What sort of hysteria?
Someone has died, and people start to think Saul is responsible. (In a very, very small way, Saul is responsible, but not in the way that everyone thinks.) Q: Saul and Patsy seem like familiar characters. Have you ever written about them before? A: Three times. They first appeared in a story of mine called “Saul and Patsy Are Getting Comfortable in Michigan.” That was in Through the Safety Net, a collection of my stories which came out in 1985. I thought I had killed them off at the end of that story (they drive off the road, and their car flips), but I was wrong. They reappeared in “Saul and Patsy Are Pregnant,” in A Relative Stranger in 1990, and they popped up again in “Saul and Patsy Are in Labor,” in Believers. The first story led to the second because a very large woman came up to me at a literary gathering around 1986 and grabbed my lapel and started to shake me, saying, “You have the nerve to kill off that nice couple!” I was frightened and said, “They aren’t dead.” She demande
