Leo stood shirtless near the fridge and drank down two glasses of orange juice. He ate three bowlfuls of Cheerios one after the other, then he made himself a peanut butter and honey sandwich and finished it off while he heated up the last of Jim’s morning coffee. He took a full cup out to the stoop and sat down.

The sky was gray but a little too bright to look straight up at. The air was heavy and warm again and the mill smelled stronger than the pines. Leo drank his sugared coffee. A car horn honked up on Paper Boulevard. The skin on his back felt dry and tight, but it didn’t sting as much. Yesterday didn’t seem real. If somebody came and told him the roof at the job is naked of shingles just like before, Leo would almost believe them. Being with Floyd happened, though, sitting in that air-conditioned truck, letting him off the hook about Chick, letting Floyd talk about fucking and Allie in the same breath-Jesus.

Three brown birds, swallows maybe, flew out of a pine and over the house. Leo sipped his coffee too fast, spilling some on his chin. He remembered what Jim had said last night about children and angels, about there being better fish in the river. And that was sad to hear, because Jim and Allie had liked each other so much. Leo could still hear her voice shrieking through the trees at him as he climbed the back of Spoon Hill. She was wrong though; he didn’t feel relieved, he felt scooped out, which was strange when you think it was Allie who got scraped clean of what they’d both conceived. But he felt so suddenly hollow, when the day before he’d been so full, that he was almost light-headed in the nothing he felt.

He wanted to take back what he’d told Floyd, though. And no matter what Allie had done, she wasn’t proud of it; Leo wished Jim could have seen her crying as hard as she did.

He drank the rest of his coffee and he thought, here he was, eighteen years old today, and life isn’t what he felt like celebrating at all. He stood and went inside and read what Katie Faye had left behind.

But I’m straying from my and Jimmy’s first date. Over a wedge of flan we shared, Jim decided he would have to play for me. We took a taxi straight to the base and Jim had me wait at the guard booth while he went on in for his guitar. I tried to make conversation with the boy on duty, but even with an MP band around his arm he was about as shy as they come. After a long twenty minutes, Jim drove up to the gate in his captain’s black Buick, the guitar neck sticking up in the back seat. Then we drove on out to Calaveras Lake and parked in a clearing among the trees by the water. We sat on a boulder at the lake’s edge, and while Jimmy tuned up his guitar, I remember looking up at the stars I hadn’t seen near enough of from downtown San Antonio. I felt more like myself than I had since Papa died.