Mrs. Gustafson now moved around before me and bent in very close and centered the knot of my one black tie. She, with her husband’s smiling approval, pressed right up against the front of me, and let her fingers stray over my ears to coil my hair back neat (did I not look my best?). When I stared, in broad daylight, at the same long platinum lashes that she had wisely never sullied with black paint, and when she, chins appearing as she nodded more, concentrated on getting the tie perfectly knotted, her exertion gave off a slight scent. —And it was mainly his—vanilla and geranium leaves and something extra that was right between being wrong and perfect and then came so down on the good side. And how to say it? when she touched me, in that state? and brushed past my ear and smoothed my long hair back, I got an erection, not just from recalling him but believing there might, just might, be left in my life a chance with her. I know, insane. But we all of us really were just then.

Bama’s plane finally lowered from nowhere, circled once while whining like some insect toy, and somehow landed. The ladder, lumbering and creaky, got maneuvered out by those two fine strong local lads. Business passengers came filing off first. On the tarmac, a great pyramid of army-green trunks and gear. Flight attendants stood at odd spots out there. Against stark farmed winter vistas, they all faced opposite directions, till, in my disorientation, it seemed a dance piece planned by some avant-gardist of New York. All in honor of today’s three strange New York arrivals.

Finally it was actual Alabama angled in the plane’s door. She looked dead white, she wore a short black suit, a tiny black pillbox hat, and not-undramatic Callas-like dark glasses. She had on black gloves to hide her “peasant claws,” as she called them. She already looked older. I thought how convenient black clothes are full-time since, when you’re summoned from Berlin to an only half-expected Iowa funeral, you come equipped. From the start, she had always been equipped.

But now Bama seemed to pull back from garish yellow healthy sunlight.

Once again she bobbed forward before retreating. I saw, floating over her head, one corner of a sort of Jackie veil. She hung there in the metal portal, acting dubious of Cedar Rapids’s even being real. She appeared disdainful, even somewhat harsh, disappointed. I knew her. I just knew that, in some griped jet-lagged part of her, she half expected to be met. And not by me. Not by his gentle, suffering folks.

“Why won’t she come out?” Robert’s mom asked no one who would answer.

Our Circle had always planned to travel to each other’s hometowns, a personal tour, spots where we’d squandered our short-lived virginities, train tracks where a car wreck nearly took us out at nineteen.