"It's the heart that makes the heat."

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Pillow Talk

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  The phone rang four times before I could grope the handset out of the cradle. Groggy and hoarse, a muffled “Lo?” was as much as I could offer, my head still on the pillow. “Is Kitty there?” I heard the door of a phone booth screech a few inches and thud shut. I needed to hear his voice again. Immediately. “Who did you want?”  “Kitty. I don’t know her last name. We met at the Hi-Lo the other night.”  “Hmmm. The Hi-Lo, huh? She gave you my number?”   “914-232-5646?” He was off by one. Close. So close. The acoustics of the phone booth were intimate. His voice was like melted butter and dark syrup swirled together. Salty, sweet, smoothly overwhelming.  “No. No kitty here. Just me.” I yawned. If I could purr, I would have.  “So, what number is this?”  “And why would I give you my number if you weren’t looking for me in the first place? I snuggled deeper into the warmth of my nest. “Hmmn?”  “Solid point, but can I have some slack 'cause I’m glad I got...
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S2:E53

  Starting at dawn to beat the heat got them to lunch by ten-thirty. They lounged on the crude temporary front steps, ate sandwiches from paper sacks, drank Gatorade or beer, and smoked. Gabe tipped his head back, looked up the front of the still-skeletal structure, and asked, “How are you with heights?” Jack shrugged. “Spent half my life on rooftops. Why?” Gabe looked skyward again. “Good, ‘cause way up there on the third level, this layout has a row of clerestory windows. If Ray had his way, we’d be working off ladders, but I’m gonna break his balls to rent some scaffolding.”  He pronounced it ‘clear story’ and Jack was thrown. He knew what they were, but just last night he heard it pronounced clair-RES-tory by a guy he’d stabbed and thrown off a moving train. “What did you call them?” Gabe repeated, “clerestories. Big, fixed-pane fuckers. Heavy as shit. Expensive.” Jack dragged his tongue along the new sharp edge on his lateral incisor. “Just another day at the office. Clea...
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Water baby

 Anna Bea and Tam had been secretly teaching each other to read and write since the little girl could sit up and hold a crayon. Tam never learned and was reluctant to subject herself to scorn, so she made do as many unlettered adults did. Each morning when chores were done, Tam would take off her apron and smack her broad palms together and say to Bea, “Time for school!” something she had no firsthand experience with. The two-year-old laboriously stacked three county phone books on the kitchen chair, climbed to her perch and waited with her grubby little fists clutching air while Tam got out the pad of lined newsprint and the cigar box full of pencils and crayons. Tam warned her, “Now don’t be letting other people know about our business here,” as the two of them drew copies of the bold letters from the front page of yesterday’s newspaper. The truth was that Bea had figured out reading and writing on her own while she sat on an apple box in a booth at the airport bar with...
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