Skylark was five cars ahead of Jimmy, top up now. The top on the Porsche was still down. There was traffic around him, but Jimmy still heard the pop, the click of the Porsche’s lighter and reached for it, turned the orange circle to him and lit another cigarette. He had stopped a ways back and bought a couple of bottles of beer. What was next, torching up a joint? He was enjoying himself a little too much, like that early part of a night (that later turns out bad) when you first taste that first drink in the first place you stop and she for a minute lets down her resistance and looks at you, just in the moment, forgetting for a moment what you both know, that you were both there to talk the other out of or into something.

So Jimmy was still thinking about her. And they’d never even been to San Francisco together.

Lucy and Les had come all the way up the Central Valley on the 101, staying at the limit. The sister and brother had talked a little, then had fallen silent, at least from what Jimmy could see ten car lengths back. A bit below San Jose, in the last stretch of farmland, as the sun was dropping, Lucy had pulled into a rest area and gone to the ladies’ room, leaving the boy in the car. She stayed long enough to make Jimmy wonder if she’d fallen back into her gloom. Or something worse. Maybe she’d just made a call from the pay phone. She didn’t seem to have a cell. When she came back to the car, that’s when she’d put up the top. And she drove faster after that. She’d remembered something, something her brother had let her forget for a little while there.

Jimmy followed the Skylark down off the Bayshore and into the city, the dropping left turn down into the Fillmore, heading west on Fell. For a quick flash, there was the skyline to his right, a clutter of blocks dropped in the foreground.

Lucy had the use of a third-floor flat in a Victorian in the regentrified Haight, on Central, a block up from Haight Street next to little Buena Vista Park angling up the hill. Jimmy slowed at the corner where she’d turned, saw where she’d parked, halfway up the hill on the right.

He looped a block and came back on the intersecting side street. There was a lucky parking spot in the dim space between two streetlights. He parked, reached back, and hoisted up the top and snapped it down. It was cool. There was moisture in the air. Imagine that.

He watched. And waited. She just sat there, motor idling. Then she got something out of the glove compartment, maybe a white envelope, read something off the face of it, and looked over at the number on the corner building, the Victorian. She turned around in the intersection, put the car right in front, the nose pointed downhill now.

She sat there some more. The boy kept looking over at her.

A man with a white ponytail, a man in his sixties, came past on the sidewalk across the street, came down the hill from Buena Vista Park walking a dog, a chow with a loose black tongue and a tail curling up and over. The man seemed to Jimmy to make a point of not staring at the new-comers sitting in the Skylark under the circle of streetlight, kept on going down the hill. He lived over the wine shop at the lower corner, at Central and Haight. The chow waited, looking down at the ground like an old man, while his owner unlocked a black lacquered door. The man looked once back up the hill before he went in and the dog followed.

Across from the corner Victorian was a four-story building, a little too neat, too perfectly painted, with Catholic trappings, a cross on the crown of the roof and a flash of gold here and there. A nun in a blue habit was framed in a tall second-floor window with the white globe of a ceiling light over her head. Two girls played a board game framed in another window a floor above her, teenage girls in light blue smocks . . . What were they called? Shifts. On one girl, the cloth was stretched tight across her belly. Then Jimmy realized the other girl was pregnant, too, from the fullness in her face as much