The Talker. Mary Sojourner

wire, in that scraggly palm. There were even a few sitting on my neighbor’s roof.”

      “Get out.” Sophieann punched him in the arm. “What happened then?”

      “We went in and played checkers. He beat me. I wasn’t even letting him win.”

      “That makes two of us,” Sopphieann said and took off her shades. “Put on the desk lamp.”

      Her right eye was swollen shut. The skin around it was purple and green. She glared at Davy, then looked down. “Scumbag,” she said. “Sold my CD player. Lost every penny. He doesn’t even have to drive to a casino anymore. There’s a card club in the strip mall. The big man lost three hundred and change and came home and decided I was the reason for his bad luck. I am not a chee-ca-na. I am not one of his people.” She winced. “So I said, ‘Okay man, I’ll talk Spanish.’ And I said, ‘Chinga tu pinche madre’ and he slammed me good.”

      “Oh shit,” Davy said. “Real dumb, but real classy.”

      Sophieann grinned. “Ouch,” she said. “Whoa, my face hurts. He’s gone. All the way. Took him five minutes to pack. I was grateful we didn’t have a joint magazine subscription—or el gato.”

      “Sophieann,” Davy said. He started to say more, but she set her hand on his arm, put her shades back on and stood.

      “I’m going to key in,” she said. “When I come back, I want to talk about it. And I want to talk about some other things too. Like why don’t you fight dirty to get Jacob. And why do you let him call you Davy? Your name is Dad, your name is David Jacob Martin. Like mine is Sophieann Elizabeth Jones, not puta or mama or you dumb broad. It’s time we didn’t forget that!” She bowed. Davy applauded.

      “How about if I go out for donuts while you’re gone?” Davy said. Sophieann dropped five bucks on the keyboard. “You fly,” she said, “I’ll buy.”

      If you got the cream-filled or frosted donuts at Nuts for Donuts, they had a special, fourteen for the price of twelve, so Davy went a little overboard. He ate three chocolate creams on the way back to work. What Sophieann had said about getting Jacob and about being called Dad had left a hollow in his gut. The donuts descended, settled in and did the job. By the time he pulled into employee parking, he was out of his mind on sugar. He sat a minute to slow things down.

      He looked out into the cool Milky Way of his headlights. He could see every blade of grass, sandstone pebble and chalky splash of bird-shit. He could see the fence spikes and their shadow on the Inc.’s parking lot. He had a half-dozen deep thoughts so fast he missed them. He was only a little surprised when three jackrabbits hopped cautiously into the light. They were huge. When they turned their faces to the light and froze, he saw their yellow eyes, slanted and mysterious, like the old magician’s in one of Jacob’s picture books.

      Davy turned off the headlights. Everything went black, then gray, then lit by a brilliant full moon. The Inc. fence was a perfect series of brushstrokes against the pale grass. The jacks hunkered down and ate. Their backs, their ears, their bent powerful haunches were silvered, moonlight rippling along their fur like water.

      Davy wondered if Sophieann was back in the room. Was she hungry? Worried? He didn’t want to scare her, but he didn’t want to be anywhere but where he was.

      “Dad,” he whispered, “a.k.a. David Jacob Martin. He decides to stay where he is. He could open the door. He could get out with the donuts. But David Jacob Martin will not scare those jacks away. He won’t. He doesn’t move.”

      A week later, Sophieann came for dinner. She wasn’t that crazy about gourmet vegetarian which, along with frozen raspberry Danish, nacho chips and milk in a glass with a warrior reptile printed on its side was David’s menu, so she brought a steak and they grilled it on the hibachi on his little patio. David made a salad with romaine, good olive oil, lemon juice and chunks of blue cheese. They sat in the gathering dusk to eat.

      Sophieann said, “I saw you that donut night sitting out in the car. It was kind of weird.”

      David put a steak sliver in his mouth and sighed happily. “No more vegetarian,” he said. “So, how was it weird?”

      “When I came out, you were sitting there totally still like you were stoned or something. Those bunnies didn’t move. Finally, you waved out your window and hollered, ‘You go home now.’ And they didn’t budge.” She picked a lemon seed out of her salad. “Of course, I wondered if they could. Those are some fat jacks. Those are some serious chubbettes.”

      “Chubbos,” David said. “Give the dudes among them some respect.”

      She laughed. While he grilled the steak, he told her about the Davy business finally getting to him, about being thirty-five and looking twenty, about the vegetarian cooking actually being a big deal because till Lisa left, he’d never put together a full meal in his life. Lisa hadn’t let him. He guessed that women’s lib had passed him by, and Lisa only got the ladies’ magazine parts, the parts where you dressed up and went to work and the kid was in day care and you came home and did everything your mom had done even better than she had and got pissed off at the unfairness of it all.

      “So, David, what are you thinking you’ll do about Jacob?” Sophieann said.

      “I don’t know,” David said.

      “You could maybe learn what to do? From some other guys with the same problem?” Sophieann had a funny gleam in her eye. It worried him. Lisa had gleamed like that the first time she came back from the therapist.

      “Meaning?”

      “Meaning I started going to this group over at a wellness center—all women. We talk about our lives. There are guy groups too.”

      “I’m not into that godstuff,” David said. “Don’t you have to have a higher power or something like that?”

      “Nope, this is different, but excuse me, I do have a higher power.”

      “You told me you were a born-again nothing. Who’s your higher power?”

      “Madonna,” she said. “She’s old school, but if I was in trouble, I’d want her watching my back.”

      “Wait a minute,” David said. “You can’t have a pop star for a higher power.”

      “You have rabbits. Jacob has doves. Case closed.”

      “Man,” David said. “Maybe I ought to get a higher power. Lisa’s turned up the heat.”

      “Time to fight dirty,” Sophieann said.

      “Just hear me out,” David said. “There’s nothing definite yet, but Lisa wants to discuss something with me at the therapist’s. Jacob’s all of a sudden talking about those California doves. He’s pretty sure they’re all different colors. They live right by the ocean, right near Grandma Raines. And he thinks those California doves might even know how to speak human.

      “Lisa called and said, ‘We have to talk, but I can’t for a few days.’ Man, I hate it when somebody says ‘we have to talk,’ and supposedly can’t make time for it right away.”

      Sophieann looked up. There were the black shapes of birds along the telephone wires. They were silent and still.

      “Oh, dude,” Sophieann said. “I wish I had an answer. Maybe all we’ve got for sure is those birds up there right now, the fat jacks, all your sea monsters floating around Safe and Serene, Jacob being such an amazing kid, you, me, Ray Cooper here. None of us hating each other. All of us just trying to get by.”

      “I’m not sure about Big Ray C.,” David said and put him in her lap. “He’s just trying to stay alive.” Sophieann scratched Ray behind the ears.

      They sat together, the three of them scarcely moving, one of them purring, with the birds quiet above them, till the silver thumbprint of moon had dropped out of sight.

      It was all very simple. Jacob would be