In seconds, to his surprise, he was telling them the story of his life. "I am twenty-six," he said, "in love, married. We have a child."

These facts, or the words so suddenly spilling from his mouth, seemed to amaze him.

"If you hang around," he said, "you might get to meet her. We can have a picnic. Wait, I’ll call and get her out here. Where are you folks from?"

The wife arrived with the baby and the five of them had a sumptuous picnic on the grass sloping up from the customs shed. The baby, whose name was Aimée, licked food from the mother’s fingers. The baby’s lips were extraordinarily red. The grass on which they sat was green. The sky blue. Ordinary, but extraordinary all the same. Aimée had gained nine pounds in the short months since her birth, he told the travellers. She’s going to be a big, healthy girl, like her mother.

The wife laughed. She was a tall muscular woman named Daphne. To the husband’s amazement, Daphne, normally so reticent with strangers, was telling these people her life’s story.

Good and getting better, was about the sum of the matter.

"There were all kinds of tests he had to pass before I’d agree to marry him," Daphne said to the strangers. "He had to prove himself a thousand times over."

"I flunked a few of those tests," the husband said. "Once in a while, I ate meat on the sly."

On the road again, Cupid said to Psyche, "Well, that went all right, didn’t it? "

Psyche smiled. She was dressed today in a white cotton top, tied off just above the waist so that her navel and its jewellery was exposed. She wore cut-off jeans appliquéd with stars, a snug fit, and at the moment was barefooted. In Three Thief Falls yesterday a woman named Lucy had done something strange to her hair. She had gone into Lucy’s Salon and said to Lucy, "Do to mine what you have done to yours." So she had come out of Lucy’s looking exactly as Lucy looked, down to the platinum sweep over her left ear, the cut-offs, the cotton shirt, the bejewelled navel.

Black toenails, too.

"I make a pretty good Lucy," she said. "I am out-Lucying Lucy."

"Yes," he said. "Too bad you can’t lift some of that weight from her shoulders."

"Oh, I’ve lifted some. Old Luce is enjoying a bit of a respite. In Greece, I believe."

"Heavens!"

Cupid had started out the day dressed in a green and gold bellboy suit from the Drake Hotel in Chicago. Earlier today in Sioux Falls, getting the vehicle gassed up, the swans settled, he’d gone into the dinette to get two coffees to go, and had come out with a white apron tied to his waist and a chef’s hat on his head.

"You can get free refills on that coffee," he had said, amazed. "So drink up!"

Everything about this trip amazed them.

Now he was wearing the young custom man’s khaki uniform. The shoes were something of a problem. Too tight. But he was still getting used to shoes, just as he and Psyche were having to get used to a great many things.

"When that mother stuck her food finger in Aimée’s mouth," Psyche said, "I nearly died. I can’t tell you how delicious that squished banana was."

"Shall we listen to the radio?"

"Yes, let’s!"

"Now they were an odd pair," the young customs man was saying to his wife.

Daphne said: "You think so? I wonder why?"

"The way they kept looking at Aimée. You’d think they had never seen a baby before. I thought they might snatch her."

"How odd. I felt they were like kin."

"They were funny, that’s all I’m saying. Something funny was going on here. What’s wrong with Aimée? Why is she crying? Do you think she’s gone off bananas? When do we get her on hard food?"

"On meat, you mean? Wait a minute, buster. No child of mine is ever eating meat."

This was the couple’s first argument. It lasted seven point two seconds. It left all three exhausted.

The baby thus far had had a thrilling day. Now it was sleepy. It had loved being in that unknown woman’s embrace. It was wind and water and exotic scent from other worlds. But now all memory of that was passing from the baby’s memory, which was why the baby was crying.

First you are a little kid and then before you know it you’re not so little any more and there’s your baby chewing on a blade of grass, Daphne was thinking. Her loverboy was thinking the same: she could see it in his eyes; she could feel his thoughts pulsing through his hand. She could read minds, a gift passed down through her mother. Her mother knew things; too bad the knowledge hadn’t helped her any.

"I will agree with you to this extent," she said. "That woman was not a Lucy. She is neither a hairdresser nor a Dakotan. I am with you that far."

This was in the customs booth, later, the child happily nursing, one chubby hand at play with a button on the mother’s soft summer dress, the other hand aimlessly flapping, the child’s eyes closed, the child dreaming its brief life as peacefully as a swan afloat on a pond, a lazy swim from one thing to another, that’s all the baby’s life amounted to so far, yet each drift such an amazing puzzle, though often fraught, who can say what is next to come, feed me, dear mother, oh the joy of being a fine and happy baby.