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classic type-A personality's drive to alleviate the sufferings of humanity. By fifty, her lock on sainthood should be clinched.
    She left the car, started for the front door.
    Adrienne called it home, but after two years it still took some adjustment. Two floors of stucco topped with red-tile roofing, on a lot whose lawn was suitably sparse, as per desert climes, and at least one palm tree visible from nearly every window. Each time she came rolling down the street she expected to see a burro tied up out front.
    Adrienne's own tastes ran more toward colonial and Victorian, but upon first setting foot inside when they'd looked at it, Sarah had loved it, and felt instantaneously at home here in that impulsive, predestined way she had about her sometimes. Adrienne figured, in her heart, that her own love would grow.
    Still waiting. By now, she was probably up to at least an amiable affection for the place.
    Sarah was in the front room when Adrienne came through the door, looked up from her book and brightened immediately. Uncurled from her cross-legged perch in the cushioned rattan chair that hung in one corner.
    " Hiya ," she said, and met Adrienne halfway to kiss hello, good morning, whatever they had skipped the night before. "Guess who missed you last night."
    "You got my message, didn't you?"
    " Yes , I got your message. I was just feeling needy." Sarah gripped her by the shoulders and steered her gently toward the sofa. "C'mon. Sit, sit, sit, sit."
    Adrienne shut her eyes and smiled and let fatigue overwhelm her, began to feel tired all over again. Let Sarah take charge — some indulgent pampering now and then was good for body and soul. Sarah stayed behind her, reaching across the back of the sofa and down to the shoulders that felt cramped and unnatural after sleeping on the office couch, and maybe from all that residual tension from her first encounter with Clay Palmer. With this one she wanted very much to tread wisely.
    "Let it out, let it out," Sarah said, then nipped her on the ear. "Can you come out and play tomorrow? I think it's in your own best interests, you're looking too serious this week."
    "Tomorrow being, what … Saturday?"
    "Gasp — she's in touch with modern timekeeping after all."
    Adrienne made a show of inner debate, but a day out on her day off sounded like a tonic she would be wise to self-prescribe. "Since it's you, and since you asked," she said. "What do you have in mind?"
    Sarah was digging with strong and nimble fingers for each and every muscle at the base of Adrienne's neck. "I was thinking Swiss coffee and a French film and Greek food. It'll be very multicultural and don't you dare say no."
    " Multi cultural? You know you're showing a definite centrism toward Western Europe."
    "Shut up. Who's the anthropologist here?"
    Sarah wrapped up her ministrations and slapped each of Adrienne's shoulders simultaneously, as if swatting the bottoms of newborns. Her shoulders sang, they hummed, they throbbed with vitality restored, and Sarah crawled over the back of the sofa to drop beside her.
    Sarah was so physical sometimes, she came close to being overpowering — not by intimidation, more that to be around her was to risk either exhaustion by proxy or feelings of inadequacy. She had entirely too much life-force to contain; would throw herself into anything and everything that drew her interest and contend with the bruises or broken heart later.
    Sarah was slim and straight above the waist, with lushly curved hips below. She had a round face almost too small for her eyes, and mismatched lips that somehow went with her body: the top one thin, the lower, heavy and ripe and delicious, the both of them bracketed by smile lines that inscribed her mouth like soft little parentheses. Her full black hair she brushed irregularly, and she scuffed around on wide peasant feet, a legacy from a barefoot childhood. At twenty-nine, Sarah still distrusted shoes.
    They molded together well, Adrienne four inches