He made the dinner while Ed sat at the kitchen table drinking a Schlitz. But he didn’t sit there morbidly like my father sometimes did in the evenings, forcing himself—or perhaps forced by my mother—to be present. Ed set his chair at an angle and put his feet up on another one and chatted. He was a great chatterer. Chatting wasn’t something I was used to.

“How long you been out of school?” He had an accent I’d never heard before. “School” sounded like scoal. It sounded Scottish or something.

“Three weeks tomorrow.” They had been boring, lonely weeks. I hated tennis lessons and trying to hit the tin can for a Coke when you served and sailing classes with all the instruction about winches and halyards and the folding and unfolding of the sails and never enough time on the water.

“Three weeks? My little sister just got out yesterday.”

“Private school,” Grant said over his shoulder.

“That right? You pay for longer vacations?” he said to Grant. And then to me: “You like scoal?”

“Not really.”

“You like anything?”

I thought. I wanted to like something. I liked them, Ed and Grant, though I wasn’t about to say that.

“Guess not,” he said. “Trying to think what I liked when I was your age. How old are you? No, wait, let me guess.” He pretended to tie a kerchief to his head then pressed his fingers on his temples. “You are fourteen years, four months, and one day.”

I did the math. He was exactly right.

He started laughing as my eyes widened at him. “Your father keeps your passports in his top desk drawer.”

His words struck me like a slap.

“So, let’s see,” Ed said. “At fourteen years, three months, and a day, I loved Celia Washburn. I loved her so much my jaw ached and—”

“You can’t go in that study. Ever. You have to promise.”

I felt Grant turning around behind me. Saw Ed glance at him. They were trying not to laugh at the weird possessed voice that had come out of me.

“Okay. It’s a promise,” Ed said. He shifted his legs and took a swig of beer. “So my mother took me to the doctor because of this jaw ache, and he said I had to stop clenching it so much and when did I clench it, and I said whenever I think about a certain girl and he and the nurse laughed. My mother was out in the waiting room. Then we got to talking about other things and I told him my mother wouldn’t let me play baseball that year because my cousin had gotten clonked on the head in the outfield, the dolt. So when he called my mother in, he told her that I was a little stressed and that she should let me play baseball to unwind.”

Grant was chuckling.