. Steve never mentioned you..." The silence hung betweenthem awkwardly for a moment. He looked her in the eyes, his expressionsoftening with empathy. ...That face she'd seen so many times, that she knewas well as she knew the features of the stiff now cooling in the morgue."I'm so sorry. Here." He crossed the kitchen he'd been in a thousandtimes, reaching to the highest shelf where the liquor lived. "I think asplash of this will help us both feel better..."Half an hour later, her backstory was in. His wife brought him the promised plate of pan fried catfish and placed two plates with pecan pie on his dinner tray. She tilted her head towards a table with a solitary person sitting at it. T'Pau sat at a remote table and looked like lazily stabbing away at a salad."May I?" he asked when he had walked over."Of course," T'Pau answered."Normally I shouldn't be able to see it, but for a Vulcan you look mighty troubled, honey," he said."I may have antagonized krei Charles," she confessed. "He was. When is the party?’ ‘It’s next Saturday night at seven. It’s a surprise so Bobby won’t know. I’ll take care of the drinks and cater the food. Be sure to wear your sexiest babydoll.’ I agreed to do the party because Tommy would be there and I trusted him. Also, I had the cops’ phone number in case the party got out of hand. Earning two or three grand closed the deal. The week prior to the party was busy. We were filming ‘The Principal.’ I had many more lines to learn than normal so I was home. But it wasn’t as priceless as the look on my face later that night when a neighbor stopped me outside my house just to tell me how wonderful my son was to take out the trash for him while he was sick. Monday night my significant other made a superb four-course dinner to celebrate my birthday, and later some friends stopped over to offer their good wishes over a bottle of special Port. Friendships are special, and all too often one doesn’t recognize how important they are until someone moves.