After Maria Concepcion, he felt the sudden need to rush back to Candy's arms. Their almost-kiss the previous afternoon gave rise to a virtual, if not virtuous fidelity which served as an excuse to hold Maria Concepcion at arm's length, to shield himself from her advances. He thought and behaved as if he and Candy were already an item, but when you peeled away the layers, you revealed in this fraudulent fidelity the heart's clever mechanism to avoid pain.

While this was brewing in him, Jason barely had time to notice that his gas gauge was perilously low. He took the Sentra to the nearest station.

As he was filling it up and watching the numbers of the pump go higher, he looked over and saw a guy in a white Mercedes-AMG pull up. The guy looked over and smiled. Jason looked back and then the guy waved at him. The dark, serious face was familiar.

“Mister,” the guy called out.

Jason recognized him, Juventino. One of his lost sheep from classroom 39.

“How are you?” Jason asked.

“I O.K.,” he smiled a dazzling smile and gestured to the white AMG. “I doin' O.K.”

Jason suppressed a professional itch to meddle with Juventino's grammar and kept the conversation going.

“Looks that way,” Jason said. “Like you're doing quite well.”

An expensive jogging jacket covered his scarred, tattooed forearms, and a lot of gold hung from his neck.

“I am still very great sadness. I no find my sister. I spend many monies to find her. Nothing,” Juventino said.

Jason wondered less about the fate of Juventino's lost sister than about the source of his material affluence. He didn't have to wait long to find out. Before they left the gas station, Juventino told him he was “in sales” and gave him a “sample.” High-grade Indica. Then each went on his own way, Jason in the Sentra and Juventino in the AMG.

Now if there was ever proof of man's illogical nature, it was Jason's behavior in the days after his Starbucks dalliance with Maria Concepcion. Her parting words, “Teach, can I still come to your class?” awoke in him a terror of the night school's stringent policy which forbade teachers from socializing with current students. He fully intended to sever contact with her, yet he phoned her many times, left tons of messages, and on the precious occasion when he did reach her on the line, a nervous edge filled her voice, as if someone was looking over her shoulder.

“I'm with my husband,” she whispered hoarsely, confirming Jason's hunch.

She always said to call back later. He'd call back later and always get the voice mail. When it became clear she wasn't going to talk to him, Jason's opulent feelings of love and desire gave way to an orgy of self-pity. Juventino's “sample” helped Jason get through that. All the same, that one night had been a wonderful spree and to his personal archive of erotic images he had added the leaf and flower braid tattooed around Maria Concepcion's ankle.

Their rendezvous marked the advent of a love season in Jason's loveless life; the angel descended. Cheap romantic love was the impetus for that grander greater love for all. The common love in reach of all, that consisted of a buoyant heart and a glow in the eyes; smiles to children and courtesy in traffic; portable peace in the heart. The intersection of Laurel Canyon and Magnolia thereafter became one of those totemic places in the highly personalized matrix that is Los Angeles, for everybody with a history in this city can be jarred awake at the awkwardest moments, convulsed by pungent and rarely shared memories, imbued by the ghosts of love's past, to remind us that in drought of said emotion, it had once sprung full force.

Oh, sweet severance. Maria Conception departed from Jason, and her parting words disconcerted, both grammatically and otherwise, “Teach, can I still come to your class?”

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