David Kern had not lived in Pennsylvania for forty years, but he always attended his high-school class reunions, which were held once every five years. The basic treasure of his life was buried back there, in the town of Olinger, and he kept hoping to uncover it. Julia Reidenhauser, on the other hand, hadn’t attended a reunion for decades, not since those first low-budget get-togethers the class committee put on at the Wenrich Grove picnic grounds and the Schenktown VFW, when they all could still fit into their high-school clothes and still meant most of the real world to one another. “Julia is here this year—with Doris, of course,” Mamie Kauffman told him.

Mamie had grown round as a muffin and her little clever dimpled hands—she had been “artistic” and had hoped to become a fashion designer—were bent by arthritis, but she still had the starry-eyed sweetness, the touchingly relieved happiness to be here, to have arrived, that she had when her mother would walk her hand in hand to the old elementary school on the Alton Pike, and boost her up onto the three-foot retaining wall that separated the asphalt playground from the sidewalk. It wasn’t a playground, exactly; although the children played on it at recess it had no swings or slides or basketball hoops, just a few half-erased white lines and circles painted on it. Only the teachers knew the games and rules that went with these markings. The asphalt encircled the building like a broad moat, and was strictly divided into the boys’ and girls’ halves, with a cement walkway, front and back, as the dividing line. Everything was symmetrical and strict at the old elementary school except for the bobbing, squirming, tittering, runny-nosed, queasy-tummied, nervous-bladdered students, kindergarten through sixth grade.

“You’re kidding,” David said, but knew she wasn’t; Mamie’s eyes, smaller than the eyes she had had in grade school, glittered mischievously with this gift she was giving him. She was class secretary and had been the heart of the reunion committee ever since there were reunions, plotting how to inveigle each one of the hundred and twelve class members to attend. “How did you get her to come?” he asked.