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Annie didn’t look down as she was getting out of the taxi, and by the time she did it was too late. Her foot was sliding out from under her on the icy curb, and she was falling backwards. She landed on her bottom with a hard smack that jolted her badly and sent the shopping bag of chocolates flying.

Picking herself up, and retrieving her thick gold shopping bag, she prayed that none of the chocolates were broken. God, she felt like enough of a klutz without having to go through a bunch of explanations and apologies.

Joe’s Place turned out to be one of those aged Federal-style brick houses common to the Village, narrow as a chimney, with a few stairs leading up to a panelled door set with an oval of bevelled glass. Below the snowcovered window box, Annie could just make out a sign pointing to another flight of steps going down to the basement service entrance.

Buzzed in through a wrought-iron gate and the door beyond, Annie immediately smelled baking bread as she entered a narrow vestibule. To the rear, down a dimly lit hallway, she could see into the kitchen, stainless steel and copper skillets hung in a row above a hulking black range. She heard voices, the clatter of pots, the hiss of steam.

Then, a smashing sound, crockery crashing against a tiled floor.

“Goddamn it!” a voice roared. “Asshole! Idiot!”

Annie jumped.

The voice coming from the kitchen seemed to reverberate, as if directed exclusively at her. Annie shrank back, reminded of Oz bellowing at Dorothy-Who are you to question the great and terrible Oz!

A figure appeared, a long shadow dancing on the propped-open door to the kitchen, followed by its owner

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-a lanky man in his early twenties, his rangy height making even five-foot-nine Annie feel short. He wore a stained apron over blue jeans, and a faded chambray shirt with its sleeves rolled up over his elbows. His longish hair was pushed back from a sweaty forehead, and his eyes swam murkily behind steam-fogged eyeglasses. Not the great and terrible Oz, after all.

Annie felt herself relax a little, though he wasn’t smiling. His face was flushed; a line of red was drawn along each sharp, angled cheekbone as if with a crayon.

“Yeah, what do you want?” he barked.

“I…” For an awful moment, her mind went blank.

Before she could get the words out, he blurted, “Look, I’m really busy. I’ve got a party of twentyfour arriving in a couple of hours, one of the ovens just fritzed out on me, two of my waiters are out sick, and the floor in there looks like a bomb went off, so whatever it is you want, for Chrissakes, spit it out.”

Something in Annie snapped. “I don’t want anything,” she said in her haughtiest voice, thrusting her shopping bag at him. “If you’re Joe Daugherty just sign the stupid invoice, and I’ll get out of your way.”

He stared at her, the condensed steam on his lenses beginning to evaporate, revealing eyes that looked gentle, wide and brown, with a thick fringe of lashes any girl would have envied. The angry flush left his cheeks, and now he looked chagrined.

“Oh, Christ. I’m sorry. Look, can we start over?” He pushed long fingers through his streaky brown hair, and turned a sheepish grin on her. “I am Joe Daugherty, and I’ve been having a day you wouldn’t believe. I guess I just sort of came unglued.”

Annie thought of the poor guy-some dishwasher, no doubt, straggling to live on fifty cents an hour-that he’d yelled at back there. Even Mr. Dimitriou, at the Parthenon, wouldn’t have called her an asshole. And if he had … well, she’d have given it right back to him in spades. So she wasn’t buying this jerk’s Mr. Nice Guy act.

“Right.” With a crisp gesture, she handed him the invoice slip. “Sign here.” Then she remembered that the

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chocolates might be damaged. She swallowed hard, and said, “Wait. You’d better check to see if they’re okay. I … I sort of slipped and fell on the ice on my way over, and some of them might be, uh, broken.”

Annie waited for the other shoe to drop, for this guy to explode again, but after a tense moment, he surprised her by laughing. A low, easy laugh that made her want to smile in spite of herself.

“I guess this isn’t your day, either,” he observed mildly. “Sorry about your fall… and you can stop looking at me like I’m going to cut you up and serve you for dinner. I really am sorry I snapped at you. You may not believe this, but I’m actually a pretty mellow guy. I have a long fuse, but when I blow, I really blow.”

“Great. But what about that poor guy in there who you dumped on?”

Daugherty looked puzzled, then he began to chuckle, and in a minute was roaring with laughter. Shoulders shaking, he leaned into the wall for support, pushing up his glasses to wipe the tears from his eyes. “I was the one who dropped those dishes. I was cursing myself out.” He shook his head, still laughing weakly. “Pardon my French, but I didn’t know you were out here.”

Annie felt like a perfect fool. She didn’t know what to say. Then she began to laugh, too.

“Why don’t we step down the corridor into my executive boardroom, and assess what damage has been done,” Joe suggested with a wry arch of his brow, leading the way down the dim hall to another door, which opened into a tiny, grungy office. “Look at it this way, you couldn’t have made a worse mess than I just did.”

He lowered the shopping bag onto a desk heaped with papers, and gestured for Annie to sit in a chair wedged between a file cabinet and an empty fish tank filled with glass ashtrays. “By the way,” he said. “I’m Joe Daugherty. But I’ve already said that, haven’t I?”

“I know.”

“And you’re-” He looked at her, questioningly.

“Annie,” she blurted without thinking, though at

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Girod’s she’d been using only her middle name, May. Now why had she let that out?

“You must be new with Dolly,” he said.

“I just started last week.”

“Funny, I would’ve pegged you for the college type. Vassar, or Sarah Lawrence maybe.”

Annie shrugged. “Well, you’d be wrong then,” she answered evenly. College, which she had once yearned for, couldn’t seem further away.

“Hey, I’m one to talk. I deep-sixed law school to open this place. And the crazy part is,” he grinned, “in spite of all the hassles, I love it. My old man is figuring this is temporary insanity. He’s even saving a space for my name plate on the door to his old office. Poth, Van Gelder, Daugherty and Prodigal Son.”

“Your father’s a lawyer?” From what Dolly had told her, she’d imagined Joe’s father to be some kind of realestate mogul.

“Used to be. Now he’s a judge. The Honorable Marcus Daugherty.” He took his glasses off, and began polishing them with his apron. “There you have it. My life story on the half-shell. So you see, you’re not the only one who’s running away.”

Annie now felt herself turn to ice. How did he know? Could Dolly have told him?

She forced a smile. “Who said anything about running away?” Her face felt as if it were cracking under the strain.

Joe shrugged, hooking a leg up onto the seat of the swivel chair in front of his desk. “One way or another, aren’t we all running to get away from someone or someplace? I mean isn’t that what this town is all about?” With his glasses off ,\he saw that his eyes weren’t really brown, they were sort of a cross between green and brown, a shifting, mossy hazel.

He just missed being handsome-not ordinary handsome, but really knockout handsome, like a movie star. Only none of his features seemed to fit exactly right. One cheekbone slanted slightly higher than the other, and his nose crooked a little to the left (had it been broken?). His

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smile, too, was faintly skewed-as if he couldn’t quite make up his mind if he was smiling or not. No, not a movie star, she thought, more like a rock idol. Mick Jagger, or George Harrison, or Peter Noonan. Some of them, she thought, were downright ugly in fact, but they had a kind of… well, an energy. A brash, jangly, almost rude energy that drove girls right out of their seats.

Annie realized she was staring, and jerked her gaze away.

“Sure. I guess so.” She felt relieved-he hadn’t really been talking about her personally. “Coming here is a little like joining the circus, isn’t it?”

Joe laughed. “Yeah, a high-wire act. One false move and you’re flat on your ass.” He snatched the invoice from her hand, and signed it with a flourish. “Stuff the chocolates,” he said. “Even if a few of them are smashed, it’s too ugly out there for you to make a second trip.”

“I’d feel better if you would at least check,” she said, not wanting to feel too grateful, in case there had been no harm done after all. “Then I could tell Dolly to take it off your bill.”

Joe shrugged, and reached for the shopping bag. “If you insist …”

The first box was okay; only a few pieces of almond bark were broken. But when Joe opened the box containing the Coquille St. Jacques, Annie nearly cried. All those beautiful, delicate shells, completely smashed, the necklace of white-chocolate pearls broken and scattered.

Joe stared at the ruins for a long moment, then he shrugged. “In arena aedificas. That’s Latin for ‘If you build your house on sand be prepared for a whole lot of shakin’ going on.’ Anyway, it won’t go to waste. My staff will eat anything that doesn’t crawl.”

Seeing how hard he was trying to make up for how he’d acted before, Annie actually found herself smiling.

“You haven’t been in New York very long, have you?” he asked. It was more a statement than a question.

“Why … does it show?”

“Your smile, it’s definitely west of the Mississippi.” So he had noticed.

“How do New Yorkers smile?”

“They don’t.”

She giggled. “Does it ever get any easier here?”

“Nope. Only it sort of grows on you after a while. You’ll see.”

Annie stood up. “I’d better go. I have to get home.” At the door, she stopped and looked back. “Uh … well, thanks.”

She was making her way out down the hallway when he called out, “Wait!”

What now?

Joe loped past her, and up a flight of stairs to her left, which presumably led up to the dining area. Minutes later, he reappeared holding a large plastic carton. He presented it to Annie as if it held the crown jewels.

“To make up for acting like such a jerk,” he said. “Merry Christmas.”

Annie heard a faint, scratching sound, and peeked inside. A big lobster, its claws bound with rubber bands, scuttled feebly about in some seaweed and a bit of water. She was so startled she nearly dropped the container.

She looked up at Joe, at his handsome, broken face and greenish-brown eyes so obviously full of good intentions. No, it wasn’t a joke.

But what on earth was she going to do with a … a lobster, for God’s sake? She didn’t even have a pot to cook it in. She thought of some of the things she so badly needed and wanted … but this … well, it was so far off the list it was almost funny.

“Uh, thanks,” she managed, reddening a little. “I’m sure it’ll be … uh … delicious.”

“With a little butter and lemon.”

“Well … thanks.”

“Don’t mention it. And, hey, drop by any time.”

Trudging through the falling snow to the subway at West Fourth, wondering how she was going to explain to Laurel-who suffered pangs if anyone accidentally stepped on an ant-that they’d have to boil this creature alive, Annie spotted a man selling Christmas trees out of the back of his truck. Her heart sank.

If only she could afford one. And the irony of it was, this lobster, if she’d bought it in a store, would have cost a lot. With that money, she might have been able to buy a small tree.

Then it hit her.

She walked over to the truck. The man was burly, bearded, wearing a red plaid lumberjack shirt, and he was nailing a cross of two-by-fours to the trunk of a bushy fir on his tailgate. He waved his hammer in greeting.

“Can I do for you, miss?”

Just come right out with it, she told herself.

“Uh … I was just wondering … would you be interested in trading one of your trees for … for …”

“Whatcha got there?” He tossed his hammer down.

Annie opened her box, and held it up so he could see inside.

The man looked at her as if she’d just offered him a slice of green cheese from the moon. But after he’d poked the lobster to see if it was still kicking, and she had agreed to accept his skinniest, spindliest tree-one he probably couldn’t have gotten much for anyway-she had a deal.

At West Fourth, as she made her way down the slushy steps to the IND, awkwardly dragging the tree behind her, Annie thought of how pleased Laurel would be, and how they would decorate it with paper chains, popcorn, and tinfoil stars.

Maybe it would turn out to be an okay Christmas after all.

Even in L.A., Val thought, December was a bitch.

As he churned his way across the pool, he tried not to feel how cold the water was, or how his head was throbbing, or to think about the realestate broker and her shit-

don’t-stink clients, who right now were tramping around inside his house, peering into closets and pointing out cracks in the plaster.

Instead, Val thought about Annie.

The rotten little bitch.

She had done this to him.

Why? Had he hurt her in any way?

Okay, so I had a couple of drinks that night… you can’t crucify a man for that. As to what he might have said or done, it couldn’t have been much. And if he raised a hand to her, she sure as hell must have deserved it. No matter what the hell it was, she’d had no right to clobber him like that. Fifteen stitches. Christ!

The little bitch was nuttier than her old lady, accusing him of kiliing Eve. So how was it his fault that she’d swallowed all those pills?

If anything it was Eve who’d done him wrongleaving him in the lurch like this, with two nagging kids to look after. If only he weren’t so broke! Not enough bread even for a plane ticket to New York to check out Dolly, see if she was being straight with him. He remembered the last time he’d spoken with her on the phone, the way Dolly had gushed on and on like he was her longlost brother instead of the creep who’d dumped her for her sister. Had she heard from the girls? Val wondered. Did she maybe know where they were?