“Oh, the shiny knees and long ponytail of Celia Washburn,” Ed said. “You enamored with anyone?”

I was, of course. Hopelessly. But I shook my head no.

Ed hooted. “Oh my God, you are a terrible liar! Le pire! Never mind. I’ll get it out of you in due time, my pretty.” He raised his beer to his lips, then put it down again. “So apart from her, who shall remain nameless for now, what do you think about? What, as Professor Marcus would say—remember this, Grant?—makes your heart sing?”

I felt so uneasy with all this interrogation, but I liked it, too. And yet I had no answer. Nothing made my heart sing. Even Becca Salinero didn’t make my heart sing. She made it hurt.

“Nothing? Nothing makes your heart sing?” Ed swung his head to Grant at the stove. “What makes your heart sing?”

“Chicken noodle casserole. The full moon and the really thin moon. Sunday mornings if the New York Times isn’t sold out. My nieces and nephews. My blue bicycle. Yeats. And Hermann Hesse sometimes.”

“Hermann Hesse. Le pire!”

“Narcissus and Goldmund,” Grant said.

“Oh, c’mon. If you have to read a German, read Mann, not that lightweight.”

“Four hundred pages about a guy wrapped in a camel hair blanket? No thanks.”

“What makes your heart sing, Ed?” I ventured.

“The venerable state of Maine.”

“So why aren’t you there now?”

“Oh, God,” said Grant.

“It’s Disneyland in the summer. Unrecognizable. Hollywood. Hate it.”

“Well, that was impressively concise.” Grant handed me the peas and said sotto voce and yet for Ed’s benefit, “Sometimes that topic can go on into the night.”

“Well, I didn’t want to scare our boy here right out of the gate.”

We ate. The food, though familiar, tasted better than when my mother made it. I listened to them talk about the part-time jobs they had just started. Grant worked the lunch shift at a diner out on the highway, and Ed paved people’s driveways. Grant said he dreaded going to sleep because he was always dreaming about gravy, pouring it into people’s coffee cups, serving it in shoes. Ed said his lungs would be paved by the end of the summer.

Grant had heated up a Sara Lee pie, blueberry. We gathered round it when he pulled it out. He started to cut into it and Ed said, “I know how you’re going to do this, a miserly wedge at a time when you know for a fact we’re going to eat the whole thing. Gimme that.”