“And I’m thirty-five. I’m always up-front about my age—especially since this gray coming in makes me look a little older.”

“Thirty-one,” she volunteered.

“Gosh, you don’t look it. Twenty-five, maybe. I will tell you this much: I was engaged for a while. Fairly recently. To a girl in Savannah.”

“Really? For how long?”

He frowned. “Not quite a year.” The frown lingered in his mouth a fraction too long; he looked pained. “She and I … saw the world differently.”

“I’m sorry,” Karen said.

“No, it had to be. That’s just what it was. Anyway”—his eyes brightened—“today is starting to feel like a—well, like a date, I hope you don’t mind me saying that, but I thought I’d be up-front. You know, fess up.” He mugged again, lifting his brow and flashing his teeth, playing down the moment with a look of exaggerated fright.

“Well, I can fess up to something as well.” The words fell from Karen’s mouth impulsively; she had only wanted to sound involved in the conversation, but now that she’d offered to divulge something, the list of choices felt longer than her reach. She was in debt. She was a high-school dropout. She’d been, for a while, a raving, reckless young woman and had landed herself in some sticky spots. In fact, it might have been easier to confess what she hadn’t done (or what hadn’t happened to her): clarify which of her many short-lived relationships with men over the years hadn’t ended in broken engagements or been drowned in boozy bickering or flat-out crashed and burned in altercations involving mild violence, property damage, and, more than once, the police. “My name is really Katherine,” she said. “Mary-Katherine. I started going by Karen when I was a teenager, and I still go by it, obviously. But I prefer Katherine.” She didn’t. And then, suddenly, she did. She wanted to be Katherine, with him. “Kind of a stupid confession,” she added.

“That’s not a confession at all. It’s a beautiful name. Katherine.”

In the sluggish line for the Peter Pan ride, she asked him what sort of convention he’d attended, and he told her it was a church thing. He asked her if she went to church. An elaborate network of railings had the line tripling and quadrupling back on itself, so that they were folded up against people on both sides. Karen found herself inches away from a bewigged old woman who had heard the question and was staring at her, waiting for her response. “Sometimes,” she lied.

Then, as they were hanging from a track over Neverland, their little ship tilting toward dioramas of piracy and rescue, he leaned into her and said gently, “Catherine Deneuve cries in the night.”