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boomed while flexing his trapezius muscles. He bounded toward us despite my best don’t-mess-with-a-trained-reporter scowl. “I almost lost an arm scoring these,” he said, holding up two Coronas in his oversized paw.
    Melinda held up her own. “Sorry. Already snagged one.” She turned to me. “Do you want a beer?”
    There was a long, awkward pause before I said, “Sure,” and an even longer one before he handed me a bottle. We eyed each other suspiciously, standing our ground, shoulder to solar plexus.
    Melinda kick-started a conversation. “So, Gavin, how did you decide to become a nurse?”
    “I didn’t,” I started to say.
    “I know exactly what you mean, dude,” he said, interrupting me. “I don’t feel I decided to become an orthopedic surgeon. It’s just something I was compelled to do. I think it’s a calling. Like being an artist, and it’s an incredible responsibility. To hold someone’s broken bones in your hands and know you have the ability to mend them.” There was no way I could compete with a sensitive surgeon in a size thirteen shoe.
    “That’s odd,” Melinda said. “I’ve always thought of surgeonsas being more technicians than artists.” The McConatron flinched.
    “It’s cold out here,” he said.
    “Maybe you should go inside and warm up,” she said with a sympathetic smile, not at all the same as her dazzling one. It seemed to knock the wind out of his surgical scrubs. He saluted me with his Corona and retreated indoors. It was like slaying Goliath. With someone else’s arrows.
    “Some people just don’t take a hint,” Melinda said, furrowing her brow. She wasn’t relishing the conquest as much as I was. A pained expression crossed her face as she nibbled on a fingernail. She turned away from me, and I wondered if I was also supposed to be taking a hint.
    “What do you think’s up there?” She was pointing to the top of the spiral staircase, not far above our heads.
    “The roof,” I offered unhelpfully.
    “What do you think’s
on
the roof?” She was already heading up the narrow steel steps, and I was right behind her.
    “My guess would be air ducts, a water tank and maybe a satellite dish,” I said, just trying to keep the conversation going while hustling up the last stairs.
    “Your guess would be wrong,” she said softly.
    A wooden boardwalk meandered through waist-high, straw-colored grass. Small lanterns dotted the landscape, like fireflies suspended in the darkening sky. We drifted along the winding path until reaching a cul-de-sac around a shallow, pond-shaped whirlpool with steam rising like mist from its rippling surface. I felt like Heathcliff on the moors.
    With little but vapor between us, we started circling the pool. Her long curls danced in the light wind, backlit by the city skyscape. I needed to say something. Anything. “So, where did you last travel?”
    “Ilived for six months in Katmandu.” She could have said Kansas City and I would still have been mesmerized. But she didn’t say Kansas City. “I volunteered at a girls’ orphanage while working as a stringer for Lonely Planet. Then spent a month teaching English in a rural village and writing freelance articles about the cultural impact of the adventure-travel industry.”
    She made me feel deficient as a journalist—and a human.
    “I might be the only person who ever went to Nepal without going mountain climbing,” she said. “The vertigo thing is a drag.”
    “You did pretty well getting up here,” I said, moving closer to her as we continued our slow orbit of the burbling water.
    “Eleanor Roosevelt said to do one thing every day that scares you,” she said, “but one flight on a staircase with handrails is about as much hiking as I do at high elevations.” Unless I was imagining things, she seemed to be moving closer to me as well. “Even at lower altitudes I can get myself in trouble. I remember being at the edge of a Himalayan lake at sunset with the fog rolling