Odd Hours

love life, because of what the beauty of this world and of this life portend. I don’t love them to excess, and I stand in awe of them only to the extent that an architect might stand in the receiving room of a magnificent palace, amazed and thrilled by what he sees, while knowing that all this is as nothing compared to the wondrous sights that lie beyond the next threshold.
    Since that day of death in Pico Mundo, seventeen months earlier, my life had not been mine. I had been spared for a reason I could not understand. I had known the day would come when I would give my life in the right cause.
    Will you die for me?
    Yes.
    Instantly upon hearing the fateful question, I felt that I had been waiting to hear it since Stormy’s death, and that the answer had been on my tongue before the question had been spoken.
    Although I had committed myself to this cause with no knowledge of it, I was nevertheless curious about what the men on the pier were planning, how Annamaria figured in their plans, and why she needed my protection.
    With the silver chain around my neck and the small bell pendant against my breastbone, I said, “Where is your husband?”
    “I’m not married.”
    I waited for her to say more.
    With her fork she held down a fig, and with her knife trimmed off the stem.
    “Where do you work?” I asked.
    Setting the knife aside, she said, “I don’t work.” She patted her swollen abdomen, and smiled. “I labor.”
    Surveying the modest accommodations, I said, “I suppose the rent is low.”
    “Very low. I stay here free.”
    “The people in the house are relatives?”
    “No. Before me, a poor family of three lived here free for two years, until they had saved enough to move on.”
    “So the owners are just…good people?”
    “You can’t be surprised by that.”
    “Maybe.”
    “You have known many good people in your young life.”
    I thought of Ozzie Boone, Chief Wyatt Porter and his wife, Karla, Terri Stambaugh, and all of my friends in Pico Mundo, thought of the monks at St. Bartholomew’s, of Sister Angela and the nuns who ran the orphanage and school for special-needs children.
    “Even in this rough and cynical age,” she said, “you’re neither rough nor cynical yourself.”
    “With all due respect, Annamaria, you don’t really know me.”
    “I know you well,” she disagreed.
    “How?”
    “Be patient and you’ll understand.”
    “All things in their time, huh?”
    “That’s right.”
    “I sort of think the time is now.”
    “But you are wrong.”
    “How can I help you if I don’t know what kind of fix you’re in?”
    “I’m not in a fix.”
    “Okay, then what kind of mess, what kind of pickle, what kind of trap?”
    Finished eating, she blotted her mouth with a paper napkin.
    “No mess, pickle, or trap,” she said, with a trace of amusement in her gentle voice.
    “Then what would you call it?”
    “The way of things.”
    “You’re in the way of things? What things are you standing in the way of?”
    “You misheard me. What lies before me is just the way of things, not a fix from which I need to be extricated.”
    Out of the shallow bowl, she retrieved one of the huge floating flowers, and she placed it on her folded napkin.
    “Then why did you ask that question, why did you give me the bell, what do you need me to do for you?”
    “Keep them from killing me,” she said.
    “Well, there you go. That sounds like a pickle to me.”
    She plucked one thick white petal from the flower and set it aside on the table.
    I said, “Who wants to kill you?”
    “The men on the pier,” she replied, plucking another petal from the flower. “And others.”
    “How many others?”
    “Innumerable.”
    “Innumerable—as in countless, as in the countless grains of sand on the oceans’ shores?”
    “That would be more like infinite . Those who want me dead can be counted, and have been, but there are too many for the number to matter.”
    “Well, I don’t know. I think it matters to me.”
    “But you’re wrong about that,” she quietly assured me.
    She continued to disassemble the flower. She had made a separate pile of half its petals.
    Her self-possession and calm demeanor did not change when she spoke of being the target of killers.
    For a while I waited for her eyes to meet mine again, but her attention remained on the flower.
    I said, “The men on the pier—who are they?”
    “I don’t know their names.”
    “Why do they want to kill you?”
    “They