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“One more thing.”

I raised my eyebrows.

“May we kiss?”

“Are you kidding me?!” Eleanor Ann sputtered. “Who does this guy think he is? Please tell me you turned him down.”

“You can’t be serious,” I replied, tossing my keys on the kitchen counter. “Hank Wheeler is irresistible. You would have kissed him, too.” I covered the phone to muffle the outburst I knew would follow.

“Calm down,” I said. “All we did was get that awkward first-kiss-good-night out of the way early, before tomorrow’s date.”

“Where’s he taking you?”

“No idea.”

“So he hasn’t decided yet. Tell me—what does he do with that pig while he’s out on the town?”

“I’ll get back to you on that Tuesday morning.”

“Tuesday
morning
?”

“Relax. I’m not planning on sleeping with the guy. But if you feel like sitting by the phone until midnight or so, I’ll call you the minute I get home.”

“Fair enough.”

“Any other questions?”

“Only one. What does Siegfried’s buddy plan on doing with that pig when the Spanish chef turns up and asks for the keys to his house?”

“I was just thinking about that. You know that horse paddock behind your barn? It’s been years since you’ve—”

“Oh, no you don’t! If you think you’re going to turn my property into the Kutztown pig sanctuary—well, then, you are
uninvited
to Thanksgiving dinner this year.”

CHAPTER SEVEN
VIVA LAS VEGAS

T
hree weeks later I was staggering down the rancid corridor connecting the Times Square subway and the Port Authority Bus Terminal, balancing my duffel bag and two dozen Everything bagels and doing my very best not to inhale the urine-scented air. Small billboards lined either side of the passageway, roughly thirty percent of them advertising the investment group behind the Leading-Edge Retirement Portfolio. Images of a Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise Ray Devine greeted me at regular twenty-foot intervals as I made my way to the Bieber bus, bound for Pennsylvania and Thanksgiving dinner at Elinor Ann’s. “Don’t worry,” his expression seemed to convey. “I’m still looking out for you.”

I greeted him back with a silent
Ha!
It might have taken two decades, but at last I was free!

Just that morning I’d been awakened by another hang-up call, which had come as no surprise. All the major holidays tended to trigger Ray’s solicitousness.
You can stop keeping tabs on me now,
I thought to myself when I passed the next billboard.
My new boyfriend is working out just great.

And Hank Wheeler
was
my boyfriend—we’d been on seven dates by then.

“So, what’s wrong with him?” Elinor Ann had asked after each one. “And don’t tell me, ‘Nothing.’ ”

“Well… I
did
notice he left the top off a felt-tipped pen,” I answered the first time. “That dries out the nib. Terribly wasteful.”

“Oh, come on.”

“Well, what do you want me to say—he flirted with the waitress and got into a road rage incident on the drive back to Ninth Street? I can’t help it if he’s perfect.”

And Hank Wheeler
was
perfect—always calling well in advance of when I expected to hear from him, chauffeuring me anywhere my heart desired in his spectacular truck, and performing astonishing feats of virility from the fourth date on. Under the circumstances, I could live with the occasional dried-out nib.

“I still think you should slow down, Dana. Just because I couldn’t find him on
America’s Most Wanted
’s Web site doesn’t mean he’s not on someone’s.”

“He is—the
New York Times
’s. A few years ago the House and Home section ran a spread about a row house he’d restored. The owner referred to him as the Brownstone Whisperer!”

Elinor Ann sighed. “I know. I saw it online. Just… be careful, would you?”

Pushing through the throngs of Thanksgiving Day travelers, I finally reached the gate and took my place at the end of the line. I carefully counted the people ahead of me and noted with relief that there were only thirty-seven of them. This was indeed cause for thanksgiving. I would make it aboard the first Kutztown-bound bus.

In fact, there was more to give thanks for than ease of transit and the perfect boyfriend. The previous afternoon, Vivian had banged on my ceiling with her broom until I went downstairs, where she’d presented me with a check.

“Hannah’s got a patron,” she announced.

I inspected the piece of paper in my hands. “Uh, I think you put too many zeros on this. I’m positive there were only two paintings left.”

“There were. I doubled the prices—should’ve tripled them, but I’m too damn nice for my own good. Do you remember that fat chick in the Comme des Garçons getup who came in a while back?”

“How could I forget? She was my first customer.”

“Well, she’s on her way to becoming your only customer. She asked me to call her immediately whenever my picker got back from Maine with more Hannahs. And then she gave me this.” Vivian waved a business card long enough for me to make out the words
GALERIE NAIFS
.

“She’s a dealer?” I said.

“ ‘Representing the Finest Examples of American Intuitive and Self-Taught Artists Since 1994,’ ” she read from the card.

It seemed I had finally arrived—at the outermost fringes of the art world.

And the outermost fringes were exactly where Vivian expected me to stay, judging by the way her fingernails obliterated the dealer’s name.

“We’ll stick with the fifty-fifty split,” she said. “This could be big for us!”

Gee. Thanks a lot,
I thought.

Then again, what if Elinor Ann’s allegation turned out to be correct? If peddling outsider art of dubious provenance indeed constituted fraud, wouldn’t Vivian be the one perpetrating it?

“Gee! Thanks a lot!” I said.

The couple waiting in front of me had been engaged in an argument ever since I’d joined them in the bus line. It had grown so heated, I was beginning to wonder if they were staging some sort of guerrilla performance piece.

“Drop it,” he growled.

“Not until I find out who that call came from,” she hissed. “Let me see your phone.”

“I mean it. Drop it.”

“It was your ex, wasn’t it?”

After a while all that growling and hissing started to make my temples throb. I leaned forward to peer through the grimy pane in the door leading to the boarding area, but all I could make out were clouds of exhaust.

The gargantuan man who was first in line decided to make himself comfortable on the floor, landing with a loud grunt and setting off a chain reaction. One by one, all but the most germophobic passengers behind him followed suit. I joined them, balancing the bag from Ess-a-Bagel squarely on top of my duffel in order to ensure the greatest possible distance between the food and the dingy linoleum.

It was at that moment Hissing Woman managed to wrest Growling Man’s cell phone from his grasp, yanking so hard that her arm ricocheted into my pile of luggage. I lunged for the food bag, but not in time to salvage the topmost bagel. It rolled an impressive fifteen feet or so, finally coming to rest in front of a pair of Converse All Stars worn by an impossibly cute guy at the tail end of the line.

He grinned, picked up the bagel, and pantomimed taking a big bite.

I grinned back, felt myself flush, then quickly lowered my eyes.

That didn’t last long. I couldn’t resist sneaking in a few more glances.

He had shaggy, dirty-blond hair that looked as if he’d cut it himself, exquisite full lips, and the razor-straight jawline common to underwear models and Olympic gymnasts. I decided he couldn’t be much older than his mid-twenties, because he was dressed in the scruffy, post-collegiate uniform of cargo pants and a T-shirt under a T-shirt under a hoodie under a vest under a jacket.

There was just one problem. Every time I allowed myself another furtive peek at Scruffy, he was looking back at me, still grinning and twirling the bagel on his index finger.

This wouldn’t do. I was already taken. By the Brownstone Whisperer.

Besides, I was old enough to be—well, maybe just his aunt, but that was bad enough. What the hell was wrong with this guy?

More to the point, what the hell was wrong with me? Now that I’d finally hit the boyfriend jackpot, there was no justifiable reason in the world to be flirting with someone nearly two decades my junior, even if he
did
have beautiful gray-green eyes and impressively large feet.

But was I really flirting? Or simply reacting, in an amused manner, to an incident involving a wayward bagel?

Scruffy mouthed,
Watch this
, turned toward the young mother in line behind him, and managed to deposit the bagel into her baby’s diaper bag without either of them noticing. I giggled and gave him a thumbs-up.

Now
I was flirting.

I needed a distraction, one that would neatly fill the twenty-or-so minutes between the present and the bus’s departure time. Reaching into my bag, I pulled out the
Times
and opened it to the crossword puzzle.

But Scruffy was undeterred. He produced his own copy of the Arts section, flipped over its front page to reveal the grid, took out a pen, and mouthed,
Race you
.

You’re on,
I mouthed back.

It was one of the easiest puzzles to appear on a Thursday in quite some time, once I’d figured out the theme. In honor of Thanksgiving, the solver was supposed to draw little turkeys in some of the boxes, completing phrases like “Turkey in the Straw” and “Jive Turkey.” In well under ten minutes, I laid down my pen and directed my gaze toward the back of the line.

Scruffy’s head was still bent over the paper, but he must have felt my eyes on him. He looked up a few seconds later.

Wow,
he mouthed when I displayed my completed grid. He held up his own puzzle. From a distance, it appeared to be about half-finished.

Good,
I thought.
Not only is he too young for you; he’s clearly an inferior solver. Plus you’d have to fight him for the crossword every morning. Now,
put your puzzle—along with any absurd fantasies about a May-August romance—away.

As I was stuffing the newspaper back into my bag, I couldn’t resist one final peek in Scruffy’s direction. He was still looking my way.

Save me a seat,
he mouthed.

This is getting out of hand,
I thought, pulling out my phone. Maybe if that big-footed whippersnapper down at the end of the line observed me exchanging endearments with my boyfriend, he’d get the hint and back off. Of course, I had yet to drop any actual hints, but that was beside the point.

It was obvious I’d awakened Hank when he picked up.

“I thought you’d be on the Thruway by now,” I said. He’d told me he was going to New Paltz to have dinner with former clients.

“Change of plans. Too much driving. I decided to go help out at that soup kitchen over on the Bowery instead—be heading over there in about an hour.”

How could I have been so fickle? Hank Wheeler was a paragon. A selfless, virtuous avatar of decency—who, it bore mentioning, had impressively large feet in his own right.

“That is so incredibly kind of you.”

“Well, now, I wouldn’t be so sure about that. I got what you might call an ulterior motive. Yesterday somebody tried to get through that padlock on the back of my truck again, this time with a pair of bolt cutters. I got a feeling it’s the same guy who—well, I guess you could say he introduced us.”

“I guess you could,” I agreed, thinking back to Snaggletooth and the scattered apples. “So you’re hoping he’ll turn up for Thanksgiving at the Mission?”

“I sure am. It’s my big chance to set that guy straight.”

“I get it—no sweet potatoes for you until you cease and desist.”

“Something like that. Although I got a feeling he’s going to keep trying, irregardless of what I say.”

His words—rather, his word—rendered me temporarily speechless. When it came to pet peeves, “irregardless” was my pick of the litter, even worse than the use of double modifiers such as “more smarter.” Not that Hank’s flawed vocabulary made him, well, less smarter than me. After all, he was rewiring an entire brownstone, and I couldn’t even rewire a lamp. But had I been deluding myself into thinking I’d found the perfect boyfriend?