Devlin was headed back to Manhattan twenty minutes later. The day was an absolute sparkler, the air clean, the clouds moving quickly. He was still taking stock of himself, methodically, carefully. He had had horrible feelings before, and he didn’t have to prod his memory to pinpoint when. After his experience with the Brennans. After his parents’ deaths. He could remember his first adult nightmare: 1957, the beginning of his great Pamela adventure. What Devlin could remember too well was the awful feeling of the bottom dropping out, nothing being the same, of suddenly not knowing anything.

In July 1957, Devlin boarded the bus for Sussex County hoping he would find ways to find girls, to be with girls, to get his hands on girls, without his stepcousin, Everett, hanging around talking about six-guns and catfish.

But Ev had grown, too. He had a girlfriend, Cindi, confidentially, the highest praise for her: “She sure can squeeze the snot out of a chicken’s neck.” Ev considered himself in love, a man. Devlin would have laughed out loud if he had been getting any sex himself. Ev was getting more than Devlin, too, a hillbilly in hog heaven.

Devlin’s cousin Alice had a new friend, too, Pamela, who was only a month older than Devlin, fat-assed, blue-eyed, blond-haired, and a bit of a scandal; according to Ev, rumor had it that she was not a virgin. Devlin wanted experience, and he started hanging on Pamela, as Ev said, laughing, “Like spit on a hurricane fence.” Even Alice thought Devlin was funny.

Pamela was sweet, maybe a little dumb. She liked to lean back when kissed; if you wanted to diddle her, too, that was fine. Devlin learned how to excite and satisfy her, but he couldn’t get her to touch him the way Cindi was grabbing young Everett. Ev told Devlin not to let her get away with it, and Devlin, growing angrier, agreed.

On the Saturday night of the Labor Day Weekend, Devlin got Pamela alone and drunk in the backseat of the ’37 Olds. He was wild to be initiated into the mystery of sex, ready to sacrifice everything of himself for the first time ever. He was ashamed of what it said about him, but he was not going to stop. Pamela needed more booze—she didn’t need more convincing than that. Soon they were “howling like puppies,” as Ev told him later.…

Devlin had horrified himself. He needed St. Theresa’s communion to purge his bone-rattling guilt. He was too ashamed to tell her what he felt so he told her nothing at all. He didn’t write to her, and soon her letters stopped coming.…

The following spring, 1958, Cousin Alice got married. The marriage was necessary, according to the morals of the time, because the bride was pregnant.