“She showed you.”

“Maybe she did,” Glenna said.

“Where’s Biff?”

“Palmer joined a practice on Seventieth and Park.”

“So he’s doing classy abortions.”

Glenna sliced her quiche with deliberate strokes, as if she were limbering up to sever my vocal cords. “You didn’t want a child. All you wanted was to tie me up and tie me down.”

There was more than a little truth in her claim, and I was glad that she changed the subject and asked me about my life. I told her about the war, nothing heavy, describing it as a bad movie with no plot.

“You going to write about it?” she asked.

“Not now. A guy I served with, we’ve got this company in Washington, and we have a contract with the Defense Department. We’re going to Germany, France, Italy, and Spain next month to observe some military exercises.”

“Are you in love?”

I shook my head. “You?”

“No.”

“Is that good for me or bad?”

She laughed that dusky laugh I’d have been better off not remembering, and a rush of excitement and fear shot through me.

Roland dropped off the check. Glenna and I reached for it. She got there first.

“My treat,” Glenna said.

Given her history of offering to pay and then not having any money, I was surprised when Glenna came up with the cash.

“The new and improved me,” she said, and I can still remember how desperately I wanted that to be true.

Chapter 30

GLENNA AND I strolled arm in arm past the Flatiron Building as an April breeze rustled in the trees of Madison Square Park. Her hair was grazing my shoulder, and a whiff of her perfume, keen as ripe berries, went riding off into the starless night. Under the glittering lights, we strolled in unison, a lover’s stroll, our private rhythm.

“You’ll come up and see my place?” she asked as we turned onto Seventh Avenue and passed under the globe lamps outside a police station.

“Sure.”

Her place was in a row of five-story brownstones. In the vestibule, a brass chandelier cast a musty light on the gray-veined marble floor, and I trailed Glenna up a staircase, captivated by the bouncy ellipses of flesh under her skirt.

“Race ya,” Glenna shouted gleefully, breaking for the fourth landing, a rerun of our old game.

She got to the door first, with me right behind her, and she unlocked it, and we stumbled into her living room, laughing. The apartment was so stylishly spick-and-span, so unlike her house in Spuyten Duyvil, I couldn’t believe that she lived here. Bulbs in polished brass sconces burned on both sides of a window. The freshly painted white walls were decorated with posters in chrome frames, and a tawny shag rug was centered perfectly on the dark hardwood floor. In front of a sofa covered in tweedy earth tones was a low table of varnished driftwood and a semicircle of vanilla-and-chocolate beanbag chairs.

“Hildi’s a neat freak,” Glenna said, and shrugged awkwardly, as though apologizing for no longer residing in a labyrinth of withered plants, dirty laundry, and junkyard furniture.