Three Fates

toast.”
    “That’d be brilliant. It’s kind of you to let us drop in on you this way.”
    “Oh, Cleo and me, we go back.” With a careless wave, Mikey started the coffee, then turned to get eggs and milk from the refrigerator. “That girl’s my honey. I’m so glad to see her back, and hooked up with someone with style. I warned her about that Sidney character. He looked tasty, no argument there, but he was all flash, no substance. And what does he do but steal her money and leave her high and dry.” He made disapproving sounds while he cracked eggs into a bowl. “And in Prague, of all places. But she told you all about that.”
    “Not really.” And Gideon was fascinated. “You know Cleo. She tends to skim over the details.”
    “Wouldn’t have run off with that rat bastard, excuse my French, if her daddy hadn’t told her, again, how she was wasting her time, how she was embarrassing herself and the family.”
    “How?”
    “Dancing. Theater.” He said it with a deliberately dramatic air, doing a fluid leg extension as he got down coffee mugs. “Fraternizing with people like me. Not only a black man, but a gay black man. A gay, black, dancing man. I mean, really. Cream, sugar?”
    “No, thanks. Just straight.” He winced. “That is—”
    Mikey let out a rollicking laugh. “Me, I like a whole lot of sugar. He wouldn’t like you, either,” Mikey added as he handed Gideon a mug. “Our Cleopatra’s daddy.”
    “No? Well, fuck him.” Gideon lifted his mug in toast, then drank. “Ah, God be praised.”
    “Drink up, honey.” Mikey dipped thick slices of sour-dough bread in the egg batter. “You and me, we’re going to get along just fine.”
    And they did. Plowing through half a loaf of bread, a pot of coffee and nearly a quart of the orange juice Mikey squeezed fresh.
    By the time Cleo staggered out of the bedroom, Gideon no longer found anything odd about the gold briefs, the tattoo of a dragon on Mikey’s left shoulder blade or being called honey by another man.

PART TWO
    Measuring
    I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.
    T. S. ELIOT

Ten
     
     
     
     
    “S UGARPLUM, I’m not sure you’re doing the right thing here.”
    “I’m doing the smart thing,” Cleo insisted. “The smart thing’s always the right thing.”
    “Whatever’s going on between you and Gideon is going to get screwed up.” Mikey shook his head as they hit the bustle of Broadway and squeezed through the eastbound crosswalk traffic. “I’ve got a good feeling about you two, and you’re going to fuck it over before you get it started.”
    “You’re too romantic for your own good.”
    “Can’t be,” he disagreed. “Romance turns sex into art. Without it, it’s just a messy, sweaty business.”
    “That’s why you get your heart broken, Mikey, and I don’t.”
    “A little heartbreak would do you good.”
    “Don’t sulk.” Because she knew he would, she slid an arm around his waist as they turned on the corner of Seventh and Fifty-second and headed north. “Besides, I’m doing this for him as well as myself. Once Anita’s got the Fate, she’ll leave him alone, and he’ll have a big fat pile of money out of it. The statue is mine, after all. I don’t have to share, but I’m going to.”
    She gave him a quick squeeze as she swung into the bank. “Let’s make this as fast as we can. If I don’t meet him by one, he’s going to ask questions, and,” she added, dropping her voice as they stepped into the quiet lobby, “he’s got something going himself right this minute, or he’d never have agreed so easily to me heading out to run some errands without him.”
    “Your trouble, Cleopatra, is you’re a cynic.”
    “You try working a few months in a strip club in the Czech Republic,” she chided. “We’ll see if you come out of it with a Pollyanna complex.”
    “You didn’t go into this with one,” he pointed out, and she gave him a smirk as she stepped up to a teller.
    “I need to get a safe-deposit box.”
     
     
    WHEN SHE WALKED back out on Seventh, the Fate was safely locked in the vault. Both she and Mikey had keys. That, she’d calculated, was the smartest move. If there was any trouble, which she didn’t anticipate, he could retrieve the statue in her stead.
    “Okay, now I make the call, set up the meet. Someplace public,” she added as she held out a hand for Mikey’s cell phone. “But where it’s unlikely anyone we know will come by and recognize