That Old Cape Magic

peer around him at Griffin. “Can you read that?”
    Griffin confessed he couldn’t.
    Her companion met his eye and shrugged, as if to suggest there was no accounting for what interested broads. You wanted a mystery to solve, you could start right there. “It’s like a proverb … a saying,” he told her. “It don’t mean nothin’.”
    “It’s got to mean something. It’s like in
The Da Vinci Code,”
she said. “Everything means something.” She was leaning forward again to speak to Griffin. “He’s not a reader,” she explained. Then, to her companion, “
I
think it’s some kind of spell. Maybe to ward off evil spirits.”
    “Bartenders is what it wards off,” he said. “I’m gonna go find the can. If our friend down there ever heads in this direction, order me a Maker’s. Get yourself whatever.”
    “A cosmopolitan,” the woman said, scrunching up her shoulders with pleasure at the idea, the front of her dress gapping as she did. Griffin noticed, and she noticed him notice, with gratitude, unless he was mistaken. Something about her expression gave him to understand that she didn’t usually dress so provocatively.Tonight was special, and she meant for things to go well with the man who’d just abruptly abandoned her. Better than well, in fact. Though as a general rule they didn’t.
“We’re
going to figure out what that says,” she told Griffin, scrunching up her shoulders again. “You and me.”
    How, he couldn’t help wondering, did you get to be this woman’s age and still believe, as she apparently did, that everything meant something? She was obviously one of those people who just soldiered on, determined to believe whatever gave them comfort in the face of all contrary evidence. And maybe that wasn’t so dumb. The attraction of cynicism was that it so often put you in the right, as if being right led directly to happiness. Probably her companion believed the sign had no meaning because this absolved him from making an effort to decode it and insulated him from failures of both intelligence and imagination. Easier to cleave to the card counter’s arithmetic, which meant at least you weren’t a sap.
    “That prime as good as it looks?” the man said when he returned from the gents. When Griffin said it was, he looked him over frankly, as if trying to decide whether he could be trusted to second a motion that he himself had just made. Apparently so, because when the bartender set down his second Maker’s, he said, “You could give us a couple of them prime ribs, I guess.”
    “We’re going to eat here?” the woman said. Clearly, she hadn’t gotten all dressed up to eat at the bar.
    The man rotated on his stool so he could survey the restaurant. The bar had been set up for diners, but a piano player was noodling show tunes in the main dining room, and that seemed to be what the woman had in mind. “This ain’t a bad spot.”
    “It’s not that—”
    “You’d rather wait another half hour so you can eat there?” He was indicating the nearest table, five feet away, where an elderly couple looked up from their fish, surprised to find themselves atthe end of a large, hairy-chested stranger’s index finger, a negative example.
    “Could we look at a menu, at least?” the woman said, staring at her cosmo, embarrassed.
    He leaned back on his stool so she could have a clear, unobstructed view of Griffin’s food. “What about that don’t look good to you?”
    “Fine,” she said without looking.
    “Two menus,” the man told the bartender. “We don’t want to do nothin’ rash.”
    When Griffin glanced in the back-bar mirror, the young Asian man he’d noticed earlier looked away. Had he, too, overheard the bickering couple?
    Finishing up quickly, Griffin paid his tab, hoping he could slip away without the woman telling him no, he couldn’t leave, not yet, not until they’d figured out what the sign said. But he was lucky. As he slid off his stool, the bartender arrived with their two big slabs of bloody beef. He told himself not to look at her, but did anyway, just a quick glance, enough to see that she was quietly crying.
    Outside, it had clouded over, the dark sky low and ugly, and as he unlocked the car door a fat raindrop hit him on the forehead. By the time he got the convertible’s top up, cold rain was leaping off the hood. He turned the key in the ignition, then turned it off again, thinking about the woman inside and also about Joy, about a morning,