When I come home from the movie, it’s late, 1:00 A.M. Margaret and I snuck into a second feature, and after that we went to an all-night diner for pie and ice cream. When I open the front door quietly, Frank pushes his head in the crack, and I pet him, whispering, “Yes, I see you, good boy.” Then, coming into the room, I see Diann sitting on the sofa, a magazine in her lap.

“Hi,” she says.

“Hi.” I close the door, scratch behind Frank’s ears. “Is Chip sleeping?”

“He’s not here,” Diann says. “He went home. Said he was going to spend a night with his parents.”

“Really?’

She shrugs, returns to her magazine.

I head for the kitchen. “I’m getting something to drink. Do you want anything?”

“No thanks. I got us a bunch of different drinks today, though—they’re on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator.”

I come into the living room with a bottle of cranberry juice, sink down into a chair.

“How was the movie?” Diann asks.

“Movies,” I say. “We went to two. That Margaret, she’s delightful. Best date I’ve ever had.”

“Do you date much?” Diann asks.

I look at her. “Are you serious?”

“Well … Yes.”

“I date about three times a year. They’re desperation dates. You know. The last time I had a date that wasn’t like that was … God, it was in high school. The night of the senior prom, I went to the mall for something to do and ran into Danny Roth, you remember him?”

“Wasn’t he a preacher’s kid?”

“Yeah.” I take a long drink, put the bottle on the floor. “He was walking around killing time, he didn’t have a date, either. We decided to go to the drive-in. It was actually kind of fun—we talked for a long time about whether there was life after death, I remember that. He thought no.”

“Really? A preacher’s kid?”

“Yeah. And I remember I said I thought there was, and that you got to pick what you would look like in heaven, too. He said that might be enough to make him believe in it.”

“I can’t believe you went to a drive-in and talked about things like that. Didn’t you make out?”

“Actually, yes. A little. It was my first French kiss.”

“I’m not sure I remember him,” Diann says. “What did he look like?”

“Oh, he was short. Good hair, bad teeth. Well, he was ugly as hell. But it was the night of the senior prom, it was the end of high school, everybody was leaving, you had to go and do something. He wrote me once, from college—did you know he went to Harvard?”

“Really?” Diann picks up her hair, makes a ponytail high on her head, drops it. “Wait. Did he have green eyes and really big black glasses?”