PART II

3859 Sproule Street

WHEN I WAS twenty-seven, the month after Simon Törnkvist and I broke up, I decided that if I wasn’t married by the time I turned thirty, I would buy a house alone. Although I told no one, keeping this idea in the back of my mind provided reassurance; it made my life seem less like something I was waiting for and more like something I was planning. When I drove around Madison, I’d sometimes think, A place like that. Three bedrooms at the most, a yard but not a large one, on a street with tall trees. Also, not a house on a corner, because those seemed too exposed. As a librarian at Theodora Liess Elementary School, I earned eight hundred and thirty-three dollars a month after taxes, and as soon as I’d made my decision, I began to put away two hundred dollars from each paycheck in a savings account; I deposited the money at my neighborhood branch of Wisconsin State Bank & Trust on the last Saturday morning of every month.

I’m not sure exactly when I would have called a realtor—the day I turned thirty? The day after? My plan had never gotten that specific—but it didn’t turn out to be anywhere close, because it was two months before my birthday, in February 1976, that my father died. Like his own father, he had a heart attack, and although my father made it into his fifties—two decades longer than my grandfather had lived—this seemed to me even then to be a dubious reprieve. Now, of course, it does not seem like a reprieve at all.

It snowed the day of my father’s funeral, and my mother, grandmother, and I all tried, for one another’s sakes and because we were midwestern, to be stoic; my mother either was or pretended to be greatly preoccupied by whether the black crepe dress I had bought at Prange’s was warm enough. Back at the house, we visited awkwardly with my mother’s siblings and their spouses, none of whom I’d seen in years. Other members of Calvary Lutheran dropped by, and my father’s coworkers at the bank, all of them bearing flowers or food (mostly casseroles, though the assistant manager brought a whole ham). Then they were gone and a quiet descended, amplified by the snow that had fallen.

I needed to drive back to Madison that Sunday evening—I’d arranged to have a substitute for three days the previous week, but the next morning, I was due at school again—and my mother walked me to my car, hugging herself against the cold. When I was settled in the driver’s seat, she motioned for me to roll down the window and said, “Fasten your seat belt,” and I said, “It’s fastened already.” As I pulled away from her, away from the house where I’d grown up, I was alone at last, and I began to sob. By the time I reached the highway, a new snow flurry had started, and though it didn’t accumulate into anything, it was my father’s directions for driving in the snow that I thought of: Go slowly. Stay well behind the car in front of you. If you skid, turn in to the skid. When I unlocked the door to my apartment in Madison—I was living then on the second floor of a house on Sproule Street—I could hear the phone ringing, and when I answered, it was, as I’d known it would be, my mother, who’d no doubt been calling every ten minutes for the last hour to see if I’d arrived yet. My upper back, between my shoulders, ached from the tension of the drive and from everything else.

In the year and a half since my father’s death, I had gone back to Riley most weekends to check in on my mother and grandmother. Usually, I’d pull into the driveway shortly before lunch on Saturday, and I’d once brought them a pizza, but instead of relieving my mother of the burden of cooking, as I’d intended, it appeared to make her agitated. So these days I brought only myself and sometimes some laundry, and the three of us sat in the dining room eating meals that had already started to seem old-fashioned to me: meat loaf and mashed potatoes, shepherd’s pie. I always planned to leave on Sunday after church (with no discussion, I had begun attending again after my father’s funeral, though it was for my mother’s sake, and I never went on the weekends I remained in Madison), but then thinking of saying goodbye, picturing them sitting in the living room that evening, my mother needlepointing in front of 60 Minutes and my grandmother reading, always made me far too sad and I ended up staying a second night, sleeping again in my old bed. The next morning, if it was during the school year, I’d have to take off around six o’clock to get back to Madison and change clothes before work. Interstate 94 would be dark and mostly empty, me and a bunch of eighteen-wheelers.

It was, I suppose, for all these reasons that I had not started looking for a house to buy until the summer of 1977. My realtor turned out to be a woman named Nadine Patora who was lively, zaftig, and over a decade my senior. Given the modesty of the houses I was considering—I’d pay forty thousand dollars at the absolute most—she treated me with more patience than I had any right to expect. By early July, we’d looked at more than thirty places, and there was only one I’d seriously considered, a little brick one-story in the Nakoma neighborhood, but after thinking it over for a few days, I hadn’t made a bid. I wanted a house I really loved, one I’d be happy to stay in forever and sink endless energy into, rather than one that was merely adequate. Otherwise, why not keep renting? “I bet you’re just as picky with men,” Nadine said, smiling mischievously as we drove one Sunday afternoon to an open house.

I laughed. “I guess that would explain why I’m still single.”

“No, it’s good.” Nadine leaned over and patted my knee. She was divorced, with two teenage daughters. “Take it from someone who settled for the first thing that came down the pike.”

Most of the houses we looked at sounded quite appealing in the MLS listings Nadine showed me, but I’d know from the minute I stepped into them, and sometimes from the outside, that they weren’t right: The windows were too small, or the kitchen cabinets depressed me, or a sour smell hung in the rooms, and I didn’t want to run the risk of assuming it would vanish along with the current owner. And so when Nadine called me the Thursday after the Fourth of July and said, “I’ve found your new home,” I honestly didn’t believe her.

It was a two-bedroom bungalow on a street called McKinley, not quite as pretty as where I lived presently, but it was unlikely I could afford to buy in my current neighborhood. And McKinley did have a pleasant energy, I thought as soon as Nadine and I turned on to it, passing a man walking a dog, two children in bathing suits darting through a sprinkler. The house we parked in front of was white-shingled with a narrow porch and, as I saw when we went inside, a living room that had window seats, and a kitchen that was small and old-fashioned but very light. Even before I consciously thought I might like to live in it, I found myself imagining where I’d place various pieces of furniture, wondering whether my round breakfast table would fit in the kitchen, or which wall I’d put my headboard against in the master bedroom upstairs. The house was empty—there was a convoluted story I half listened to Nadine tell about the owner having moved to Tennessee six months before but putting the house on the market only this week. I peeked behind the shower curtain and opened all the closets; I walked down to the basement. The clincher was a little oak cabinet in the second-floor hallway, shoulder-high, with a clasp that you turned shut. It was about the size of a medicine cabinet you’d find behind a bathroom mirror but slightly deeper—too small to keep linens or cleaning supplies or anything truly practical. It seemed a place to store love letters, secret charms or trinkets.

Back in Nadine’s car, I said, “I want it.”

“Aren’t we decisive all of a sudden.”

“You were right,” I said. “It’s perfect.”

“All right, then.” Nadine seemed amused. “If you’re sure you wouldn’t like to sleep on it first, how much are you offering?”

The asking price was thirty-eight thousand, four hundred. “Thirty-seven?” I said uncertainly.

She shook her head. “Thirty-two. You’ll go up, he’ll come down, you’ll meet in the middle.” She glanced at her watch—it was a little before five on Thursday afternoon. “You want to give him twenty-four hours?”

“Are we allowed to make him decide that quickly?”

“If you’d rather, we can say forty-eight.”

“No, twenty-four would be great. I just don’t want to be pushy.” In fact, twenty-four hours was preferable; I was driving to Riley on Saturday, and I strongly wished to avoid being on the phone with Nadine in front of my mother or grandmother. I hadn’t told them I was hoping to buy a place because I was afraid my mother would try to give me money, which I doubted she could afford after my father’s death. My plan was to tell them when it was all finished, when rather than just mentioning the possibility, I could invite them to Madison, show them the actual house, and call it mine. The three of us would sit on the front porch drinking lemonade, I thought—well, assuming I bought some outdoor chairs.

“Pushy, my fanny!” Nadine was saying. “You’re offering this man money. Now, the likelihood is that negotiations will go through the weekend, but I’ll see what I can do.” She punched my shoulder lightly. “Kind of exciting, huh? Cross your fingers, babycakes.”

THAT NIGHT, ABOUT twenty minutes after I’d turned out the light for bed, the phone rang, and I thought immediately that it might be Nadine, with an answer already, but when I picked up the receiver, a far more familiar female voice said, “Don’t you dare think of skipping the Hickens’ barbecue.”

“Dena, I thought you had a date tonight, or I’d have called to tell you I made an offer on a house.”

“You finally found one that meets your exacting standards? Hot damn—let’s go see it!”

“Not now,” I said quickly. “We’d be arrested for prowling.” By this point, I was seated at the kitchen table—the kitchen was where I kept my phone—wearing my white sleeveless nightgown. I’d been sleeping in the living room pretty much since school had let out in June. It was not yet ten-thirty, I noted on the wall clock, which meant I really couldn’t scold Dena for calling late. She already mocked my early bedtime, and my usual defense—that I had to get up in the morning to be at school—wouldn’t cut it, given that it was summer. “It’s on McKinley Street,” I said. “Maybe we can go by tomorrow, although I don’t want to jinx it before I hear back.”

Dena sighed extravagantly. “You have no sense of fun. Speaking of which, I ran into Kathleen Hicken at Eagle, and she said you told her you’re going home this weekend. Alice, you can’t make me socialize with those people by myself. Rose Trommler hates me.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“All those women are fat, and their husbands are boring.”

“First of all, that’s not true, but if you really feel that way, why are you so intent on going?”

“I have to,” Dena said. “Charlie Blackwell will be there, and I’m planning to seduce him.”

I laughed. “I’m sure you’ll be just fine without me.”

“Charlie Blackwell,” she said. “As in the Blackwells.”

“Oh, Dena, do you really want to be mixed up with that family?” The Blackwells, as everyone from Wisconsin knew, had made their fortune in meat products. (There were several plants near Milwaukee, and it was said you could now buy a package of Blackwell sausage at any grocery store in the country—not, I thought, that you’d necessarily want to. It was what I’d grown up eating, but as an adult, I found it rather greasy.) Harold Blackwell, this generation’s paterfamilias, had served as Wisconsin’s governor from ’59 to ’67 and then made an unsuccessful presidential bid in ’68. A week after a rally at UW in which a young woman named Donna Ann Keske, a sophomore from Racine, was paralyzed from the chest down when police used force to break up the demonstration, Governor Blackwell appeared on Face the Nation and called Vietnam protestors “unwashed and uneducated,” thereby demonstrating a tin ear that would have been unfortunate under normal circumstances but was downright callous during a time of such tumult. Though Blackwell was a Republican and from Wisconsin, even my father wouldn’t have supported him had he not dropped out of the presidential race after the New Hampshire primary: He had a disdainful air, as if he didn’t trust the average person to be smart enough to vote for him. Now he was out of politics—I had the dim sense he was head of some university, though I couldn’t have said which—but one of his sons, of whom there were four, had been elected to Congress from Milwaukee the year before. “You know,” I said, “if Charlie is the Blackwell brother I’m thinking of, then Jeanette and Frank tried to set me up with him a couple years ago. But maybe it was a different brother.”

“They tried to set you up with him and you said no?” Dena sounded incredulous.

“I was dating Simon.” The truth was that I probably would have declined anyway—money and Republicans and sausage did not strike me as a particularly tempting combination.

“Ed is the one who’s a congressman, but Charlie’s also about to run,” Dena said. “North of here, I think around Houghton. It’s still a secret, but Kathleen told me he’ll announce his candidacy in the spring. Don’t you think I deserve to be married to a powerful man?”

“Absolutely.”

When she spoke again, Dena sounded less confident. “Alice, the Hickens and all those people are so judgmental. The only reason Kathleen invited me is that I’m friends with you. I need you there for moral support.”

Dena had been married—her ex-husband was an older man, an ad executive who was already twice divorced when she met him while working as a flight attendant for TWA. They’d lived in Kansas City in the late sixties and early seventies, and in 1975, having had no children, they, too, divorced. Dena had moved to Madison then and used the money from her settlement to open a store on State Street that sold clothes and accessories to fashionable coeds: bell-bottoms and pantsuits and miniskirts, sheer scarves and velvety handbags, crocheted shawls, ambiguously ethnic baubles. Entering the store—it was called D’s—never failed to make me feel very old, and while the merchandise was not really to my taste, I usually bought something.

My inappropriate sartorial purchases aside, having Dena in town was a real joy, especially since almost everyone I’d once been close to from college had gotten married. And it wasn’t that you couldn’t be friends with a married woman, but you weren’t friends in the same way, she didn’t have the same freedom in her schedule, especially not after she had children, and even before that, she didn’t need you; you needed friendship, and friendship to her was auxiliary, extra.

But Dena and I would phone each other four times a day, including a minute after we’d just hung up if one of us remembered something we’d forgotten to say: “What’s the name of that guy at Salon Styles who cut your hair last time?” Or “When you come over tonight, will you bring the Carpenters’ album?” She’d swing by to show me her outfit before a date, or she’d call and say, “I’m in the mood for a movie,” and ten minutes later, we’d meet at the Majestic. We went for long walks together on Sunday mornings—Dena no longer attended church, either, and we called these walks our constitutionals, which made them sound a little more like a respectable substitute for prayer—and we’d regularly meet for dinner, after which she’d suggest having a drink and be gravely disapproving of my need to go home and sleep. She dated much more frequently than I did; she told me once that she’d gotten a prescription for the pill the first week she was hired at TWA, the summer we graduated from high school, and she hadn’t been off it since. As for my own dating habits, people I knew often tried to set me up, and sometimes I went to be a good sport, but on a Saturday night, I tended to be just as happy attending a play with a female friend—Dena also teased me for my friendship with Rita Alwin, a French teacher at Liess Elementary who was black and older than our mothers—or even staying in and reading. People like the Hickens, whom I saw every month or two, formed a kind of secondary social circle: I’d been sorority sisters at the University of Wisconsin with a lot of the wives in these couples, I’d gone to fraternity formals with a few of the husbands (one starry night beside Lake Mendota, in the spring of our junior year, Wade Trommler had drunkenly announced that he considered me the ideal girl), and we’d remained in touch after graduation as they all paired off and had children. Admittedly, my enthusiasm for spending time with them fluctuated with my tolerance for being pecked at about my single status. It always amazed me that married people thought they could say an illuminating thing to you on the topic, as if you were scarcely aware, until they pointed it out, of being unwed.

“Dena, I’m sorry,” I said, “but I already told Kathleen Hicken I can’t come. My mother and grandmother are expecting me.”

“Go home Sunday,” Dena said. “What’s the difference if it’s summer?”

“You don’t need me at the party,” I said. “Wear your halter dress, and Charlie Blackwell won’t be able to take his eyes off you.”

“Listen,” Dena said. “This isn’t negotiable. I’ll pick you up Saturday at five-thirty.”

“I thought the barbecue started at five.”

“We’re arriving fashionably late. We’ll toast to you becoming landed gentry.”

SO FAR, THAT summer had been an especially nice one. The grief I felt about my father’s death was milder after a year and a half, without the rawness of surprise. Plus, I was filled with purpose, and not just in looking for a house; there was also my library project.

I had graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1968, taught for two years—I taught third-graders, an especially boisterous age—then returned to the university to get my master’s in library science. What I’d realized while teaching was that the part of the school day I loved most was reading period: Charlotte’s Web, Harold and the Purple Crayon, Blueberries for Sal, the kids sitting cross-legged on the floor, their eyes wide, their bodies leaning forward with anticipation. If I could be a librarian, I decided, it would be like reading period lasting forever. After I’d earned my master’s degree in 1972, I went to work at Liess Elementary, and five years later, at the age of thirty-one, I was still there.

My project that summer was this: I was creating ten large papier-mâché figures of characters from children’s books, among them Eloise; the mother and baby rabbits from The Runaway Bunny; and Mr. Sneeze from the Mr. Men series (I’d used chicken wire to fashion the triangular points of Mr. Sneeze’s oversize head). I’d had the idea the previous fall when I saw a little girl on my street dressed as Pippi Longstocking for Halloween. In the spring, I’d written to publishers asking for permission—I suppose I could have gotten away with not doing so, but the idea of being a librarian who infringed on copyrighted material made me shudder—and in early June, I’d bought the materials. By the time school opened after Labor Day, I planned to have all the characters displayed on the library’s shelves, or, in the case of the Paddle-to-the-Sea figure in his canoe, hanging over the entrance.

I’d been surprised by the scope of the project—I had thought it would take only a couple weeks—but the longer it lasted, the more absorbed I became. At first I’d worked in my living room, but the characters began taking up so much space, and I didn’t want anyone who might come over (mostly, this meant Dena) to see them before I was finished, so I’d covered the floor of my bedroom and even the bed with butcher paper, then started sleeping on the living room couch. When I was working, I wore a denim skirt and old shirts of my father’s, often dropping globs of the flour and water mixture on myself, and perspiring because I didn’t have an air conditioner.

Every morning, before it got hot, I’d cut through campus and walk along Lake Mendota, the sun sparkling on the water, the waves lapping lightly at the shore (walks by myself weren’t constitutionals—they were just walks), and then I’d come back and work until lunch, or until long after that if Nadine didn’t have any houses to show me. During my walks, and sometimes in the middle of the night, I’d suddenly have an idea about, say, how to create more realistic eyebrows for Maurice Sendak’s “I don’t care” Pierre (by snipping up a black wig, because when I painted on the eyebrows, they just looked flat). Early in the evening, I’d stop working and make a corn-and-tomato salad, or broil a pork chop, and after dinner, I’d perch on the windowsill of the bedroom and drink a beer and admire my progress. I hadn’t mentioned the project to anyone, and sometimes I worried that the other teachers might find it odd or excessive, but when I thought of the children entering the library on the first day of school, I felt excited.

NADINE CALLED EARLY Friday afternoon. “The seller counter-offered—you interested in going up to thirty-five and a half?”

If I were putting down 20 percent, which was what I had told the loan officer at the bank I probably could do, that would mean seventy-one hundred dollars. “Okay,” I said.

“Jeez Louise, you’re way too easy. Don’t you want to complain just a little?”

I laughed. “I want the house.”

“All righty. Stand by.”

She called me back twenty minutes later and said, “Let me be the first to congratulate you on becoming a homeowner.”

I yelped.

“Why don’t you come by my office now to sign the papers, and I’d recommend calling the inspector before the end of the day. Can I make one more suggestion?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Buy yourself a bottle of champagne. You’ve got a lot to look forward to.”

DENA PICKED ME up the next afternoon for the Hickens’ barbecue, but first we drove to McKinley Street. In the car, Dena sang, “ ‘Home, home on the range, where the deer and the antelope play . . . ’ ” When I pointed to where she should park, the house was both different and the same as I remembered—it was more vivid somehow, more real. There was a spruce tree in the yard, and the grass was deep green; the house was a white box, the wooden front-porch floor peeling maroon. There wasn’t a garage, just a driveway that was two concrete lines separated by a strip of grass. The knowledge that all of this would belong to me was overwhelming and exhilarating. I didn’t yet have keys, but Dena insisted on peering into the windows and wandering into the backyard, which sloped.

“It’s cute, right?” I said.

Dena nodded vigorously and sang, “ ‘Where seldom is heard a discouraging word / And the skies are not cloudy all day.’ ”

Although we were late to the barbecue, Charlie Blackwell was later, and Dena and I were already out back, sitting side by side on a picnic bench in the grass, when he emerged from the kitchen at the rear of the house and appeared on the deck holding a six-pack in each hand. He was wearing Docksiders without socks, fraying khaki shorts, a belt with a rectangular silver buckle, and a faded pink button-down shirt that I could tell, even from several yards away, had once been good quality. He held the six-packs up near his ears, shook them—a stupid thing to do with beer, I thought—and called out to the yard at large, “Hello there, boys and girls!”

About fifteen of us were present, and several men approached him at once, Cliff Hicken slapping him on the back. Charlie opened one of the beers he’d brought, and after he popped the top, some fizzed up and he pressed his mouth against the side of the can and slurped the cascading foam. Then he said something, and when he and the other men burst into laughter, his was the loudest. Under my breath, I said to Dena, “He’s perfect for you.”

“I don’t have lipstick on my teeth, do I?” She turned to me, baring her incisors.

“You look great,” I said. She waited ten minutes, so as not to be too obvious, and I watched as she crossed the yard and offered herself up, like a gift, to Charlie Blackwell. The day before, I had been in the public library and looked for mentions of Charlie in news articles—long before the arrival of the Internet, I prided myself on my ability to find information, my golden touch with reference books and microfiche—and although I’d turned up little about Charlie himself beyond his status as a former governor’s son, I’d learned that if he really was running in the district that contained Houghton, as Dena had claimed, he’d be up against an incumbent of forty years.

When Dena was gone, Rose Trommler, who was sitting on the opposite side of the picnic bench next to Jeanette Werden, said, “Dena Cimino is sure a piece of work.” Cimino was Dena’s surname now; she was no longer a Janaszewski.

As if I’d misunderstood Rose’s meaning, I nodded and said, “Dena’s the most entertaining person I know. She’s been exactly the same since we were in kindergarten.”

Rose and I were drinking white wine; Jeanette was six months pregnant and not drinking. Rose leaned forward. “I shouldn’t say this, but doesn’t she sometimes drive you crazy?” Rose and her husband lived next door to the Hickens; we’d been in Kappa Alpha Theta together in college, and she wasn’t a bad person, but she was quite a gossip.

“No more than I probably drive her crazy,” I said lightly.

“She’s practically throwing herself at Charlie Blackwell,” Jeanette said. “I wonder if we should warn him.”

I looked directly at her. “About what?” I asked in a neutral voice, and neither she nor Rose said anything. “I bet he can take care of himself,” I added.

“Alice, how about you?” Rose dunked a potato chip in a bowl of onion dip. “You must have your eye on someone special.”

“Not really.” I smiled to show that I didn’t mind. The irony was, I honestly didn’t mind, or not in the way they imagined. In my least charitable moments, I’d think about these women, It’s not that I couldn’t have married your husbands; it’s that I didn’t want to. But it was a rare married woman who was able to believe that a single woman had any choice in the matter of her own singleness. I shifted on the bench. “Jeanette, am I right that you and Frank were in Sheboygan for the Fourth of July? That must have been wonderful.”

“Well, the way Frank’s mother scolded Katie and Danny, you’d think she’d never been around children before.” Jeanette shook her head. “Just a broken record of ‘Put that down, quit running around,’ when why were we there but for them to run around? And Frank was one of six growing up, but he claims she was even-tempered back then.”

“That’s hard,” I said.

“Oh, but you’re lucky having the company of other adults, Jeanette,” Rose said. “When Wade and I took the kids up to La Crosse, he spent so much time fishing, I felt like a widow. I said to him, ‘Wade, if you’re not careful, your son won’t remember his daddy’s face.’ ”

Jeanette chuckled, and so did I, to be pleasant, though the remark made me think of my mother and grandmother—actual widows—and of how much I’d have preferred to be at the house in Riley with them instead of sitting with these two women. Or I’d rather have been working on my papier-mâché characters—I was halfway through Babar (the tricky part was his trunk) and hadn’t started on Yertle the Turtle—or I’d rather have been sitting alone with a pen and a pad of paper, figuring out plans for my house.

“Alice, am I right that you haven’t had a serious beau since that tall fellow?” Rose said. “Remind me of his—”

“Simon.” Again, I tried to smile agreeably, and then I did it, I gave her what I was sure she wanted—some admission of failure on my part—because I hoped it would get her to drop the subject. “I guess I’m in a dry spell,” I said.

“Frank has a real good-looking coworker at the DA’s office,” Jeanette said.

“Jeanette, that’s not nice to set up Alice with a felon,” Rose said.

Jeanette swatted her. “You know that isn’t what I mean. He’s another lawyer, and he owns a super place over in Orchard Ridge. You wouldn’t mind an iguana, would you?”

“I’m not sure if I’m the reptile type.” I stood. “I’m just getting a bit more wine. Do either of you need anything?”

“When you come back, remind me to tell you about the new principal at Katie’s school,” Jeanette said. “He’s a big, tall fellow, and he has the shortest little Chinese wife.”

I nodded several times and held up my empty glass, as if to offer proof that I wasn’t walking away because I found them intolerable.

On the deck, I passed Dena and Charlie Blackwell just as Dena set her fingertips on his forearm. Good for her, I thought. Once inside the house, I used the first-floor powder room, and on my way out, I almost collided with Tanya, the older of the Hickens’ two daughters.

She held up a hardcover book. “Will you read this to me?” It was Madeline’s Rescue, the one where Madeline falls in the Seine and is saved by a dog.

I looked around. There were a few adults in the kitchen, including Kathleen Hicken, Tanya’s mother, but we were out of their view, and I doubted anyone would notice my absence. “Sure,” I said.

We sat on the living room couch, Tanya next to me. She was a fair-haired little girl with a bob and large brown eyes. “Do you know my name?” I asked. “I’m Miss Alice. And you’re Tanya, aren’t you?”

She nodded.

“And how old are you?” I asked.

“Five and one quarter.”

“Five and one quarter! Does that mean your birthday is in April?”

“It’s April twenty-third,” she said. “Lisa’s birthday is January fourth, but she’s only two years old.” Lisa was the Hickens’ other daughter.

“My birthday’s in April, too,” I said. “It’s on the sixth, seventeen days before yours.” I opened the book and began reading: “ ‘In an old house in Paris that was covered with vines—’ ” I paused. Tanya had squirmed closer to me, as if hopeful that she might be able to climb inside the book. It was an impulse I understood well. “I bet you know what comes next,” I said, and I repeated, “ ‘In an old house in Paris that was covered with vines—’ ”

“—‘Lived twelve little girls in two straight lines,’ ” Tanya said.

“ ‘They left the house at half past nine / In two straight lines, in rain or shine. / The smallest one was—’ ”

“—‘Madeline,’ ” Tanya cried.

I turned the page, which featured an illustration of Madeline falling over the bridge. “Uh-oh,” I said.

“She doesn’t drown,” Tanya told me reassuringly.

We kept reading, and when we got to the next page, Tanya added, “They name the dog Genevieve.”

She continued to inject these comments, either editorial or explanatory—“The fat lady is mean,” “Genevieve has puppies”—and when we’d gotten to the end, she said, “Will you read it again?”

I glanced at my watch. “All right, and then I should go back out and talk to the grown-ups. Your daddy’s grilling the meat for dinner, isn’t he?”

“I’m having fish sticks with tartar sauce.”

“Doesn’t that sound fancy,” I said.

As if comforting me, helping me to not be intimidated, Tanya said, “No, tartar sauce is like mayonnaise,” and I decided that I liked her even more.

We had neared the end of our second run-through of Madeline’s Rescue when Charlie Blackwell appeared in the archway of the living room. I looked up, made eye contact with him, smiled, and continued reading. It didn’t seem that what Tanya and I were doing required explanation, and besides, I believed that the secret of interacting with children—or it appeared to be a secret, based on the behavior of some parents—was that all you did was talk to them in a normal way. You didn’t let yourself be distracted by someone else, you didn’t perform above their heads, using them as a prop, nor did you coddle and indulge them. You paid attention, but not inordinately.

He didn’t leave, though. I could feel him standing there watching us, and when we got to the last page, he set down his beer can and applauded. This applause concealed the sound of Tanya farting, which I was glad for, because she seemed self-aware enough, despite her age, that farting in front of a tall, unfamiliar man might have embarrassed her. “I have to go potty,” she murmured, and slid off the couch, darting around Charlie Blackwell in the threshold.

“I scare her off?” He had a bit of a drawl, not the flat Wisconsin accent but something at once twangier and more educated.

“I think she had somewhere to go,” I said.

“Then I guess you just lost your excuse for hiding out.” He took a sip of beer and grinned.

“I’m not hiding out. We were reading a story.”

“Is that right?” He was undeniably handsome, but his bearing was cocky in a way I didn’t like: He was just over six feet, athletic-looking, and a little sunburned, with thick, dry, wavy light brown hair of the sort that wouldn’t move if he shook his head. He also had mischievous eyebrows and a hawk nose with wide nostrils, as if he was flaring them at all times. This lent him an air of impatience that I imagined enhanced his stature in the view of some people—implying that he had other, more interesting places to go, that his attention to you would be limited.

“Sometimes I find that the company of children compares favorably to the company of adults,” I said wryly.

“Touché.” He didn’t seem at all offended—he still was grinning—but I immediately felt remorseful because I knew I’d been rude.

“Or maybe it’s that I don’t always have much to say around adults,” I said.

“Not having much to say doesn’t stop most people.” His expression was impish. “Not me, anyway.”

His self-mockery caught me off guard, and I smiled. As I stood, planning to return to the backyard, I said, “I should introduce myself. I’m Alice Lindgren.”

“Oh, I know who you are. You think I’d forget the name of a girl who refuses to go on a date with me?”

“I didn’t—” I paused, flustered. “That was years ago. I was involved with someone. It wasn’t personal.”

“I thought maybe you’d heard some terrible rumor. Or, better yet, some terrible truth.” He grinned; clearly, he was accustomed to being considered charming.

“If there are terrible truths about you circulating, you might want to take care of them before running for office.” I could have played it cool and pretended I didn’t know who he was, but I didn’t see the point. Everyone at the barbecue knew who he was, whether or not we’d met him before. And he knew we knew; otherwise, he’d have introduced himself when I had.

“Before I run for office, huh?” he said. “Word travels fast.”

“Madison is a pretty small town.”

“Yet we’ve never met until now. How do you explain that?”

I shrugged. “Have you lived here that long? I was under the impression—Isn’t your family more from Milwaukee?”

“Au contraire, mademoiselle. I’m a Madison native. Went to kindergarten and first grade at Duncan Country Day and came back for part of eighth grade.”

“Oh, I teach at Liess,” I said. “I’m the librarian.”

“Aha! I thought you showed authority when you were reading. Cliff and Kathleen’s little girl knew just who to ask, huh?”

“Now do you believe I wasn’t hiding out?”

“There was a boy on my street growing up who went to Liess,” Charlie said. “Norm Barker, but we called him Ratty. He was a good kid. Real pale face and pink, quivery nose, but a good kid. I don’t think I’ve laid eyes on the guy since 1952.”

“I suspect the school has changed since Ratty’s time.”

Charlie grinned. “You mean it’s not lily-white anymore?”

“Not exactly.” There was a silence, and I suppose it was to fill it—it was in the interest of preventing Charlie from implying that Liess’s non-lily-whiteness was a bad thing (I didn’t know if he would imply this, but I didn’t want to run the risk)—that I announced, “I bought a house yesterday.”

He raised his eyebrows. “No kidding? Just you, not . . . ?” Not at all surreptitiously, he glanced at the ring finger of my left hand.

I ignored the question. “It’s on McKinley. If you know where Roney’s Hardware is, it’s behind that a couple streets.”

“Congratulations—way to get yourself a little piece of the American dream.” He held up his own left hand, high-five-style; to slap it required walking toward him, which, a little self-consciously, I did. Our hands hit firmly, a satisfying slap, and he said, “It’s in decent shape? The pipes and the roof and all that jazz?”

“It seems all right, although the inspector hasn’t gone through yet.” I tapped my knuckles against the wall. “Knock on wood.”

“You run into any problems, I’d be happy to take a look.” He paused. “Not that I know a damn thing about house maintenance, but I’m trying to impress you. Is it working?”

Although I laughed, I felt a clenching in my stomach. No. This barbecue was about Dena’s interest in Charlie Blackwell, not mine.

And then he said, “How about if you let me take you out for dinner next week to celebrate life, liberty, and the pursuit of the ten percent mortgage rate—you free Tuesday?”

“Oh, the rate isn’t nearly that bad anymore,” I said. “It’s closer to seven percent.”

“What, the other fellow’s still in the picture?” His voice remained game, but I could tell he was rattled that I hadn’t immediately accepted his invitation—I could tell by the way the corners of his smile collapsed a little. “You want me to challenge him to a duel, that’s what you’re trying to say?”

I had no desire to hurt Charlie Blackwell’s feelings. I attempted to sound as sincere as possible when I said, “Unfortunately, I have a busy few weeks coming up—lots of lesson plans.”

“You can’t do better than that? Lesson plans in July, hell, that’s on the order of needing to wash your hair.”

“It’s not you,” I said. “It’s really not.” We were standing a few feet apart, and I was tempted to set my palm on his cheek. He was more vulnerable, less smug, than I had initially thought. Then I did close the space between us, but all I touched was his elbow, through his pink oxford shirt. This close to him, I could sense his clean soapy warmth, the way he smelled of beer and summer. I tilted my head. “Should we go back to the party?”

I HAD THOUGHT I’d leave shortly after the food was served, but we started a game of charades that was lengthy and quite a lot of fun and, just before my team’s last turn, Dena pressed up against me, her lips at my ear, and said, “I’m gonna be sick.” I pulled her arm around my neck and placed my own arm at her waist, and I walked us briskly into the house; at the two steps leading up to the deck, she stumbled a little, and I hoped that the other guests were preoccupied by the game. It was after nine o’clock, still over eighty degrees and only now getting dark. The mosquitoes were out, but Kathleen Hicken had lit a few citronella candles that were semi-successfully keeping them at bay.

In the first-floor bathroom, I lifted the toilet seat and said, “Lean over it.” Already, Dena had arranged herself so she was supine on the floor, her head as far from the bowl as possible. “Come on, Dena,” I said. “You need to cooperate.”

“How is it we’re thirty-one years old and neither of us has a husband or children?” she slurred. “I was supposed to have three children by now. Mindy and Alexander and—What was I planning to call the other one?”

“I don’t remember,” I said.

“Don’t tell me that.” She was as petulant as my students, the first-or second-graders, when it had been too long since their last snack. “You do remember!”

“Tracy?” I said.

“Tracy’s not a special name.”

“Dena, if you’re going to throw up, you need to lean over the toilet. Can you take my hand and I’ll lift you?” Dena hadn’t gone up for charades in several turns, but even so, if she was this drunk, I was surprised not to have noticed outside. In an uncharacteristic act of compliance, she raised both her arms, and I tugged on them until she was sitting up. “Scoot your behind forward,” I said.

“You haven’t even been married once,” she said.

“You know what, Dena, I’m all right with that.”

She looked at me, her eyes glassy. “But you’ve been pregnant. Do you ever wish you’d kept the baby?” It had been only a couple of years earlier that I’d finally told Dena about my long-ago abortion; she was the first person I’d ever mentioned it to, and she seemed to see it as considerably less significant than I did. She said, “At TWA, I knew a girl who had three.”

In the Hickens’ bathroom, I said, “Dena, do you want me to help you here or not?”

“Did I ever tell you, when you were dating Simon, I used to picture him having a really long, thin penis. Because, you know, he was such a long, thin person.”

This was not actually inaccurate, but I wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of saying so.

“Have you ever noticed,” she continued, “that every time we see Rose Trommler, she’s either gained or lost twenty pounds?”

“She does look a little heavy tonight,” I admitted.

“It’s like Superman going into the phone booth. She walks out of the room a size six, and she walks back in a size twelve.” Dena belched then, and I was crouched so near her that it was a warm, sour wind on my face.

“Come on, Dena! Be considerate. Should I wait outside?”

“Here it comes,” she said, and at last she did lean properly over the toilet bowl. We both were quiet.

Perhaps a minute had passed, and I said, “It’s Theresa. That’s your other daughter’s name. I just remembered.”

Dena seemed about to respond, but instead, she belched again, a smaller belch that seemed unequal as a harbinger to the monstrous chunky gush that erupted from inside her. I held her hair back and looked away as she finished retching. Working with children had made me less squeamish—they were constantly presenting their grubby hands to you, having accidents—but at some point, disgusting was still disgusting. Especially with an adult woman.

I flushed the toilet, and when the water had resettled, Dena spat a few times into it. Her voice was matter-of-fact, already more sober, when she said, “Charlie Blackwell doesn’t like me.” She stood, turned on the faucet, cupped one hand beneath the stream, and brought her hand to her mouth. When she’d swallowed, she said, “He seems like a guy you’d meet on the East Coast more than someone from around here. Real full of himself.”

“I just talked to him briefly,” I said.

“Another Saturday night down the crapper, huh?” She almost but didn’t quite smile.

“This isn’t the time to analyze your life,” I said. “Let me thank the Hickens and I’ll drive us home.”

“I need to lie down.” She opened the bathroom door, and I followed her into the living room. The Madeline book was still on the sofa, and I moved it to an ottoman. I would have preferred for us to leave instead of me waiting while Dena passed out, which I felt reflected badly on both of us.

But Kathleen Hicken seemed practically tickled when I found her in the kitchen and told her that Dena wasn’t feeling well and was resting. “Must be the sign of a successful party,” Kathleen said.

“I’ll give her half an hour,” I said.

“Oh, jeez, leave her until morning.” Kathleen waved a hand through the air. “You don’t want to wrestle her into bed by yourself.”

“Really?” I bit my lip. “If you honestly don’t mind, then I can walk home tonight and give her car keys to you so she has them tomorrow.”

“Well, she won’t need an alarm clock.” Kathleen smiled as she wiped down the counter with a rag. “The girls will make sure she’s awake before the rooster crows.”

IN THE YARD, the party seemed to be breaking up. Most people were standing, some had already taken off, and I joined the other women who were carrying in the bone-laden paper plates, the bowls of chips and empty wineglasses and beer cans. A few minutes later, when I went to thank Kathleen before leaving, I said, “Are you sure about Dena?” and she said, “Alice, don’t give it a thought.”

I thanked Cliff, too, collected my bag, peeked in at Dena—she was lying on her side, snoring—and walked out the front door; I lived about three quarters of a mile west of the Hickens. I had gone half a block when I heard quick footsteps behind me. I turned, and over my shoulder, I saw Charlie Blackwell. “Got somewhere better to be?” he asked.

“I’m pretty sure things were winding down,” I said.

“Fair enough. Can I offer you a ride?”

It was buggy out. I tried to scrutinize his face, which, in the glow cast by the streetlight a few yards away, was both flushed and sallow.

“How many drinks have you had?” I asked.

“You’re certainly direct.”

Since high school, I had never ridden in a car with a driver who might be so much as tipsy. “You know what?” I said. “I’ll walk. But it was nice to meet you.” When I turned around again, Charlie stayed beside me.

“You’ve at least got to let me escort you. There’s only so much rejection a fellow can withstand in one night, Alice.”

We continued walking, and he said, “I take it you’re not afraid of the dark?”

I gave him a sidelong glance. “Are you joking?”

“I’ll tell you a secret, but you’ve got to promise not to repeat it. You promise?” Without waiting for my reply, he said, “I’m terrified of the dark. Scares the living bejesus out of me. My parents have a place up in Door County, and I’d rather chew off my own leg than spend the night there alone.”

“What are you so afraid of ?”

“That’s just it—you have no idea what’s out there! But hey, you know what? I’m not scared right now, and it’s because you’re beside me. Dainty as you are, you seem extraordinarily capable. If something terrible befell us, I’m sure you’d take care of it.”

“Do you always lavish compliments on women you hardly know?”

“Hardly know you? Good God, I thought we were old friends by now.” He brought his hand to his heart as if wounded, then made a rapid recovery. “Here’s what I’ve got: Number one, you just bought a house by yourself, which means you’re independent and financially solvent. Number two, you’re already getting your school papers together even though it’s July, which means you’re responsible. Or you’re a liar, but I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt.” He was raising one finger for each point. “Number three, you’re a crackerjack charades player.” This was untrue; my enactment of The Sound of Music had been particularly abysmal. “Number four, either you have a boyfriend but are pretending not to because of your overpowering attraction to me, or you don’t have a boyfriend and are letting me down easy. Whichever it is, these are challenges I’m willing to surmount. In conclusion, I know all about you.” As we walked, I could feel Charlie looking at me, grinning. “I understand you, I sense a long and happy future for the two of us, and I’m sure you sense it, too. Oh, but you have to like baseball—you like baseball?”

“I wouldn’t say I’m a die-hard fan.”

“You will be.” Charlie swung an imaginary bat through the air. “The Brewers are finally pulling it together. A lot of young talent on the team, and you mark my words, this could be a winning season.”

“Truthfully,” I said, “the only reason I went to the Hickens’ party tonight was to help Dena catch your eye.”

“Dena?” He sounded puzzled. “You mean the divorcée?”

“Who told you that? No, never mind—you’re as bad as Rose and Jeanette. Dena’s a wonderful person. She was a flight attendant for more than five years, and she’s traveled the country.”

“Yet she still hasn’t learned to hold her liquor.”

“She didn’t have much to eat,” I said. “That’s why.”

“I’ll tell you what,” he said. “You can look at her face and know she’s done some hard living, but who am I to throw stones? She seemed like a perfectly nice girl. But she does not, if you catch my meaning, strike me as marriage material for a rising star of the Republican Party.”

His arrogance was really rather extraordinary; it was amusing, and it was also irritating. “I’m a registered Democrat,” I said. “That’s something you might want to include in your dossier on me. And I have to say that you’re remarkably confident for someone who’s about to run against a forty-year incumbent.”

Rather than being insulted, Charlie appeared delighted. “I always appreciate someone who’s done her research. You know who does seem like ideal wife material?” He pointed toward me.

“You’re ridiculous,” I said.

“How is it that a woman as—as lovely as you hasn’t been snapped up by now?”

“Maybe I don’t want to be snapped up,” I said. “Did that occur to you?” Needless to say, I wanted it very much: I wanted to get married and sleep in a bed with a man at night, I wanted to hold his hand while walking downtown, to prepare the meals for him that were too much trouble for one person—roast beef, and lasagna. I wanted children, and I knew I would be a good mother, not perfect but good, and I’d already decided I wouldn’t let my daughters have hair longer than chin-length because I’d seen in my students how it made them vain, the maintenance of one’s locks as a family project. Still, despite all this, it felt gratifying to lie to Charlie Blackwell.

“Don’t tell me you’re one of those feminists,” he said. “You couldn’t be, because you’re too pretty.”

I stared at him. “That’s not even worth dignifying, and frankly, I’m not sure why my romantic status is your business.”

“Oh, it’s most definitely my business. It’s my business because I’m bewitched by you.”

Part of the reason he was frustrating was that his comments were so close to what I wanted to hear from a man, but I wanted them to be real. I yearned for genuine emotion, not this banter and jest.

When we arrived in front of the house where I lived, Charlie said, “I think you ought to invite me in for a cup of coffee. There’s a rumor that I’m drunk.”

I shook my head in exasperation and let him follow me into the small entry hall and up the carpeted stairs to the second floor. He stood behind me as I unlocked the door to my apartment. In the kitchen, I went to turn on the coffeemaker when he said, “You got any beer? Because if it’s all the same to you, I’d prefer it.”

I pulled two cans of Pabst from the refrigerator and passed him one. When we’d pulled the tabs off, he tipped his can toward mine. “To Alice,” he said. “A woman of beauty, virtue, and outstanding taste in alcohol.”

“Has anyone ever told you you’re relentless?” I asked, and then I watched in horror as he walked out of the kitchen, down the hall, and toward the bedroom where I worked on my book characters.

“Please don’t go in—” I started to say, but he was well ahead of me and obviously not listening. Besides, the door to the room was open. When I caught up with him, he was standing in the room’s center, turning to look at the papier-mâché figures one by one.

“They’re for the library where I work,” I said, and my voice was loud in the silence. I couldn’t imagine how he’d react to the characters or even how I wanted him to. He was not, I reminded myself, the intended audience. He was quiet for a full minute, and then, in a completely serious tone, he said, “These are amazing.”

I swallowed.

“I recognize Ferdinand.” He pointed to the bull with flowers woven around his horns. “And that’s Mike Mulligan and his steam shovel, Mary Anne.”

“They’re not exactly to scale,” I said.

“I was madly in love with Mary Anne.” He grinned. “I just knew they’d be able to dig that cellar in one day. Oh, and Eloise—I always thought she was a pain in the ass.”

“Girls like her more than boys.”

“Who’s that?” He motioned with his chin toward the corner of the room, where bright green leaves—I’d cut them from a bolt of lurid silk fabric—hung atop a brown trunk.

“The Giving Tree,” I said. “It’s a book published when we were in high school, assuming—Well, how old are you?”

“Thirty-one,” he said. “Class of 1964.”

“Me, too. That’s the year The Giving Tree came out. It’s my favorite book. I’ve probably read it seventy times, and the end still always makes me cry.” Just describing the book, I could hear my voice thickening with emotion, and I felt embarrassed.

“Why would you want to cry seventy times?” Charlie said, but his tone was sweet, not mocking. He gestured to his right. “Who’s the Chinaman?”

“That’s Tikki Tikki Tembo. He’s a boy who falls down a well, and everyone who tries to get help for him has to repeat his name, which is really long. Tikki Tikki Tembo is actually the short version. His whole name is—Trust me, it’s long.”

“Now you have to say it.”

“Really?”

He nodded.

I took a breath. I rarely talked about my job when I was out on dates—though this was not, of course, a date. “Tikki Tikki Tembo-no sa rembo-chari bari ruchi-pip peri pembo,” I said, and when I finished, we were smiling at each other.

“One more time,” he said. I complied, and he said, “That’s most impressive.”

I bowed.

“Those kids you teach must be nuts about you,” he said.

“Well, I’m no fool. Students start rebelling against their teachers in junior high, but in elementary school, they’re fighting to sit on your lap.”

He regarded me—he was still in the center of the room, and I was just inside the door—and the only way I can describe the expression on his face is to say it was one of enchantment; I had no idea why, but Charlie Blackwell found me enchanting. And I recognized, with a pang that was at once sorrow, remorse, and the first stirring of hope, that it was a way no one had looked at me since Andrew Imhof. In the last fourteen years, I had been on plenty of dates, I’d been in relationships, I’d even been proposed to, but there was nobody I’d enchanted.

“Alice, what would you do if I kissed you right now?” Charlie said.

We looked at each other, and the room was filled with shyness and promise. After a long time, I said, “If you want to find out, I guess you’ll have to try.”

I’D MET SIMON Törnkvist at a shoe store when I was twenty-six; he was buying clogs, and I was buying Dr. Scholl’s sandals. He was six-four and slender, wore John Lennon–style glasses with gold frames and round lenses, and had floppy blond hair, a wispy blond beard, a droopy left eye contiguous to a scar running from the outer tip of his cheek-bone to below his ear, and an amputated left hand. His injuries were from Vietnam, which I guessed before he told me. Because he’d been left-handed, his writing looked childish; this was something I learned later.

As we sat in the store waiting for the salesman to return with shoes, I remarked on the unseasonably warm March weather. After we’d made our purchases, we stood on the sidewalk outside the store, continuing to talk. Perhaps ten minutes passed, and then he held up his left arm. He wore a long-sleeved rust-colored velour shirt, and the sleeve was folded under his elbow and pinned at his shoulder. He said, “Does this bother you?”

“No,” I said.

“Then would you like to see a movie sometime?”

We went to The Godfather, and I made sure to sit on his right side, in case he wanted to hold my hand, but he didn’t try. Afterward, we ate dinner at a pub on Doty Street, and he said he’d found the movie overrated, though he did not explain in what way. He was a year younger than I was—this surprised me, because upon meeting people, I had a silly tendency to think of those who were shorter than I was as younger and those who were taller as older—and he was working as the dispatcher for a plumbing company while taking classes at the university. He hadn’t decided on a major yet but was inclined, he said, toward philosophy or political science. He had grown up on a pea farm outside Oshkosh.

I didn’t find our conversation very interesting, but the entire time, I felt a sort of internal shuddering, as if my ribs were about to collapse and I had to concentrate fiercely to hold them aright. I recognized this sensation for what it was: physical attraction. Simon drove me home (I had wondered if he might have on his steering wheel what we’d called, growing up, a “necker’s knob”—Dena’s grandfather, who’d lost his right hand in a tractor accident, had had one—but Simon did not and was a perfectly competent driver with one hand), and outside my apartment I scooted across the seat and kissed his cheek. I had never made the first move, but the fact that Simon was a little younger emboldened me.

He seemed surprised but receptive, and we curled toward each other, he wrapped his right arm around me, and I hoped he would set his left arm on me, too, the stub, but he did not. I know now—I didn’t know it then, but years later, I read an article—that there are amputee fetishists, and while denying such an inclination in myself feels rather defensive, I sincerely don’t think that’s what it was. I recognize in retrospect that I wouldn’t have been attracted to him if not for his injuries. But it wasn’t the injuries, per se. It was that if he set his handless arm on my back, it would be an act of trust, he would make himself vulnerable in order to be closer to me, and it would give me the opportunity to show I was worthy of the risk he’d taken. Unjudgmentally, I would care for him.

The question he’d asked outside the shoe store notwithstanding, Simon himself didn’t appear all that self-conscious about his wounds. He also had scars, as I discovered over our next several dates, on the left side of his chest. In Phuoc Long Province, in the early winter of 1970, his company had been ambushed, and he had been hit by a rocket-propelled grenade. He was matter-of-fact about this, as about most everything; he referred more than once to the Vietnam War as “a bill of goods,” but he expressed his political views infrequently and succinctly. He was certainly not the first person I knew to have fought in Vietnam. More than a dozen boys from my class at Benton County Central High School had gone over, and Bradley Skilba had been killed in Tay Ninh in September 1968, three months after we graduated; in 1969 Yves Haakenstad had come home in a wheelchair, paralyzed below the waist; Randall Larson had died northeast of Katum in 1970. Sometimes I thought of how things might have been different if Andrew Imhof had gone over also—not an impossibility—and if it had been in Vietnam that he had died instead of at the intersection of De Soto Way and Farm Road 177. Probably it would have been easier for his family, I imagined; it would have felt like an honorable tragedy and not just a waste. Clearly, it would have been easier for me, without the suffocating guilt. But I’d still miss him, he’d still be gone, and in some ways, it would be worse to know it had happened in another country, that he’d been so far from home; in the end, it didn’t really seem a better sadness.

The first few times Simon and I had sex, it was flushed and protracted and new and exciting. Since Pete Imhof, I had slept only with Wade Trommler, whom I’d dated for two years in college; although we’d broken up when I turned down his marriage proposal the summer before we were seniors, I would always be grateful to Wade for his kindness and tenderness, for being so different from Pete. In the time since Wade, I had gone on dates here and there, and I’d often been able to sense when certain fellows would have asked me out, had I given them encouragement. But these men seemed to me, as Wade had, mostly innocent, boyish.

During my senior year in high school, I’d stopped thinking of marriage as my birthright. It wasn’t just that I no longer considered myself inherently deserving or that I no longer believed I was looked after by the universe. It was also that I would not want to marry a man unless I could show myself to him truly—I had no interest in tricking anyone—but I couldn’t imagine showing myself to most men, revealing myself as someone more complicated than I seemed. If thinking of the exertion and explanations that would require discouraged me, it also made me calm. I didn’t work myself up, as other women I knew did, panicking over finding Mr. Right. I accepted that the years to come would unfold in their way, that I could control only a few aspects of them. To remain alone did not seem to me a terrible fate, no worse than being falsely joined to another person.

Then I met Simon, who was a variation I hadn’t anticipated. He represented neither solitude nor phony bliss but some third possibility, a redemptive coupling. I thought this had to be the next best thing to being accepted completely—to completely accept someone else. I still partly agree with this notion, though the rest of what I thought about Simon, about my own capacity to take care of him, I now see as vain and wrongheaded.

We dated for eleven months, during which time we lived a mile and a half apart and saw each other twice a week. I was busy teaching, he was taking classes and working at the plumbing company, but that should have been another sign: It wasn’t that I was consciously unwilling to turn my schedule upside down for him, more that the thought never occurred to me. Although he had a younger sister who was married and a younger brother who was mentally retarded and lived with his parents on the farm, I didn’t ever meet anyone in his family. I did, however, after about three months, take him to have Sunday lunch in Riley. At the end of the visit, though the subject of Vietnam had not come up, my father—himself a veteran—shook his hand and said, “Young men like you are a credit to this country.” In the car back to Madison, Simon said, “Your father is painfully naive.”

Was I some kind of automaton? That’s what I wonder now, not just about that moment when I didn’t respond, but about all my time with Simon. But it appeared to be a relationship, it had all the contours and rituals, so who was to say it wasn’t? I made dinner for him Wednesdays, we went to a movie every Saturday night at the Majestic (he was the only person I knew besides my friend Rita Alwin, the French teacher, whom I never had to convince to see a foreign film), and following the movie, we went back to my place and had sex before he drove home around midnight. After the first few episodes, I did not climax regularly with Simon, but I attributed the erraticness more to an early abundance of excitement on my part than to a subsequent failure on his. We soon became used to each other, and if he was grumpy, then his grumpiness was a guiding force; to accommodate him was an opportunity. And I didn’t think this because of generational notions about gender, not really. I thought it because I was me, because he was him.

My parents seemed pleased. My mother wouldn’t bring herself to ask directly when we might get engaged, but she’d say, “Do you think if Daddy could help Simon get a job at the bank, would he be interested in that?” Or “Ginny Metzger told me that Arlette found a wedding dress with real lacework for seventy dollars at a bridal shop in Milwaukee.” Meanwhile, all my grandmother said was “He’s like Mr. Lloyd, isn’t he?” This was a reference to the licentious one-armed art teacher in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, and I knew it meant Simon had made an unfavorable impression on my grandmother. I did not realize how unfavorable for several months.

At Christmas that year—it was 1973—I was ironing a shirt in my grandmother’s room while she sat on her bed reading when she said, “You simply can’t marry that friend of yours.” She wasn’t even looking at me as she spoke.

I turned. “You mean Simon?”

“He’s a wet blanket.”

I was taken aback. “Granny, he’s been through a lot.”

She shook her head. “I’m not saying he hasn’t known difficulty, but I’ll bet he was a wet blanket even when he was a boy.”

“Are you suggesting I end things with him?”

My grandmother considered the question, then said, “I suppose I am.”

I was silent.

“With Dena down in Kansas City, who’ll give you a piece of their mind if I don’t?” my grandmother said. “Don’t be offended. I’m only thinking of your best interest.”

“Maybe you don’t want me to get married,” I said, and the part I did not say was to a man. My grandmother and I never discussed Gladys Wycomb, not even before or after my grandmother’s visits to Chicago. Following everything that had happened in the fall of 1963, my grandmother and I had wordlessly made peace—there was much I was indebted to her for—and over time, our interactions had returned to normal. But it was a normality that sometimes had to be attended to and guarded. I tried to be less judgmental, more deferential and considerate, than I had been as a teenager, and the very fact of my trying was evidence that things between us would never again be effortless.

“Why would I not want you to marry?” My grandmother scoffed. “That’s absurd. Marriage is no picnic, but it compares favorably to the alternative. I’ll tell you what the problems are with your beau. There are two.”

I felt torn, tempted to stop her before she could go any further, and also extremely curious to know what she thought.

“First,” she said, “he’s dull. He’s not lively. Now, plenty of women marry dull men, but your Simon isn’t kind, either, and that’s a terrible combination. Marrying a man who’s dull and nice is fine, or a man who’s cruel but fascinating—some people have an appetite for that. But marrying a man who’s ponderous and unkind is a recipe for unhappiness.”

As I listened to her, I felt my face flushing, and it wasn’t from the iron. “You scarcely know him,” I said.

“I’m a keen observer of human behavior. You dote on that young man, and he’s a cold fish. Listen—if you choose to marry him, I’ll sit in the church smiling, because I’ll know it’s a decision you made with your eyes wide open. But if I’d never said a word, I’d wonder if I could have prevented a great deal of heartache.”

“Well, you can’t be held responsible now.” I used a light tone, I meant to show I was willing to forgive her harsh remarks, but apparently, she didn’t yet wish to be forgiven.

“It’s very clear to me that this is about the Imhof boy,” she said. “You want to trade a dead boy for an injured man, and if I thought it would work, I’d let you try. It isn’t immoral. But it’s unrealistic. Misfortunes don’t cancel each other out.”

I thought, of course, that she was wrong about Simon. I thought it almost completely, then less so as days passed and her words continued to echo in my head; I remembered them one evening after dinner at an Italian restaurant, when I stood on tiptoe to kiss Simon before we climbed in the car, and he turned his head and said, “Your breath is too garlicky.”

Still, we continued to spend time together twice a week, and on a Wednesday night a month before our one-year anniversary, as I dished creamed chicken onto plates at my apartment, I said, “Do you ever think of us getting married?”

The chicken was steaming, and Simon had removed his glasses and was rubbing at the lenses with a napkin. He said, “Not really.”

I knew right away that both the conversation and our relationship were over, but the situation seemed to demand that I persist.

“Even though we’ve been dating for almost a year?”

“I don’t know if I believe in marriage.” He put his glasses back on. “It seems like a doomed institution. But I do know I definitely don’t want children.”

I’m not sure what expression I made in this moment (as much as I felt disappointed and caught off guard, I also felt just plain stupid—shouldn’t I have found this out about him months earlier, shouldn’t I have done my research?), but Simon said, “I take it you do want kids.”

“Simon, I’m a teacher. I wouldn’t work with them if I didn’t enjoy being around them.”

He set his hand on mine. “Let’s talk about this another time.”

Two weeks later, over the phone, he said, “I’m not sure we’re compatible in the long term,” and I said, “I think you might be right.” In this way, we completed perhaps the most bloodless breakup of all time. When I was home next, my grandmother said, “I know in my bones you made the right decision.” Because I didn’t want her to see me as pitiable, I simply nodded, never revealing that the decision had hardly been mine.

WITH CHARLIE AT my apartment until late the night before, I had gotten so little sleep that by the time I arrived in Riley early Sunday afternoon, I was giddy and guilt-ridden and exhausted; a headache had formed in a band above my eyes.

I noticed that my mother’s car, a cream-colored Ford Galaxie, wasn’t in the driveway. When I let myself in to the house, my grandmother was seated on the living room couch—my skinny, ageless grandmother, sustained on a diet of nicotine and literature—and she offered her cheek to me to kiss. “I think your mother has a secret,” she said.

“A good or bad one?”

My grandmother’s features formed an expression of both concentration and confusion, the sort you’d make if you were tasting a spice whose name you couldn’t remember. “I believe she might be having a romance with Lars Enderstraisse.”

“Mr. Enderstraisse the mailman?”

“He’s a decent-looking fellow. A bit portly, but he probably doesn’t eat right, living on his own.”

“You think Mom is dating Mr. Enderstraisse? Since when?” Mr. Enderstraisse had worked at the post office on Commerce Street since I was a child; he was a kind-seeming man with a walrus mustache and a rotund midsection.

“There’s no need to work yourself up,” my grandmother said. “Your mother is a mature woman, and she deserves to enjoy herself.”

“But how certain are you?”

“She’s been having lengthy phone conversations that she takes upstairs—to thwart my attempts at eavesdropping, I can only assume. And she runs mysterious errands. When I ask where she’s been, she’s quite vague.”

“How does Mr. Enderstraisse figure into this?”

“That’s where she is now. He has shingles, or so Dorothy claims, and she’s taken him some cold soup.”

“But if you know where she is, that’s not a mysterious errand.”

My grandmother frowned. “Don’t sass me.”

“I just meant—” I paused. “Granny, I might be having a romance, too.”

She perked up immediately.

“But Dena had dibs on the guy first, so I have no idea what to do. I really like him, even though I just met him last night.”

“Oh my word.” My grandmother crossed one leg over the other. “Bring me an iced tea, if you would, and then you can tell me the whole story.”

I poured iced tea for both of us from the pitcher in the refrigerator, carried the glasses back to the living room, and summarized the events of the previous night, skimming over Dena’s intoxication and Charlie’s extended visit to my apartment; I tried to imply, without saying it out-right, that we’d bade each other farewell after he’d walked me home. I was genuinely uncertain what my grandmother’s reaction would be, given her fondness for Dena. Never a particular Dena fan when I was growing up, my grandmother had developed a soft spot for her the summer I’d graduated from college. This was 1968, and my grandmother had announced to me one afternoon that she’d like to try marijuana; she was hearing a lot about it. I hadn’t previously tried pot myself, and without enthusiasm, I’d approached Dena when she was next in town—as a stewardess, she could fly free into Milwaukee, then come to visit me in Madison or go home to Riley—and the time after that, when my parents were at a fish fry, the three of us sat in my grandmother’s bedroom, smoking a joint. “While I’m having trouble seeing what all the fuss is about,” my grandmother said, “I’m very grateful to you girls for satisfying my curiosity.” When the joint was gone, she lit a normal cigarette.

After I finished my description of meeting Charlie, my grandmother took a sip of her iced tea. “That certainly is awkward for you and Dena.”

“Do you think I shouldn’t see him again?”

She set the glass down on a cork coaster on the end table. “I wouldn’t rush to a decision. See how the situation evolves.”

“I don’t even know if he’ll call, but meeting him made me feel hopeful—I can’t really describe it.”

“He was good company,” my grandmother said.

Was it that simple? And if it was, why did it feel so rare? From outside, I heard the approach of my mother’s car.

“Don’t breathe a word about Lars Enderstraisse.” My grandmother pinched her thumb and forefinger together and ran them across her mouth. “Zip your lip.”

THAT NIGHT, MY grandmother had gone upstairs by eight P.M., and my mother and I sat in front of The Six Million Dollar Man, though neither of us was really watching: She was needlepointing an eyeglasses case, and I was flipping through my grandmother’s latest issue of Vogue. During a commercial break, I turned to her. “Mom, if you ever want to start dating—”

Before I could go further, she said, “Where on earth did you get that idea?”

“I’m not saying you should or shouldn’t, but if you did—if you feel like you’re ready—no one will disapprove.”

“Alice, think how your father would feel to hear you talk like that.” She set down her needlepoint and walked out of the room, and as I was wondering how deeply I’d offended her, she returned with her left hand clenched in a fist. When she’d sat beside me again, she uncurled her fingers, revealing a gold brooch. “Can you sell this for me?”

It was shaped like a tree branch, the leaves encrusted with tiny diamonds, and one small round garnet—meant to resemble an apple, or perhaps a berry—hung down. I had never seen it before.

“It belonged to my mother, but I don’t have any use for it,” she said.

“It must be nice to have as a keepsake, though.” My mother seemed to have so few tangible ties to her family that it was hard to understand why she’d get rid of one. She passed me the brooch, and I touched the garnet with my fingertip; it was cool and smooth. “You could wear it to church on Christmas,” I said, and without warning, my mother burst into tears. “Mom, what’s wrong?” I set my hand on her back. I had not seen my mother cry since shortly after my father’s death.

“I’ve made such a mess of things,” she said.

“What are you talking about?”

“I had a misapprehension from the beginning. But you want to give a young person the benefit of the doubt, and I thought it could be an opportunity to create a nest egg not just for Granny and me but for you, too, because you work so hard at the school. And he said the annual returns get up to three hundred percent.”

“Who’s he? Start at the beginning.” Although an anxious tingle had risen on my skin, I felt that it was important for one of us to remain calm. “I want to help you, Mom, but I need to understand what’s happened.”

“It’s a fellow about your age. He came by, and he was very nice, very intelligent.”

“So you gave him some money?” I strove to keep emotion from my voice.

“I made a dreadful mistake.” The tears seized her again, and I said, “Mom, it’s okay. We’ll sort it out. I just have to ask, how much did you give him?”

“From your father—from his insurance—” Her voice was shaky.

The tingling had turned into goose bumps covering my entire body. “Money from Dad’s life insurance policy?” I asked, and she nodded. “Did you give him all of it?”

“Oh, honey, I wouldn’t do that.”

“Then how much?” It was astonishing to me that I sounded as neutral as I did.

“Originally, he asked for ten thousand dollars, but I told him I wouldn’t recruit other investors. I said, ‘I don’t know about finances, and I won’t pretend I do.’ He said if I made a double investment, he’d make an exception for me, because most people have to recruit.”

“So you gave him twice as much money?”

Tears pooled again in her eyes, and she said, “Alice, I’m so ashamed. I don’t know what on earth I was thinking—I just—”

“Mom, please don’t get upset. I’m wondering, was there anything you were buying? Was it stock, or real estate, or some kind of product?”

“It was an investment fund.”

“I can’t help thinking,” I said slowly, “could it have been a pyramid scheme?”

“Oh, certainly not.” For the first time in several minutes, my mother’s tone was firm. “No, no. It was an investment fund, and the money would come back when new members joined.”

“So maybe it still will make money—”

She was shaking her head. “He couldn’t get enough people to join, but he had to pay the administrative costs.”

“Who is this guy? This sounds incredibly fishy to me.”

“I know, honey. I wish I didn’t make the double investment, but if I’d encouraged my friends to do it, oh, I would feel so much worse now.”

“So besides what’s left of Dad’s life insurance policy, are there other savings you have?”

“Heavens, Alice, Granny and I won’t end up on the street, if that’s what you’re worried about. If worse comes to worst, we can take out a home equity loan. You know Daddy’s bank will give us the most favorable rate, although to spare him the embarrassment, I’d have half a mind to go somewhere else. Oh, he’d be appalled at what I’ve done.”

A home equity loan? I still couldn’t figure out what she had left in savings, nor did I know how much their monthly expenses were, but I feared that if I forced my mother to provide numbers, it would undo her.

“You can’t beat yourself up,” I said. “You were trying to take care of you and Granny, and that’s exactly what Dad would want you to do.”

“He was such a responsible man. Do you know I get half his pension every month, and when I’m sixty-two, I’ll get his social security as well?” This would be in 1987, which seemed so far away that it provided me with little comfort. “You mustn’t mention anything to your grandmother,” my mother was saying. “At her age, we can’t have her worrying.”

“Fine, but it sounds like this investment guy should go to prison. I know you’re embarrassed, but I think you should report him.”

An expression crossed my mother’s face in this moment, a look of fake innocence I had never seen on her.

“We don’t—” I hesitated. “We don’t know him, do we?”

“Honey, that hardly matters.”

“Mom, you need to tell me who it was.”

“Riley is such a small town, and you know how people talk,” she said, and I thought of having made a similar observation to Charlie Blackwell about Madison. But it was truer, much truer, of Riley. “After we sell the brooch, we’ll see where that leaves us,” my mother continued. “It’s Victorian, you know, which means it’s valuable. If I can make up some of what I lost, we’ll pretend it never happened.”

“Mom, who did you invest the money with?”

She did not seem angry at all, which was more than I could say for myself; she just seemed sad and tired. “I don’t want to get anyone in trouble, do you understand? You can’t tell a soul. I’m sure he didn’t mean harm, but he was inexperienced, and he got ahead of himself.” She seemed to consider a few more rationalizations, but in the end, she simply said, “It was Pete Imhof.”

AFTER A FITFUL night in my childhood bed, I ate the bacon and eggs my mother prepared for breakfast, and we did not acknowledge our conversation of the night before; my grandmother was still asleep upstairs. When I finished breakfast, I read The Riley Citizen, and as soon as my mother left the kitchen, I leaped up and opened the drawer where she kept the phone book. He was listed, his number and an address on Parade Street. A few minutes later, I took off on foot; I told my mother that, driving into Riley the previous afternoon, I’d seen a blouse I liked in one of the windows downtown.

Given that it was a Monday, my going over there before five o’clock, when he’d be at work, didn’t seem to serve much purpose, but I was so agitated that I was reluctant to be around my mother or grandmother. I’d walk by his place first, I thought, figure out exactly where it was, and then return in the afternoon to try to catch him before I left town. If I didn’t speak to him, I’d need to stay another night, which I wasn’t keen to do; among other reasons, I couldn’t help wondering if Charlie Blackwell would call, and if he did, I wanted to be in Madison. (Courtship before the widespread use of answering machines, before voice mail or e-mail—how quaint it seems now.)

When thoughts of Charlie came to me, as they had repeatedly in the last twenty-four hours, I’d have the feeling of a pat of butter melting in a hot pan. Our initial kiss had lasted for several minutes, and eventually, we’d ended up sitting on the couch and then lying on it, me on my back with my head on the armrest, and him on top of me. We had talked and talked and kissed and kissed, his mouth warm and wet and familiar and new, and sometimes we’d just looked at each other, our faces ridiculously close together, and smiled. We both were old enough to know how unlikely this was to last or become anything genuine, but that probably made us enjoy it more, the awareness that it might only be these few hours. Lying beneath him, I felt tremendously happy.

Just past midnight, he said, “I think I’d better leave in the next five minutes, before I abandon my gentlemanly act and try to seduce you.”

Although we both had on all our clothes, my bra had come unfastened along the way, and as he spoke, he had an erection. And certainly we could sleep together, people did that now, it was 1977. A diaphragm (not the one given to me by Gladys Wycomb but a newer version) sat inside a toiletry case in the cabinet beneath my bathroom sink, unused since Simon. But this was the first time in my life I’d been tempted to have sex with a man the night we met, and I was only half tempted—it would be like leapfrogging over the normal stages of getting acquainted. Besides, Dena would never speak to me again.

A little reluctantly, I said, “Maybe you should kiss me good night and ask if I’m free later this week.”

“Hold on a second.” He feigned shock. “You mean to tell me you can squeeze in a date in between all the library preparation?”

“That’s not very nice.” I turned my head to the side, glancing back at him from under my eyelashes. “I wanted to accept when you asked me out earlier. I just thought I shouldn’t because of Dena.”

“I’m glad you reconsidered.” When I turned my head again, he was grinning, and the force of his grin was almost enough to obliterate the idea of Dena’s wrath.

But he didn’t ask me out again before he left, we didn’t make a firm plan, and as soon as he was gone, I wished we had. I didn’t specifically think that I liked Charlie Blackwell, but it was the same as wondering where to put my furniture in the house on McKinley before realizing I wanted the house itself. Except, I thought now, how could I buy a house when my mother’s financial situation had become so precarious? Wouldn’t I be better off keeping my money in savings in case the problem was even worse than I thought?

And what about Dena? As I headed east on Commerce Street, away from the Riley River, my betrayal of her seemed far starker without Charlie present to distract me. I needed to talk to her. First I needed to think of what to say, then I needed to talk to her. No, first I needed to figure out what was happening with Charlie, if he was nothing but a flirt, or if we really would see each other again, then I needed to think of what to say to Dena, then I needed to talk to her.

Walking up Commerce, I passed Jurec Brothers’ butcher shop, Grady’s Tavern, and Stromond’s bakery, where, if you were under the age of twelve, they gave you a free sugar cookie in the shape of a dog bone. In the space that had once been occupied by the fabric shop, there was now a Chinese restaurant—a Chinese restaurant in Riley!—and I had heard that Ruth Hofstetter, the comely fabric-shop clerk whose single status into her late twenties had confused and saddened my mother and me, had later become the shop’s proprietress before selling it altogether when she married a widowed farmer in Houghton. Ruth was probably in her early forties now, I thought, and the age difference between us struck me as significantly smaller than when I was in high school and she was twenty-seven or twenty-eight. It had occurred to me recently that I could marry a man in his forties or even his fifties, as I was pretty sure Ruth had, especially if I didn’t marry anytime soon. And this seemed not so much objectionable as impossibly hard to fathom. How could you, if it was your first wedding, marry an old man? How could you still carry within yourself the you of your girlhood, your ideas of satin dresses and white lilies, yet be joined to a groom with fleshy hands, age spots, thinning gray hair? Dick Cimino had been forty-eight when Dena had married him, though in her case, that had sort of been the point, May-December, a sugar daddy to bestow on her gifts and attention.

The answer to how Ruth had done it, I supposed, was that she was older, too; if you married an older man, you were older, and you looked older. You were not so different from him. Or, inversely, he carried inside him a younger self, his droops and wrinkles felt like a costume.

Where Commerce crossed Colway Avenue, I could feel a shift in the neighborhood. Not that it was seedy, none of Riley was truly seedy, but there were more houses here with peeling paint, ratty indoor furniture on their front porches. The sun had gone behind a cloud, but it was still hot.

I turned onto Parade Street, checking the numbers. His address was a two-story structure with gray vinyl siding; it clearly had been built as apartments without ever having been a house. My heart beat rapidly as I tried the main door, which was not locked, and then I was standing in an entryway with gray walls, a blue linoleum floor, and a wooden staircase covered by a clear plastic runner. The hall smelled of old cigarette smoke. His door was along the left wall of the first floor, and I thought before I rang the bell that he would be home after all, because if you lived in a place this dingy, you probably didn’t have a job, and then I thought that was a snobby observation on my part and no doubt incorrect, and then he opened the door.

He seemed surprised, but in a faintly amused way, to find me standing there. “Alice Lindgren,” he said. “It’s been a long time.”

Although I was nervous, I was angry, too, and my anger guided me. “How could you?” I blurted out.

He actually smiled, which infuriated me more. He was wearing a white tank top, cutoff jeans, and flip-flops, and he had grown a dark, dense beard and gained perhaps forty pounds since I’d seen him last. (Once, getting milk shakes at Tatty’s with Betty Bridges when I was home from college, I’d spotted him across the restaurant, sitting at the counter with his back to us, and I had hardly moved or spoken until he left half an hour later. Other than that, I had not laid eyes on him in nearly fourteen years.)

He ambled to the couch where it seemed he’d been sitting before—the television beside me was on, showing The Price Is Right (Pete Imhof watched The Price Is Right?), and on the coffee table in front of the couch was an incomplete Riley Citizen crossword puzzle with an uncapped pen lying sideways atop it and an ashtray, the smoke still rising from a just-stubbed cigarette. Only after he’d lit a fresh one, inhaled, and released smoke through his nostrils did he say, “Business deals go south all the time.”

“Pete, it was clearly a scam!”

“Since when are you an expert on asset management?” He looked indignant, and for the first time, it occurred to me that this hadn’t been intentional. He had gone to my mother because, presumably, he’d heard my father had died, he’d guessed she’d have received an inheritance, and he’d been trying to raise money for this scheme. But he really might have thought it would turn out to be profitable. Perhaps it hadn’t been just to spite me.

“Whatever it was,” I said, “you don’t involve vulnerable people in a risky venture. My mother needs that money to live off, and to support my eighty-two-year-old grandmother.”

“Alice, I lost out, too. Thirty-five grand, in fact, which is a lot more than anyone else.”

“You need to repay my mother.” I tried to sound firm and persuasive.

He snorted. “You can’t squeeze blood from a turnip.”

“Then find some other way to fix the situation.”

“If I hear of an opportunity in the future she might be interested in—”

“Don’t even think about contacting her again.”

“You seem to be having trouble making up your mind.” I glared at him, and he added, “Why don’t you relax?” He extended the pack of cigarettes to me—they were Camels—and I shook my head. “If you’d prefer a beer, I’ve got plenty,” he said. “It’s early in the day, but I don’t judge.”

I folded my arms in front of my chest.

“Hey, I see you’re not wearing a wedding ring,” he said. “You still single?”

I stared at him, and my rage was like a storm inside me, a hurricane of fury. I thought of him calling me a whore that day at his family’s house; it was a memory I’d never forgotten but one I tried to store as far back in my mind as possible.

“I can think of something that might take the edge off.” He was smirking. “Be fun for both of us.”

“You’re repulsive,” I said.

“That’s not what you used to think.” He smiled, and when I didn’t return the smile, his expression grew sour. “Forget about the money, Alice. Your mother’s a grown woman, married her whole life to a banker, for Christ’s sake. That deal had a lot of potential, but not enough people came on board, and we had to cut our losses.”

“That isn’t satisfactory,” I said.

We looked unpleasantly at each other, and he shook his head. “You have some nerve, I gotta say. What are you really accusing me of here, fucking over your family? When you of all people should understand that mistakes happen.”

It was his ace card. And hadn’t I, in my way, forced it? Because then the situation could, at core, be my fault instead of his, and I could feel guilt instead of anger. And wasn’t guilt much more ladylike, didn’t it fit me far more comfortably? Yes, no matter what Pete Imhof did or said, no matter how manipulative or crude, I would always have done worse. This knowledge was what prevented me from upending his coffee table, from throwing his ashtray across the room or clawing his face. As I left his apartment, all I said was “Never come near any of us.”

I MADE IT a few blocks before I began to cry, and I was so worried about being seen by someone I knew that I immediately ducked into the narrow alley between two houses; presumably, I was trespassing. I stood there, leaning against one house’s white aluminum siding, and my shoulders shook, and I was grateful for the blasting noise of an airconditioning unit above my head. It wasn’t even that I believed I didn’t deserve to be punished; sure, I deserved it. Almost fourteen years had passed since the evening I’d slammed my car into Andrew Imhof’s—the dread that gathered in me every late August, as September approached, would come in a few weeks, as reliable in its annual arrival as dogwood blossoms or fireflies—and Andrew would still be dead, and I would still be shocked by the enormity of my mistake. Andrew would always be dead, and I would always be shocked. It never went away.

And the problems that had arisen for me in the last forty-eight hours, my mother losing twenty thousand dollars while I unexpectedly found myself drawn to a man Dena was interested in—what right did I have to complain about either situation? On the whole, I was far more lucky than unlucky. But it was hard not to wonder what I could have done differently, how I could have prevented this sequence of events. I went out of my way to be considerate and responsible; it wasn’t as if I didn’t care what people thought or how they felt.

Don’t, I told myself. Don’t be self-pitying. You’re fine. The tears had begun drying up—really, the older I got, the less I cried in either frequency or duration. Be practical. Think of which steps you need to take, address each problem on its own without lumping them together. You have not committed a new wrong toward Andrew; it is only the same wrong arising again. You can’t undo anything; you have to live your life forward, trying not to cause additional unhappiness. Immediately, it was clear to me that I couldn’t go through with my purchase of the house on McKinley and that even if Charlie did call, I couldn’t see him again; there were my solutions, and they hadn’t been remotely difficult to figure out.

I swallowed, wiped my eyes with a tissue from my purse, and stepped out from between the houses. Long ago, I had become my own confidante.

I HADN’T DECIDED ahead of time to do so—I’d had the dim notion that I’d go to a store that sold estate jewelry—but on 94 heading into Madison, after I’d passed the third billboard for the same pawnshop, I pulled off. It surprised me that the proprietor was a woman or that, at any rate, it was a woman behind the counter that afternoon. The aisles were cramped with television sets and stereos, with motorcycles and leather jackets and, on a shelf behind glass, a large jade Buddha.

My mother had given me the brooch by itself, not even wrapped in brown paper, and as I passed it to the woman, I immediately wished I’d waited and put it first in one of the three or four small velvet jewelry boxes I’d acquired over the years (they always seemed too nice to throw away). That surely would have given the brooch a classier aura.

“I’d like to sell this,” I said. I thought it best to speak as little as possible, lest I reveal my ignorance of pawn lingo. I was the only customer in the shop, so at least I didn’t have an audience.

The woman was about my mother’s age, wearing several bracelets and rings (her nails were long and dark red) and a large silver cross on a silver chain. Her hair was a brassy shade, short but voluminous, and her voice was deep and friendly. “Hot as blazes out there, huh?” she said as she inspected the brooch.

“Wisconsin in July,” I said agreeably. Please, I thought. Please, please, please.

She was peering at the brooch through a magnifying glass. “I’m taking my granddaughter swimming this evening, I bet you the beach is packed. I’ll give you ninety bucks for it.”

I blinked. She looked up, and I tried to compose my face in a normal way.

“Really, you don’t think—” I paused. “I’m pretty sure it’s Victorian.” Standing there next to an oversize television set, I sounded ridiculous even to myself.

“Ninety bucks,” the woman repeated, and she seemed a degree less friendly. Surely she had heard countless stories of financial woe; flintiness was a quality that would serve her well.

I took back the brooch. “I’d like to think about it.”

“Offer’s good till eight tonight. After that, bring it in, and it gets reappraised.”

“Thank you for your help.” And then, because I didn’t want to seem desperate or resentful, because I didn’t want to be desperate or resentful, I added before I stepped outside again, “Enjoy swimming.”

I CALLED NADINE from my kitchen, and when I’d identified myself, she said, “How’s tricks?”

“I feel terrible doing this,” I began. “I’m so sorry, especially after how hard you worked to help me find the right house, but can we retract the bid? We can, right? That’s legal? And the seller just keeps the earnest money?” I had put down five hundred dollars for this—not nothing, but a good deal less than a down payment and a monthly mortgage would be.

“Are you pulling my leg?” Nadine asked.

What I felt most aware of in this moment, far more than the loss of the house, was the social awkwardness of reneging on a person who’d been good to me. Equally powerfully, I felt a fear that I wouldn’t be able to renege, that it was already too late.

“Alice, everyone has second thoughts.” Nadine sounded upbeat. “Here’s what I want you to do. Make a list of your concerns, and we’ll go through them together and see if they check out. Buying a house is a big step, but I know you’ll be happy as a clam.”

“I can’t buy the house,” I said. “Something has come up.”

“Are you worried about the inspection?” Nadine asked.

“It’s not this house. I can’t buy any house.”

For a long, excruciating moment, Nadine was silent. Then she said, “You know, there are some nutso clients out there, but I never thought you were one of them.”

“I’m sincerely grateful for your help,” I said. I did not consider telling her the reason for my change of heart—it would have been a violation of my mother’s privacy—but I decided that later in the week, I would write Nadine a note. That would make the situation at least a little better. “I’m wondering if there’s a penalty besides the earnest money. Do I need to pay you any sort of fee?”

“Nope.” Her voice was cold in a way I had never heard. “You’re free to walk away. All you gave was your word.”

I WAS IN my apartment working on Babar—he wore a papier-mâché green suit and red bow tie, a yellow papier-mâché crown—and I was delighted with how he’d turned out, except for the not insignificant problem that the weight of his trunk made his whole head fall forward, as if he were asleep. My solution was to attach a weight to a string around his neck; the weight, which in this trial run was a can of chicken noodle soup from my cupboard, would be hidden behind his back, but unfortunately, the string was still visible and looked like a very small noose. Maybe a better solution, I thought, would be to attach some sort of wire loop to the back of his head (I could set him against a wall so the children wouldn’t see it) and then to run a hook from the wall to the loop. As I considered all this, there unfolded in my mind a simultaneous consideration of Charlie Blackwell and how he hadn’t called yet and how, if he didn’t call at all, it would be insulting—it would show he hadn’t really been interested in me, he’d just been hoping to spend the night—but it would also make things far simpler; I wouldn’t have to explain to him why we couldn’t see each other again. Either way, I had decided not to say anything about him to Dena. To confess would be indulgent, an attempt to absolve myself more than to enlighten her. As my brain skipped among Babar and Charlie and Dena, the phone rang and my heart seized a little (Charlie?), but when I answered, it was Dena who said, “If you come over tonight, I’ll make ratatouille. I have an eggplant that’s about to turn against me.”

“What can I bring?” I asked.

“I never say no to a bottle of wine. Shit, I have a customer. Let me call you in a second.”

A few minutes later, the phone rang again. “Red goes better with ratatouille, right?” I said.

There was a pause, and then Charlie said, “Alice?”

I felt dual surges of pleasure and anxiety. “Sorry—I was expecting someone else.”

“Should I call you back?”

“No—no, I mean—” I paused. “I can talk now, if you can.”

“Well, I did call you.” He sounded amused.

There was a silence, and at the same time, he said, “What’s up?” and I said, “I’m working on Bab—” We both paused, to let the other reply first.

Finally, he said, “So I had a thought about our plans tonight.”

We had plans tonight? It was Tuesday, the night he’d first suggested, but hadn’t I declined that invitation, and hadn’t he neglected to offer another?

“I’m thinking the Gilded Rose,” he continued. “I have a speaking engagement up in Waupun, so if you don’t mind, let’s make it on the late side. Eight-thirty all right with you?”

The Gilded Rose was the fanciest restaurant in Madison, practically the only fancy restaurant, and I had never been; my friend Rita, who’d been taken there by her nephew and his wife, had told me they had a shrimp cocktail for five dollars. “Charlie, I can’t go out with you,” I said.

“Haven’t we been through this already?”

“I had a chance to think about it, and it’s not that you aren’t appealing or that I’m not—” I paused, but there wasn’t much reason not to be frank with him, especially if it would spare his feelings. “It’s not that I’m not attracted to you. But Dena is my best friend, and this would be unfair to her.”

“That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.”

I had expected him to agree, or at least to see this as an argument not worth having. I was making myself seem neurotic, and why would he persist with someone who showed her neuroses so quickly? But his utter dismissal of my concerns wasn’t insulting; on the contrary, it gave me a lift of happiness, a hope that he might be right. This hope ran against my certainty that he was not.

“I met your friend about ten minutes before I met you,” he said. “If she thinks she staked some kind of claim on me, she’s crazy, and if you believe her, you’re even crazier than she is.”

“Charlie, questioning a woman’s sanity probably isn’t the most effective way of wooing her,” I said. He laughed, an embarrassed laugh. “But I bet our paths will cross again,” I continued, “so how about if we say goodbye as friends?”

“You know the last time I invited a girl to the Gilded Rose?” He still didn’t sound annoyed; he sounded determined. “Never. I’m a stingy dude, but that’s how hard I’m trying to win you over.”

“I’m flattered, Charlie, I really—”

“Okay, how about this,” he interrupted. “Forget dinner. Come to my speech. It won’t be a date, it’ll be a civic field trip.”

“Your speech tonight?”

“It’s one of those Lions Club gigs. Didn’t you mention that you enjoy listening to people who have nothing to say?”

“Is this because you’re running for Congress?”

“Who says I’m running for Congress? This is how rumors get started, sweetheart.” He was all breeziness and good cheer; when I was talking to him, the world did not seem like such a complicated place. “I promise it won’t be a date,” he said. “We’ll have a lodge full of septuagenarian farmers chaperoning us.”

“Are women even allowed at those things?”

“You kidding me? The Lions love their Lionesses. I gotta go up early and talk with a few folks, so if you’re okay meeting there, the address is 2726 Oak Street, right off Waupun’s main drag. Speech starts at seven.” I could hear him grinning. “Earplugs are optional.”

THAT AFTERNOON, I went by a store near the capitol that sold not only estate jewelry but also antiques. I felt more comfortable there than I had at the pawnshop, but the man behind the counter—he was about sixty, a thin fellow with a thin mustache and exaggerated inflections that made me almost sure he was homosexual—offered me seventy-five dollars for my mother’s brooch.

“But it’s real, isn’t it?” I said. Here, I was less shy of showing my ignorance about jewelry resale.

“It’s fourteen-carat,” he said. “It contains more base metal than gold. I’d guess it’s Victorian.”

At the pawnshop, my unrealistic sense of hope, my hunch that the brooch probably couldn’t solve my mother’s financial problems but my lack of certainty that this was so—they had made me vulnerable, priming me for disappointment. This time my expectations were low. I wouldn’t try to convince this man of anything.

UPON HANGING UP after my conversation with Charlie, I’d called Dena and asked if we could postpone the ratatouille until the following night—I’d claimed I’d forgotten that I had prior plans with Rita Alwin—and Dena had said, “Okay, but I’m warning you that the eggplant’s best days are behind it.” I tried to justify the lie by telling myself that when we’d been on the phone earlier, she’d hardly given me the chance to confirm that I could come. But this felt like a weak defense, and I was uneasy as I showered and applied mascara and lipstick. My mood lifted in the car, though—Jimmy Buffett was on the radio, and it really was a nice time for driving, the evening sun a fuzzy gold medallion over the fields.

The Waupun Lions Club was a low brick building that shared a parking lot with a title company. When I walked inside just before seven, about forty people were sitting in sixty chairs, and most members of the audience were in the rows farther from the front. (Something I was to learn quickly is that a turnout’s success can always be judged proportionally. It is better to have twenty-five people and twenty chairs than a hundred and fifty people and six hundred chairs. Though now, I also must confess, the idea of a public audience of either twenty-five or a hundred and fifty makes me quite nostalgic.) I sat halfway back in an aisle seat, and when Charlie saw me—he was standing in front by the podium, wearing a blue-and-white-seersucker jacket, khaki pants, a wide-collared white shirt, and a fat red-and-brown-striped tie—he gestured for me to come closer. In as unobvious a way as I could manage, I shook my head. He tilted his head—Why not?—and I had a flashing realization of how little we knew each other. If he thought I was a person who’d want to sit in the front row or, heaven forbid, a person who’d like to be singled out in any way during a speech, then he had no sense of me whatsoever.

He was introduced by a gentleman who identified himself as the club president, and upon my hearing Charlie’s biography, I was also reminded of how little I knew him; as the summary of his degrees and accomplishments gained momentum, it occurred to me that I didn’t have the slightest idea what his job was, or whether gearing up to run for Congress was a job by itself. He had graduated from Princeton University in 1968, I learned, and worked from ’68 to ’73 in the hospitality industry out west. Then he’d gone on to the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, graduating in 1975. (Business school? I thought.) For the last two years, he’d been executive vice president of Blackwell Meats, where he oversaw product management and sales (so he did have a job) and was currently making his home in Houghton. But wait a second—Houghton?

Charlie stood before the podium and adjusted the microphone. “Those of us in Wisconsin’s Sixth District are a strong citizenry,” he said. “We are a self-reliant people, a salt-of-the-earth people, proud but not prideful, forward-looking but respectful of the past.”

I turned my head to the left, scanning the faces in my row. How could anyone mistake this for anything other than a campaign speech? Not that, as a campaign speech, it was bad. He wasn’t electrifying, but he seemed confident and intelligent, and—I could admit it now—he was remarkably good-looking. “It is no secret that we face challenges,” he was saying. “Our state needs more jobs, more comprehensive health care, fewer expenses for working families. These have long been priorities for all Blackwells, and they are important priorities for me.”

When he was finished, questions came from a few men (except for two grandmotherly types, the audience was all men), but it was a typical midwestern audience, polite and deferential. Even the most potentially confrontational question—“How about if you drum up some jobs by opening a Blackwell factory here in Waupun?”—seemed to be meant as a joke or was, at any rate, met with laughter. I stayed in my seat until the lodge had cleared out, leaving only Charlie, the club president who’d introduced him, another man who began folding up the chairs, and a younger man who was standing next to Charlie. From my purse, I pulled the book I was reading—Rabbit Redux, which I had started the night before—and after a few minutes, the young man approached me. When he was still a few feet away, he stuck out his hand. “Hank Ucker. You must be Marian the Librarian.”

“Alice Lindgren,” I said, standing to accept his handshake. I didn’t acknowledge the Marian reference—I heard them often, usually from men and especially from men I’d just met. The references tended, of course, to be accompanied by allusions to buns, glasses, and frigidity that concealed sexual wildness.

Hank Ucker gestured toward my Updike novel. “I’ve always enjoyed a good animal story.”

In fact, Rabbit Redux was about a man in Pennsylvania whose marriage has foundered, but I did not correct him. Hank Ucker was shorter than Charlie, an inch or so taller than I was, with a receding hairline, intelligent and slightly squinty eyes behind tortoiseshell glasses, a large upturned nose, and the beginning of a double chin. Although I assumed he, too, was about thirty, he was one of those men who looked like he’d been born middle-aged; indeed, over the decades to come, his appearance would change little, and in his fifties, he was almost baby-faced. “A fine speech on the part of our friend Blackwell,” he said. “Wouldn’t you agree?”

“Will you be working on his campaign?” I asked.

Mock-oblivious, Hank Ucker said, “What campaign?”

I hesitated.

“I’m kidding,” he said. “Although we’re keeping a lid on it for now, the better to make a bang when it’s official. You haven’t been married before, have you?”

I blinked at him.

“I ask because you’re so beautiful,” he added, and the absence of any flirtatious energy behind the comment was striking. “I’d imagine a woman like you has many suitors.”

“Are you married, Mr. Ucker?”

“Hank, please, and yes, I am.” He held up the back of his left hand and wiggled his fingers, showing off a gold band. “The Mrs. and I just celebrated our fifth anniversary.”

“Congratulations.”

“It’s an institution I highly recommend, or maybe you’ve experienced firsthand its myriad pleasures?” He said this jovially—he was jovial, he was practically cherubic—but he also came across as entirely calculating. In a tone just as cheerful as his, I said, “I’m almost certain I haven’t been married,” and this was when Charlie came up behind Hank, setting both hands on Hank’s shoulders for a three-second massage.

“Don’t listen to a word this man says,” Charlie said, and then I could tell that he was deciding whether to kiss me on the cheek, trying to figure out if it would be too forward or public. Instead, he took my hand and squeezed it. Slowly, not showily, I pulled my hand away from his.

As the three of us began walking toward the front doors of the lodge, I said, “I enjoyed your speech.”

Charlie shrugged. “Could have been better, could have been worse. Might’ve helped if the audience wasn’t comatose.” We still were just inside the lodge, and across the room, the club president was unplugging the microphone. I wondered, as Charlie did not seem to, if he could hear us.

“This is all warm-up, Alice,” Hank said, pushing the lodge door open. “Think tonight times a thousand, and that ought to give you some idea.”

Charlie elbowed me lightly. “Don’t bother, Ucks. She’s not easily impressed.”

Standing in the parking lot, Hank said, “An honor meeting you, Alice.” He took my right hand and kissed the back of it. This was both aggressive and parodic, though I wasn’t sure what it was a parody of.

Charlie tossed Hank a set of keys. “Talk in the morning, big guy?”

“You know where to find me,” Hank said. He walked a few feet away, then turned back. “In case you’re worried, Alice, Harry and Janice get back together at the end.”

I must have looked at him blankly, because he pointed toward the novel I still was carrying outside my purse and said, “Redux is a more mature work than Rabbit, Run, but frankly, I found both books self-indulgent.”

“You’d know about self-indulgence, huh, Ucks?” Charlie said as Hank headed to his car. Then, as if something had just occurred to him, Charlie said to me, “Hey, you know what? Looks like I need a ride.”

I rolled my eyes. “Well, I heard you don’t really live in Madison, so I’m not sure I’d know where to take you.”

“Oh, that.” Charlie waved his arm through the air. “Obviously, you’ve got to live in the district you’re running in, so Hank found me a rental in Houghton. My place in Madison’s in my brother’s name.”

“Very sneaky.”

“Nah, pretty standard, actually. So there’s a burger joint between here and Beaver Dam that’s out of this world—you a girl that eats bacon cheeseburgers?”

“This is sounding a lot like a date, Charlie.”

He grinned. “Not at all. Just two adults of different sexes out on a summer evening, having a conversation.”

As Charlie spoke, Hank was pulling out of the parking lot, and he honked once. “Your campaign manager or whatever he is just gave away the ending of my book,” I said. “Do you realize that?”

Charlie made a fake-menacing expression. “Oh man, Hank’s in deep shit now. Tomorrow I’ll show him which way is up.”

“Seriously,” I said. “There was no reason for that.”

“He was just toying with you. He probably wants to talk to you about books—he’s superbly well read—but he’s too clumsy to say so. As for those of us less intellectually inclined—” Charlie took my hand again, and this time I let him. “How ’bout a burger?”

THE RESTAURANT WAS called Red’s, and the pine walls were covered in a cheap shiny finish, the seats in our booth black vinyl, the table scratched with initials and declarations of love or enmity. “The onion rings here are stellar,” Charlie said. “If I get an order, are you in?”

I generally steered clear of both onion rings and french fries—I watched my weight—but I nodded, knowing that when they came, I’d be too keyed up to eat more than a few.

Our waitress was over fifty and wore a name tag that said EVELYN. “Thanks, sweetheart,” Charlie said as she set down two plastic glasses of ice water. After we’d ordered, he said, “You gonna make that burger rare like I like it? Full of flavor?”

The waitress smiled indulgently. “I’ll tell the cook.”

When she was gone, I said, “Do you know her?”

“In these parts, Alice, I know everyone.” He was grinning his Charlie grin. “Okay, I’ve never seen her in my life. But I bet you dollars to doughnuts if I told her I was running for office, I could win her vote by the end of dinner.”

“Then I guess it’s too bad you’re being secretive. Did you put Hank up to asking me if I’d been married before?”

Charlie whistled. “Boy, he really cuts to the chase. I definitely didn’t put him up to anything of the kind.” I actually believed Charlie—he seemed to be someone who found his own flaws endearing and thus concealed nothing. “I imagine he was vetting you to see if you’re acceptable to date a congressional candidate. He doesn’t understand that the question is whether I’m good enough to date you. I probably should have warned you about him—he’s not a master of subtlety, but honest to God, he’s absolutely brilliant. Twenty-seven years old, graduated first in his law school class at UW, and the guy was weaned on the Wisconsin Republican Party. You can’t imagine anyone more devoted. He started interning when he was sixteen, seventeen, and after he graduated college Phi Beta Kappa, he became an assistant to my dad.”

“Are you two friends?”

“He’s not who I call to have a beer with, and that’s only partly because he’s a teetotaler. But we’ve begun to log a lot of hours together, and he holds up. He’s a quality guy, and the sharpest mind. I’ll bring in the big guns as the race heats up, but I’m not sure there’s a more talented strategist out there than Ucks. He’s spectacular at thinking through the big picture, anticipating attacks from the other side—I’ll be sure to get a lot of nepotism crap, and his thing is, address it and move on. We control the agenda.”

The waitress brought our beers—Charlie had ordered a Miller, so I had, too—and Charlie knocked his bottle toward mine. “Cheers.”

“So what are the other questions that would determine whether or not I’m fit to go out with a congressional candidate?” I asked. “Hypothetically, of course.”

He took a long sip of beer. “There’s the problem of your party affiliation.” He still seemed mischievous, though, not really serious. “Why are you a Democrat, anyway? I mean, Jimmy Carter—how can you stand that peanut-growing goofball?”

“He compares pretty favorably to Nixon.”

Charlie shook his head. “Nixon is out of the picture. New day, new order.”

“I think it’s standard for public school teachers to be Democrats,” I said. “You’d be surprised how many of my students have to get free lunches.”

“I assume these are the kids of the black welfare mothers moving in from Chicago?”

“That doesn’t seem like a very nice way to put it.”

“You just have a soft heart,” Charlie said. “That’s why you think you’re a Dem. You’ll get older, come into some money, and see where you stand then.”

“Aren’t we the same age?”

“But I grew up around all this. I’ve been thinking about it longer.”

“I’m not a Democrat because I haven’t thought about the issues,” I said. “I’m a Democrat because I have.”

“Holy cats, woman, you ever thought of writing speeches? You’re not convincing me, but a lot of people would eat that shit up. Pardon my French.”

“You know, I grew up in Riley, right near Houghton,” I said. “Houghton High was our rival. So if you need to know anything about the place you allegedly live, I might be able to help you, but only if you quit mocking my political party.”

“In that case, I don’t have to explain to you why I live there in name only,” he said. “I go once a week, collect mail, make sure a raccoon hasn’t destroyed the place, and get the hell back out of Dodge.”

“If it’s so awful, you could have picked somewhere else.”

Charlie shook his head. “Sixth District extends up to Appleton, but we have factories in the north, so that’s taken care of. Down south is Alvin Wincek’s stronghold, where we gotta focus. See, you’re lucky you grew up in Riley instead of Houghton—Meersman is your rep, right? There’s a good Republican team player for you, Bud Meersman.”

“I’ve never voted in Riley,” I said. “The first time I was eligible was in ’68, and I registered in Madison.”

“Please don’t say you voted for Humphrey.”

“Charlie, I’m a Democrat,” I said. “Of course I did.”

“It’s people like you that cost my dad the race,” Charlie said, and though there were several reasons I could have pointed to that Governor Blackwell hadn’t been elected president in ’68—he hadn’t even been one of the final three Republican candidates—it did not seem that Charlie was completely kidding.

The waitress appeared carrying red oval plastic baskets, the food nestled inside them in waxed paper. “You see if that’s to your liking,” she said, and Charlie replied, “I’m sure it will be, Miss Evelyn.”

As I sliced my burger in half, I said, “So why’d you go to school in the East?”

“Are you referring to my Ivy League education?” He pronounced the words in a mincing way. “Believe me, it’s worse than Princeton and Penn. First, I was shipped off to boarding school—a little place called Exeter that’s basically a breeding ground for snobs. It’s in New Hampshire, my mother grew up in Boston, and she’s still enamored with the East Coast way of life—you can take the girl out of Massachusetts, et cetera, et cetera. So we all did our time at Exeter, then four years at Old Nassau, as the cognoscenti call Princeton, then Wharton. I made some terrific friends, and I did learn a thing or two in spite of my best efforts, but make no mistake, New England trust-funders are not my people. It’s all very Mimsy, won’t you pass the gin and tonic, very cold and fake. You go to one of their weddings—I was a groomsman for a fellow from New Canaan—and it’s the most uptight affair this side of a funeral. That ain’t my style.”

“But if you were the son of the governor, I’d think you grew up belonging to the Madison Country Club and all that.”

Charlie scoffed. “The Madison Country Club is for parvenus, sweetheart. The Maronee Country Club is where those in the know belong. It’s north of Milwaukee.”

“Is that a joke?”

“What?” His expression was defensive but lightheartedly so, how he might have looked if he’d been accused of eating the last cookie in the jar.

“Listen to yourself,” I said. “Forget your classmates at Princeton—you’re the snob.”

“There’s nothing wrong with separating the wheat from the chaff, and I’m not saying on an economic basis. That’s the Ivy League mentality—did your daddy join such-and-such eating club, was your grandma a DAR? Those are just labels. But surely you don’t deny that some people are quality and some aren’t.”

“I have no idea what you even mean by that.” I think I might have turned against him in that moment, at least a little and maybe more, but he furrowed his brow, grinned, and said, “Yeah, neither do I.”

He took a bite of his burger. Unlike me, he had not cut it in half but held the bun with both hands, and he was plowing through it with alacrity. “I suppose I’m a hypocrite like anyone else,” he said. “But to give a guy a split personality, nothing compares to having your dad become governor when you’re in eighth grade. I’m not complaining, mind you. I couldn’t be prouder of him. But you’re royalty at public events, you’re a bull’s-eye target in the locker room, then you go away to boarding school, and when people hear you’re from Wisconsin, they think you were raised in a barn. My first week at Exeter, I had a fellow ask me, I kid you not, if I’d grown up with electricity. Now, the prejudice I faced ultimately bolstered my pride in where I come from and who I am, but that said, am I about to join a bowling team with Bob the mechanic? Probably not.” He leered. “At least not until I’ve officially declared my candidacy and a photographer from The Houghton Gazette is there to document it. Really, though—” He leaned forward. “I’m not an elitist. You believe me, don’t you?”

“I’m not sure what to believe.”

A look of sincere worry crossed his face, and his sincerity won me back. I was pretty sure Charlie’s views were not unlike those of the other men who’d been at the Hickens’ barbecue. The difference was that Charlie was so open about his. I said, “I bet that when you were a tormented eighth-grade boy, you were awfully cute.”

His grin reappeared immediately. “Damn straight I was. How’s that burger working out for you?”

“It’s delicious.” He’d polished his off, and I wasn’t yet through my first half.

“I have an idea,” Charlie said. “It just occurred to me. You want to hear it?”

“Sure.”

“I’ll go settle the tab. Then we head back to Madison—I’m happy to drive. We go to your apartment, we take off all our clothes, we get in bed, and I show you that Republicans do know a little something about a little something.” He paused. “After you’re finished eating, of course.”

Had I expressed shock or distaste, it would have been disingenuous—enough had happened in my life already that was far more shocking and distasteful than a sexual proposition. And besides, he’d sounded so boyish, so sweet, even. Then, too, I suppose I might have feigned offense not because I really was offended but because I wanted him to think I was, for propriety’s sake. But this seemed silly. I was thirty-one. To hell with my concerns about leapfrogging over the stages of acquaintanceship, to hell with making an argument—the argument against dating Charlie—that I didn’t want to win. No, I wasn’t completely certain about him, and yes, this would strain my friendship with Dena. But the responsibility and caution that I’d tried to employ for so long—since the accident, though in some ways even before that—hadn’t served me well, especially lately. Plus, Charlie was an incredibly handsome man. I wanted to take off all my clothes and climb in bed with him.

I set down my cheeseburger. “I’m finished eating.”

BACK AT MY apartment, Pierre and Mr. Sneeze were reclining on my bed, and crouching near them was the baby rabbit from The Runaway Bunny, whom I’d outfitted in fish garb. (The mother rabbit was in the living room, awaiting her fishing rod and waders.) I carefully set the figures on the floor by the wall, and when I turned around, Charlie was shirtless and unfastening his pants. “What?” he said. “Did you think I was kidding?”

“Let me at least put on a record.” As I walked past him, I swatted at the side of his head without making contact, though I did note (subtly, I hoped) that his bare chest was muscular, tan, and had some but not too much light brown hair. In the living room, I first reached for a John Denver album, then remembered Denver had supported President Carter. I imagined Charlie might think I was trying to make a point and instead put on Stevie Wonder.

A short hall led from the living room to my bedroom, and as I headed back down it, Charlie stood completely naked in the bedroom doorway, his arms folded across his chest, his grin huge. As I approached, he unfolded his arms, opened them, and took me in, he rubbed my back and kissed the top of my head, and in return, I kissed his bare shoulder—it was dotted with beige freckles—and we found each other’s mouths, then each other’s tongues, and his penis flicked toward me a few times before hardening into an erection. It is a pleasantly uneven thing to embrace a man while he is naked and you are clothed, and I could smell his skin, I could taste the beer from dinner, and I was the one who lifted my shirt above my head and let it drop on the floor. He leaned forward and buried his face in my breasts; he didn’t unfasten my bra but simply pushed down the cups.

Soon all my clothes were off, too, we were rolling on the bed, I’d wrapped my legs around him, and I took his erection in my hand and guided him into me, and it felt so elemental, so necessary, for us to be joined like this and then it was like awakening abruptly, and I gripped his arms and said, “Wait, my diaphragm is in the—”

“No, I have protection. We’re fine.” It was in his wallet, which was inside his pants on the floor, and as I watched him retrieve the condom, I was already too dazed to feel self-conscious about staring. His butt was small in the way that I always forgot a lot of men’s were; how could he possibly be an unscrupulous politician with such a cute little butt? Back in bed, he knelt on the mattress—I was lying flat, and he was above me—and perhaps it sounds crude to say that this was the moment I knew I could love him, when I saw his penis. With men in my past, the penis had seemed to me an odd creature, both comic and forlorn. But I felt a great devotion to Charlie when I first got a look at his, the ruddy-hued upward-pointing shaft, its swollen veins and cap-like tip. All of it was so completely of him, and I felt how there was no part of his body I wouldn’t want to touch, no way I wouldn’t allow him to touch me.

When he’d rolled the condom on, he straddled my waist and lowered his body down and thrust into me again, and he murmured, “I can’t believe anything that feels this good is legal,” and I said, “I’m really happy you’re here right now,” and he groaned against my neck. He came a few minutes later, collapsing onto me, and we both were quiet, I hugged him without speaking, and after a few more minutes, he lifted his head so we could see each other and said, “I meant to hold on a little longer, but you’re this goddess with these amazing, luscious breasts—”

“Charlie.” This was the first moment of the evening I did feel embarrassment.

“Do you not know that you have luscious breasts?”

I clamped my hand over his mouth.

When he pulled my hand off, he said, “Now your turn. I’m a rightie, so for maximum dexterity, it’s better if I go this way.” He nodded left with his chin and rolled off me.

“You don’t have to,” I said.

“Alice, I aim for total customer satisfaction.”

“I’m not sure—I just don’t—”

“You’ve had an orgasm before, haven’t you? It’s fine if you haven’t, although if that’s the case, you’ve been seriously shortchanged.”

“No, I have,” I said. “Just not, you know, every time.”

“That’s unacceptable. It’s a simple biological function.”

“Aren’t you enlightened.”

“Hey, I’ve read Fear of Flying. I know all about the zipless you-know-what.”

“I appreciate—” I hesitated. How long I took had become an issue toward the end of my relationship with Simon; sometimes he’d given up. “I’m glad you want to try,” I said. “But I’m afraid it might not work, and I don’t want to spoil what’s been a really fun evening.”

“Clearly, you have no idea how talented I am in this department.”

I turned my head so we were making full eye contact. “Not tonight.”

He drew his eyebrows together. “I don’t understand how someone can turn down the—”

“Charlie, I don’t feel like it,” I said, and I knew there was an edge in my voice.

Neither of us spoke until he said tentatively, “Want to hear the other information I’ve gathered for your dossier?”

We had been under a spell, and the spell had broken. I didn’t want to be cold to him, but I also didn’t want to feign merriment. I said, “Maybe later.”

“No, it’s all positive. I’ve been updating my file over the course of the night.” His voice was warm and conciliatory. “I’ll start at the beginning: Alice Marie Lindgren, born April 6, 1946. Beloved only daughter of Phillip and Dorothy, granddaughter of—hmm—You might need to give me a hint.”

“Emilie.” I made sure to sound nicer, too—if he was trying, so could

I. Also, I was surprised and flattered to hear him reciting these facts. Although I had revealed them during the hours we’d spent lying on the couch in my living room the previous Saturday night, I hadn’t expected he’d remember, partly because he’d been drinking and partly because we’d been talking idly.

“Honor-roll student and all-around good girl,” he continued. “What religion are you, by the way?”

“My family is Lutheran, but I only go to church when I’m with them.”

“You don’t go to church? Mon dieu, I was bedded by an atheist!”

“Oh, please,” I said, and Charlie snuggled in to me.

“Moving on. University of Wisconsin class of 1968—summa cum laude?”

I shook my head. “Magna, but given that you’re the one who went to Princeton, I’m not sure why you think I’m so smart.”

He grinned. “Let’s just say I wasn’t known around campus for my straight A’s. Luckily, this is about you, not me. After college, you teach third grade at—Give me a little help on this one, too.”

“Harrison Elementary,” I said. “But I doubt I told you before, so I won’t deduct points.”

“Frequent reader of The Giving Tree, equally frequent crier. No, I’m teasing—I took a look at it, and I see why you’re a fan. And not too many big words for a knucklehead like me.” He’d sought out The Giving Tree in the three days since we’d seen each other last? I was astonished. (Later it emerged that he hadn’t actually bought it, he’d read the whole thing standing in the bookstore—but still.)

“Then a master’s back at UW,” he was saying, “then Theodora Liess Elementary, where our heroine presently remains, dazzling children during the school year with her charm and good looks and spending the summers constructing large, brightly colored cardboard animals.”

“Papier-mâché, but that was very impressive overall.”

“Wait, there’s one more entry in the dossier.” He squinted at his palm, pretending to read. “ ‘Now being wooed by a strapping young politico. Doesn’t know it yet but is about to fall madly in love.’ ”

“Oh, really? Is that what it says?” I grabbed for his hand, and he pulled it away.

“These are classified documents, Miss Lindgren, and you don’t have clearance.” He turned and kissed me on the lips, and at first the kiss was a distraction, and then it was what both of us were paying all our attention to, the push and retreat of each other’s mouths.

Charlie was wrong, though; I did know, I knew already, that I was falling in love.

I MET DENA at her store. I was the one who’d suggested lunch, thinking I could get my confession over with, that by the time we saw each other that evening for our belated ratatouille, this conversation would be finished and behind us, but I realized as soon as I walked into D’s that I’d made a mistake. The store was crowded with customers, and Dena was buzzing with a tense, pleased preoccupation. As we left, she said to the girl behind the counter, “If Joan Dorff doesn’t pick up the corduroy handbag by one, call her and say we can’t keep holding it.”

We walked to a nearby sandwich place, and when we opened the menus, I said, “By the way, my treat.”

“Shit, if I’d known, I’d have suggested the Gilded Rose. Are we celebrating your home ownership?”

It seemed early in the lunch to bring up the real reason. But maybe I was worrying too much, maybe it would only be a brief awkwardness.

Dena said, “Before I forget, I saw this great couch at Second Time Around that you should buy for your new living room. It’s three hundred bucks, but I know the owner, and I bet I can talk her down.”

“Dena, I went on a date with Charlie Blackwell,” I said.

Immediately, her eyes narrowed.

I pressed on. “At the party, you said you didn’t really like him.” In fact, she had said she thought he didn’t like her, but the two weren’t so far off, and this seemed the more diplomatic version. “Obviously, this wasn’t my plan, but we just—I guess we clicked. I would have thought before I got to know him that you’d be more compatible, but it turns out—” I seemed to be losing traction. “Our friendship is so important to me, Dena, and that’s why I’m being honest. I realize that—”

She cut me off. “You didn’t sleep with him, did you?”

I hesitated.

“You’ve got to be kidding.” She exhaled disgustedly. “It’s like me being interested in a guy automatically makes you interested. You’ve always been jealous.”

“That’s not true at all.”

“How do you explain it, then? Because this isn’t the first time.”

Don’t say it, Dena, I thought. Please, for both of our sakes. I swallowed. “If I didn’t feel a true sense of connection with Charlie, I wouldn’t have let things progress. But when I’m with him—” It was impossible, I realized. I couldn’t justify my behavior without sounding like I was gloating.

“What, are you planning to marry him?”

“I don’t think it’s beyond the realm of possibility,” I said, and I suspect I was as surprised as Dena. Not that I wasn’t dimly, dimly aware of having considered it, but I would never have guessed I’d risk uttering the thought aloud. Quickly, I added, “We’re still getting to know each other.”

“Is it because he’s rich?”

“Of course not! I’ve never even—We haven’t talked about money. I’m not sure he is that rich.”

“He is,” Dena said. “He’s loaded.”

“His family, maybe, but—”

“No.” Her voice was flat. “Him. All of them.”

The waitress approached, and Dena held up her palm. “I’m not staying.” The waitress looked at me.

“Give us a minute?” I said, and she nodded and walked away. “Dena, don’t leave. Or leave if you feel like you need to, but please let’s not have this be some ugly thing between us. You’re my closest friend.”

She was shaking her head. “Once you’ve been divorced, you know that walking away from a marriage is a lot harder than walking away from a friendship.”

“But I’ve known you longer than Dick did,” I said, which sounded slightly pathetic even to my own ears.

“The last time you pulled this crap, we were teenagers, and what did we know about anything?” Dena said. “But we’re adults, which means this is who you really are—a person who goes after the man your best friend is interested in.” I almost wished she were ranting, but she hadn’t raised her voice at all. “I’m sick of your fakeness,” she said. “You’ve always gotten to be the good girl, so go be a congressman’s wife, you know? Spend all your time with the Trommlers and the Hickens and those other uptight couples. Let Charlie buy you jewelry and cars.” Though we’d never ordered, we both had set our napkins on our laps; she crumpled hers, dropped it on the table, and stood. “I hope he gives you everything you want.”

Sitting there after she left, I felt a mild embarrassment at having been abandoned, and also an incredulity at how extreme her reaction had been; it was what I’d feared but hadn’t really expected. And then, less close to the surface than these emotions but perhaps more profound, I felt one more: a great gratitude that she, like Pete Imhof, had never mentioned Andrew by name.

ON MY NEXT visit to Riley, I didn’t tell my mother or grandmother that I wouldn’t be staying over until we were nearly finished with lunch. With as little fanfare as possible, I said, “I made some plans in Madison tonight, so I think I’ll take off this afternoon.” It was a hot Saturday, and we had just finished chicken-salad sandwiches.

“Really, this afternoon?” my mother said, and my grandmother said, “What sort of plans?” Since my father’s death, I had never come home without spending the night.

I gave my grandmother a look—presumably, she could have guessed the plans involved Charlie, and she also could have guessed that if I wanted to be more specific, I would have—and I said, “Just some people getting together on the Terrace.” This, at least, was true: I’d be meeting a bunch of Charlie’s friends for the first time.

When my mother rose to clear the plates, my grandmother gripped my wrist, holding me back. As soon as my mother was in the kitchen, my grandmother murmured, “She made a Vienna torte for dessert tonight on your account.”

“Oh, I didn’t realize—No, I can stay then,” I said.

My mother came back into the dining room, and my grandmother said, “Dorothy, it sounds like your daughter has a new beau.”

“Oh my goodness.” It was my mother, not me, who blushed in this moment.

“It’s not official yet.” I shot my grandmother an irritated look. “But his name is Charlie, he grew up in Madison and Milwaukee, and I met him through Kathleen Hicken and her husband, remember them?” Volunteering this information was a subterfuge, a way of not volunteering the more noteworthy details of Charlie’s upbringing or his current congressional aspirations. I was uncertain what my family’s reaction would be when I did share the news, given my father’s maxim about fools’ names and fools’ faces. Also, as I sat there, it occurred to me that I had no idea of my mother’s political leanings. I’d always known that my grandmother was a Democrat and my father a Republican, but I wasn’t sure my mother voted.

My grandmother said, “A little companionship can be wonderful. Don’t you think, Dorothy?”

My mother, still standing, lifted the iced-tea pitcher. “He sounds appealing, Alice,” she said, and she disappeared again into the kitchen. When she turned on the water, my grandmother whispered, “I was trying to give her an entrée to talk about Lars Enderstraisse.”

“Granny, I really doubt they’re involved.” I, too, was whispering. “Whatever Mom’s mystery errands are, I’m pretty sure they don’t have to do with him.”

“You think you’re the only one being wooed?” My grandmother chuckled, and, speaking at a normal volume, said, “Someone has an awfully high opinion of herself.”

MY GRANDMOTHER AND I read in the living room that afternoon, she on the couch and I in the chair, and when I went to find my mother, she was weeding tomato plants in the backyard.

“If it’s all right, I think I will stay for dinner,” I said. “My friends aren’t meeting until around nine o’clock.” This was a lie, but my mother’s face lit up.

“Oh, I’m delighted. We’re having a dessert I know you like.”

Watching her—she was on her knees, wearing a white terry-cloth hat—I felt colliding surges of affection and guilt. Why had I not told Charlie from the start that I wouldn’t be free tonight? Our schedules were flexible, we could go out during the upcoming week. But the truth was that I didn’t want to stay in Riley. The pulls of familial love and obligation could not, for the moment, compete with the promise of early-relationship sex. Starlight and beer and our twisting, naked bodies—that was what I wanted, not a seat at a dining room table with two old women eating breaded veal cutlets and Vienna torte. If infatuation was making me selfish, it was not, I supposed, that I’d previously been exempt from a capacity for it; it was more that I hadn’t ever been infatuated, or at least not in a good long time.

I squatted next to her. “The tomatoes look nice.”

My mother set a bunch of weeds on the pile. “Honey, Dena must have told you about Marjorie. Lillian is having a fit.”

I tried to make a noncommittal expression. Of course Dena hadn’t told me about Marjorie, who was one of her two younger sisters.

“You know how that family is, though,” my mother said. “The girls have always been so strong-willed. Mack could be such a disciplinarian, Lillian compensated by being lenient, and it was feast or famine for the girls.” The last I’d heard of Marjorie Janaszewski, she’d gotten involved with David Geisseler, the younger brother of our former classmate Pauline Geisseler; David already had two children with a woman whom he hadn’t married, and he and Marjorie were bartenders together at the Loose Caboose on Burlington Street. “I can’t fault Lillian for worrying, though,” my mother said.

All this time I had been carrying an envelope—it was unsealed, unwritten on—and I held it out to my mother. “That was a good idea about selling the brooch,” I said. “I took it to an antiques store.”

“Oh, bless your heart.” Without looking inside, she folded the envelope and inserted it in the pocket of her skirt.

I had to bite my tongue to keep from saying Be careful with that. The closest I came, straining to sound casual, was “It turns out it was pretty valuable.”

“That’s wonderful,” she said vaguely. “Alice, I was having some trouble with hornworms feeding on the tomatoes, and Mrs. Falke told me to plant marigolds, and they’ve worked beautifully. Mrs. Falke’s very modest, but she has quite a green thumb.”

I closed my eyes, and briefly, the house on McKinley, the porch and the window seats and the secret cupboard, appeared in my mind, but then I opened my eyes, and my mother was pulling weeds from the soil, my steadfast and kindhearted mother in her white terry-cloth hat, and the house went away. The check was for seventy-one hundred dollars—a great deal less than my mother had given to Pete Imhof, and exactly the amount I’d have put toward a down payment.

IT WAS AFTER midnight by the time Charlie and I left the Terrace. His friends, it turned out, were a lot like the crowd at the Hickens’ barbecue, and in fact there was some overlap: Will Werden, who was Frank Werden’s first cousin, was there with his wife, Gayle, and as soon as Charlie introduced me to everyone two of the other women and I realized we’d met a few years before at a baby shower. Ten of us were there in total, all couples, and the other couples all were married except for Charlie’s stockbroker friend Howard and his girlfriend, Petal, a twenty-one-year-old who’d graduated from the university two months before. “How long ago do you think she made that name up?” one of the baby-shower women—her own name was Anne—whispered to me, rolling her eyes. “We don’t know where Howard gets them.” This was an extension of friendship on Anne’s part that I gratefully accepted, though later, I talked to Petal (it wasn’t her fault that she was a decade younger than the rest of us), and she was perfectly intelligent; she’d double-majored in art history and Italian. At the end of the night, Anne pulled me aside and said, “Charlie is smitten with you.” I laughed, because it was easier than saying anything. Even Will Werden nudged me at one point and said, “I didn’t know you and Blackwell there were an item.” Again,I only smiled.

There’d been a bit of shifting over the course of the night, people getting up to use the restroom or the parents in the group checking in by pay phone with their babysitters, but most of the time Charlie and I had sat side by side, and even when we were both talking to other people, I felt his attention: his hand on my knee or at the small of my back, the quickness with which he’d turn if I said his name or tapped his arm. Every so often he’d lean in and say, “You okay?” Or “Hanging in there?” It was probably seventy degrees, a perfect summer night, and Lake Mendota was mostly blackness with a few wavering reflected lights.

And then we were bidding everyone goodbye—another couple left at the same time we did—and as we walked around Memorial Union to where Charlie had parked on Gilman Street, he took my hand. As if our fingers were acting independently of us, down there far below the conversation, we adjusted them so they were interlocked. “Your friends are nice,” I said.

We reached Charlie’s car, a gray Chevy Nova hatchback, and I said, “How about if I drive?” I had carefully nursed one glass of beer.

Charlie passed me the keys, and as I was turning on the ignition, he said, “Look over here.” When I did, he leaned forward and kissed me. Then he said, “I’ve been wanting to do that all night.” I turned the ignition back off, tilting my head toward his, and we kissed some more, we wrapped our arms around each other, and I was happy that we were alone, just us, holding each other tight. It wasn’t that I hadn’t enjoyed being on the Terrace—I had—but suddenly, it was as if all the talk had been the part we had to get through in order to arrive at this reward.

Charlie pulled back an inch. “So I haven’t forgotten about what I owe you. Let’s go to my place.”

Confused, I said, “You don’t owe me anything.” And then I understood—he was grinning—and I said, “Oh, that.”

“I’m not taking no for an answer. You’ve got to claim what’s rightfully yours.”

And even though, as I drove, I felt stirrings of nervous anticipation, I also wanted to just stay forever in this limbo; I’d have been content to drive all the way to Canada, knowing that something wonderful would happen when we got there.

It was the first time I’d been to Charlie’s apartment, and what I noticed immediately was that he’d left nearly all his lights on. His place was both smaller and less furnished than mine, and the living room seemed mostly like a repository for sports equipment: a brown leather bag of golf clubs leaning against one wall and, in a messy pile, a baseball bat, gloves, tennis racquets, a soccer ball, and the first lacrosse stick I’d ever seen. There was a large television set, a sizable stereo, a black bean bag, and a French baroque sofa complete with cabriole legs and covered in burgundy mohair. (I would learn that he’d acquired the sofa by raiding his parents’ basement in Milwaukee, which was where his paternal grandmother’s belongings had been stored untouched since her death seventeen years before.) Nothing hung on the walls, and a five-ledge bookshelf had two empty ledges. Of the remaining three, one contained books, one contained gewgaws, and one contained photos in frames: his father in a tuxedo and his mother in a sparkly red gown, looking into each other’s eyes; Charlie and three men I assumed to be his brothers, standing in a row in blazers; him and another guy in plaid jackets, crouched over the body of a dead buck with blood trickling from its mouth, Charlie grinning as the other man bent his head to kiss the buck’s antlers; Charlie at twenty or twenty-one clutching a BLACKWELL FOR PRESIDENT sign. On the next ledge, the one holding books, were a dictionary, a biography of Willie Mays, best-sellers such as Peter Benchley’s The Deep and, yes, Fear of Flying, and a smattering of the sort of titles one reads in undergraduate literature courses: Paradise Lost, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Goethe’s Faust. Resting on the final shelf were a signed baseball, a beer stein, several shot glasses, a paperweight of a black-and-orange enamel shield, and a chartreuse rubber snake.

I noticed all of this, I took it in quickly, and I didn’t really care. So he was a bachelor—of course he was, otherwise he wouldn’t be dating me. The space actually was clean, not dusty or cluttered. The bedroom was empty except for a mattress on top of box springs with no frame. The sheets were blue-and-white striped, pulled tidily up to the pillows, and a ceiling fan was already running. In the doorway of the bedroom, Charlie kissed me again, and then he walked me backward, maneuvering me onto the bed. When I was lying on my back, he stood above me grinning. “That’s much better.”

I was wearing my denim skirt and a maroon tunic with orange and pink flowers. He leaned over and used both hands to lift the tunic from around my waist and push it above my bra and over my shoulders. Being undressed like this made me feel, in a strangely nice way, like a child: watched over and taken care of. My bra was next to go, and when he’d tossed it somewhere behind my head, he gazed down at me, lying in the light of his bedroom—attached to the ceiling fan, sticking out from its center, was a bare bulb—and he said, “I can’t believe how beautiful you are.” He leaned forward and kissed one nipple and then the other, slowly and methodically, first with his lips closed, then opening his mouth to suck in a manner that seemed respectful, almost reverent.

Next he unbuttoned my denim skirt, unzipped the zipper, and I arched my back to help him slide it off; this, too, he tossed aside. I was wearing pink cotton underpants, and he stuck his thumb inside the elastic waistband, snapping it lightly against my hipbone and grinning. “Hi, pink,” he said.

“Hi,” I said back, and as we looked at each other, I felt what I’d felt the times I’d laid beneath him at my apartment: sprawling, enormous happiness. What I most wanted was exactly the same as what was about to happen. Which forces had conspired to make me so unreasonably lucky?

He ran his forefinger from my navel straight down over the front of my underwear, slowing above my pubic bone, and when he got to the cleft, the cotton fabric beneath his finger was damp, and he said, “Looks like someone’s enjoying herself.”

I reached up; he had so little fat on his stomach that I could slip my hand into his boxer shorts without unfastening his pants. His erection was hot and stiff, and when I brushed my fingers over the tip, he inhaled, but then he drew back, shaking his head. “This is about you. We’ll get to me later.”

“It can be about both of us.” I was touching him from outside his pants now, and he shook his head and nudged my hand away.

This was when he pulled down my underwear—they got caught for a second around my ankles before I kicked them off—and then I was naked on his blue-and-white-striped sheets and he was crouching over me, tanned and masculine in a yellow oxford shirt, his flared nostrils, his slight hint of stubble, his light brown hair, and his smile, his perfect smile, and I felt a total, unfettered attraction to him. He bent his head to kiss my sternum, my navel and belly, my pubic bone, the tops of my thighs, and then he dropped to his knees on the floor and used his elbows to spread my legs, to open me up, and he brought his face in and was licking me, he was licking me firmly and repeatedly, and it seemed both difficult to believe (Charlie Blackwell’s face burrowed between my legs?) and also entirely inevitable: beyond logic and language and decorum. Possibly, I thought, I had lived my life up to now in order to be licked by this man. I could hear myself cooing—I was leaning on my elbows with my feet near the floor, and he was kneeling, with his arms beneath my thighs—and he began to flick his tongue rapidly, almost thrashing it, in a focused spot. His cheeks between my thighs, his bobbing head, and his earnest assiduous lapping—very quickly, it was too much to bear, and I gasped and cried out. It was like tremors, and I felt my thighs clenching around his head, and when he came up a few seconds later and kissed my forehead, I said, “I hope I didn’t suffocate you,” and he said, “I can’t think of a better way to go.” Then he whispered, his mouth against my ear, “I really want to be inside you right now,” and as soon as he’d rolled on the condom, I encircled him with my legs, and he slid into me. He didn’t make much noise when he came, his breathing just thickened and slowed a little, and we both were still. Lying there, I felt a peaceful kind of sleepiness come over me. I could have gone to bed right then, without brushing my teeth or washing my face, without changing positions. Not that I would; instead, I’d leave within the hour and return alone to my own apartment. To have sex with a man was one thing, but to spend the night with him was another—even if my personal sense of etiquette had become outdated, I had difficulty disregarding it.

Against my neck, Charlie said, “We should do this every day for the rest of our lives.” Then he said, “I can feel you smiling.”

ALL AT ONCE we were spending vast amounts of time together. In my apartment, I moved the papier-mâché characters into the living room so he and I could lie on my bed, and though I didn’t let him stay over, he ended up leaving at a later hour each night—one or two, sometimes three. Because we often fell asleep after making love, I started setting my alarm clock for two, and when it beeped, Charlie would groan and say, “For the love of God, woman, make that thing stop,” and then we’d curl in to each other and fall back asleep, and after twenty or thirty minutes, I’d wake with a start and push at his torso, saying, “You really have to go now,” and he’d pretend to cower, covering his head and groaning, “I’m being exiled! The queen is banishing me from the castle!”

Several times he said, “Don’t you think it’d be nice to wake up together? And we can make some morning mischief that no one but us needs to know about?” But the fact that I felt it was improper for us to stay over at each other’s apartments was really our only point of dissent. He was very easy to be around, very comfortable, in a way that surprised me. With Simon, if we had gone to kiss each other and our mouths missed, he’d pretend it hadn’t happened; he wouldn’t acknowledge if one of our stomachs rumbled. With Charlie, everything was out in the open. Once, after dinner, when we were watching television in his living room, he stuck his hand beneath my shirt to rub my belly, and when I shook my head and said, “I have a stomachache,” he said, “Go ahead and let one rip if you need to. I’ll still think you’re the prettiest girl in all of Madison.” I didn’t do it—I couldn’t have, I’d sooner have tap-danced in Calvary Lutheran Church—but he apparently felt no such inhibition. A few days later, I walked into the kitchen after him, smelled an earthily unpleasant odor, and said, “Did you just—?”

“I can’t remember, but probably.” He grinned. “In my family, we call that tooting your own horn.”

He was so appealing to me, and so confident of his own appeal in a way that was boyishly endearing rather than arrogant. He always wanted to snuggle, he even used the word snuggle, which I’d never heard a man do. The night I made us halibut in aspic for dinner, he did the dishes afterward, and when he finished, he came into the living room, where I was lying on the couch reading. Wordlessly, he lifted away my book and lay flat on top of me, then said, “Aren’t you going to put your arms around your man?”

At his apartment, we always grilled out, making either hamburgers or steaks (I had not realized the evening we’d gone to Red’s that we were having one of the two dinners Charlie most preferred). His refrigerator was largely empty but held a few items that all belonged to the same category: ketchup; mustard; relish; packs of hamburger buns that he never closed properly after their first use, causing them to go stale; and a shelf of beer. Meanwhile, his freezer was filled to capacity with multiple packages of Blackwell-brand boneless strip steaks and ground beef. His apartment was on the first floor, and he kept a three-legged black kettle charcoal grill on a patch of pavement in the backyard and usually accessed it by climbing out his kitchen window rather than walking through the front of the house and around the side. I’d perch on a stool in the kitchen while he climbed in and out, tending to the meat, and when dinner was ready, we carried our plates to the living room, sat on the couch, and watched baseball. I knew plenty of women wouldn’t have considered this a pleasant arrangement, but I liked how the game made conversation easy, how we could talk or comfortably not talk, and Charlie seemed especially sweet when he was explaining a play: “That was a great save, because when the ball’s coming directly at you, it’s harder to tell how deep it is.” Or “He bunted foul with two strikes, so that’s why it’s an out.”

Charlie ate breakfast every morning at a diner on Atwood Avenue, and he encouraged me to meet him there, but I was afraid, should we run into anyone we knew, that it would look like we’d spent the night together. (“Then I guess we might as well,” he’d joked, but I had come of age before sexual liberation really took hold, there’d been curfews in place when I’d started college—ten on weeknights, midnight on weekends—and men weren’t allowed in our rooms in the sorority. I’d had trouble entirely shaking the propriety of that time.) Besides, I had work to do during the day: I wanted to finish the papier-mâché characters by the time back-to-school faculty meetings started in late August, and as the weeks passed, I really was beginning my lesson plans. I prided myself on being a librarian who didn’t just rehash the same material year after year, and this year I was especially excited about a new book called Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes, which I planned to use with the fourth-graders as an entry point into a unit on origami.

As for Charlie’s schedule, he described this time as the calm before the storm—he used the expression repeatedly, both with me and with other people. I was hesitant to ask him much about his impending congressional run because the topic made me skittish, and it also didn’t seem entirely real. Did he actually want to live most of the year in Washington, D.C., to sit in an office building on Capitol Hill debating policy, casting votes on the House floor? Restless, joking, athletic, spontaneous Charlie? It seemed like he’d be acting out a role in a play. And of course, if he were elected (it was unlikely, but if he were), what would happen to us?

For his job at Blackwell Meats, he did not, as far as I could tell, go to the company headquarters on the outskirts of Milwaukee more than twice a week. He did drive to Milwaukee regularly, but more often it was to play midday golf or tennis with one of his brothers, preceded by lunch with Hank Ucker and prospective donors to his war chest: lawyers from large firms, the CEO of an outboard motor company, men Charlie referred to as stuffed shirts. I once asked a little tentatively if he considered his job at the meat company full-time, and without hesitating, he said, “Alice, here’s an insight I’ll give you into who I am. Being a Blackwell is my full-time job.”

In the late afternoons or on the weekends when, increasingly, I skipped my trips to Riley, Charlie and I would go swimming at BB Clarke Beach (“You should wear a bikini,” he said the first time we went, when he saw my red-and-white-striped one-piece) and then we’d go play badminton at the Hickens’ house or meet up on the Terrace with Howard and his latest young thing—he had already moved on from Petal—and Howard and Charlie would go through several pitchers of beer (Charlie would always drive there, I’d always drive back), and then Charlie and I would go home and grill. We’d never made it to the Gilded Rose, we hadn’t even discussed it again. I didn’t mind.

The way I’d felt in Charlie’s presence, ever since leaving the Hickens’ barbecue, was as if I were suspending disbelief. Our compatibility seemed so improbable that at first dating him struck me as some combination of amusing and mildly irresponsible. Once, late on a Sunday afternoon the previous May, I had run into Maggie Stenta, one of Liess’s first-grade teachers, at the food co-op where I belonged, and we’d started chatting while Maggie’s children ran wild in the aisles. “Listen, do you want to come over?” Maggie had said. “We’re just having sloppy joes.” Though I’d drawn up a list of other errands I needed to run, I accepted the invitation, which meant following Maggie back to her house, where I proceeded to forget my milk in a bag in the backseat of my car. Inside, Maggie said, “Do you want some sangria? We had people over last night, and it’ll go bad if we don’t drink it.” We sat on chairs in the yard, Maggie’s kids were jumping on a trampoline—the older one, Jill, was my student—and Maggie’s husband was inside on the second floor, and Maggie yelled at him, “Can you fix dinner, Bob? I don’t have the energy,” and then her neighbor, a woman named Gloria, came over and said she was pretty sure she’d seen a lizard run under her living room couch—“Not a big one, maybe four inches,” she explained—and this seemed to delight Maggie, so we went over and were tipping up the couch, and then the lizard scampered out—it was olive-colored—and into a vent in the floor, and Maggie decided what we needed was a net, which neither household had, so we left the children with Maggie’s husband and walked to a hardware store that he’d told us would be closed and indeed was. On our return, Maggie said good-naturedly, “Have you ever seen kids more badly behaved than mine?” We went back to Gloria’s house and looked around in the basement, which was outrageously cluttered, but we saw no sign of the lizard. By then it was seven o’clock, I had prep work for my classes the next day, I was tipsy from sangria (I ended up calling a taxi two hours later), and no doubt the milk in my car had gone bad. But what I felt that afternoon and evening was what I felt around Charlie all the time: This is not my real life. There are other things I should be doing. I’m enjoying myself.

IN MID-AUGUST, I was getting a haircut at Salon Styles—I had just settled into the chair after being shampooed—when Richard, the man who cut my hair, said, “Did you hear about Elvis?”

“I don’t think so.”

“He died. They were saying on the radio it was a heart attack, but it sounds to me like the old hound dog had a fondness for the pharmaceuticals.”

In the large mirror I was facing, I could see my own eyes widen. “He wasn’t that old, was he?”

“Forty-two.” Richard had parted my wet hair in the middle, and he took hold of chunks on either side, holding out the hair by the tips. “How many inches are we taking off today?”

THAT EVENING, AS soon as I knew she’d be home from work, I dialed Dena’s number. The friendliness in her voice when she answered the phone, before she knew it was me, broke my heart a little.

“It’s Alice,” I said. “I was thinking about you today because of—I’m sure you know Elvis died, and do you remember when your mom took us to see Jailhouse Rock the night it opened, and then she made us peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches afterward?” Dena didn’t respond immediately, and I added, “Is your mom really upset?”

“I haven’t talked to her.”

“Well, I just was thinking about your family.” I paused. “Dena, I miss you. I’m sorry and I miss you.”

She was silent. Then she said, “Are you still seeing him?”

“I understand why you’re angry at me, obviously, but this shouldn’t ruin our friendship. I didn’t set out to spite you.”

“So you are still seeing him?”

“Dena, you’ve dated a lot more men than I have. It just seems like—Well, you’re so pretty and dynamic, and I’m a hundred percent confident that you’ll meet someone you really click with. You’ll be glad you didn’t end up with Charlie.”

“It must be nice to be clairvoyant.” Her tone was dry.

“What I have with him, it’s not like anything I’ve experienced in the past,” I said. “I wouldn’t be cavalier about our friendship, but this just feels different.”

“That’s what you called to tell me?”

I was sitting at my kitchen table, and I looked down at the place mat, orange vinyl with a butterfly motif, and I knew Dena wouldn’t forgive me. Still, I said, “Is your sister all right? A few weeks ago, my mom mentioned—”

“Alice, just stop,” she said. “Okay? Stop it.”

“If you change your mind—” I began.

She cut me off. “Leave me alone. That’s all I want from you.”