Early in the afternoon, the summer-school kids crowded the walk at the end of our yard. Raf and I sat on the porch together, on the metal folding chairs, and watched students board a long navy-blue school bus.

“Look at the one in the camouflage outfit. They have ROTC for elementary grades now?” Raf said.

I said, “There are soldiers in Africa who are not that old.”

“I think there should be more fat kids,” he said. “I count only two. If I had a fuckin’ kid, I’d make sure he was fat. Or she. You can’t love ’em otherwise.”

“You want to bounce them around.”

“Fat as buddhas,” Raf said.

I rented a Toro from the corner hardware and mowed the yellow lawn along a trail of shade cast by the liquid-oxygen company. I raked and bagged the grass clippings; edged with a new pair of shears.

This yellow grass was sweet, sodded to an anatomy of slopes and ridges that were gentle as a boy’s back.

“It’s like carpet,” Raymond said from the porch.

When I finished, I joined him there and drank a frothy Tecate.

Raymond tossed a silver coin into the yard. He said, “There you go, see? It’s long enough to lose a dime but short enough that you could find it, you know where to look.”

“I’ve never heard that,” I said.

“Well, it’s the right length for July.”

Raymond was different around me—acting shy as a shadow.

“After Princeton,” Raymond said now. “After they cut me loose, naturally I lost my student deferment.”

“Couple years before I did,” Raf said, dropping onto a chair between us.

“Ummm,” I said.

“Some story,” said Raymond.

I said, “Everyone who was around back then has a story, and there isn’t one that I want to hear.”

“A deal we have,” Raf explained to Raymond.

“I busted out,” Raymond said. “Not as honorably as they’d of liked.”

“Me too. Me neither,” Raf said.

“You guys,” I said. “Do you mind? Raf, you promised you wouldn’t.”

The dance club we frequented now was the Palm, and here Raf seemed driven by some decisive engine.

He paused at our table only long enough to gulp an iced coffee.

I said, “We are going home sometime—back East—right?”

“Guess so,” he said and shrugged.

“Because if you’re never going back you ought to tell me, Raf. I always thought we were happy in Brookline. . . .”

He stopped me with a dark look.

“A functional phrase, ‘we were happy,’ ” I said. “Apart from a few obvious things: That it’s cold. Students, and they call too often. You’re not allowed to park your car anywhere . . .”

He was leaving even as I recited.

I watched him move toward a woman in a knitted bubble of mini skirt; watched as he asked her to dance.