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brightness of her stare.
    “Are you a cutthroat murderer?” she asked.
    “No, ma’am.”
    I chose not to say that I had sometimes killed in self-defense and to protect the innocent. Killing is different from murder, though most people tend to get nervous when you try to explain why one might be acceptable but never the other.
    “Are you a rapist?”
    “No, ma’am.”
    “You don’t look like a rapist.”
    “Thank you.”
    “You don’t look drug-crazed, either.”
    “People often tell me that, ma’am.”
    She squinted at me but then smiled, apparently having decided that I wasn’t
trying
to be a wiseass.
    “Do you have a job, child?”
    “I’m a fry cook, currently unemployed.”
    “I don’t need a fry cook.”
    “I think everyone does, ma’am, they just don’t know it.”
    A Peterbilt, a motor home, and a Cadillac Escalade roared past, and we waited for silence.
    She said, “What I need is a chauffeur.”
    “I thought you were the chauffeur.”
    “Isn’t anybody in this big old boat but me. Four days ago, up in Moonlight Bay, Oscar Dunningham, my best friend and my driver for twenty-two years, dropped dead of a massive heart attack.”
    “That’s terrible, ma’am. I’m sorry.”
    “Maybe it would be a tragedy if Oscar wasn’t ninety-two years old. He had a good life. Now he’s ashes in an urn, flying back to Georgia where the truly sad thing is his mother will see him buried.”
    “His mother is still alive?”
    “She’s not some walking-dead zombie, child. Of course she’s alive. Or was this morning. You never know. None of us does. If it matters at all, I’m eighty-six.”
    “You don’t look it, ma’am.”
    “The hell I don’t. When I see myself in a mirror, I scream.”
    In fact, she had one of those fine-boned, perfectly symmetrical faces that time could little distort, and her soft skin was not so much wrinkled as precisely pleated to sweet effect.
    She said, “Can you drive?”
    “Yes. But I can’t take a job right now.”
    “You don’t look like a shiftless good-for-nothing.”
    “That’s kind of you to say. But the problem is, I have this thing I’ve got to do.”
    “Somewhere south of here, you don’t know where, but you’ll know the place when you get there.”
    “That’s right, ma’am.”
    Her blue eyes were neither clouded nor sorrowed by age, but were alert, quick, and clear. “This thing you’ve got to do—have you any idea what it is?”
    “More or less,” I said. “But I’d rather not talk about it.”
    “Okay, then,” she said, putting the limo in park and applying the emergency brake, but leaving the engine running, “you be my chauffeur and just drive us where you need to go.”
    “You can’t mean that, ma’am. What kind of chauffeur would that be?”
    “The kind I can live with. A lot of the time, I don’t much care where I go, just so I go somewhere.”
    She got out of the limousine and came around to the passenger side. She was wearing a yellow pantsuit with a white blouse that featured frilly lace-trimmed collar and cuffs, and a gold brooch with little diamonds and rubies arranged to form a glittering exclamation point.
    When she looked up at me, I felt extraordinarily tall, like Alice after consuming a piece of cake labeled EAT ME .
    “As my chauffeur,” she said, “you need to open the door for me.”
    “I can’t be your chauffeur, ma’am.”
    “I’ll ride up front with you to get to know you better.”
    “I’m sorry, but I really can’t be your—”
    “I’m Edie Fischer. I don’t hold with formalities, so you can just call me Edie.”
    “Thank you, ma’am. But—”
    “I was named after St. Eadgyth. She was a virgin and martyr. I can’t claim to be a virgin, but the way the world is sliding into darkness, I might yet be a martyr, even though I don’t aspire to it. What’s your name, child—or are you as unsure of that as you are of where you’re going?”
    I have in the past used aliases. Using one now made