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the fun summers he
had spent in locations she was familiar with. He was good-looking
and sure of himself. She was enjoying herself and felt loose enough
to ask some probing questions.
    “So, where are you from?”
    “Originally?”
    “Of course originally.”
    “I grew up in Chicago, but I’ve spent so much
time traveling it’s hard to name a place I really think of as home.
I guess I’m from here now.”
    “Why’d you move around so much?” Allie picked
up a breadstick and began to nibble on the end. She wasn’t a big
fan of carbs, but she was feeling her drink and needed to put
something into her stomach.
    “My dad was a big executive at Motorola. You
know how those big companies operate; if you don’t let them move
you around every few years, they figure you’ve lost the spark. They
send you to some gulag to do a meaningless job, and you’re never
heard from again. They put you in charge of staplers and
paperclips, and you wake up one morning to realize that your career
is over and decide to commit suicide.”
    Keith Cooper’s real father drove
containerized freight for a living. He left Keith and his mother
for a twenty-two-year-old hairdresser when Keith was just twelve.
His father did share the same name as Martin Cooper, the Motorola
executive credited with the creation of modern cell phone
technology, but that was about all. From there the story grew—while
attempting to Google his father’s current whereabouts, he
accidentally stumbled on the Motorola exec’s Wikipedia page and
sort of reverse-adopted him as his father. If anyone checked his
story, they would find that Keith Cooper’s father was Martin
Cooper. He figured most people would not look any deeper than that,
and the multimillionaire-father story got more women into bed than
the trucker-who-abandoned-his-family version. Keith was quite a
talented bullshit artist when he had something to work with.
    “I’ve been everywhere, L.A., Texas . . .
Japan.”
    “Japan, oh that’s so cool. What was it
like?”
    “Congested, and you can’t get a good dessert
over there. Everything’s red-bean this and green-tea that. I don’t
think chocolate’s a Japanese staple.”
    Allie laughed. “No chocolate? I’d hate it
there.”
    “And everything is tiny. If you check into a
hotel and get a regular room, you get a space the size of a closet.
The place is totally messed up.”
    “Don’t put down the Japanese,” Allie said,
taking up their cause. “They’ve had so much trouble: the tsunami
and the nuclear power plant meltdown. Those poor people are living
such a nightmare.”
    “Yeah, I know what you mean, those people are
screwed. I think it’s all payback for the way they treated
Godzilla.”
    “ What?” Allie laughed so hard she
almost spit out her breadstick. “What are you talking about?”
    Keith chuckled at her reaction. “You’ve never
watched those old dubbed movies? The Japanese hunted Godzilla, King
Kong, and every other creature into extinction. They were all
created as the result of some radiation blunder.” He did his best
to impersonate Darth Vader: “It is their destiny.”
    Allie’s eyes widened. “Okay, I guess they had it coming. Is that what you’re implying?” She was still
laughing.
    The waitress came over to their table. “My
name is Dana and I’ll be your server tonight. I see you’ve already
got drinks. Can I start you off with an appetizer?” The staff
members at Prime not only had to be professional, they had to be
much, much more. The male waiters were dark and handsome. Dana was
strikingly pretty and statuesque enough to hold her own on the
Victoria’s Secret runway. Keith couldn’t keep his eyes off of her.
Allie noticed immediately. He picked up on the fact that he had
been spotted—he flipped open the menu and pretended to study it so
that he could buy a little time.
    “Sushi?” he asked.
    “That’s fine,” she said with
indifference.
    Is she pissed off or just jealous? he
wondered.