So children were not allowed as members, but they were also not allowed to accompany their member parents to the events. The Children of Resilient Marriages liked an adult atmosphere at their events. They liked the freedom to drink a lot of alcohol without having to consider the presence of impressionable youths. The spouses of members were also not allowed to attend unless they themselves were fully-qualified members, but this rule had less to do with maintaining a specific atmosphere and more to do with quelling complaints of unfairness from parents who wanted to bring their kids instead of finding babysitters.

               Laverne wasn’t drinking much alcohol, though. Just one drink, just a small one, barely enough to feel anything. She kept returning to the coolers full of bottled water, though, so she wouldn’t get light-headed as the afternoon got hotter and her energy flagged. She had fainted at a summer Children of Resilient Marriages event eight years before and now the other members wouldn’t stop asking her how she felt unless she had a bottle of water in hand at all times. And even that wasn’t enough for some of them.

               Laverne had just opened a fresh bottle of water and taken a hearty swig when Marv sidled up and asked, “How are you feeling? Do you need to sit down?” Marv and Laverne shared a birthday – September 3^rd – but he was only fifty-five, six years younger than Laverne. His parents’ marriage had remained intact for forty-three years and counting after his father was caught in an affair with Marv’s fifth-grade teacher.

               “No, I don’t need to sit down,” said Laverne. “I’m fine. I’m drinking water.” She sounded peeved and she didn’t care. She was peeved. She stood on the browning grass in the shadow of the picnic shelter and waved her free hand around her face as a warning against flies flying there. The flies didn’t care. They were happy to remain down near her exposed, sweaty ankles. Laverne and Marv didn’t have much in common beyond the resilience of their parents’ marriages. Laverne’s primary interest was dogs, especially the differences between breeds, the astounding variety. Marv was into electronics repair.

A happy cry went up from a group of members standing near the lineup of privately owned grills transported to the event in favor of the inferior grills installed in the park for public use. Event organizers had erected outdoor canopies over the grills to keep the grillers out of direct sunlight. But no one was grilling yet. “What’s going on over there?” asked Laverne, steering the conversation away from discussion of her likelihood of fainting.

               Marv turned a full one hundred and eighty degrees to look at the group near the grills, the horizontal white stripes on his blue polo shirt making his broad back look broader. Then he turned one hundred and eighty degrees back to Laverne and said, “Travis brought a device that’s getting everyone all excited. He did me already. I guess the results were really good? I don’t know. He was impressed. Not sure what it all means, though.”

               “What’s it supposed to do?” asked Laverne. Marv was eyeing the bottle of water in her hand again. She could feel him willing her to drink it.

               “He said it measures your heart,” said Marv.

               “Your heart rate?” asked Laverne.

               “No.”

               “The size of your heart?”

               “Kind of,” said Marv. “It’s how much heart you have.”

               “The physical amount of heart you have?” asked Laverne. “Like the actual size of your heart?”

               “No,” said Marv. “Like when someone says, ‘That gal’s got a lot of heart.’”

               “Huh,” said Laverne. “Doesn’t seem like that would be possible to measure with a device.”

               “That’s what I was thinking,” said Marv.

               “Seems like it’d be like one of those machines they used to have at the store,” said Laverne. “Where you’d pay a quarter and put your hand on it in a certain spot and it’d tell you how romantic you were. Or how passionate you were, maybe? What was it supposed to tell you?”

               “I don’t remember those,” said Marv. “They must have been before my time.”

               Laverne couldn’t care less about his implication that she was substantially older than him, but she was very annoyed at how wrong he was. Those machines had definitely been around during a significant portion of his life. They had still been around in some places when her kids were teenagers.

               Another shout went up from the cluster by the grills. Lucy Shamper turned from the group and called toward the picnic shelter. “Frida! Come over here, you have to try this!” In response, Frida and her two bashful sisters crossed the sunbaked patch of park lawn between the shelter of the shelter and the shelter of the canopies and were absorbed by the group, disappearing into its center.

               “I’m going to check it out,” said Laverne.

               “Be my guest,” said Marv. “I’m sure Travis will want to try it on you, too.” He paused. “And as long as you stay under the canopies, you’ll probably be fine.”

               Laverne beat down a swell of rage and headed for the canopies. The way the sun beat down on the back of her neck as she walked did make her feel a bit faint, actually, but not nearly faint enough to faint. She was plenty hydrated. As she reached the perimeter of the group surrounding Travis, Frida, and Frida’s bashful sisters, the gathered members cheered again, although not as loudly as before. “Still a very good result!” This was Travis’s voice. Laverne could see only the bald, red crown of his head from her vantage point. “Still higher than the average person, that’s for sure!” The members clapped at this pronouncement.

               “Are you next?” asked Travis. Laverne couldn’t see who he was talking to. “And what’s your name again? I’m sorry, I know we’ve met…”

               The response was too quiet for Laverne to hear, which probably meant he was talking to one of Frida’s bashful sisters. Laverne couldn’t remember their names either. Laverne didn’t recognize the member standing in front of her. Maybe she was a new member. Or maybe she was a member who rarely came to events. She was a slim woman in jeans and a muted orange tank top, probably fifteen years younger than Laverne. “Excuse me,” said Laverne, tapping the woman’s freckled shoulder. “What’s going on? Is Travis measuring people’s heart with a device?” She phrased her question this way so the woman wouldn’t just answer with the most basic overview.

               “Yes,” said the woman, which was worse than the most basic overview.

               But the woman in front of that woman was Laverne’s friend Karla. When she heard Laverne’s voice, she turned around and said, “Laverne! Your heart hasn’t been measured yet, has it?” She wore sunglasses and a fetching pastel-blue scarf knotted in her dyed-silver perm. She was the most persuasive person Laverne had ever met, but she deployed her persuasiveness judiciously.

               Before Laverne could answer, other members turned to face her, reaching for her. Some called from the other side of the group. “Laverne! Laverne’s here! Measure Laverne’s heart!” A lane appeared through the assembled bodies and Laverne was hustled not-quite-gently to the center where Travis was positioning his device to measure one of Frida’s bashful sisters, the marginally less bashful one. Frida’s sister looked at Laverne with relief, grateful to have attention drawn away from her, at least for a few moments.

               “Oh, Laverne!” said Travis. “We can’t forget Laverne!” He was a man born to be fifty-two years old, and now that he was getting close, he was thriving. He was tall and heavy, but more dense than wide. He somehow wore his khaki shorts and golf shirt as if they were pajamas.

               “Laverne can go before me,” said Frida’s sister. “Or instead of me.”

               “No, no,” said Laverne. “You go ahead. I want to see how it works.”

               Frida’s sister grimaced. Hovering nearby, Frida’s other sister maintained a neutral expression, perhaps hoping to be forgotten entirely.

               Frida said, “You’re already hooked up, Sis. Just let him do the reading and be done with it.”

               Laverne turned her attention to Travis’s heart-measuring device. It didn’t look like much. It was the size and shape of a football cut in half and coated in pebbled blue plastic. Travis gripped the wide end of the device and held it vertically with the narrow end pointed upward. A white cord snaked out of a port on one side of the device and connected to Travis’s smart phone in his right hand. From the other side of the device, a stiff wire extended three feet to Frida’s sister’s head where it was attached to her right earlobe with a padded clip. A third opening in the device, an irregular hole of pinky-finger width not consistent with the rest of the design, emitted wisps of purplish vapor.

               “It’s totally painless,” Travis said to Laverne. “You’ll see. This woman – Frida’s sister – won’t experience any pain.”

               “The clip on my ear kind of hurts,” said Frida’s sister.

               Travis looked at Laverne and rolled his eyes. “Other than some slight discomfort on the earlobe. Which I’m sure you can handle.”

               The watching members chuckled. Were they chuckling at Travis’s light exasperation with Frida’s sister? Or were they chuckling at the prospect of notorious fainter Laverne fainting again upon feeling some light pain in her earlobe? Frida’s sister and Laverne both blushed.

               “Anyway,” said Travis, “by the time you’re hooked up, we’re almost done. And there’s no reason to be worried about the results. We’ve been getting very good results all day. Astonishingly good. The Children of Resilient Marriages have a lot of heart. A lot. Which does not come as a surprise to me! That’s why I brought the device today. I had a feeling what the results would be, but I was excited to confirm. But the results have exceeded all of my expectations. The app on my phone that displays the readings from the device is actually connected to a network of-”

               “Can you please just do the reading and explain afterward?” asked Frida’s sister. “I’m not comfortable. It’s not about the ear. It’s everyone watching me. I don’t like it.”

               “All right, all right,” said Travis. Using the thumb of his right hand, he pressed a button on his phone screen. The phone switched to a display of flickering red numerals. The wire attached to Frida’s sister’s ear began to withdraw into the device, stretching her lobe as the numbers on the phone screen sped up. Then the clip popped loose from her ear, the device shuddered, and the phone buzzed.

               “Ouch,” said Frida’s sister.

               Travis looked at his phone as the trickle of vapor from the hole in the side of the device swelled for two pulses before tapering off again. “Eight,” he announced in a voice that did not sound impressed. No one clapped. A few people sighed.

               “The screen says ‘twenty-four,’” said Laverne, pointing at the phone.

               “You divide that number by three for the true result,” said Travis. “Her number is eight.”

               “What does that mean?” asked Laverne.

               “The heart measurement doesn’t mean anything about one’s value as a person,” said Travis.

               Shame-faced, Frida’s sister took Frida’s other sister by the hand and ducked into the crowd, melting away. Frida followed. No one tried to stop them.

               “All right,” said Travis, using his head to motion for Laverne to take a position within ear-clipping range of the device. “Let’s go, let’s go.” Laverne could tell Frida’s sister’s bad result had made him eager to move on quickly, to restore the group’s excitement. She saw some people at the back of the gathering already beginning to straggle away.

               “I don’t think I want to do it,” said Laverne. “I don’t believe in it anyway.”

               “No, no, no,” said Travis. “This measurement has nothing to do with one’s physical heartiness. ‘Heartiness’ is not the same as ‘heart.’ ‘Heart’ has more to do with your ability to persevere in the face of emotional shocks, to not succumb to despair, whereas ‘heartiness’ would be like, well, how you withstand adverse physical conditions such as…”

               “Heat,” said Laverne. “Dehydration.”

               “Exactly,” said Travis. “And this isn’t about that. That’s a different device. I left that device at home. I’ve barely used it. I find this one to be much more interesting. Especially with this group. I took that other device to a different group: The Children of Dedicated Corporal Punishers. And they turned out to be less hearty than you’d imagine. Of course, they allow actual children to be members of their organization and the kids’ results dragged down our average, but maybe some of those kids will gain heartiness with the perspective of age.”                           

“I still don’t know,” said Laverne. “Maybe if it wasn’t so…”

“C’mon, Laverne!” someone shouted. “You’re gonna do great!”

“I did it!” shouted someone else. “It was fun!”

Two different people tried to start two different “Laverne” chants, but they had different ideas of how to execute it. One was like, “La! Verne! La! Verne!” and the other was like, “Laverne! Laverne!” so they couldn’t get synced up and no one else joined in, but the general mood remained insistent.

               “All right, OK, I’ll do it,” said Laverne.

               The members praised her decision, but Laverne wondered if caving to their peer pressure was a more dependable indication of a lack of heart than whatever Travis’s device might show.

               She stood in the open center of the circled group and allowed Travis to attach the clip to her right earlobe. She did not say “ouch,” nor did she want to. She wouldn’t have said “ouch” even had she been alone. It just didn’t hurt.

               “Ready?” asked Travis.

               “OK,” said Laverne.

               Travis’s thumb tapped the button on his phone screen. Laverne watched as Travis’s eyes, fixed on his phone, grew wider and wider. The wire retracted, stretching Laverne’s ear, which still did not hurt. “No way,” said Travis. “No way.” The clip popped loose from Laverne’s earlobe, the device shuddered in Travis’s hand, the phone buzzed in his other hand. “No way!” shouted Travis, holding his phone aloft in triumph. But before Laverne could see what he was so excited about, the hole in the side of the device began belching huge quantities of dark vapor all over everyone and the crowd dispersed in a hurry with cries of, “It’s hot!” and “It burns!” and “It stinks!” and “I can’t breathe!”

               No one, as it turned out, had been seriously harmed by the sudden flood of warm, unpleasant-smelling vapor from the device, nor was anyone trampled in the ensuing stampede. Even calling it a “stampede” was overselling it.

               Laverne sat at a table in the picnic shelter and enjoyed her second can of hard seltzer of the day while members of The Children of Resilient Marriages took turns approaching her to offer congratulations on the amount of heart she had been revealed to possess. Four hundred and seventy-nine! Four hundred and seventy-nine heart! Travis said it was a record. A world record. Granted, the heart-measuring technology was fairly new and there weren’t many people who had been tested relative to the population of the entire world, but still, it was the highest reading on record by a substantial margin.

               After Laverne accepted a stuttering series of compliments from Jewel, perhaps the richest member of the organization, Marv leaned on Laverne’s table with both hands and said, “Well, this is funny, because when they told me how much heart you have, I almost fainted.” He paused for Laverne to laugh, but she didn’t. “I mean, it was almost me who fainted this time instead of you.”

               “I’m pretty tired of all the talk about me fainting,” said Laverne, her voice as cool as her can of hard seltzer still cool from the cooler. “That was eight years ago, I haven’t fainted since, and I’m tired of hearing about it.”

               “Oh,” said Marv. “Uh, sorry.”

               “What was your reading?” asked Laverne.

               “My reading?”

               “Your result,” said Laverne. “Your number from the device. How much heart do you have?”

               “Ah,” said Marv. “Not even close to you. I mean, Travis told me it was good, but yeah, not in the same league as you.”

               “What was it?”

               “Three figures,” said Marv. “I remember that much. Or, uh, almost three figures.”

               “So it was in the nineties?” asked Laverne. “The high nineties?”

               “Well, I’m not sure how definitive a single reading is,” said Marv. “I wonder if it fluctuates? Like blood pressure?”

               “So it wasn’t in the nineties,” said Laverne.

               “It was eighty-four,” said Marv.

               “Mid-eighties, then,” said Laverne. “Or low eighties, I guess. Mid-to-low eighties.”

               “But, of course, going back to our previous conversation,” said Marv. “What we were saying before. How you can’t probably measure heart at all, or at least not like that.”

               Laverne gazed at him. She left Marv suspended among his own doubting words. The situation had changed and he knew it. This was no longer the appropriate environment for skepticism directed at Travis’s heart-measuring device. He scuttled off.

               Perhaps sensing some residual tension from Laverne’s conversation with Marv, the flow of admirers dried up for the time being, although Laverne could see that they were all still glancing at her, gesturing at her, talking with each other about her. Whenever she caught one of their eyes, they smiled at her, maybe even raised a drink in her direction. With her first few moments to herself since her heart measurement, the spectacular result, and the device’s ensuing meltdown, Laverne considered her own reaction to her world-record reading. What did it mean that she had not believed in the device’s ability to measure heart until it had revealed her to have more heart than anyone else ever measured? She lingered over this question for a few moments. Then she realized that there was another more fundamental question that she needed to answer: did she now believe in the device’s ability to measure heart? Or was she just enjoying being recognized for something good, for a reason other than fainting one time at an event eight years ago? That did feel nice, she couldn’t deny it. But also, hadn’t she always thought of herself as someone with a lot of heart? Hadn’t the trajectory of her life shown her to be someone with a lot of heart over and over again? Not that she thought she actually had the most heart of anyone in the world. But more than anyone else at this event? Certainly. More than anyone else in Multioak? Why not? More than anyone else in the state? Well, why not? Someone had to be at the top, or at least tied. Maybe she would end up being tied with a hundred other people. If that turned out to be the case, then maybe that would mean that four hundred and seventy-nine was the most heart it was even possible for a human to have. Unless that was part of human evolution. Maybe a baby would come along in a later generation with the capacity to develop into a person with a heart measurement higher than four hundred and seventy-nine. But maybe not! Maybe humans were headed the other direction. Maybe each generation of humans had less capacity for heart. Or what if Laverne’s rating was the high-water mark for humans? What if heart capacity had been going up, had now peaked with her, and would now head back down again? What if she had the most heart of any human who had ever existed and ever would exist?

               “Attention! Can I have everyone’s attention, please?” Travis stood on top of an overturned cooler at the other end of the picnic shelter, waving his arms as a visual reinforcement of his desire for everyone’s attention. Once the conversations among the members had died down and he seemed to feel that enough eyes were on him, Travis continued. “As you all know, I brought a device with me to our little event today. A heart-measuring device. Why did I bring it to this event? Because I had a hunch. Because I had a feeling that the device would definitively prove and quantify something which I already knew to be true: that this group, The Children of Resilient Marriages, has more heart per person than any other group on the planet! At least out of those groups that have been measured, which isn’t a ton considering the newness of the technology, but still, still!” He began to clap, rotating at the waist so as to strafe his audience with applause. The other members joined in, applauding themselves, their fellow members, and Travis. Laverne also applauded, but not excessively. She didn’t want to seem too pleased at her enormous contribution to raising the overall average of the group.

               Travis saw Laverne applauding and pointed at her, first with one hand and then with both hands. This recognition caused the other members to turn and face her, and soon their applause was directed at her alone. Most of the clapping members grinned; some opted for expressions of sober respect. As the applause at last began to fade, Travis spoke again. “And let me make something clear: even without Laverne’s incredible, world-record individual reading, we would still have had a very good average per person. I’ve actually crunched the numbers and if we exclude Laverne, this would still have been the third-highest average heart rating of any gathering of this size on record. So that’s great. If that was as well as we’d done, I’d probably still be giving a little speech right now, we’d still be clapping, we’d still be feeling good about the collective heart of our organization. But with Laverne’s reading, we shattered the world record. And that feels even better!”

               Another round of applause broke out. Laverne smiled, she waved, she angled her clapping hands so that it was clear that she was graciously acknowledging the lesser contributions of her peers.

               “Can you feel it?” Travis cried above the applause. He wobbled in precarious fashion on top of the cooler, but did not fall. “Can you feel the heart? So much heart! It’s overwhelming! We’re in heart heaven! We’re in heart heaven! I’m in heart heaven! This is Heart Heaven!”

               Embarrassed by Travis’s fervor, The Children or Resilient Marriages allowed their applause to fizzle.

               “It’s almost dinner time,” said Ricardo, the newest member. “Or, well, it will be pretty soon. Maybe we should fire up the grills?”

               “Yes!” said Travis. “Fire up the grills!” His tone was still grandiose. “Fire up the grills in celebration of the greatest collection of heart ever assembled anywhere! Tonight there will be feasting in Heart Heaven!”

               “Excuse me.”

               With his fists still raised above his head, Travis looked down at the man tapping on his hip.

               “Hello, yes,” said the man. He was shaggy-headed and his spindly limbs did not match his tubby torso. He was dressed for office work with a white shirt tucked into khaki pants. He looked around, blinking at The Children of Resilient Marriages. “Oh, wow, everyone’s listening. OK, well, sure, I’ll speak to everyone. That will save some time. So there’s no reason to get upset, but I’m here to collect, let’s see, uh…” He pulled his phone from his front pants pocket and looked at the screen. “All right, here it is, so I’m here to collect eighty-four, seventy-eight, and seventy-five. Can you three raise your hands, please? Or better yet, just come up here?”

               “Wait, what’s this about?” asked Travis. “You want who?”

               The man looked at his phone again. “Eighty-four, seventy-”

               “Right, but who are they?” asked Travis.

               “I don’t know,” said the man. “I don’t know their names. That’s why I’m asking that they come up here. Or at least raise their hands. I’m here to collect them.”

               Travis stepped off of the cooler. “But what are those numbers?”

               “Those are their heart measurements,” said the man. “Weren’t you doing heart measurements here today? We get notifications through the network any time someone gets a measurement of seventy or above. And you’ve got three in one place, that’s pretty impressive! Almost unprecedented, actually.”

               Laverne felt two things: a touch of indignation that the man wasn’t acknowledging her own much higher reading, and relief that he did not seem interested in “collecting” her, whatever that meant. The man gave her an uneasy feeling, and judging by the changing atmosphere in the picnic shelter, she wasn’t the only member for whom that was the case.

               But Travis, of course, couldn’t keep his mouth shut. “Well, I don’t know who you are or how you’d have access to our readings – unless maybe you work for the company that made the device – but we actually had a fourth reading here today that was much, much higher than those three. A world record, in fact.”

               The man smiled with flagrant condescension. “We saw that result come in over the network, of course. But we knew, of course, that it was the result of a testing failure. Not a believable result. That didn’t occur to you?”

               Travis frowned. “I know how to use the device. I was the same one who took all those other readings.”

               The man shrugged, his condescension somehow increasing. “Well, if you’d like to use your device to test whoever it was who got that result again, and if that result is confirmed, then yes, of course, we’ll happily collect him or her, too.”

               “The device broke down,” said Travis. “Right after that reading.”

               “Hmm, or maybe during that measurement?” said the man. “Which then resulted in the absurdly high reading?"

               “No,” said Travis. He sounded pouty now. “No, it broke after the measurement. Because it was overloaded by so much heart in one person. It couldn’t handle that much heart.”

               “Look,” said the man. “Let’s set this issue aside for now and focus on getting, uh…” He looked at his phone again. “Eighty-four, seventy-eight, and seventy-five.” He turned to again address the confused group. “Can those three people come up here, please? There’s no reason not to. Nothing bad is happening. We’re very impressed with your readings, that’s all. So there’s no reason to worry. And there’s no reason to run. And even if you did want to run, that would be a bad idea because, if you’ll notice, we’ve surreptitiously evacuated the entire park – except for your group, of course – and the perimeter of the park is surrounded by an elite team of hidden snipers who will shoot you dead if you actually do try to run. So there’s no reason to run, but there’s a very good reason not to run. Unless, I guess, you’d rather be dead than allow us to collect you. But that wouldn’t be wise. That’s not a rational position for you to hold. And there’s no reason to attempt to use your phones to attempt to call for someone to attempt to help you attempt get away from us. We are blocking all phone connectivity in this park. We have that ability, so we’re doing it. So those of you with the readings higher than seventy, you three, just be proud of your high heart measurements and step forward and come with me, all three of you, and then the rest of you can enjoy the rest of your event. And some of you who we won’t be collecting also have a lot of heart. Believe me when I say that we noticed you too, I think there was a sixty-seven. That’s so close to the number we’re looking for. Just three more heart and you’d be on my list, whoever you are. But you don’t need to identify yourself, sixty-seven. I only need, uh…” He looked at his phone again. “Eighty-four, seventy-eight, and seventy-five.”

               When he stopped speaking, silence weighed oppressively upon the picnic shelter. Laverne sat up straight and scanned what she could see of Principles Park. The playground was empty. The basketball court was empty. No one walked a dog. No one reclined on a blanket in the shade of a tree. No one posed for a picture in front of the new mural painted on the bathroom building. It really seemed as if everyone else had been evacuated. Laverne couldn’t see any snipers, but the man had said they were hidden. Elite and hidden, that’s how he had described them. Laverne looked at her phone. A warning message onscreen actually read, “Connectivity blocked.” She’d never seen a message like that before.

               “Hold on,” said Jamie, rising to his feet from a table at the back of the picnic shelter. His parents had the most resilient marriage Laverne had ever heard of. Maybe even too resilient, Laverne sometimes thought. Jamie’s stories were horrifying, and she doubted she’d heard the worst of them. She wondered if Jamie was the seventy-eight or the seventy-five. Surely he was one of them. If she hadn’t already known Marv was the eighty-four, she would have assumed Jamie was the eighty-four. “You’re telling us we’re being held hostage here?” asked Jamie. With his backward cap and thick arms folded across his chest, Laverne thought he looked tough. She wondered how this intruding man would react.

               “Yes, you’re sort of hostages,” said the man. “In that none of you can leave until those of you I’ve come to collect, uh, come with me. Those being, uh…” He looked at his phone again. “Uh…uh…”

               “Eighty-four, seventy-eight, and seventy-five,” said Travis.

               “No,” said the man. “No, uh…oh. Yes. Those three.”

               Then Laverne’s friend Karla stood. “No one is going with you. Not even one of us.” She sounded persuasive, as always. She sounded resolute. She sounded like someone with a lot of heart.

               Laverne wondered at herself. If she was the one with the world-record amount of heart, why wasn’t she standing up to defy the directives of this intruder? Was her reluctance to speak up a sign that he was right, that her world-record reading was caused by a malfunction in the device? Or was she just being smart, waiting for the right moment, observing, gathering information so that she would recognize the moment to act when it arrived? Yes, it was that one. The “being smart” one. That’s what she was doing.

               All around Laverne, The Children of Resilient Marriages shouted at the intruder. Someone threw a handful of ice at him, but more of it hit Travis than the intended target. Although it was difficult to distinguish individual ideas in the clamor, the general message was obvious. They wanted the intruder to go away and leave them alone. Laverne tried a small shout of her own. “Go away and leave us alone!” Even though no one was listening to her specifically, she could tell it didn’t sound very convincing. It didn’t sound like her considerable heart was in it. Was this lack of conviction because she was still bothered by the man’s denial of her reading? Were her hurt feelings at this apparent expert’s disbelief diluting her outrage at his efforts to bully the group?

               The man held his hands up and shouted, “Quiet! Listen, please!”

               The members reigned in their anger. They would listen long enough to find out if the man was backing down or if further disorder was called for.

               “Listen,” he said. But everyone was already listening by now. “I’ll give you until…” He looked at his phone. “Oh, let’s say midnight. It’s 4:12 right now. So that gives you, I don’t know, someone else do the math. That gives you a few hours. But if midnight rolls around and I don’t have those three…uh…those three numbers…the people who got those three numbers…if I don’t know who they are yet or they’re not willing to go with me willingly, then we’ll do this the forceful way. By force, I mean none of you will like it. If we have to load all of you into vans unwillingly and take you to the Main Device unwillingly and have all of your hearts measured against your will, then that’s what we’ll do. And you’ll be at gunpoint the whole time. Probably blindfolds. Handcuffs. All of that. So anyway, I’ll be relaxing in my car over there in the parking lot. I need some air conditioning.” He pulled at the collar of his shirt in a manner possibly intended to be comedic. “If you decide you want to cooperate without all the drama, send someone to let me know. Otherwise, I’ll see you at midnight.” With that, he turned and walked away from the picnic shelter in the direction of the parking lot, as promised. He did not seem worried that someone might run up behind him and hit him with an improvised weapon. And this lack of worry proved well-founded because no one did that.

               Laverne needed a break from the debate that had been raging with unflagging intensity since the intruder had returned to his car. The record-setting amount of heart per person for a group of their size was not helping The Children of Resilient Marriages reach a consensus about what they should do next. All that heart might have been hurting, actually. More people in a state of emotional shock would have meant more compliant people. Very few members were being compliant. Worse, those who were inclined to defer to someone else’s decision seemed to expect Laverne to take charge because of her world-record individual heart measurement. She tried to tell them that her huge amount of heart didn’t work like that, but then she had difficulty getting people to understand what her huge amount of heart was good for and Travis was too embroiled in a side argument about whether or not this incident was a validation of the group’s “no kids at events” policy to step in and help her explain. Maybe Karla could have used her powers of persuasion to get more people on the same page, but she was busy keeping Marv persuaded that he was capable of fixing the phone issue despite mounting evidence to the contrary.

And everyone was getting hungry. Considering the apparent gravity of the situation, no one felt like grilling. So The Children of Resilient Marriages were passing around bags of chips and eating the cookies and brownies intended as desserts for the now-canceled meal. But chips and cookies were not enough for Laverne. Even as she drank another bottle of water, she felt a bit light-headed. All the water in the world wouldn’t keep her steady if she couldn’t eat something substantial.

               “I’m going to the bathroom,” said Laverne. “All this water is catching up to me.” No one acknowledged her announcement, but then, what did she expect them to say? She wasn’t asking permission. She left the picnic shelter, crossed the dry park lawn, and made her way around the low, cream-colored building to the women’s restroom entrance on its far side. Her route took her past the new mural painted on what would likely be considered the building’s front wall, the same mural she had earlier noted when the intruder declared that the rest of the park had been evacuated. Although eager to relieve herself, Laverne stopped to study the mural from up close.

It depicted a woman from the shoulders up against a blue background, her eyes closed and her brow furrowed in concentration. On the left and right edges of the mural, the artist had rendered several disembodied pairs of wings to allow people to position themselves so that when photographed from specific angles, they would appear to be winged characters perched on the woman’s shoulders. The wings on the left edge of the mural were white and feathery while the wings on the right edge of the mural were deep red and leathery. Park-goers could pose as angels on one shoulder whispering good advice or devils on the other shoulder muttering ruinous advice. But then Laverne noticed another pair of wings at the very top of the mural, floating a few feet above the mural-woman’s head. They were painted to appear as if they had been cobbled together from household materials and discarded junk. They were not symmetrical. It was hard to imagine wings such as those keeping anyone or anything aloft for long.

And how were people supposed to pose with those wings? They’d have to stand on a ladder or dangle from a harness attached to the roof, either of which would spoil the effect. Or, Laverne supposed, someone could slide off the edge of the roof and have someone else photograph them in mid-fall, hoping that the timing would work out and, before landing on the pavement, they would be captured in the perfect moment, ideally displaying a transcendent facial expression, hovering serenely above the conflict.

The bathroom was not in good condition. Laverne wished she had some homemade wings so she could hover serenely over the dirty floor and the toilet seat. But from inside the bathroom stall, the heated discussion of her fellow members sounded far away, like a TV on low volume in a room down the hall, and that was another form of relief. And being in a dirty bathroom helped to suppress her appetite too, although she was still conscious of the airy void in her gut.

After flushing and washing her hands, Laverne examined herself in the mirror. She looked pale, there was no question about that. Someone had scratched the words “I heart drugs” into the top corner of the mirror. Rather than render “heart” as a heart shape, the vandal had spelled the word out. Laverne wished she could confront the artist about the fact that “heart” isn’t a verb, and certainly isn’t synonymous with the word “love,” not even the noun form of “love.”

The bathroom door opened and, in the mirror, Laverne saw one of Frida’s bashful sisters enter with her right hand clasped hard against the upper part of her left arm. Bright blood soaked the sleeve of her green t-shirt, seeped between her fingers, ran down her bicep, and dripped from her elbow.

Laverne gasped and was about to turn to ask what had happened when her head began to spin. She gripped the edge of the sink and leaned forward, gulping oxygen. Frida’s sister stepped up to the sink on Laverne’s right side and turned on the cold water. She did not seem panicked.

Laverne closed her eyes. After a few moments, her insides stabilized and she opened her eyes again.

“I’m sorry,” said Frida’s sister. She was the other sister, the one Travis hadn’t tested with his device.

“No, no,” said Laverne. “It isn’t the blood. I just haven’t had much to eat. I had a small lunch because I thought we'd be having a big dinner here.”

“Oh, good,” said Frida’s sister. “Well, not good that you’re dizzy from hunger, but good that I didn’t cause the dizziness.” She had rolled her sleeve up over her shoulder and was now hunched over the sink so she could splash water directly onto her wound. Laverne forced herself to look at the wound in an attempt to gauge its severity.

“It isn’t too bad,” said Frida’s sister, noticing Laverne’s concern. “He just grazed me. Or she. I suppose the sniper could have been a woman.”

“You got shot?” asked Laverne. “The snipers are definitely real, then?”

“One of them is, at least,” said Frida’s sister. “I tried to sneak out the other side of the park, but they got me.”

“I never heard a shot,” said Laverne.

“They’re using silencers,” said Frida’s sister. “Do you call them ‘silencers’ or ‘suppressors?’”

“Me personally?” asked Laverne.

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know,” said Laverne. “I don’t know if I’ve ever talked about them before.”

“I don’t think this is going to stop bleeding,” said Frida’s sister. “I need a bandage.”

“There might be a first-aid kit at the picnic shelter,” said Laverne.

“I don’t want to go back over there,” said Frida’s sister. “I’m trying to get away. I don’t want Frida and Sue to know where I am. They’ll try to keep me there.”

“Who’s Sue?”

“My sister,” said Laverne. “Sue’s my sister who isn’t Frida.”

“Wait, you’re going to try to get away again?” asked Laverne. “After you already got shot once?”

“Yes,” said Frida’s sister who was not Sue. “I won’t stay here to get rounded up at gunpoint and forced into a van and taken away to who-knows-where.”

“Wow, it’s a shame Travis didn’t get a chance to test you with his device,” said Laverne. “It seems like you’ve got a lot of heart.”

“No,” said Frida’s sister. “It’s the opposite, actually.” She gripped the bottom hem of her shirt with both hands and tore off a long, ragged piece of green fabric. “Can you help me tie this around my wound?”

Laverne wasn’t squeamish about blood. Within reason, anyway. She took the t-shirt strip from Frida’s sister and bound her wound inexpertly. But when Frida’s sister examined the improvised wrap in the mirror, she said, “That should hold until I can get to an emergency room.”

“What did you mean?” asked Laverne.

“About what?”

“When you said you have the opposite of a lot of heart.”

“Oh, right,” said Frida’s sister. “I mean, I’ve never been measured, but I’m sure it’s quite low. Maybe even in the negatives. I was relieved when Travis tested you before me and then the device broke. I’m sure it would have been embarrassing.”

“But look at you,” said Laverne. “You’re being so brave in the face of adversity!”

“That’s not what heart is,” said Frida’s sister.

“Then what is it?” asked Laverne. “Travis said how much heart you have means how well you can persevere in the face of emotional shocks, but I don’t really know what that means in practice.”

“It means how much can you stay yourself when things are going wrong,” said Frida’s sister. “What are you good at?”

“Me?” asked Laverne. “Not to brag, but I know a lot about different dog breeds. Their distinct characteristics."

“OK,” said Frida’s sister. “So let’s say you know a lot about dog breeds when things are going well. If you have a lot of heart – which you apparently do – then you’ll still know a lot about dog breeds when things start going wrong, at least up to a certain point. But if you don’t know a lot about dog breeds when things are going well, then having a lot of heart isn’t going to make you suddenly become someone who knows a lot about dog breeds when things go wrong.”

“So it’s only useful to have a lot of heart if what you’re already usually good at applies to whatever crisis you’re facing,” said Laverne. “Is that what you’re saying?”

“Yes,” said Frida’s sister. “Like, normally I’m shy, yes, but I’m also very attached to my sisters. Maybe you consider those things to be good qualities or bad qualities, I don’t know, but now that we’re here in a crisis situation, my complete lack of heart means that I’m not persisting in being myself at all, I’m acting totally out of character, I’m putting my own life in danger in a desperate attempt to flee the crisis situation without my sisters.”

“Oh,” said Laverne. “But you’re handling the wound well.”

Frida’s sister grimaced. “Did you know that Frida, Sue, and I are also members of The Children of Dedicated Corporal Punishers?”

“No, I didn’t,” said Laverne. “I didn’t know such a group existed until Travis mentioned it earlier.”

Frida’s sister nodded. “I’ve often wondered if one of the things that made our parents’ marriage so resilient was their shared enthusiasm for inflicting corporal punishment on their three daughters. Anyway, Travis measured my heartiness at an event for that other group a little while ago and my heartiness measurement was really good. Anyway, good luck. If my sisters are wondering about me, just tell them I’m gone.” She turned and left the bathroom, the makeshift bandage around her arm soaked dark.

After Frida’s sister was gone, Laverne wished she’d asked for her name. Not knowing both of Frida’s bashful sisters’ names didn’t bother her, but not knowing one of them was annoying, it felt off-kilter. Well, she’d probably forget Sue’s name soon, and then at least that one small problem would be resolved.

Back at the picnic shelter, The Children of Resilient Marriages had made no tangible progress toward a plan of action. The central debate had split into a dozen tangential arguments, all of them happening simultaneously.

“Are you OK?” asked Karla when Laverne returned to her seat. “You have blood on your clothes.”

“Oh, yeah, I’m fine,” said Laverne, brushing with futility at the droplets of Frida’s sister’s blood spattered across her shirt. “The bathroom’s a mess.”

Satisfied at this response – or satisfied enough, anyway – Karla turned back to her chosen argument, which turned out to be whether or not the intruder was from a government agency or a private company with connections to the government that allowed it to act with impunity. Laverne couldn’t quite tell which side Karla was on, but whichever one it was, she sounded correct.

As the hours between the present and midnight contracted and collapsed and vanished, the summer sun ducked out of sight. The lights in the park, which usually came on at dusk, did not come on at all. Another trick of the intruder and the shadowy organization he represented? As The Children of Resilient Marriages bickered, the picnic shelter was gradually immersed in gloom. The chips, brownies, and cookies were all gone. The beverages ran low. Factions formed and dissolved, immediately riven by internal conflict. No one could articulate the goal of all this quarreling. Where were these disputes intended to carry them?

When, eventually, the members finally found unity in anger at Travis for bringing the device to the event without considering the potential consequences, Laverne was surprised it had taken so long. Travis tried to shout over his accusers for a while, and when that didn’t work, he diverted the spotlight – a figurative spotlight; a literal spotlight would have been handy in the dark – to Laverne.

“We’re falling apart!” he cried. “Even in Heart Heaven, our heart is not up to this challenge! Laverne, you’re the only one of us who is still fully capable of being your true self! Please!”

“Please what?” asked Laverne. She couldn’t see the faces aimed at her, but she could feel them trying to read confidence in her silhouette.

               “Please speak!” said Travis. “Observe our predicament from your normal perspective, unaltered by the limits of lesser heart, and tell us how to proceed!”

               “All right, well, Travis, I’m kind of surprised to hear you say that,” said Laverne. “Because I thought you knew that having a lot of heart doesn’t give me abilities I don’t already have, it just lets me hold onto my regular abilities even when things are bad. So, I mean, even though things are really bad right now, I think I could still identify dog breeds really well, where if I had less heart, I might be flustered enough right now to get some dog breeds mixed up, even some easy ones like Pomeranians and Keeshonds.”

               “Where is she?” another voice cried out, a woman’s voice. “Where’s Trina? You’ve been talking to Trina, I can tell! That’s her definition of having heart!”

               “Who’s Trina?” asked Laverne.

               “My sister! My other sister!”

               Laverne realized this must be Frida. Either Frida or…or…the other one’s name. Great, now that she had learned Trina’s name, Frida’s other sister’s name had disappeared from her brain and her knowledge was unbalanced again. “I saw her in the bathroom a few hours ago,” said Laverne. “We chatted a bit. I helped her dress her bullet wound.”

               “Bullet wound?” screamed Frida. “She’s been shot? And you didn’t tell anyone?”

               “The snipers are real!” shouted a male voice. “I knew it!”

               “We have to all run for it at once!” shouted someone else. “They can’t shoot all of us!”

               “Just give them the three people they want! Stop being selfish and identify yourselves!”

               “They won’t!” wailed a woman’s voice. “They’re too afraid!”

               “Who were they, Travis? Who was eighty-four? Who was seventy-eight? Who was seventy-five?”

               “I don’t remember!” shouted Travis.

               Laverne’s last thought before she fainted from lack of nourishment was that Travis sounded like someone whose heart had run out and who would gladly give up his friends if he could, so he was probably telling the truth.

               Laverne came back to herself belted into the passenger seat of a strange car. Her hands were cuffed together and connected to her seatbelt by a sturdy chain allowing no more than a few inches of movement in any direction. Her head was sore from vibrating against the cold window for…how long? Outside the window, the world was black.

               “Are you awake?” The voice was familiar.

               Laverne sat up straight and looked at the driver. It was the intruder, of course. She looked in the back seat and found it empty. “Where are the others?”

               “I made a deal with your group,” said the intruder. “If they could prove you truly had four hundred and seventy-nine heart, then I’d take you and let the others go.”

               Laverne’s head swam. Swum? Swimmed? She said nothing, instead focusing on taking shallow, even breaths.

               “You should have seen how they came together,” said the intruder, his face illuminated by dashboard lights the yellow shade of which Laverne had never before seen. “They showed a lot of heart. I can see why they called it Heart Heaven! The situation was stressful, no question. Minutes to midnight, the clock was ticking, and I know I have an unnerving effect on people. Honestly, it’s a useful trait in my line of work. But one of them came up with the plan, one of them persuaded almost everyone to get on board – including me! – one of them intimidated the few dissenters, one of them repaired the device. And then they laid you out on a picnic table, they hooked you up, and sure enough, right at the very stroke of midnight: four hundred and seventy-nine! They were actually firing up the grills when we left.”

               “What are you going to do with me?” asked Laverne. Her voice sounded wan, peaked.

               “Oh, all kinds of things,” said the intruder. “Since you’re such an anomaly, we’ll probably expose you to the most severe emotional shocks we can think of and see how you hold up. At four hundred and seventy-nine heart, I don’t know if anything can break you! But it’ll be fun to try.”

               Laverne shuddered. “But why? What good will that do?”

               “We’ll make you into the best sniper of all time,” said the intruder.

               “That won’t work,” said Laverne. “I’m not a good aim. I’ve never even fired a gun before. Having a lot of heart won’t make me good at something I’m not good at just because the pressure’s on. Having a lot of heart won’t make me a good sniper.”

               “Yes, it will,” said the intruder. “That’s what ‘heart’ is. It allows you to do things you didn’t know you were capable of when the chips are down.”

               “No,” said Laverne.

               “Yes,” said the intruder.

               “Your snipers missed someone today,” said Laverne. “I forget her name, but they only grazed her shoulder.” She paused, then made a risky guess. “And then she tried to get away again and it worked. She got away.”

               “The silencers threw them off,” said the intruder.

               “I call them ‘suppressors,’” said Laverne.

“We designed the heart-measuring device,” said the intruder. “I think we know what it is we’re measuring.”

“Wrong,” said Laverne.

The intruder fumed in silence.

Laverne allowed herself a guarded smirk. Her circumstances were bad. Extremely bad. But once she got some food in her, she would be fully herself. And then all she needed to do was wait for the moment when her knowledge of dog breeds would eventuate her escape. She didn’t know how her knowledge of dog breeds might eventuate her escape, but the moment was coming, she could sense it slithering its way toward her through the murk of the future. And she knew that no matter what the intruder and his sinister partners did to her between now and the arrival of that moment, the liberating knowledge would be there at the very forefront of her mind, unburied, unhidden, unobstructed; easily accessible and ready for use.