I had been to the restaurant twice before, once at lunch with Gram, and one weekday night with Mama after a show. It was small and square with low stucco ceilings, the walls papered with bullfight posters, a short candle in red glass at each table. The waiters were middle-aged Mexicanos. They wore white shirts, black bow ties, and gold lamé cummerbunds that were half covered by the soiled white aprons around their waists. Our waiter was close to fifty, a thin bald man with a bushy gray mustache. He bowed slightly, tilting his head as he listened to our orders. It was a formality I liked; it matched the stiffness in my face.

Our table was near the back. I remember hearing through the kitchen doors a man shouting something in Spanish about onions and oil. Behind that was the static patter of an announcer at a night baseball game. For some reason, it put me in mind of Ernest Hemingway and Spain and then Gertrude Stein in France. I smiled at dark-eyed Jim, who was looking at me, then I sipped my iced tea and before I knew it I’d put down my glass, dabbed the tea at my lip, and said, “I’m flying to France come November. I’m sure 111 live there many years.”

It was such an odd way to begin! I hadn’t told one beating heart about my life’s plans and here I was cracking them open on the table in front of a big-necked soldier they called Guitar Jimmy. But things got even more amazing: as Papa would say, Jim didn’t “miss a whisker.” He sat there nodding his head slightly, the smile gone, that warmth still in his face. He was waiting for me to continue, and there wasn’t a solitary hint of one derisive bone in his body about a nineteen-year-old girl from Hartley County flying herself off to Europe. Then I said, “I want to be a poet, Guitar Jimmy. I write all the darn time.”

He nodded again, his lips pursed in reflection. It was the sort of quiet respect I was accustomed to getting from my father only. I sipped my iced tea to settle myself. Then Jim said such a wondrous thing.

“All I think about is music, Kate. I don’t believe I give anything else a thought.”