Twisted

expected the same from others.
    “Yes, with qualifiers.”
    Love tamed his irascibility and he grinned, chiding good-naturedly, “Well, you better. Because there is such a thing. Allison and me, we were fated to be together. See, if I hadn’t been running that sixty-pound stock, if I hadn’t slipped just when I did, if she hadn’t been working an extra shift to cover for a sick friend, if, if, if . . . See what I’m saying? Am I right?”
    He sat back in the creaky chair. “Oh, Frankie, she was fantastic. I mean, here I am, this, like, four-inch slash in my arm, twenty stitches, I could’ve bled todeath, and all I’m thinking is she’s the most beautiful woman I ever saw.”
    “I’ve seen her picture.” But that didn’t stop him from continuing to describe her. The words alone gave him pleasure.
    “Her hair’s blonde. Gold blonde. Natural, not out of a bottle. And curly but not teased, like some high-hair slut. And her face, it’s heart-shaped. Her body . . . Well, she has a nice figure. Let’s leave it at that.” His glance at me contained a warning. I was about to assure him that I had no impure thoughts about Allison Morgan when he continued. He said, “Twenty-one years old.” Echoing my exact thought he added sheepishly, “Kind of an age difference, huh?”
    Manko was thirty-seven—three years younger than I—but I learned this after I’d met him and had guessed he was in his late twenties. It was impossible for me to revise that assessment upward.
    “I asked her out. There. On the spot. In the emergency room, you can believe it. She was probably thinking, How d’I get rid of this bozo? But she was interested, yessir. A man can tell. Words and looks, they’re two different things, and I was getting the capital M message. She said she had this rule she never dated patients. So I go, ‘How ’bout if you married somebody and he cuts his hand in an accident and goes to the emergency room and there you are? Then you’d be married to a patient.’ She laughed and said, no, that was somehow backwards. Then this emergency call came in, some car wreck, and she had to go off.
    “The next day I came back with a dozen roses.She pretended she didn’t remember me and acted like I was a florist delivery boy. ‘Oh, what room are those for?’
    “I said, ‘They’re for you . . . if you have room in your heart for me.’ Okay, okay, it was a bullshit line.” The rugged ex-Marine fiddled awkwardly with his coffee cup. “But, hey, if it works, it works.”
    I couldn’t argue with him there.
    “The first date was magic. We had dinner at the fanciest restaurant in town. A French place. It cost me two days’ pay. It was embarrassing ’cause I wore my leather jacket and you were suppose to have a suit coat. One of those places. They made me wear one they had in the coat room and it didn’t fit too good. But Allison didn’t care. We laughed about it. She was all dressed up in a white dress, with a red, white and blue scarf around her neck. Oh, God, she was beautiful. We spent, I don’t know, three, four hours easy there. She was pretty shy. Didn’t say much. Mostly she stared like she was kind of hypnotized. Me, I talked and talked, and sometimes she’d look at me all funny and then laugh. And I’d realize I wasn’t making any sense ’cause I was looking at her and not paying any attention to what I was saying. We drank a whole bottle of wine. Cost fifty bucks.”
    Manko had always seemed both impressed by and contemptuous of money. Myself, I’ve never come close to being rich so wealth simply perplexes me.
    “It was the best,” he said dreamily, replaying the memory.
    “Ambrosia,” I offered.
    He laughed as he sometimes did—in a way thatwas both amused and mocking—and continued his story. “I told her all about the Philippines, where I was stationed for a while, and about hitching around the country. She was interested in everything I’d done. Even—well, I should say especially —some of the stuff I wasn’t too proud of. Grifting, perping cars. You know, when I was a kid, going at it. Stuff we all did.”
    I held back a smile. Speak for yourself, Manko.
    “Then all of a sudden, the sky lit up outside. Fireworks! Talk about signs from God. You know what it was? It was the Fourth of July! I’d forgotten about it ’cause all I’d been thinking about was going out with her. That’s why she was wearing the red, white and blue. We watched the fireworks from the