“It is scary,” Chip says. And right then everything between us changes. Because we remember what’s beneath his kerchief. I can feel us both doing it, together. Both of us thinking, oh, yeah.

A young woman I knew who had breast cancer told me that after she was diagnosed, she couldn’t go to movies anymore. She used to love them, but she found that they took her out of herself, and reentry was too hard. “It’s better to just stay aware of it, keep it at a slow boil,” she said. “If you forget, however briefly, it’s like you have to deal with the shock of being diagnosed all over again.”

When that woman’s hair started falling out, she saved it in a manila envelope and kept it in her night-table drawer. I think she was going to use it to have a wig made. But then she died suddenly—much sooner than any of us thought she would, two days short of her thirtieth birthday. Her mother kept the envelope, moved it to her own night-table drawer. “I don’t know why I’m saving this,” she told me. “But how can I throw it out?”

We eat everything on our platters, then order dessert. Chip gets cherry pie, and I order Al’s famous rice pudding—famous for its inconsistency. One time, it will be delicious; the next time, it will taste like wallpaper paste. Today, it’s great.

On the way home, Chip gets tired. He doesn’t say so, but I can tell. It’s not in his gait; it’s in his face—the sagging of certain fine muscles, the effort that shows in his eyes. I suggest we stop at a playground we’re walking past, tell him I want to sit on a bench and watch the kids. There is a line for the slide—all boys. On one of the swings, a lone little girl about eight years old sits still, lost in a book. Two mothers with babies in matching buggies sit on the bench across the playground from us, earnestly talking. I remember being at this playground as a child. My mother would sit on the bench and knit, staring straight ahead; she steadfastly—though politely—refused the attempts at conversation by the other mothers. Her friends were back in Poland, she told me, those were her friends. Eventually, everyone learned to leave her alone.

After a while, I say, “How come you never married, Chip?”