Глен Хиршберг - Flowers on Their Bridles, Hooves in the Air

Ash came in late, on the 10:30 train. I was sure Rebecca would stay home and sleep, but instead she got a sitter for our infant daughter, let her dark hair down for what seemed the first time in months, and emerged from our tiny bathroom in the jeans she hadn't been able to wear since her Cesarean.

"My CD," she said happily, handing me the New York Dolls disc she'd once howled along with every night while we did the dishes, and which I hadn't even seen for over a year. Then she stood in front of me and bobbed on the clunky black shoes I always loved to see her in, not because they were sexy but because of their bulk. Those shoes, it seemed to me, could hold even Rebecca to the ground.

So all the way across the San Fernando Valley we played the Dolls, and she didn't howl anymore, but she rocked side-to-side in her seat and mouthed the words while I snuck glances at her. The last time I could remember seeing her in this mood was on her thirty-first birthday, over a year ago, right before her mother died and the homeless person's political action committee she'd been serving on collapsed in the wake of 9/11 as charitable donations got siphoned to New York and she finally decided to give up on the rest of the world long enough for us to try to have a child. I had thought maybe this Rebecca — arms twitching at her sides like folded wings, green eyes skimming the night for anything alive — had vanished for good.

As usual, even at that hour, traffic snarled where the 101 and the 110 and the 5 emptied together into downtown Los Angeles, so I ducked onto Hill Street, edging us through the surprising crowds of Chinese teens tossing pop-pops in the air and leaning against lampposts and chain-shuttered shop windows to smoke. Rebecca rolled down her window, and the car filled with burning smells: tobacco, firecracker filament, pork and fish. I thought she might try bumming a cigarette from a passing kid — though as far as I knew, she hadn't smoked in years — but instead she leaned against the seatback and closed her eyes.

We were pulling into Union Station when she turned the volume down, caught me looking at her in the mirror, and said, "A flowered one."

I grinned back, shook my head. "He's a new man, remember? Official, responsible, full-time job. Brand new lakefront bungalow. He'll be wearing gray pinstripes. From a suit he bought but hasn't worn."

We were both wrong. And of course, the funniest thing — the worst — was that even with all that green and purple paisley flashing off the front of this latest vest like scales on some spectacular tropical fish, I still didn't see him until I'd driven ten yards past him.

"Hey, dude," he said to both of us as he approached the car, then dropped his black duffel to the curb and stood quietly, leaning to the right the way he always did.

He'd shaved off the last of the tumbling dark brown curls which, even thinning, used to flop over both his eyes and made him look like a Lhasa apsos. Even more brightly than the new vest, the top of his head shone, practically winking white and red with the lights from passing cars. His shoulders, big from the boxing classes he took — for fitness; he'd never gotten in a ring and swore he never would — ballooned from either side of the vest. His jeans were black, and on his wrists were leather bracelets studded with silver spikes.

"Ash, you, um," I said, and then I was laughing. "You don't look like a nurse."

"Wait," Rebecca said, and her hand snaked out the window and grabbed the side of Ash's vest, right where the paisley met the black polyester backing. Then she popped her seatbelt open and leaned to look more closely. "Did you do this?"

Ash's blush spread all the way up his head until he was red all over, and his tiny ferret-eyes blinked. It was as though Rebecca had spray-painted him.

"Do what?"

"What was this?" Rebecca said. "Was this a shirt?"

"What do you mean?"

"Look, El. Someone cut this shiny paisley part off … curtains, maybe? Something else, anyway. And they stitched it to the rest. See?" She held the edge of the vest out from Ash's sides.

Ash's blush deepened, but his smile came more easily than I remembered. "No wonder it cost a dollar."

Rebecca burst out laughing, and I laughed, too. "Been way too long, Ash," I said.

Still leaning, as though he were standing in some invisible rowboat in a current, Ash folded himself into our Metro's tiny back seat. "Good to be here, Elliot." He pronounced it El-yut, just as he had when we were twelve.

"You get all dolled up for us?" I said, nodding in the mirror at the vest, and to my surprise, Ash blushed again and looked at the floor.

"I've been going out a lot," he said.

Both he and Rebecca left their windows open as I spun the car out of the lot and, without asking, turned south. With Chinatown behind us, the street corners emptied. I couldn't see the smog, but I could taste it, a sweet tang in the air that shouldn't have been there and prickled the lungs like nicotine and had a similar sort of narcotic, addictive effect, because you just kept gulping it. Of course, that was partially because there wasn't enough oxygen in it.

"Where are you going?" Rebecca asked as we drifted down the white and nameless warehouses that line both sides of Alameda Street and house the city's other industries, whatever they are.

"Don't know," I said. "Just figured, between that vest and your mood, home wasn't an option."

Rebecca twisted her head around to look at Ash. "Where's all this out you've been going?"

"Meditation classes, for one," Ash said, effectively choking Rebecca to silence. She'd forgotten about Ash's professed Zen conversion, or discovery, or whatever it was. He'd told us about it in a particularly cryptic phone call that had struck both of us as dispassionate even for Ash. Yet another 9/11 by-product, we both thought at the time, but now I actually suspected not. Even back in our Berkeley days, Ash's sense of right and just behavior had been more … inward, somehow, than Rebecca's.

Also less ferocious — he hadn't actually believed he could effect change, or maybe wasn't as interested, and was therefore less perpetually disappointed. And now, as we floated between late-night trucks down the dark toward the freeways, a series of quick, sweet feelings lit up inside me like roman candles. I was remembering Friday nights lost in Oakland, gliding through streets emptier and darker than this in Ash's beat-up green B-210, singing "Shoplifters of the World," spending no money except on gas and double-doubles from In-N-Out. We always got them animal style even though Rebecca hated the grilled onions, because it never got old knowing the secret menu, declaring it to cashiers like a password.

"I've been going to music, too. Lots of clubs. My friends Rubina and Liz—"

"Long Beach," Rebecca said over him, and I hit the brakes and paused, right on the lip of the on-ramp to the 10. Whether out of perceptiveness or meditation training or typical Ashy patience, our friend in the back went quiet and waited.

"Rebecca," I said carefully, after a long breath. She'd been taking us to her sister's almost every weekend since her mother died. She'd been going during the week, too, of late, and even more than she told me, I suspected. "Don't you want to get Ash a Pink's? Show him that ant at the Museum of Jurassic Tech? Take him bowling at the Starlight? Show him the Ashy parts of town?"

"Starlight's gone," Rebecca said, as though she were talking about her mother.