The red-headed woman drove her station wagon to the fish market at 3:30 a.m. on Mondays to have first pick. Usually, the restaurant people were already there, but today it was just her and the fishmongers in their stalls. Monger seemed a nasty word - hoarding mounds - but the dictionary's first definition, the one before the derogatory useage, said the word was British. A dealer or trader.

I lived across the street from the market, under the expressway. I ran poker games for the bartenders in the neighborhood. Our games ended at 6 a.m. when everyone left to get some sleep, but I got tired before they did. While they played and smoked and drank cold beer from ice chests, I sat on my window ledge and watched the activity down at the fish market, careful not to burn the rayon curtains with my cigar. My wife made them from the outgrown dresses of our twin girls. A faraway tropical print with parrots and hibiscus. She cut the tops off and ripped out the seams of the skirt. That was hard to watch because the girls used to wear them to mass on Sunday. There was enough fabric for two windows. The way the sun lit up the curtains that one hour in the late afternoon made me miss them worse. They'd gone to college at Alabama, not my choice, an SEC school, but they were sick of snow. I tried not to call too much. Twice on a good week.

The red-headed woman opened her palms, haggling over price with an Asian man selling silver fish. Mackerel? He argued back waving his arms in anger. My gut told me to go downstairs, but my wife had come down on me hard the last time I did this. She thought I babied women. I didn't think the woman needed my brute, I just wanted a reason to leave the apartment, the winning hands, the water stains and piles of chips, so I could go downstairs and listen to her buy fish. Her voice didn't waver. That's all I'd done the last time. She wore lemon as perfume and it almost cut through the stench. Her toe nails were polished coral. I couldn't see them from the window. Maybe she had changed the color. The fishmonger wrapped her purchase in cellophane, then newspaper, and put it in a plastic bag. The red-headed woman paid in cash and nodded goodbye.

A brake light was out on her station wagon; the light at the corner turned green. In a blink, women left rooms empty.