I talked to them about Anna, and the feelings I was developing for her. Feelings that seemed to be at odds with common sense and my devotion to Laura....Feelings for someone I didn’t even really know. They proved to be good listeners, never interrupting me or asking me to clarify anything I said. They just plodded along, shaking their heads in their harnesses from time to time as if to say it was all a mystery to them, too.I pulled the wagon up near the house, unhitched the mules, and harnessed. “It just feels wrong to stay here three days and never bathe.”“So take a whore’s bath,” I said. I regretted my comment immediately.“What?” came twin squeals of outrage.“Don’t tell me you never heard of a whore’s bath,” I bluffed.Suddenly I wasn’t being held down by girls anymore. They were both indignant.“Calm down. I’m not calling you whores,” I said. That would fix things. Right?“You most certainly did just call us whores!” shouted Karla.“I did not,” I said. “I suggested you take a whore’s. I put my robe back on and went out to the kitchen.Joney had poured us some more coffee.I sat down and said, "A couple of days after you left, I was enjoyingthe evening and witnessed a bunch of meteors, or what I thought weremeteors. Remember when we ran across that transgendered story website?We read some of the stories in the MAU section. Well, it's true, the MAUexists! The next day, I found a lot of them, over 5,000 of them. I triedit out. This is not science fiction, and I can prove it." You. ”She smiled, “You would need a formal kimono. They’re handmade and very expensive. I’m not even sure where we would get one here in Ohio. It takes special skills to make them. I need to ask my mom what the tradition is for a «外国人» (gaikokujin) at a tea ceremony.”“A what?” I asked.“Sorry! It means ‘foreign-country person’ — that is, someone who is not Japanese by ancestry. I think I told you that there is a 6th Dan black belt at the school where my brother trains who is an American, a former.