I put the receipt in my wallet and turned back to see Nancy drawing invisible lines with her finger on the café table. “It wasn’t really very nice, you know, showing off your new girlfriend to me this way,” she said.

She’d been so friendly to Gail during lunch that it had not occurred to me for an instant that she’d been insulted or hurt.

“Oh, Nance—” I began.

“A bit mean-spirited, Ray. I wouldn’t have expected it of you. I guess you have been on the road too long. And don’t you think she’s just a bit . . . I mean, how old is she?”

I told her.

“Well, Ray, I mean, Ray, the last thing I would ever want to do is stop you from feeling happy, but, Ray, she’s—. Ray, do I have to say it?”

“Say what, Nancy?”

“Oh please. That you’re old enough—” She stopped and looked at me.

Into me.

“Oh, Ray,” she said quietly. “What are you doing?”

“I know what I’m doing, Nancy,” I said, although I really didn’t. Boy, I sure didn’t. “It isn’t as simple as you think.”

“Ray—”

“There are things you don’t know.”

“Ray. Listen to me, my dearest boy.” She reached across the table and held my face in her hands. “You can’t get her back, honey.”

She looked in my eyes for a moment, then took her hands away from my cheeks and sat back in her seat.

“Ray, do you want to come home with me tonight?” She saw a startled look on my face. “No, don’t flatter yourself,” she scolded, the third time I’d been told this of late. “I mean, come to my home. When was the last time you ate a meal that you didn’t order?”

In point of fact, I’d had a home-cooked meal just a few days earlier that had been very enjoyable, except for when the woman who’d prepared it had stabbed me.

I told Nancy thanks, but that the food was pretty good at the Claremont.

She reached for her pocketbook and took out a compact. “You really don’t want any help, do you?” I said nothing, and as she fixed her makeup, she asked, “Do you still sing ‘Beef Lo Mein’ on the bandstand each night?”

“My most popular number,” I assured her. The vintage tune was a variant on the old “for want of a nail” proverb, relating in ever-compounding terms how one event can radically alter the course of one’s life. In this instance, a lack of Beef Lo Mein at a Chinese restaurant causes the narrator’s marriage proposal to be rejected. And thus “ there went the son who would run the bank, and marry into money with some honey born with swank; there went the new governor of the state of Maine, and his ascent to president, for lack of Beef Lo Mein.”