Campaign signs for various gubernatorial candidates stand spiked into the various lawns around town. Armenta enjoys this part of the drive the most, after getting off the interstate and onto the highway that turns into a small artery that wends itself through St Claire�s northern residential neighborhoods. The writers live here, she knows, the ramshackle artist colony apartments and co-op houses full of people who are in turn full of themselves, the loose fraternal institutions that had shut their doors on Otto when he�d applied to the MFA program here and been summarily rejected. Armenta tried to tell him then that it was for the best, that we bounce back from our defeats, turn our misfortunes into happy accidents, but of course he�d have none of it at the time, and she couldn�t really blame him, either. Still, she fancies herself correct, and is waiting for the day he�ll roll over one night in bed, in the little duplex they now share down by the river, and say: you know, you were right. It isn�t a smug thing, and it isn�t like she was waiting for validation. It�s just another little comfort she anticipates one night in the quiet of a shared bed before sleep.

Otto�s happy accident turned out to be a pregnancy in the English department of St Claire East High School. He sort of fell into the role after he sheepishly went to apply as a substitute teacher in his old alma mater, back in April, after the MFA program rejected him. Perhaps they took pity on him, or saw his alum status as some kind of asset, because they gave Otto Dunkel, SCE Class of 1993, the entire first semester at two-thirds salary. Now he comes home exhausted and hopeless at five o�clock every weekday, and Armenta just smiles to herself as he throws his bag on the couch and collapses. Everything happens for a reason, she tends to say, which is usually met with a groan from Otto that is somehow both despairing and affectionate.

Her job at Snap Photo in the mall is thankless and soul-draining, but it�s a job. And it�s technically in her field, which is photography, which was her major. What she really came to school for was dance; she was going to be a dancer. Photography was only a hobby. But it went from hobby to major the winter of her sophomore year, when she was drunk on the icy sidewalk outside the Jackhammer one night. She�d gone there for Wicked Wednesdays (domestic bottles for seventy-five cents) with some fairweather friends, sorority fashionistas she had a strange attachment to because they lived on her floor freshman year. She�d also left Otto at home that night, which may have been the bad omen she should have heeded. She can still remember the dreadful sound her knee made when it hit the pavement, the way she spiralled down, every detail of the fall thrown into sharp, slo-mo relief in her memory, even though she was drunk. Her promising rise through the ranks of the university�s dance program came to an abrupt halt in that one instant, when her ACL exploded and she screamed in a way she didn�t think herself capable. One long hospital stay and a semester�s vacation later, she brought her dad�s old SLR back to school and enrolled in as many art courses as she could.

When she is introduced to people, they always say they love her name. She would trade a million I love your names for something like Sarah or Jill. Calle Armenta was the name of the street in Tucson her parents lived on while in grad school. Supposedly, Armenta was conceived in that shitty rental house in the summer of 1973, though that�s really more information than Armenta would care to have. She wouldn�t call her parents hippies, but they were odd and artistic and sentimental enough to give her such a name. The oddity is only compounded by the fact that Armenta doesn�t look the slightest bit Hispanic; her parents are Dutch-English and her skin is white as milk. She�s got long golden hair, and a slim but muscular dancer�s body that she�s managed to maintain since the accident.

None of which is really here nor there as far as Otto�s concerned, since he would love her even if she were obese and missing three limbs. Put enough beers in him and Otto, normally reticent, will tell anyone about the night he fell in love with Armenta. It was his freshman year, her sophomore, and they�d already been dating about a month. They were in a bar downtown called Hannigan�s, since turned into a Chinese carryout, which always lends just the right wistful tone to Otto�s story. They both had fake IDs, and getting into bars back then was cake. Anyhoo, Otto will say, he was getting drunk and hanging onto Armenta like she was the most beautiful girl in the place, which she was, he'll say, and the jukebox started playing �With Or Without You�, a song with which, Otto will emphasize, he had a more or less ambivalent relationship until that very moment. And they were sitting in a booth with two or perhaps three other people and Armenta was quiet while the other people were yammering on about something or other, and she was looking at nothing in particular. Otto was sitting at a 90� angle to her, the odd man out of the booth on a chair he�d pulled up, and when the song came on, he sat there and tuned out everything but the music and looked at Armenta�s face, and even though she was of course at eye level, it almost seemed as if he were looking up at her, and in that instant her face went slightly out of focus, like there was a diffusion lens on everything, and in that moment she looked asbolutely beautiful and he knew that there was a true capacity, a real and immediate chance that he�d fall in love with her, Ms Armenta Jensen. Like maybe he�d passed that point of no return in relationships when it can no longer just end cleanly; they are now in it to win it, and he was glad to give it the old college try. This is Otto at his most vociferous, and even though Armenta feigns good-natured annoyance whenever Otto pulls this story out, she is always a little touched, and a little choked up, because it is, for all of Otto�s drunken posturing, true and real beyond any of the other bullshit they may have gone through that year or in the time since.

She remembered the story five minutes ago, when she was on the interstate and, lo and behold, that very song came on the radio. She turned it up and kept driving, gliding along from the mall to the main St Claire exit at eighty miles an hour. (She remembers the spring that the song had first been popular. She remembers hearing it on the bathroom radio while her dad shaved, on the morning of the very last day of seventh grade in Tucson. She remembers waking up, and pausing in the middle of getting dressed to look out the window and breathe in the ineffible air of the last day of school, and she remembers the lemony wooden smell of the windowsill upon which she rested her chin.) She was on the interstate and a fantastic and somewhat unsettling optical illusion occurred when a semi trailer in front and to the right, in the next lane, passed under a huge green highway sign, and the resultant shadow dropped and slid down to the back of the trailer, so that it looked for an split second like the truck had sheared off the very sign itself, and was now causing a minor highway catastrohphe right there in front of her eyes, on an otherwise placid October afternoon just east of St Claire, as the sign fell to the highway below and motorists swerved to avoid its sudden clattering intrusion. But the sign stayed in place; it was only the shadows that moved, and she returned her fuzzy-eyed stare to the road just in front of the car, while everything in her line of sight and in her mind itself got diffuse, pleasantly blurry, perhaps as a result of that song on the radio.

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