David, who upon entering the reunion had been nervous, jittery, trying too hard to get back into the Olinger groove, was aware of feeling altered in the presence of Julia and little Doris. He became another self, calmer and taller. “How are you both?”

“Oh, we can’t complain too much,” Doris said.

“Maybe you can’t, but I can,” Julia said, brushing back her thick hair with a languid gesture. “I spend half my time at the dentist and the rest at the chiropractor.”

“You look great,” David said. “You both look great.” And then he interrupted their stilted but smiling pleasantries to call his wife out of another conversation—she had attended enough reunions with him to have her own acquaintances in his class. He wanted her to meet Julia. The two women shook hands and looked at each other with a quizzical blandness. David wondered why he had forced this little encounter, and why he felt so uncharacteristically relaxed and at home. Then he remembered: lunch hour. To these Schenktown girls he had been another country person, a normal person. They had not minded his being torn from Olinger, by a mother with absurd ideas; they had seen him as he was, a man-to-be.

His family’s move had occurred when he was in the ninth grade. The farm wasn’t in the Schenktown direction, but to the southeast instead of the southwest of Olinger and Alton. The idea of going to school in the district in which they now lived horrified him, as a descent into a chasm of strange rural offspring, smelling of hay and dung. But his father taught in Olinger, and it was easy to arrange that David continue in the school; they commuted back and forth together, in an old black Chevrolet. After school, David killed time on the school grounds or at the luncheonette up the street. He had gone from being an Olinger boy to being a waif, a homeless bumpkin clinging to the status of a student. Of all his class, he came from farthest away.