There was Vietnam, but I had less drastic choices. Drive to California with Todd or go visit my sister, Elaine, who had relocated from Europe to Boston, where she had a job as a social worker.

My resolve to beat it weakened considerably when I walked into the house and spotted Glenna’s leatherette valise under the Lucite coat-tree. Assuming that she’d cut her vacation short to spend New Year’s with me, I grabbed her luggage and bounded up the stairs, calling her name.

She was standing by the desk in her terry-cloth robe, depositing a soiled sanitary napkin in the wastebasket. Far out; her period was here. I dropped her bags and noticed that she was bent at the waist, as if she had cramps, and holding on to the desk chair for support as she hobbled around it and lowered herself onto the bay-window seat.

Then I saw the long-stemmed rose lying on top of a stack of books on the desk. The petals were wilted. Cheap rose, sad rose, the consolatory rose that each woman was given after her abortion at the clinic.

“Are you all right?” I said.

“Yes.”

“Can I get you something?”

“The ginger ale on the nightstand.”

I gave her the bottle of Canada Dry. She drank from it. I sat on the chair, anger saturating my arms and legs like molten lead.

“Biff came home early, too?” I asked.

“He did.”

“Where is he?”

She said, “I told him to crash with friends.”

“Too bad. I could have used the exercise.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“How’d you get out of your mom’s birthday party?”

“My mother found out about it. She hates surprises and got in a big fight with my father. The party was canceled.”

Glenna set the bottle by her bare feet and looked at me, her face pale as first frost. “I want to talk to you,” she said, a sentence that has probably, in various languages, preceded most every heartbreak since the Stone Age. “I did some thinking in Florida.”

“That’s a lousy idea,” I replied, telling myself that if I cracked wise for another hour and fifty minutes, 1969 would be 1970, and a whole new decade might furnish her with a rationale to reconsider.

“I’m not—” Glenna said, and then she stopped.

I could live with that. Silence. Everything the same. It was the dim light in her eyes that scared me. Like that first day, generally right after Thanksgiving, when you know that the autumn has gone and winter is going to be around for a while.

Glenna said, “I’m not very good at relationships.”

“As good as I am.”

“Gordo, don’t debate with me. Listen to me, okay?”

“Okay.”

“It’s not only that I’m not good at relationships. It’s that I’ve lost interest in them.”

“I don’t get it, you ‘lost interest.’”

“I don’t get it, either,” Glenna said. “And maybe lost interest is the wrong word.”

“Or the wrong two words.”

“Don’t talk horseshit, Gordon. I get an ear infection from it.”