“Maybe we should stop for coffee?” she said fifteen minutes later, and I smiled at my accurate prediction. We’d been walking south. Her face was red and she had a runny nose. She wrapped her arms around herself as though this might help.

“You cold?” I asked.

“A little.”

We entered a café on Diversey, and Carolyn sat on the couch in front of the fireplace while I went to the counter. It was very warm inside. I ordered a regular coffee for myself and a cappuccino, extra froth, for her. By the time I carried them over, she had taken off her jacket and was holding her hands up to the fire. I sat beside her.

“I wish we had a fireplace, don’t you?” she said.

“It’d certainly be nice.”

Neither of us said much and I stared at the fire feeling the heat coming off the flames. The frothing machine was going at full blast, but over it you could still hear the soft music. I had had a good day of work and with the fire and the instantaneous caffeine buzz, I was feeling very affectionate. I turned to Carolyn. Her eyes were closed, and in the fire’s lambent light, her tilted face looked profoundly content. She held the cappuccino in her lap, but when she had taken her last sip, she had stuck her nose in too deeply and on the tip of it hung a spot of froth she was unaware of. She felt me watching her and slowly turned toward me, looking cute and innocent. Her cheeks were still red. I was already smiling, and the second her eyes bore into mine, a shiver ran up my spine. Butterflies flittered about in the pit of my stomach. I reached over and wiped the froth away with my thumb. I kept my hand against her cheek, and she pressed her face against it, watching me through the tops of her eyes. I could see the fire dancing within them.

“I love you,” I said.

A tender grin played across her lips. “I love you, too,” she replied.

It was the first time either of us had said it. And I couldn’t stop smiling.

eighteen

1

I WAS THE SMALLEST kid in the seventh-grade class, weighing a whopping seventy-four pounds and still waiting impatiently for puberty. In the fall they called all the boys into the cafeteria to tell us about winter sports. The wrestling and basketball seasons both began in a month. Though my friends were divided, there was never any doubt which of the two I’d choose.

After school, I found my mother at the dining room table. Her legs were crossed and she held a cigarette in the fingers of her right hand.

“How was school?” she asked.

I sat beside her. “It was good. They went over winter sports with us today.”

“Yeah? And what do you think?”