“Better hold it down or we’ll wake Merilee.” “Quality, you’ll find, never goes out of style.” I glanced up at our bedroom window, which overlooked the herb garden and was open. He threw back his head and roared like a lion. “About as well as can be expected,” I replied. I stood in the doorway holding the baby, a towel thrown over the shoulder of my Turnbull and Asser silk dressing gown to guard against the seven different categories of discharges Tracy was capable of producing-the standard six plus one more for which there was still no known scientific classification. She was with him, sitting on the bike untangling her mane of windblown hair with her fingers. “How the hell are you, boy?” he asked me, standing out there on the porch. Silence was always brief when Thor Gibbs was around. Then came the crunching of gravel as he eased it up the long, private drive that led from Joshua Town Road to the farmhouse. Heard it grow closer and closer, then pause. I heard its roar from miles away in the still of the country night. It was his bad black ’68 Norton Commando I heard first. But, hey, you want the whole story, you’re going to get the whole story-poopy and all. And definitely not some thing I thought I’d ever be caught doing for any midget human life form, particularly my own. Not the height of glamorous living, I’ll give you that one. I WAS CHANGING TRACY’S diapers at four o’clock in the morning when Thor Gibbs showed up. She sleeps next to me, secure in the belief that I know what I’m doing. But then I awaken, and realize that it is my own house that is creaking, from the wind, and that I am in the master bedroom. For a moment I think it is my father on his way down to the kitchen for a glass of milk in the night, and that I am in my old room, snug in my narrow bed. SOMETIMES AS I SLEEP I hear a creak on the stairs. Preview: The Man Who Loved Women to Death

The Bright Silver Star by David Handler