“Sure.” Then he sighed. “Okay, look. What does ‘bougie’ mean?” and Iris kindly explained that, too.

They did end up back at David’s place, and they ate on the back porch, facing the street. Iris took off her sweater. On her right forearm was—

“You have a Johnny Rotten tattoo!”

“My one moment of rebellion.” Iris blew on her food. “When I was eighteen. I had my moment; that was it. Reality is I’m a mama’s girl. It’s the worst. Shit, we didn’t get wine. Do you want to get a bottle of wine after this?”

“I do,” said David, but he didn’t move. He sat, grinning at Iris like a dumbass, waiting for her to lean in and kiss him, and soon enough, she did.

“What about you?” she said the next morning as David loaded the coffee maker. “Where’s home?”

“Boring,” David said dismissively.

“Whatever!”

David chuckled. “Gets ’em every time. I’m just being a jerk—Boring, Oregon.”

“Now you get to enlighten me.”

“It’s like Gresham’s Gresham.”

“Aha, roger that, cap’n.” You did not have to live in Portland very long to understand Gresham as an outsizedly maligned suburb. “Small-town boy, huh?”

“I was born in Seattle. I lived there when I was little. Downtown. But Boring’s home now. My mom’s there.”

“Suburbia.” Iris sighed. “What’s your mom like, kid?”

David winked at her. “You got all day? No, my mom’s awesome.

I’m lucky. She’s a tough ol’ broad. I look up to her, honestly.”

“What makes you call her a”—Iris paused, then enunciated—“tough old broad”?

“In a good way!” David stressed. “So, when I was five, she decided to apply to med school? That summer, my dad walked out.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah,” David said, hopping up to sit on the counter. “And like, they were pretty broke already. We didn’t have much to lean on. But she did it. And she’s a doctor now. And check it out, I’m alive!” David laughed, a tall, soft summer figure in a T-shirt and shorts, swinging his legs. “And I still like hanging out with her. So she must’ve done something right.”

“Strong woman,” Iris said, impressed. “Sounds like you made out okay, kid.”

“I think so.” The coffee maker finished. “Do you want cream?”

Iris waved her hand. “I got it.” And she took it from the fridge, then retrieved mugs like she lived there, and David started to love her.

It wasn’t slow. That same night, they hung out at her place, watching Cinema Paradiso on Iris’s insistence and making out through most of it (“Look at us, we’re so cultured,” she whispered as she gripped David’s hair). After that, the questions were Whose place tonight? Should I pick anything up?

Ray got along with Iris fabulously, and they even went on double dates with Ray’s girlfriend, which all four agreed felt very adult. Even Leah begrudgingly liked her. Leah’d always hated David’s girlfriends, but she and Iris became smoking buddies at parties, and Iris hooked her up with a room on Woodstock. They all went to a lot of parties, Iris hauling leftover pie from work.