1503951243 by Laurel Saville Page B

alone too much recently. He was ready to like anything.
    “What do you do?” he asked Sally as they stood in the dank living room, swiveling their heads around in the thick air of the long-closed-off space.
    “Do?” she said. “Do about what?”
    “You know, for work.” He was irritated by what he felt was her unnecessary stonewalling of his obvious query.
    She reached into her coat pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. Cigarettes. No one Darius knew smoked cigarettes. Certainly not indoors. Sally shook one out of the pack and lighted it before answering him.
    “I’m a social worker,” she said.
    Darius wasn’t quite sure what that meant. “What sort of social worker?” he asked, trying to cover his ignorance.
    “I work for the state,” Sally said. “I work with kids. Foster kids. JDs. Fucked-up kids and their fucked-up families.”
    Darius wondered what a “JD” was but didn’t ask. He was a bit startled by her use of profanity. He didn’t know any women who swore so freely.
    “Sounds like hard work,” he said, not knowing what else to say.
    “Sometimes. At least the job is secure. Never a shortage of delinquents around here.”
    Ah, he thought. Delinquents. Juvenile Delinquents. JDs.
    He wasn’t sure what to do next. Sally stared at him and took a long drag on her cigarette. The directness of her gaze made him uncomfortable in a way he’d never been before. He was used to people coming at each other in a certain way. There was a standard set of questions one normally asked, about fathers’ last names, firms worked for, schools attended. These queries were always pitched in a tone designed to sound casual and friendly, but the answers were used to place people in a pecking order, to help decide if you were someone to compete with, dismiss, or try to cozy up to. This Sally person was doing none of these things. Darius wondered how old she was. She looked like she’d lived a lot more than he had. That didn’t necessarily mean she was much older. He wanted to ask her age, but that was a question he knew was considered impolite. At least among the people he was used to. Maybe it didn’t matter to someone like her.
    “How old are you?” he asked quickly, before his courage gave out.
    She gave him an annoyed look. He didn’t care. He wanted to know.
    “That’s a rude fucking question,” Sally said. “Not that I care. But still. Twenty-nine.”
    He nodded instead of apologizing. Looked around the room to avoid looking at her.
    “Not from around here, are you?” she asked, squinting against an exhalation of smoke.
    He shook his head.
    “What do you think of the place?” she asked, then sucked on her cigarette again.
    “It’s perfect,” he said.
    “Yup,” she said, crushing the cigarette under her boot and into the orange carpet. “Definitely not from around here.”

    Darius tried and failed to get bank financing. His small trust fund and lack of a job or credit history did not impress the bank officers. He came to Sally with the news, expecting that would be the end of things, but Sally said she’d take his $10,000 down payment and hold the mortgage herself.
    “What do I have to lose?” she said with a shrug. “Even if you bail on me, I’m still ahead ten thousand bucks.”
    They met a few weeks later and signed a simple purchase-and-sale agreement she’d downloaded from the Internet.
    “David?” she asked as she looked things over. “Thought you said your name was Darius?”
    “My legal name is David. But I’ve been called Darius for most of my life.”
    “Two kings,” Sally said.
    Darius looked at her quizzically.
    “A Jewish king and a Persian king?”
    Darius was silent.
    “Never mind,” she said as she handed him a set of keys.
    She had brought a twelve-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon to celebrate the deal. They emptied the cans down their throats while wandering the rooms, then crushed and left them on the floor. As they went, Darius made mental notes about the