Within the hour Dan had rounded up his shameless crew: Rick, who was in a vague penalty/power-play situation with Lili for eyeing another girl or some other petty merde; Sticky, who was ranting at poor Agatha Torres about the Cowboys’ flex defense; and Rob, who was serving up the nice-boy shoulder to cry on with Jenny O’Meara. (Jason deMarini had apparently told her they needed to “take it easy,” and what did that really mean?) They had all basically struck out but gotten through unscathed by major rejection or drawing unwanted attention to themselves.

So after a minor success of a night, the boys hit the skids, piling into Sticky’s station wagon to cruise Forest Lane. The dance wound down to “Stairway to Heaven,” and then lights up, hands coming off butts and bras quick. At ten p.m., Mother Pauline came over from the convent to lock up. She led the DJ toward the music room to stow the speakers and the turntables.

As they placed all the equipment in the A/V closet, Mother Pauline gazed around her music teacher’s classroom with a deep sadness. This was Margaret Raleigh’s class, and it was her usual job to close down the dances. The reason she wasn’t there was terrible: in April, Peggy had been brutally attacked and strangled in the driveway of her Lake Highlands home. This left the Ursuline music teacher in a coma, lying in a bed of Presbyterian Hospital. Her husband was Reverend Standing Raleigh, the pastor of First United Methodist, whom the Dallas police had arrested and charged with attempted murder. His Park Cities congregation put up his bail as he awaited trial.

As she flicked out the lights in the music room, Mother Pauline said a prayer for Peggy and whispered to no one: “Heaven help us.”

September 18

[ SEPTEMBER 18 ]

In the first quarter of 1987, American Airlines saved $40,000 by eliminating one olive from each salad served in first class. Pat Malone considered this as he sucked the brine and vodka out of the pit of the olive he had drowned and then salvaged from his martini. The memory of the financials meeting, an exhausting carousel of fiscal slides, shuffled forward in his mind as Pat replayed a god-awful long day. Pat’s boss, Robert Crandall, the lugubrious leader of the largest airline in the free world, was hunting and pecking for cuts all over the place.

“Do you know how much overhead was saved by not painting the hulls on the new craft silver or white?”

Crandall was an hour into the managers’ summit in the airline’s old New York HQ, 633 Third Avenue, and started to chain-smoke.