-red pack of smokes and tapped it against the palm of his hand.

“Why do people do that?” she said.

“I don’t know, I think it packs the tobacco tighter or something,” Jimmy said.

“Or everyone saw someone do it in a movie.”

“Are you an actress?” Jimmy said.

“No, you are,” she said. “You are.”

They walked almost as far as Tower Records and the sushi place. Jimmy was prepared to run into the boyfriend again, the director, but that would be overestimating him.

“Let’s go somewhere. Where do you want to go?” Jimmy said, standing there on the sidewalk. In 1995.

“San Francisco,” she said. “L.A. is bothering me. You’re not the Cut Killer, are you?” Lately, since the beginning of summer, there’d been a series of killings, girls’ bodies left spread-eagle on road cuts, the sloping gouges into the rock where the highway sliced through. Nine of them.

“Where do you want to go?” Jimmy asked her again, as serious about anything as he’d been in a long, long time.

Mary wasn’t a single mom. She wasn’t alone.

He came late to the soccer practice or play date or picnic or whatever it was. Sunday afternoon in the park on Tiburon. Her husband. Jimmy saw him drive up in a black BMW X-5. On the phone. He parked and sat there another two minutes, finishing his call. There were two other mothers and a father next to Mary on the sidelines of the playing fie ld. She had her back to the parking lot and didn’t see him. She had her eyes on the boy, who was dribbling a ball down the fie ld, or at least making an earnest six-year-old’s attempt at dribbling.

Her son. It was hard for Jimmy to even think it. He didn’t know much about kids but got close guessing the boy’s age. He did the math. Everything in him wanted to get closer, to see more, but he knew that Mary would spot him, his shape, his coloration, as easily as he had hers. Or at least that was what he told himself, to keep himself inside the car. To stop himself. He turned the key and started the engine. The sound of the rev made Mary turn to look. It was then that she saw her husband walking toward her across the apron of the field. He wore a dark gray suit, but as he came closer he pulled off the necktie and unbuttoned the collar of the blue shirt. He folded the tie in half and slipped it into his coat pocket. (Who goes into the office on a Sunday? Even for a half day?) He was dark-haired. With a hundred-dollar haircut. He smiled at his wife from ten yards out and then looked away quickly to find the boy on the field, to wave, though the kid wasn’t looking.

He came up and kissed Mary, put his hand on her back. Her hair was longer. And darker.

Jimmy drove away out the exit of the lot but turned left on the main road in and stopped on the shoulder. There was a little elevation, to look down on the fie ld, the water behind it, Sausalito behind that. The boy had come over. The father had kneeled down to ruffle his hair. The mother was saying something. A family was laughing.

Jimmy let out the clutch and drove on. Fast and loud.

Very high school.

And what do you call sitting in the dark in a car on a hilly lane on Tiburon, on Belvedere, across from a black Craftsman house with a light in the second-flo or window and a woman framed there, lifting a boy’s T-shirt over his head, his arms raised as if surrendering?

Mary kept living in the director’s house, though she said it wasn’t “living with him . . .” In his rented long and low ranch house up at the top of a cul-de-sac in Benedict Canyon. (“Leased,” she said. “He always makes me say leased.”) Whatever it was now, it had been a family’s house once, stuck up off in a rustic canyon, three bedrooms, two baths, a kidney-shaped pool, an enormous bank of rock behind it