A few hours later, they sat on the horsehair club-sofa in Kettlewell's living room and hit a number he'd never taken out of his speed-dial. "Hi, this is Perry. Leave a message." "Perry!" they chorused. They looked at each other, at a loss for what to say next, then dissolved in peals of laughter. "Perry, it's Suzanne and Kettlebelly. What the hell are you up to? Call us!" They looked at the phone with renewed hilarity and laughed some more. But by the time the sun was setting over Potrero Hill and Suzanne's jet-lag was beating her up again, they'd both descended into their own personal funks. Suzanne went up to the guest room and put herself to bed, not bothering to brush her teeth or even change into her nightie. # Perry touched down in Miami in a near-coma, his eyes gummed shut by several days' worth of hangovers chased by drink. Sleep deprivation made him uncoordinated, so he tripped twice deplaning, and his voice was a barely audible rasp, his throat sore with a cold he'd picked up in Texas or maybe it was Oklahoma. Lester was waiting beyond the luggage carousels, grinning like a holy fool, tall and broad-shouldered and tanned, dressed in fatkins pimped-out finery, all tight stretch-fabrics and glitter. "Oh man, you look like shit," he said, breaking off from the fatkins girl he'd been chatting up. Perry noticed that he was holding his phone, a sure sign that he'd gotten her number. "Ten," Perry said, grinning through the snotty rheum of his cold. "Ten rides." "Ten rides?" Lester said. "Ten. San Francisco, Austin, Minneapolis, Omaha, Oklahoma City, Madison, Bellingham, Chapel Hill and --" He faltered. "And -- Shit. I forget. It's all written down." Lester took his bag from him and set it down, then crushed him in an enormous, muscular hug that whiffed slightly of the ketosis fumes that all the fatkins exuded. "You did good, cowboy," he said. "Let's mosey back to the ranch, feed you and put you to bed, s'awright?" "Can I sleep in?" "Of course." "Until April?" Lester laughed and slipped one of Perry's arms over his shoulders and picked up his suitcase and walked them back through the parking lot to his latest hotrod. Perry breathed in the hot, wet air as they went, feeling it open his chest and nasal passages. His eyes were at half mast, but the sight of the sickly roadside palms, the wandering vendors on the traffic islands with their net bags full of ipods and vpods -- he was home, and his body knew it. Lester cooked him a huge plate of scrambled eggs with corned beef, pastrami, salami and cheese, with a mountain of sauerkraut on top. "There you go, fatten you up. You're all skinny and haggard, buddy." Lester was an expert at throwing together high-calorie meals on short order. Perry stuffed away as much as he could, then collapsed on his old bed with his old sheets and his old pillows, and in seconds he was sleeping the best sleep he'd had in months.