Finally a single magazine arrived by mail containing fiction of a certain length, my name claiming it. (Twice!—once in the table of contents, once hovering—a wing—below the tide, above my text!)

I’d deleted my unasked-for “Jr.” Which of Dad’s golf partners might take this work as Dick Senior’s?

Faking disinterest, I bought a copy right at our corner newsstand not thirty-five feet from my bed/desk. It felt warm as toast.

I carried it to our empty table; the hour was early; none of our Circle ever appeared before two or three.

Over coffee, I flipped through the issue, sniffing gloss paper. Its ink smelled like tea. I endured the opening ads for luxury cars, for plum-sized jewels; I then perused some town talk. And, oops, what have we here? I “chanced upon” a tale.

I remember Ossorio was watering the plants that day—tall “mother-in-law’s-tongues” in brass pots. There was the extra sound of rushing wet and a bright domestic sense of calm defending me.

I read it cold, as if to judge the work of any no-name stranger. In print, alive in the visible (purchasable) world, it first seemed the product of someone not unlike myself. But soon, this shape appeared made by someone finer, more serene, more generous. Less a bitch, not so apt to whine. Less likely to pine for loves hard-drinking and unattainable. A deeper, better friend.

Reading, I wondered: What if I had stayed in Falls? Had New York kilned me into someone harder or far more hopeful? Imagine if I’d not met Robert, Angie. How had I even come to be here at this green marble table, one that felt so populated before anybody else showed up? What force had let my story ascend into plain view of the whole world (for at least one week)?

On paper, at Ossorio’s, in an toney typeface not my Hermes portable’s, I seemed to learn what I owned so far. How much I needed yet to know! What I read was executed (dreadful, deadly firing-squad word) with the correctness of a grammatical model for my Chinese-American students. And yet, it seemed far less alive than the life we really willy-nilly led here: its squalor, its raw fun, its serious work, its temporary tiffs, and rabid loyalties. Still, even fictionalized, who would ever care to read about our ragamuffin band? Hadn’t I always exaggerated Robert’s beauty and virtue? Could Angie be half the pugnacious diva I daily required? All we’d earned so far was rent on floorspace for our makeshift workshops. Nothing had yet truly happened to us. Sure, some erotic popularity. But certainly not fame. Barely a head cold.

Still, reading fiction about a terrier traumatized during divorce, I experienced, as if for the first time, certain emotions that some stranger-author had stuffed—perhaps overactively—into each paragraph.

The boy writer was at least sheepdogging me through events and sensations, sentence to sentence, accountable to the end. His nips at my heels were, at times, too evident. But at least the story was traversing an ambitious cliffside path. When it comes to guarding his first flock, a young sheepdog can never be too careful.