The woman, who we called Sparrow among ourselves but whose real name, funnily enough, was Gloria, noticed this about Randy, the way he was with his mother, and added it to the growing list of things she liked about him. That is, she would say he was a good man; that you can tell a lot about a man by how he treats his mother; that mothers were God’s special gift to us all. And so forth. Just all the things you would expect her to say, all the first-order things someone might say had she made no attempt to think anew about the thing in question.

Noticing that she was having no effect on Randy, she started trying new things, such as having opinions of her own. But it was as if she were just manufacturing these in order to have them. “Oh, I know what!” she’d say. “We should put the fudge up there, with the olives.” Or “So-and-so is such a good actor. I think I have a little crush on him.” And it was always whatever actor was on the cover of some magazine that month, and if you pressed her on it you’d find she’d never seen any of his movies.

You would never have described her as feminine. But now she decided that the way to Randy’s heart was to become more girlish. Somewhere she got hold of a curling iron and some perfume. Imagine that trip to the mall in Werthley. Or the one in Clover. She didn’t drive. So would have taken the bus. Soon the store smelled of her new perfume. She started, based on an article in one of the women’s magazines she’d begun reading, to laugh more. She would laugh at anything Randy said, and not just the things that he meant to be funny. He would look over, startled, at such a time.