"You make it sound so attractive." "You got something better to do?" "I'm in." # Suzanne came home a week later and found them sitting up in the living room. They'd pushed all the furniture up against the walls and covered the floor with board-game boards, laid edge-to-edge or overlapping. They had tokens, cards and money from several of the games laid out around the rims of the games. "What the blistering fuck?" she said good naturedly. Lester had told her that Perry was around, so she'd been prepared for something odd, but this was pretty amazing, even so. Lester held up a hand for silence and rolled two dice. They skittered across the floor, one of them slipping through the heating-grating. "Three points," Perry said. "One for not going into the grating, two for going into the grating." "I thought we said it was two points for not going into the grating, and one for dropping it?" "Let's call it 1.5 points for each." "Gentlemen," Suzanne said, "I believe I asked a question? To wit, 'What the blistering fuck --'" "Calvinball," Lester said. "Like in the old Calvin and Hobbes strips. The rules are, the rules can never be the same twice." "And you're supposed to wear a mask," Perry said. "But we kept stepping on the pieces." "No peripheral vision," Lester said. "Caucus race!" Perry yelled, and took a lap around the world. Lester struggled to his feet, then flopped back down. "I disbelieve," he said, taking up two ten-sided dice and rolling them. "87," he said. "Fine," Perry said. He picked up a Battleship board and said, "B7," and then he said, "What's the score, anyway?" "Orange to seven," Lester said. "Who's orange?" "You are." "Shit. OK, let's take a break." Suzanne tried to hold in her laughter, but she couldn't. She ended up doubled over, tears streaming down her face. When she straightened up, Lester hobbled to her and gave her a surprisingly strong welcome-home hug. He smelled like Lester, like the man she'd shared her bed with all these years. Perry held out his hand to her and she yanked him into a long, hard hug. "It's good to have you back, Perry," she said, once she'd kissed both his cheeks. "It's fantastic to see you, Suzanne," he said. He was thinner than she remembered, with snow on the roof, but he was still handsome as a pirate. "We missed you. Tell me everything you've been up to." "It's not interesting," he said. "Really." "I find that difficult to believe." So he told them stories from the road, and they were interesting in a kind of microcosm sort of way. Stories about interesting characters he'd met, improbable meals he'd eaten, bad working conditions, memorable rides hitched. "So that's it?" Suzanne said. "That's what you've done?" "It's what I do," he said. "And you're happy?" "I'm not sad," he said. She shook her head involuntarily. Perry stiffened. "What's wrong with not sad?"