Free The Biology of Luck by Jacob M. Appel Page B

wealth? Would Larry, if the tables were turned? He watches the woman’s arm slowly folding against itself, willpower fighting against tendon, love battling bone, knowing that in this case biology has pre-determined the outcome. Intervention would prove futile. Some situations invite rescue, a girl drowning in the bay, a naked waif on a window ledge, the victim offering herself to the highest bidder, but other traumas are personal affairs, cataclysms restricted to a private membership, and Larry recognizes that this is one of the latter. His intrusion might temporarily salvage their relationship, offer them the respite of an outside threat. It will gain him nothing.
    Borasch is reading aloud from one of his notebooks, his tongue tripping over his own penmanship. The pianist is flourishing his way through pop hits and Golden Oldies, tunes to make you forget your diet and your purse strings, music telling you that you were youngonce, that you are happy, that there is no real danger in a McFlurry and a packaged apple pie. Or, if you are alone, reminding you of the teenage love that has passed you by. Serenading you to tears. The woman’s grasp breaks without warning and the man’s wallet falls to the floor in the aisle, skidding to within inches of Larry’s left foot, sealing the couple’s fate. The man retrieves it. He counts his bills, slams a portion of his accumulated capital on the tabletop, the ultimate souvenir of vengeance and spite, then storms out of the restaurant before his companion can shred the offering. He is gone. She is crying. There is no longer any need for display, for dignity, so she counts the money and stuffs it into her handbag. Then she sits in solitude, stirring her lost lover’s coffee with a wooden swizzle stick, joining Larry Bloom in the world of the forsaken. But her stay is transitory. His may be permanent. He is down to his last, best hope.
    The music rivets him suddenly. Unexpectedly.
    â€œListen!” shouts Larry.
    Borasch peers over his notebook in irritation and alarm.
    â€œDo you hear that music, Borasch? Do you know what that means?”
    â€œWhat’s gotten into you, man?”
    â€œNothing,” Larry apologizes. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
    Borasch, placated, returns to his monotonous drone, but his audience is off the radar screen. Larry’s ears are elsewhere. His fingers tap to the music. Hope does somersaults in his soul. And all around him, like a messianic reveille in the land of the dead, cascades the glorious, triumphant sound of the pianist covering Strawberry Alarm Clock, crooning the most exquisite phrase in the repertoire of Western song. “Good Morning, Starshine.”

CHAPTER 4
BY Larry Bloom
    Starshine leans against her Higgins in front of the Dolphin Credit Union and scans the street for inspiration, for anyone or anything capable of driving a distressed damsel to tears, but the languid warehouses and wheezing factories of Long Island City offer little to provoke emotion. Yet emotion—and specifically, sorrow—is what the occasion demands.
    She has been around the block enough times to understand the rules of the game: the practiced comptrollers of the credit union are too unfeeling, too meticulous, to confront without the benefit of a young girl’s desperation. Either she overcomes her good cheer and strides through the revolving doors as a spool of nerves, fit to unravel at the least provocation, so helpless and hopeless that even the hardest of hearts will melt at her first sob, or her presence must inevitably arouse another instinct, that natural urge of street-corner loan sharks, and then her mission is doomed. Why in God’s name hadn’t she opened an account at a real bank like Aunt Agatha had advised? What made her think that a rag-tag army of graying swamp rats and over-the-hill tree-spikers could handle money responsibly? And yet the environmental credit union had