“It’s for a course I’m taking in art appreciation. I want to—”

“Better yourself,” he interrupted. “That’s a good thing, nothing wrong with that.” He seemed nervous. He was staring at the parking lot again, smoking.

“I want to be a schoolteacher,” she said. “An English teacher, really, but you have to take a lot of different courses.”

“That’s one thing I never wanted to be: a teacher. I wanted to do a lot, when I was younger—a lot of stuff I never ended up doing. Like be president of the United States. And be an animator for Walt Disney. I even wanted to be a soldier, but I’ve got a gimp foot.”

She wasn’t sure what the proper response was to the admission of a deformity. “Something you were … born with?”

David Hardy laughed. “Nah.” He leaned back on the bench, lifted his leg, and planted a shoe between them. “It happened in college. I lost a battle with a farmer named Boone. Who, it turned out, was in cahoots with a Daniels named Jack.”

She was confused, and then startled when he hiked up his left pant leg and pulled down his sock. Suddenly she was staring at his bare ankle and shin.

“That line, right there,” he said, pointing to a satiny, lipstick-red trail as wide as a pencil that climbed out of his shoe and curled at the end.

“Oh,” Teresa said, wincing. “Ouch.”

He shrugged. “Doesn’t hurt anymore.” He uncapped his pen and drew a pair of mouse ears and a little black nose on one end of the scar. “See, this other part becomes the tail. I don’t even have to draw it.” He wiggled his bare ankle, flexed the scar, and said in a pinched voice out the side of his mouth, “Hi, Mrs. Ragazzino.”

She gave him the same smile she gave Matt when he was trying to tell a funny story. “So you got into a fight?”

“Only with a reservoir wall,” he said, shucking the pant leg down. “Which was in cahoots with a broken pop bottle. I got it cut up and broken, two for the price of one. Anyway, they told me I shouldn’t play tennis anymore—not that I was any Rod Laver—but I can’t really run, either, and it’s kept me from being shipped out.”

“Well, that’s a good thing, then.”

“I guess it is. I wouldn’t mind, you know, defending my country.”

“Against Communism?”

“You betcha.”

He was staring out over the parking lot again and she felt she’d steered them into a different conversation. She felt responsible for saying the right thing next. “My super’s brother was killed in … Chu Lai? He stepped on a land mine. I saw a letter from a priest over there, and another one sent by a colonel.”

“War is hell,” David Hardy said around his cigarette.