I smiled, trying to imagine Gene as a much younger, more brazen man living a dream in Europe, a man falling headlong into the kind of love only the truly lucky ever find.

“What did you do after that?” I asked.

“Reenlisted in the Marines and came back to the States. I got sent to California that time and we stayed there for three years.”

We sat through a silence. Then I asked the question and almost immediately wished I hadn’t.

“Do you want to tell me what happened?”

He drank what was left of his wine, set the glass upon the table, and just like that all the happiness and smiles of things remembered drained out of him and were replaced with a pervasive sadness cut deeply into the wrinkles across his face and neck.

“You know why I offered this place up to you so quickly, even when you hardly had a penny to your name?”

“No.”

“Because I could tell the things you’d been through just by the way you carried yourself, that they were probably pretty damn equal to the things I myself have endured. If you live with pain long enough you learn to recognize it in others.”

I stayed quiet, unsure whether he’d give me anything else. But I knew he was right about recognizing pain in others. I had noticed it myself.

“My wife and son were killed in an automobile accident twenty years ago this month. And poof, just like that, everything in my life that I loved was gone,” he said. “My son was only ten.”

I shook my head. “I’m sorry, Gene.”

“Thank you,” he said.

I picked at a ball of lint on my sweater, looked at the way the light reflected off the rim of the glass in my hand, and watched Gene flex his jaw while he stared out the window. Then he turned to me and I took a deep breath. I could have told him then, and I wanted to, but I didn’t. I’m still not sure why.