They shot pool.  The girl laughed and dropped her head whenever she made a stupid shot, and Will grinned and bumped her out of the way with his hip.  Cute.  She even got Will to dance when someone played Psycho Killer.  Justine had never seen him do that before.  And of course they drank.  They and the greasy idiot Didier in his lumberjack shirt.  The girl had the silly tart act down pretty well though she didn’t look like someone who’d let herself get too off her tits.  But then assistance was available in that regard.
    Young Gianfranco, the boy-bartender, brought another glass.  Justine couldn’t pay anymore, and wouldn’t have in any case, and Gianfranco knew that, but it didn’t matter.  She was here.  It was her temporary court.  People came to talk, to stand by her, and when they ordered their own drinks, if they failed to offer to buy her one, too, Gianfranco simply deducted a little something extra from the bills they handed him.  They never counted the change anyway. 
    They called her La Madre.  They sought advice.  They sought compassion.  Revenge.  Chemicals.  Some of them didn’t know what they sought -- they just came to be near.  And Justine smiled and nodded and let them touch her in their subtle ways.  This was Rome, after all.
    It wasn’t hard to imagine Will watching the water slip beneath him, imagine him feeling he were watching time itself roll away, feeling himself getting older even as he stood there above the dirty old Tiber.  Justine imagined him looking at the watch, fiddling with it, the Clerc he’d nicked a week earlier.  He could’ve pawned it and fed them both for days, but he fell in love with it, a stupid boy trick, and now he was hungry.
    She knew that hunger.  Justine knew all the hungers.  They’d age anyone.  Will was a child still, she often told him.  You’re my little boy now and I will take care of you, as a good mother should.  But, lately, she had not.  So it’d come to this point, of the boy standing over the river, feeling that empty pain, watching the flow, and undoubtedly thinking about how it was no longer the Justine who’d rescued him.  How that Justine had gone away somewhere, and how tired he was, road tired, yes, and hunger tired and not-enough-sex tired and lonely tired, all of those, but those were understandable, to be expected.  This was another kind of tired.  A tired of.  Tired of fighting.  Tired of waiting.  Tired of being tired.
    Justine knew.  And she knew that Will thought she did not.  Will didn’t believe Justine understood anything except herself.  He had it just exactly backwards.
    As he stood looking down, watching the flow, Justine could picture the young woman coming onto the bridge as clearly as if she’d been there herself.
    And now, however improbably, she, the wealthy little American wonder girl, was here.  Drinking, dancing, bumping, giggling.  And watching Justine even as Justine watched her.  She caught the glances, the peeks in the direction of the bar.  The girl might’ve been naive but she wasn’t stupid.  She knew where the power lay.  So it was time to move.  Justine said ciao to Gianfranco, slid him a little change.  When Will and the girl got back to their table, they found her sitting there, acting friendly with Didier, who by that point was so drunk he could barely speak.
    “Well, hello,” she said.  “I’m Will’s mother.”  The girl’s eyes widened, and Didier started to laugh, and Will laughed and Justine smiled at her and said, “Sit, baby girl.”
    And just like that the girl was beside her, close to her, leaning in even so that their arms brushed, as if the two of them were already fast friends, or as if Justine was the one she’d really come here to see.  That was just how she was, how she felt to people.  As if they could lean on her.
    “So you found our little Will wandering the streets and bought him some dins.”
    The girl nodded.
    “That was generous of you.”
    “Not at all.”
    “She say she knowing him,” said Didier, seeming to wake up.  “She say dey go to l’ecole togedder.  Den she jus see him on da . . . qu’est ce que s’avez dire, le pont?”
    “Bridge,” the girl said.
    “Ah, oui.”
    “Really,” Justine said.  “Kind of amazing, isn’t it?”
    The girl gave a sheepish little smile and looked away.  It was all so much goofiness, but Justine understood how delicious it felt.  She understood that.  Everything, even the stupid parts, were so rich and filling.
    “Oui, yes.  Amazing,” said Didier.  “Ho-lee gawd.”
    “But then lots of things are amazing,” Justine said.
    “What do you mean?” the girl asked.
    “Just how it works out.  How you want something, maybe, but you don’t even know what it is exactly.  You just know you want it.  You want to find out what it is, and then you want to have it, but you have no idea how to go about it.  And then it just comes to you.  And there you are.”
    She could feel Will watching as the girl stared at her, as she fell into the black pool of Justine’s eyes. 
    The girl said, “And what do I want?”
    “You’re asking me?  I just met you.”
    “What do you want?” Will asked.
    “I don’t know.  I know I have to go soon because I have to get up really early, like six, and take a bus to the train station and a train to Florence so I can see even more classic merde and follow the creep of western civilization across Europe.”
    “But -- ?“
    “But what I really want is another drink.”
    Justine smiled and put her hand alongside the girl’s on the table so that their pinkies overlapped.  “Well,” she said, “we can manage that.  That’s what we’re here for.”

    So Justine and the girl had themselves a good old fashioned chin wag.  And it struck her finally what the girl wanted.  It was true what Will had said earlier -- one like this, from money and all, having herself flown all over the world to study this or that, was tit bored with it, hard as that might be to imagine.  But that was not the heart of it.  She wanted what many of them wanted but didn’t know it -- someone to tell her no.  Just that.  You can’t have that.  Can’t go there.  Can’t see this.  No, no, no.  Justine doubted anyone had ever said it to her.
    There and then it was not her place to fill the girl’s needs, to satisfy her unacknowledged desires.  Rather it was the other way around -- she was there to help see to theirs.  It was Will who had to be looked after, and this girl was simply another means.
    Still, a different thought flickered through Justines’s mind, of the darker possibilities this woman might present.  The possibility of salvation for them all.  It was too beguiling to imagine.  And what it would require, what it would cost, was too frightening.  Altogether too much to contemplate.  And anyway, she told herself, the possibilities of it actually playing out, even if she decided to try to turn it that way, were next to nil.  So put it away, she told herself.  There was no chance.
    Justine went to the bar and ordered another round, which, as it happened, the girl had offered to pay for.  Nice, that.  Beers for Will and Didier, wine for herself and the girl.  She made sure to push all the change back at Gianfranco, who gave a wink as he set down the tray and said, “Grazie, Madre.”
    She put her hand over one of the wine glasses and held it there for several moments, until the sudden fizzing and bubbling stopped.

    The girl had mentioned the early train to Florence she had to be on with her group.  And that suggested possibilities.  And those brought Justine back again to the dark notions brewing in her.  She could see it laid out, the way it might play if she steered it just so, how it could end up being more than just the folding in the girl’s wallet and a few pieces of plastic to fence. So so much more.  But that was a very different game.  One she had forsworn when she found Will again. 
    Back at the table, the girl touched her on the shoulder, leaned in so close that she could feel her breathing.
    “I’ve got to get up early.”
    “Not to worry,” Justine whispered.
    “One more,” said Will.  He leaned across and said something into her ear.  The girl giggled and maybe even blushed a little.  He was turning into a real pro, there was no doubt.  But Justine couldn’t help the jealous bite that came with watching it, the feeling that Will was enjoying this in ways that weren’t strictly part of the game.

    She handed out the beers and set one of the wine glasses in front of the girl, who said, “Oh, gosh.”
    “One for the road, sweet,” Justine said.  “Come on then, tip it up.”
    She sipped again, and Justine could see that she was on the edge anyway, that point where, if she were to let it go, she’d just keep drinking until she was stupid.  But Justine also saw that the girl knew that.  She’d gotten good at getting very close without slipping over.  Well, this would be something new for her, then.
    She took another sip.  She knew where she was.  This was why her first reaction, upon standing to go to the bathroom, was more surprise than anything.  She looked as if someone had just hit her across the back of the knees with a cricket bat.  They let go on her and she caught herself on the table.  The crowd around them let go a loud whoop in honor of someone else who couldn’t handle the plonk, didn’t know how to control herself.  But it wasn’t that, she seemed to want to tell them.  It wasn’t that, Justine almost wanted to say to her, to assuage her.
    The girl sat for perhaps a full minute, watching.  She took another sip.  I’m ok, her face said.  Ok.  She stood again.  And then, as if that invisible someone had moved the target higher, the bat came down across the back of her head this time.  Justine could see the room swimming and swirling in her eyes.  For a moment she panicked, and seemed to struggle to draw breath.  She opened her mouth and looked at Justine who thought that in her own eyes the girl could perhaps see what it was.  Justine saw, for just an instant, a realization, a dawning.  The girl thought to be frightened.  But that moment passed, became an abstraction, a distant part of something else that was not now and not here.  The crowd shouted again but Justine did not think she heard it.  Or rather, she probably did hear but would not remember, and so it would be as is if it had never happened.
    Now the girl no longer struggled to breathe.  Now, it was all there was for her -- breathing, and looking blankly at the world and at Justine before her.  La Madre.  Always there to help.