Free Dive From Clausen's Pier by Ann Packer Page A

cheese, and she paused for a moment to look up at me. “The men are sniffing each other?”
    “Too bad they can’t just each pee in a corner and be done with it.”
    Back in the living room I found them all still standing, Tom and his brother off to the side looking at a book, Viktor glowering down at Kilroy. When he saw me he muttered something, then went into the kitchen.
    I looked at Kilroy. He was about my height, 5′6″, with a narrow, sharp-featured face and straggly brown hair.
    He smiled. “I like your necklace.”
    Instinctively I reached up to touch it. “Thanks.” It was just a silk cord that I’d strung with some odds and ends: a too-small ring and some old glass beads, plus a tiny seashell Mike had given me once. No one had ever commented on it before except Jamie, who’d said it looked like something someone’s little sister might have made in art class.
    “Did you make it?” he said.
    “That authentic-looking, huh?”
    “No, I like it.” He shrugged. “It’s pretty.”
    From the kitchen came the sound of Viktor and Ania talking in their own language, and after a moment Kilroy tilted his head in their direction and then raised his eyebrows at me. “Close friend of yours?”
    “I just work with him.” I felt myself blush a little, denying a stronger connection in order to look good for this guy.
    “Where?”
    “At the UW library. What do you do? In New York, I mean.”
    “I shoot pool.”
    “No, really.”
    “You don’t like pool?” He shook his head. “You don’t know what you’re missing. Of course, it helps to have the right place to play. On Sixth Avenue right near my apartment there’s a bar called McClanahan’s with a pool table that’s got a tiny little gouge in the felt right near one of the side pockets, and I’m such an accomplished student of that table that I can just about always make the gouge work for me.”
    He struck me as the kind of person who was always joking, who joked as a way of life, but still I said, “I meant, what do you do for work?”
    He shook his head again. “Work is beside the point, as you’ll learn someday when you’re a little older.”
    I blushed again. “I’m older than I look.” I lifted my beer and took along swig, which made me look about twelve. “See how well I can drink beer?”
    He smiled, but he was watching me closely, and now he said, “You’re twenty-three, I’d say, give or take no more than a year. Right?”
    I was taken aback. “Excuse me?”
    “You’re twenty-three, you’ve lived in Madison all your life. Let’s see—you’re engaged to marry your high school sweetheart, who couldn’t come tonight because he’s on a weekend fishing trip with his father.” He tilted his head. “How’d I do?”
    My heart was speeding wildly, and I didn’t know what to say. Mike could have been on a weekend fishing trip with his father—it was something the two of them did once or twice a summer.
    “Well?” Kilroy said.
    “You weren’t entirely wrong or entirely right.”
    He grinned. “I read minds, sideline to pool. So where’d I screw up—you’re not from Madison?”
    “I am.”
    “He’s your college sweetheart?”
    “What makes you so sure I’m engaged?”
    He pointed at his own ring finger.
    “He’s both.”
    “But I was right about everything else?”
    Ania came into the room then, a huge steaming pot in her mitted hands, and behind her came Viktor, carrying a bowl of salad. They put the food on the dining table, then turned to face us.
    “Almost everything else,” I said to Kilroy. “But not quite.”
    What Kilroy said haunted me all evening long. I was wearing something fairly bland, pistachio-green linen pants and a white T-shirt, and I wondered how much that had guided him, how much the homemade necklace, how much the way I’d downed my beer. But what information could he really have gotten from any of that? How could he have known I was from Madison? Was there a never-left-home look about me?