Needless to say, Danny was out at Jennifer and Blake’s at the appointed hour. It wasn’t a big party, but it included a lot of people involved with the racing in one way or another. The centerpiece, of course, was the presence of Josh and Tiffany – the first time they both had been present for the finish parties they had inspired. There were several people there, some of whom Danny only knew slightly, and several he didn’t recognize at all.

One of the people at the party he recognized but didn’t know well was Debbie Elkstalker. He’d seen her regularly, once a week, when she came in to talk advertising for the week. She always had a smile on her face, was friendly, and had a wisecrack or two. Danny recognized a lot of it as professional salesmanship; after all, he’d been a salesman for a long time and had walked into a lot of stores with a friendly demeanor and a joke to lighten the atmosphere before he cracked open the sample case. Now, they sat and talked for a minute in front of the fireplace in Blake and Jennifer’s living room. Debbie asked what he’d heard from his folks, and he told her he didn’t know a lot except that they were last heard from in Arizona, and seemed to be having a good time.

"Good," she said. "They both needed it. Your mother especially was getting to the point where she needed to get away for a while."

"I think so," he agreed. "I just hope they’re getting a good time in and learning to relax a little."

"Just out of curiosity," she asked, "I’ve often wondered how come they call you Danny, instead of Dan or something."

"It does sound a little childish, I suppose," he grinned. It was not the first time he’d been asked the question; it had come up frequently over the years, and he’d long had a stock response. "But people like Danny Thomas or Danny DeVito don’t seem to mind either. Actually, my late grandfather was Dan. I was always called Danny to keep us separate, so I’ve always answered to it. I wouldn’t want to change, now."

"Makes sense, I suppose," she nodded. "There is a lot of power in a name. One of the hardest questions people have to ask themselves sometimes is, ‘What’s your name?’ to discover the power that lies within it."

Danny wasn’t real sure what she was talking about. He’d heard, of course, that she was some sort of tribal shaman or mystic, and people had said that she had some interesting ideas about the relationship of man, Earth and spirit, or something like that. But, somehow, at the moment, he didn’t want to dig into it. "You’re probably right," he replied neutrally. "But when you stop and think about names, think about all the trouble that Josh and Tiffany have gone through naming dogs."

"Oh, I’ve heard stories," she laughed, recognizing that he wasn’t up for a cerebral discussion. "They went through a period of about a year there when they just grabbed a road atlas and went over the map until they found a likely prospect. That’s how they came up with dogs named Ogden and Wichita and Memphis. At least they got over it before they started naming them, oh, Albuquerque or Texarkana."

"Absolutely," Danny laughed. "On, Salt Lake City! On, you huskies! But think of the real tough problem they’re facing. Soon they’re going to have to name a kid something they haven’t already used for a dog."

"Or something that’s not sort of related," he heard a voice say at his elbow. He looked up to see Randy Clark standing next to him, with a good looking woman in a business suit at his side. She was a little taller than Randy, with dark hair that had just a tinge of red in it. "Danny, you remember Nicole, don’t you?"

Danny looked at Randy’s wife, who had a bright smile on her face. "I have to admit, sort of," he smiled. "My memory of you is roughly when you were a preteen. It looks to me like you’ve grown up some."

"Well, so have you," she smiled, and let out a long sigh. "I understand you’re the one responsible for raising the flabbergasting factor of my wedding, at least in retrospect."

"A little, maybe," Danny teased. "From what I hear, it was a little on the wild side, anyway."

"You’re sure about that woman?" she asked.

"Oh, yeah, there’s no question," Danny said, resolving to keep this straight and simple, and not get into the background too much.

"What woman is this?" Debbie asked.

"The one who flew our friends in for the wedding on her Learjet," Nicole shook her head.

"The millionaire prostitute?" Debbie smiled. "Danny, do you know her?"

"‘Know’ is too strong a word," Danny replied. "I’ve met her, sat and drank coffee for an hour with her once. More than anyone I’ve ever met, I think it safe to say that no one really knows her."

"I don’t understand it at all," Nicole replied. "I mean, I can understand how a woman can get in such bad shape that she has no other choice but to do something like that, but a millionaire who flies her own Learjet?"

"If you want an answer that’s sort of like a Zen koan, in that it says nothing but says everything," Danny smiled, "it’s because she wants to."

"Wants to?" Debbie frowned.

"As I said, I don’t think anyone really knows her," Danny told them. "I could be totally wrong, but my take on her is that she’s a serious loner, to the point of being an incomplete personality. Brilliant, flamboyant, yes, in spades. Capable of being personally intimate with someone, as opposed to sexually intimate, no way, she can’t do it and she readily admits it. Being a prostitute is just a spin-off, it’s how she deals with a strong sex drive. It keeps it on her terms and no one else’s."

"Plus she must not mind the money," Randy grinned.

"Probably so, but it’s also a tool to keep it from getting too personal," Danny nodded, realizing that he’d never quite thought about Jennlynn that way before. But yeah, it made sense, now that he’d been from the Redlite for a while and had time to reflect on it. And that implied a few angles about other things that needed thinking about sometime.

"It seems strange, but almost understandable when you put it that way," Nicole nodded.

Just about that time, Tiffany drifted up and got Debbie talking about something else. "She must be an interesting woman in her own way," Randy commented. I guess it’s just one of those wild things that happen once in a while."

"I’ve heard that you’ve had a few wild ones happen to you," Danny nodded, wanting to draw the topic away from Jennlynn.

"Oh, one or two," Randy said. "Nicole is actually the adventurer, she’s the one with the stories to tell. I just stay home and keep the home fires burning."

"It’s not that adventurous," Nicole said. "I run a Girl Scout camp in the summer. I did a couple other things before I got married."

"That includes end-to-ending the Appalachian Trail as one of those ‘other things,’" Randy explained. "Anyway, I’ve been meaning to ask you over for dinner sometime, maybe we can tell some stories. You must be getting tired of your own cooking with your dad and mom gone."

"Sure," Danny smiled at the chance to get to know someone new, "I’d like that."

"I suppose we’d better get it in sooner than later," Randy agreed. "We wait too long, I’ll be up to my fanny in construction and you’ll be hauling rock."

"We could do it tomorrow night," Nicole suggested.

"Works for me."

*   *   *

Dinner with Randy and Nicole Clark proved interesting, and so did sitting around talking afterward. The Clarks had a big new lakefront house on Hannegan’s Cove, modern to the point of being avant-garde and very striking, neat as a pin.

For the first time outside of close family, Randy managed to worm out the fact that Danny had been working at the Redlite Ranch as the source of the Jennlynn story. He cautioned them to not pass it around, and then told the rest of the story of how he happened to be talking with Jennlynn, the part that he hadn’t told out at the café, the part about Jon and Tonia, although he didn’t use their names or mention the fact that she was black. He told a couple of the more innocent and funnier stories, and got the expected laughs, and finally was able to wiggle his way off the subject and get Randy to talk about some of his adventures, and Nicole about some of hers.

All in all, it was a fun evening and a good time, and they agreed they’d have to get together again sometime, maybe go snowboarding or something. Danny had done some skiing when he was younger but had not been on a snowboard, which wasn’t surprising considering all the years in Florida. The season was winding down now, spring was coming to the North Country, and busy time was not far off, so it looked like one of those "another year" things.

Danny felt good when he left the Clark’s, but the drive across town ended at an empty and lonely house, and the warmth of the evening only shoved the darkness away for a while, and on Friday morning, he was feeling lonely again.

That morning, he happened to glance up at the calendar in the quiet office, thinking about what Randy had said about things turning busy before long. Here it was the Ides of March already; there were only two and a half weeks left, and the rock season on the trains was going to be starting not long after the end of the month, Josh was sure, now. Danny’s folks would be back by then, too. Plus, Phil and Brandy and Candice would be getting home probably early next week, and there was an annual welcome home party scheduled for the weekend that he really didn’t want to miss. If you put all that together, it meant that the upcoming weekend was probably about the last chance he’d have to get over and see Tara and Sylvia before rock season got rolling.

Besides just wanting to do it, and see Tara a little more and get to know her friend – was "friend" the term to use? ‘Lover?’ What? – a little bit, Danny was pretty sure there were a few issues in his mind that he could talk to the two of them about, and no one else that he knew – issues concerning Marsha, obviously, but some others, too.

A quick phone call proved that Tara was going through one of her quiescent phases at the moment, and sure, she and Sylvia would love to have him over. She knew that it was a long haul to the Twin Cities and he couldn’t leave before noon on Saturday, so it would be evening before he’d roll in. Fine, he was welcome to spend the night; they had a spare bedroom, and it would be kind of a kick to have a man around the house for once . . .

Sylvia proved to be interesting. She was a big woman, pretty close to his size, and not real shapely. He had considerably more hair although it was far from long. She was indeed pretty butch, but she was also pretty smiley and friendly. It proved that she worked in an ad agency as a copywriter, and wrote poetry on the side – some of it was pretty incomprehensible to Danny, but she’d published two slim volumes of poetry and was about to have her third one released.

There was a little initial awkwardness – Danny was as hetero as they come; the knowledge about Marsha had only sharpened it, if anything, and he had little shame about it to these two – but it was clear to them that he accepted them for what they were, too. Before long, he and Sylvia were good buddies, although in a totally nonsexual way, like he might be with a guy. And again, the experience at the Redlite Ranch helped, both with them and with his own attitude of tolerance of the way others did things. He told some Redlite Ranch stories – Tara had already primed the pump – and here he could tell some of the rougher and kinkier stories that he wouldn’t tell in Spearfish Lake, even to the guys. Really, only Amelia/Amy and his own adventures with Frenchy and Shirley were off limits.

The two women told him stories, too – some of them were just as incredible to him as the Redlite Ranch stories were to some of the people in Spearfish Lake. The three of them talked about Marsha, too, and some of the thoughts he’d had. Both women agreed she’d been pretty shitty to him, even considering that he was a guy.

It was a fun weekend, although Danny had to be on the road around noon on Sunday, and he was sorry to have to leave so quickly. About the only uncomfortable point in the weekend had come when he went to bed late on Saturday night, knowing that Tara and Sylvia were going to bed together . . . just a touch surreal, there, but again his Redlite Ranch experiences helped him stand a little away from it.

Danny had lots to think about on Sunday afternoon as he pointed the nose of the Lumina toward Spearfish Lake. The experience with the two women had been an eye opener in a way, levering his thought processes into new channels, giving him new perspectives on the same old problem.

For no good reason, he thought about his words to Randy and Nicole and Debbie at the finish party the other night. Yes, there was truth in them – Jennlynn was a serious loner, and that separated her from a lot of the other women at the Redlite. With a few exceptions like Peppermint Patty, most had someone else in their lives – a boyfriend, a husband, another woman, often someone Danny would have to categorize as a pimp, living off their earnings. What did they get in return? A friendship, a companionship, a feeling of being needed, wanted, cared about. Danny had understood that instinctively, and it had carried him through some of the literal horror stories some of the girls had told about those relationships. Why? Independent though they might be, they still had a need to depend on someone, someone to depend on them. It wasn’t sexual, it was a deeper need, a need of the soul.

Danny had often thought it was a little strange that there was very little kissing around the Redlite, to the point where a kiss was notable and worth remembering. In spite of the sexual atmosphere, in spite of the experiences with Frenchy and Shirley, he’d only had three kisses out there, goodbye kisses with Frenchy, Amy, and Patty – and those had seemed deep and intimate indeed. Now, he understood. The sex was only sex. Kissing was an intimacy that went to that deeper need that even a prostitute did not easily share.

Since leaving the Redlite, Danny had seen and envied the evidence of that closer intimacy that transcended mere sex in lots of people. That included his parents, of course, but Blake and Jennifer, Phil and Brandy, Josh and Tiffany, John and Candice, Randy and Nicole, even Tara and Sylvia – and, for that matter, to a lesser extent even in Garth and Michelle. Lack of that intimacy was obviously at the root of Randy’s frustrations with his girlfriends out having adventures, Danny now understood from the discussion of the other night. It was an intimacy that he didn’t share, didn’t have anyone to share it with. But, he knew he was lonely, what was new about that?

Back when Jennifer had been talking about hiring Blake, it had been quite clear that she’d been alone, scared, and unhappy. Without realizing it, he’d filled a need for her, and she in him – so strongly that it had changed their lives considerably. Over the course of that evening, Jennifer had explained that they’d held off on getting married until Jeremy came along because they were afraid that being married would louse up their delicately balanced friendship – and it had, though luckily it had been replaced with an even deeper friendship and love, incredible to watch, incredible people though they were.

He remembered talking to Patty about how there were sometimes guys who would come in and hire her just to sit down in the lounge and talk with them. He’d said at the time he could understand them, how that could happen, but until now he couldn’t have put words to the why. It was a pretty damn desperate expedient when you got right down to it, one that almost made hiring a prostitute for sex seem routine and reasonable.

As the miles rolled on, though, an epiphany came over him – he was a person who needed that kind of intimacy.

When you looked at it from that viewpoint, there had been no difference between a girl who gave money to her pimp, got beaten up for it, and still went back to him than there had been with him and Marsha, except that the roles were reversed. He hadn’t been blind, after all. He should have picked up the hints of Marsha’s catting around, but at the bottom line it didn’t matter until it slapped him in the face, and he’d reacted like a prostitute finally getting mad at her pimp one final time and throwing him out. What he had been getting from Marsha was an intimacy, a companionship, a comradeship, an indefinable something that however weak and distorted had managed to more or less fill some of his needs for years.

Why else would he have put up with her bad temper, her tirades, her weird ideas, a lot of negative things for as long as he had? Could it be that somehow, probably against her will, she’d managed to fill an unspoken need in him, a need that was deeper than sex, deeper than a lot of things? The fear of losing that little bit of something that filled that need in him had been so great that he had put up with everything else he’d endured from her for so long.

Now, here he was, he’d lost it, and it was damn hard to adapt to. His anger had carried him the first couple of weeks since he’d left her; then, the adventures and the new friends at the Redlite Ranch. Then, after he’d come home, friends and family had managed to fill that need a little, but that well was running dry and there was a limit to how much he could expect them to give of themselves from their own lives.

Now what the hell did he do?

Get right down to it, he needed a woman to care for, to care for him – hopefully one that would fill that unspoken need better than Marsha had, but at least contribute something. Unlike Jennlynn, he was not a loner, he was a people person. Maybe it had something to do with being raised in a large family. It wouldn’t have surprised him although Blake had been an only child – perhaps the need for intimacy had transcended gender for him early on, who knew?

Maybe it was a little too soon, he was still sorting things out – but it was clear the direction he’d have to take sometime sooner or later, preferably sooner.

Not that the pickings were exactly what you called good in Spearfish Lake. In over two months at home, a fair chunk of which had been spent out in the community at things like basketball games or sled dog races, he had yet to come across even one halfway appealing woman somewhere around his age that wasn’t married or otherwise engaged, had a boyfriend, or something like that. Not that he’d really been looking yet, but he’d kept a weather eye out.

That wasn’t quite true, he admitted to himself – he’d met two or three divorcees like he was, but even superficial examination had revealed things that were pretty unappealing, mostly that they’d been thrown back in the pond for good cause, bratty kids, alcohol, attitude, things like that. He didn’t even have to think about it – he was looking for a woman to love, not to party with. If he was looking for the latter, a plane ticket to Vegas, a car rental and an evening at the Redlite Ranch was much cheaper in the long run than getting involved with some of those women.

And hell, maybe even that wasn’t that bad, if you stopped to think about it, he thought. Just for the sake of kicking it around, consider Amy. She was a friend of a sort, not bad looking. She had two kids she did care for. Yes, she was a prostitute, had problems keeping her pants on around men, and had for years. Yes, she had family that ranged from distaste to disgust in him. Yes, because of her ex-husband and visitation problems, it meant living in Florida, but even that was warm instead of this godawful ongoing damp cold. And, she was a known quantity. He’d stopped off at Fern and Judy’s bar one night just for a beer and to see what was happening, and had heard a rather loudmouthed woman talking about what an asshole her boyfriend was and how her kids were such brats. It was clear she was single, and might be available – but an unknown quantity, and dubious at best. When he stopped and thought about it, it almost seemed to make Amy the lesser of two evils.

But, that was just something to think about, despite the ongoing guilt he felt about not doing something when he met her at the Redlite Ranch back before Christmas. It made for an interesting thought experiment, but the reality was that there were so many downsides with her that they weren’t even worth counting.

And, on the other hand, who knew what lay out there, what the future would bring? After all, last night, due to the time zones, about the time he was going to bed in Tara and Sylvia’s apartment, feeling both a little surreal and envious, Phil was escorting Brandy and Candice to the Iditarod Finishers Banquet up in Nome. Not even a year ago, Candice had been a suburban mom and bank bookkeeper in Decatur and had been on a dog sled once in her life, that for a ride. She could never have dreamed where she would be in a year’s time and would have been positively flabbergasted if some oracle had been able to sweep aside the curtains of the future to give her a glimpse. And she certainly couldn’t have imagined that in another year after that, she might be a principal at that banquet, not a guest! And it stood a good chance of happening.

So, there was no point in being too hasty. Something better could lie out there, something totally unexpected. As far as that went, there was the Club. He’d pretty well given up on it, but he remembered that there always used to be a handful of single women who came up there not because they necessarily liked nudism but because they liked all-over suntans. Granted, some of them might have fit in well at the Redlite Ranch, but at least some had been trolling. He hadn’t paid any attention out at the Club last summer, but on thinking about it realized that he’d seen some hints of it still going on. Well, maybe he wasn’t done with the Club after all . . .

Or, whatever. The key seemed to be patience and waiting for the right thing to come along, rather than just grabbing the first one out of desperate loneliness. It would mean being lonely for a while longer. He didn’t like it a bit, but there it was, and it didn’t make it any easier.

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