“Your table’s ready,” the host said. He led Bill to a small table with a view of the MUNI stop. A lanky guy waiting for the train, a yellow handkerchief hanging out his rear pocket, glanced at Bill and smiled. Bill opened his menu, pretending to read. Being cruised by a stranger into watersports was more than he could handle at the moment.

The waiter came by and asked him if wanted anything to drink. It took all his strength to say, “Just coffee.”

Waldo pushed through the restaurant door, stopped and looked around. Bill waved him over. Ordinarily, Waldo would have fluttered across the room, but today he stumbled over, unseeing and clearly miserable. Tamara had phoned Waldo and said if he showed up at Eddie’s funeral, her father and brothers would kick his ass.

“You know I should go,” he had told Bill defiantly, “just to show her what’s what, but the girls will be there and I don’t want to make a scene in front of them.” He broke down and stuttered through his tears, “I love them like they were my own and I’ll probably never see them again.”

“Hi, Billy,” he muttered now that he had reached the table and dropped into a chair. “You order yet?”

“Coffee. I was waiting for you.”

“I ain’t hungry.”

Always pale and slim, Waldo appeared almost transparent and so skinny his skull seemed to float just beneath his skin.

“You have to eat. You don’t look good.”

“Like you look any better. Another fight with Nick?”

Bill shrugged. “The usual.”

“Don’t fuck it up, Bill, because when they’re gone, they’re gone.” He blinked away tears. “And that’s when you start to miss them.”

The waiter came by. “You boys ready to order?”

“The eye-opener,” Bill said. “Eggs over easy, wheat toast and bacon.”

“I’ll have what she’s having,” Waldo said. When the waiter departed, Waldo continued. “I can’t get it out of my head, the thing that bitch said at the hospital. That I killed Eddie. Me and my faggot ways.”

“You didn’t kill him.”

“What about that gay cancer that’s going around?”

Bill remembered the posters that had appeared in the windows of the Castro Walgreen’s depicting a back and a torso sprinkled with purple blisters, signs of a skin cancer called Kaposi’s Sarcoma.

“Eddie didn’t have cancer. He had meningitis. Anyway, didn’t you tell me the gay cancer’s just a couple of drama queens trying to get attention?”

“Yeah. Probably.” He raised his head and looked at Bill, not bothering to restrain his tears. “I can’t believe he’s gone, Billy.”

Bill put his hand on Waldo’s. “Me either. God takes the good ones first.”