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lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take. Amen.’ That’s all you need to say,” she told me. And then again that little sneaky caboose, “For now.
    “But do it every night,” she then added. “Every night!”
    “Hey, you sweet-lookin’ honey!”
    Jane and I quickly stood up. It was a group of three guys, most likely eighth-graders from Our Lady of We Don’t Need No Stinking Badges, one big and pretty brawny in a red tank T-shirt with the single word “SO?” on the front in huge letters. “Why don’t you dump your skinny boyfriend,” he went on, “and come along with us guys to a party? What do you say? You want to come? Sure, you do. Come on, I got something nice for you there. Real nice.”
    When I finally had to recognize the probability he was talking to Jane and not someone on the Planet Schwartz, before I could open my mouth to advise him his behavior was “not the way of Zen,” the guy in the tank shirt reached to clutch at Jane’s arm when suddenly, WHAMMO! She’d whipped around sideways and kicked him in the jewels, and with his mouth wide open in shock and awe, not to mention excruciating pain, Mister “I Am Not Zorro After All” slowly crumpled to the ground while the two lesser toughs held back, looking suddenly fearful and confused and not at all like Huntz Hall, a St. Stephen’s grad who played one of the “Dead End Kids” in the movie. Meantime, Jane was now crouched in a fighting position with a tightly clenched fist held out in front of her and another fist coiled at her waist. “Vamanos, hombres!” she warned them. “I have power! I am the power!” Then she took a step forward and instantly the three caballeros turned and ran, heading back uptown, their disgraced fallen leader hobbling gamely as he straggled behind muttering threats of revenge that would have even made the Count of Monte Cristo blench, while now and then he would turn and shake a fist at us, yelling, “You going to see what going to hoppen to you now! You know? You going to see! My God, you going to see!” His Latino Jeremiads continued sporadically until, as he began to recede in the distance, a final valediction so faint that it might have been coming from the edge of the Andromeda galaxy dimly floated down to us from far upriver: “I feel sorry for you guys! You know? I’m feeling sorry so bad I’m going to puke!! ”
    The glow of the Tokay had worn off and I wasn’t sure how I should take all of this. First my role as a provider and now this.
    But I was quick to give praise.
    “Holy whack!” I exclaimed. “Jane, where’d you learn judo?”
    “It’s not judo.”
    “Then what is it?”
    “Effective. Listen, Joey, gotta go now. I got lots of stuff to do.”
    “Gee, so early?”
    “Can’t be helped.”
    “Well, okay then,” I said. “I’ll walk you home.”
    She shook her head.
    “No. This is something I need to do alone.”
    “Such as what?”
    “Seven churches,” she said. “Okay? On Holy Thursday you get graces if you visit seven churches.”
    “It isn’t Thursday, though. It’s Friday.”
    She looked up at me with patience in her eyes. And something else. Maybe fondness. Maybe worry. Maybe both.
    Looking aside, Jane folded her arms across her chest while a sigh fluttered down to the tabletop with the weight of a withered leaf.
    “Now it starts,” she murmured.
    She was shaking her head.
    “Whaddya mean?” I said, frowning a little in puzzlement.
    With this she turned back to me, her eyes a little tight as she answered, “You know perfectly well what I mean. Must you always be so quarrelsome, Joey? Do you have to be right every time? Someone tells you it’s daytime, you insist it’s night? Then they point to the sky and say, ‘See, there’s the sun,’ and you give them your biggest killer line, ‘Yes, but! ’”
    “What do you mean?” I said; “It really is Friday!”
    “And you’re