“You tell Freddy, Bubba, that if I don’t get his permission, I’ll do it anyway.”

“Now you’re talking,” he said.

Phil and I worked in shifts.

If one of us had to use the bathroom or get a drink, the other held Angie’s hand. All day, her hand was enclosed in one of ours.

At noon, Phil went looking for the cafeteria, and I lifted her hand to my lips and closed my eyes.

The day I met her, she was missing both front teeth and her hair was cut so short and so badly that I thought she was another boy. We were in the gym at the Little House Recreation Center on East Cottage, and it was a free-for-all for six-year-olds. This was back before there was much official after-school care in my neighborhood, but parents could drop their kids at the Little House for three hours for five dollars a week, and the staff pretty much gave us free rein as long as we didn’t break anything.

That day, the floor of the gym was littered with maroon dodgeballs and orange Nerfs and hard plastic footballs and floor hockey sticks and pucks and basketballs and maybe twenty-five uncoordinated six-year-olds running around and screaming like maniacs.

The pucks were in short supply, and after I picked up a hockey stick I honed in on the short kid with the bad haircut as she pushed one awkwardly around the edge of the gym. I snuck up behind her, lifted her stick off the floor with my own, and stole the puck.

And she tackled me, punched me in the head, and stole it back.

With her hand to my face in the ICU unit, I could remember that day as vividly as any in my life.

I leaned in and placed my cheek against hers, pressed her hand tightly to my chest, closed my eyes.

When Phil came back, I bummed a cigarette off him and went out to the parking lot to smoke it.

I hadn’t smoked in seven years, but the tobacco smelled like perfume as I lit it and the smoke that filled my lungs felt clean and pure in the frigid air.

“That Porsche,” someone on my right said, “is one nice ride. Sixty-six?”

“Sixty-three,” I said and turned to look at him.

Pine wore a camel hair topcoat and burgundy twill trousers and a black cashmere sweater. His black gloves looked like a second skin over his hands.

“How’d you afford it?” he said.

“I pretty much bought a body only,” I said. “Acquired parts over several years.”

“You one of those guys who loves his car more than his wife or friends?”

I held up the keys. “It’s chrome and metal and rubber, Pine, and it couldn’t mean less to me right now. You want it, take it.”

He shook his head. “Far too ostentatious for my tastes. Drive an Acura myself.”

I took my second drag on the cigarette and immediately felt light-headed. The air danced in front of my eyes.