Strangers

traditional Chinese medicines. The apothecary was closed, but a light shone in a window of the Alliance offices. Jack rang the bell at the street-level door, rang it and rang it until an elderly and wizened Chinese man came down the stairs and spoke to him through a small grille. When Jack ascertained that the Alliance's current major project was the rescue of brutalized Chinese families from Vietnam (and resettlement in the States), he passed twenty thousand in cash through the grille. The Chinese gentleman reverted to his native language in surprise and came out into the cold winter wind, insistent upon shaking hands. "Friend," the elderly mandarin said. "You can't know what suffering this gift will relieve." Jack echoed the old man, "Friend." In that single word, and in the warm grasp of the venerable Oriental's callused hand, Jack found something he thought he had lost forever: a sense of belonging, a feeling of community, fellowship.
        In his car again, he drove up Bayard to Mott Street, turned right, and had to pull to the curb. A flood of tears blurred his vision.
        He could not remember ever having been more confused than he was now. He wept in part because the stain of guilt, for the moment at least, seemed an ineradicable mark upon his soul. Yet some of the tears were tears of joy, for he was abruptly brimming over with brotherhood. For the better part of a decade, he had been outside society, distanced in mind and spirit if not in body. But now, for the first time since Central America, Jack Twist had the need, desire, and ability to reach out to the society around him, to make friends.
        Bitterness was a dead-end. Hatred hurt no one more than he who harbored it. The wine of alienation was loneliness.
        During the past eight years, he had often wept for Jenny, and he had sometimes wept in fits of self-pity. But these tears were different from all others he had let previously, for they were cleansing tears, purging tears, washing all the rage and resentment out of him.
        He still did not understand the cause of these radical and rapid changes taking place in him. However, he sensed that his evolution - from outcast and criminal to law-abiding citizen - was not finished and would generate several more surprises before it reached a conclusion. He wondered where he was bound and by what route he would arrive there.
        That night in Chinatown, hope swept back into his world like a summer breeze stirring music from a cluster of wind chimes.
        
        Elko County, Nevada.
        Ned and Sandy Sarver were able to run the diner by themselves because they were hard workers by nature, but also because their menu was simple and because Ned had learned efficient food service as a cook in the U S. Army. A hundred tricks were employed to make the Tranquility Grille function smoothly with as little effort as possible.
        Nevertheless, at the end of work, Ned was always glad that Ernie and Faye provided the motel's guests with a free continental breakfast in their rooms, so it was not necessary to open the diner before noon.
        Saturday evening, while he grilled hamburgers and made French fries and served chili-dogs, Ned Sarver glanced frequently at Sandy as she worked. He still could not get used to the change in her, the sudden flowering. She had added ten pounds, and her figure had acquired an appealing female roundness it never possessed before. And she no longer shuffled slump-shouldered through the diner, but moved with a fluid grace and a jaunty good humor that Ned found enormously appealing.
        He was not the only man who had eyes for the new Sandy. Some of the truckers watched the roll of her hips and the flex of her buttocks as she crossed the room with plates of food or bottles of cold beer.
        Until recently, although Sandy had been unfailingly polite to the customers, she had not been chatty. That changed, too. She was still somewhat shy, but she responded to the truckers' teasing and even teased them in return, and came up with some damn good quips.
        For the first time in eight years of marriage, Ned Sarver feared losing Sandy. He knew she loved him, and he told himself that these changes in her appearance and personality would not also change the nature of their relationship. But that was precisely what he feared.
        This morning, when Sandy went to Elko to meet Ernie and Faye at the airport, Ned had worried that she