On Charlie’s last birthday he was twenty-six. He’d received a nice letter from his brother, Pete, who was living in Oklahoma and working on his wife’s father’s farm. Pete had wished him many happy returns and told him that he was welcome anytime he wanted to come visit, and was he thinking about getting married yet, because it was a good thing to be married. Charlie still had the letter, in a box in his closet. One of these days, he would write Pete back and tell him he was just fine.

He thought about being married. Pete made it sound like the best thing that could ever happen to a man. But Tom told him he was lucky he wasn’t hampered by any woman. He told Charlie he wished they could trade places sometime, because he was starting to forget what it was like to be a free man.

Maybe he should get married. Maybe it would settle him and make him stop feeling so itchy. If he was married, maybe he wouldn’t feel like he was getting eaten up a little bit at a time with every passing day. If he had a wife, he’d mean something to somebody. That, he thought, would be a good feeling. Maybe the most wonderful feeling in the world.

Tom had married Alice when he was just seventeen and she was sixteen. He’d once told Charlie that they’d had to get married because Alice thought she might be having a baby. She hadn’t, but by then they were already living in an apartment over a pharmacy and it was too late to do anything about it. Tom had told Charlie that since Alice hadn’t produced any baby in all the time they’d been married that he sometimes thought maybe she’d made the whole thing up about that first baby on purpose, but he couldn’t prove it and she wouldn’t say.

Pete and his wife had two babies. Charlie had never met them, but he knew all about them from Pete’s letters. They were five and three, two boys, Pete Jr. and Amos, named after his and Charlie’s grandfather. Pete said he’d saved Otis, which was their dead father’s name, for Charlie to give to his own son. Charlie had thanked him for his kindness, although he thought he maybe preferred the name Luke.

Before Luke, though, there was the matter of a wife. He hadn’t found one yet, although he admitted he hadn’t looked too hard. There had been one girl, the sister of a friend, who he’d visited a few times. But after three conversations he’d run out of things to talk about, and had not returned.