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habit of smiling too much when Bobo was around.
    “Oh, he’s pissed off because I’m tired of listening to his story about killing the mouse,” Fiji said, pulling another weed and tossing it into her bucket. “I might be willing to hear about it again, if he hadn’t put the corpse in my shoe.”
    Bobo laughed. He did it well, because it was natural for him. In the past few months she hadn’t seen him laugh enough. He’d been running; he was wearing an ancient sleeveless sweatshirt and even more ancient gym shorts. And he was sweating, though the air was pleasantly cool.
    “Pull up a chair and tell me what you know,” Fiji suggested. She sat back on her haunches. Instead of getting a stadium chair from the porch, Bobo folded down onto the ground to sit with her. She sighed inwardly. Bobo was flexible and fit, the right weight for his height, though he was years older than her. “How old are you?” she asked abruptly, giving in to gravity and settling on the ground, too.
    “Thirty-five,” he said. “How come?”
    Fiji felt heavy and depressed. “Oh, nothing!” she said, doing her best to sound upbeat. “What brings you over here today?” He was due to open the pawnshop soon. And she would have to shower and unlock her own business.
    “You know what we need, Feej?” He was looking very serious, and her heart began thudding, just a bit.
    Fiji could think of several things they needed, or at least she needed.
    “What?” she said, trying not to sound as though she were strangling.
    “We need a vacation.”
    She wanted to be absolutely certain what Bobo meant before she made a fool of herself. Cautiously, she said, “Do you mean we need to go to a desert island? Or the Grand Canyon? That kind of vacation?”
    “I don’t know of any other kind,” he said, smiling. “Yes, that’s what we need. How long has it been since you’ve been out of Midnight for more than a couple of hours?”
    “Four years,” she said promptly.
    “I’ve been gone overnight maybe three times, but I can’t remember being gone longer than that. Even Lemuel went traveling when he was trying to find someone to translate the books. Chuy visits his kin, Joe goes to antique shows. Manfred goes to Dallas or Los Angeles or Miami for a couple of days every few months. Olivia is gone half the time!”
    “Not the Rev,” Fiji said.
    “No, not the Rev, I’ll give you that one. And not the Reeds. And Diederik’s only lived here for a few months, so he doesn’t count.”
    Fiji was thinking that it surely sounded as though Bobo was proposing they go somewhere together. Like a couple. But she could hardly believe it. She tested the idea. “You think you and I should go to see Hawaii, or Death Valley?”
    “That’s what I’m saying.” He looked serious enough to mean it. The morning wind blew his light hair around.
    Fiji had waited for this moment for so long. It was like a clear, perfect, shimmering crystal of happiness. Then Bobo shifted slightly and looked anxiously into her face.
    “Of course, we can get two rooms,” he said.
    For the life of her, she could not interpret his tone. The crystal shattered.
    Fiji mustered every smidgen of self-control she could summon to keep her face from showing her painful disillusion. Something inside her snapped, and she lost hope. “I just can’t do this,” Fiji said into her hands. “You have to leave now.”
    Her dearest friend and longed-for lover looked shocked, but maybe not so shocked that he could claim ignorance of his offense. “Let me backtrack,” Bobo said urgently.
    “No.” She stood up, pushing off the ground to rise to her feet, for once not caring how heavy and clumsy she might look in the process. “No. I’m going in. Do what you like.” She flicked her hand to show how little she cared. She walked away, into the back door, and closed and locked it behind her. Somehow Mr. Snuggly had beat her inside.
    “I’m done with him,” she told Mr. Snuggly. “I can’t live