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didn’t sound quite right. “Since when are Cancer and Leo compatible? I thought water and fire didn’t mix.”
    “Sure they do,” Ruby said. “How else would you get steam? And the eighth house is all about sexuality, you know. When we’re together, it’s very volatile.”
    “It’s just that I don’t want you to go off the deep end again. I don’t want you to get hurt. I’m running short of Kleenex.”
    I shut up. What gave me the right to give advice, even to my best friend? Where love was concerned, my own record wasn’t anything to brag about. Maybe I was jealous of Ruby’s ability to feel so deeply, to allow herself to be so fully involved with a man. I’d had a number of scorching affairs, all of which began with wild enthusiasm but eventually perished from lack of proper care and feeding. I couldn’t be the world’s greatest lawyer and the world’s greatest lover at the same time. Actually, I couldn’t be a lawyer and anything else at the same time. The year before I quit, I billed fifty-eight hours a week on average, no padding—and that didn’t include another twenty hours overhead. I had two sixty-day jury trials, one forty-five-day jury trial, and one bench trial—not to mention innumerable consultations, depositions, and hearings. No wonder I gave up sex. I almost didn’t have the energy to go to the bathroom.
    But my relational skills haven’t noticeably improved since I stopped practicing law. When I moved to Pecan Springs, I promised myself I’d be open to a real relationship, commitment and all. Then McQuaid and I got involved in what seems like a healthy relationship, and while I’m a little less wary and a little more open, I still haven’t been able to bring myself to commit. So maybe I don’t really love him. Or maybe I do and don’t know it. Maybe, in fact, I haven’t yet figured out what love is. I guess there’s no law that says you learn how to love just by getting a little seniority.
    That’s why I stopped offering Ruby advice on how to manage her affairs, pushed back my chair, and stood up. So did she. “Thanks for tonight’s lesson. Ruby. With a little practice, I might even get in touch with my unconscious.”
    Ruby bent down and enveloped me in a sisterly hug, companionable and loving. I felt once again, as I often do, that maybe we are soul mates.
    “Maybe there’s hope for you yet,” she said.
    I enjoy riding my bike along Pecan Springs streets after dark. Living room lights are on and people don’t always draw their drapes, maybe because they want the neighbors to see the new piano or the painting they bought at the last Starving Artists show up in Austin. So I glance inside as I ride to see what the residents do with themselves at night. Most, of course, are watching TV or reading the newspaper or talking on the telephone. Once I saw a man building a ship in a bottle. The scenes are tranquil, pleasant, peaceful— boring, McQuaid would say. Ordinary life in an ordinary small town.
    It was peaceful tonight, too. Except that Shorty Ennis, who lives by himself in an unpainted frame house at the corner of Vine and Mayberry, was drinking out of his bottle instead of building a ship in it. From the look of him, it wasn’t the first bottle of the day. Three blocks down Mayberry, I surprised two boys smashing a jack-o’-lantern on somebody’s front steps, and when I rode past, one heaved a hunk of it at me. At the corner of Mayberry and Crockett, a trio of teenaged ghosts, trick-or-treaters, were spraying pentagrams on car windows with aerosol shaving soap, inspired by witches, no doubt. I yelled at them and they scattered down the dark alley, but I knew they’d be back the minute I’d gone.
     
     
    CHAPTER 3
     
    Ah, peace. Ah, tranquility. Ordinary life in an ordinary small town.
    Thyme and Seasons Herb Company opens for business at nine, when I put the cash tray in the register, get out the herb snacks and tea, and move racks of potted herbs out to the