The good thing about touring with a band is that when you leave a town, the people that you met there can’t really hold it against you that you’ve left them behind as well. That’s one of the very reasons some people tour with a band. The bad news is what Gail had already pointed out: when your band comes into a town, everyone knows where they can find you come eight P.M. And if you stay in the same hotel where you’re playing, well, you might as well pitch a tent in the lobby.

Not that it was awful to hear Nancy’s voice. It was something much worse than awful.

“Where in San Francisco, Nance?”

“Oh, I’ve just got a simple room near Willow and Polk.”

There was the obligatory question. “How’s the kid?”

“Fine, and doing well at school, but hardly a kid, Ray.”

“Sorry,” I said.

“Listen, I have to interview someone for a job not too far from you, at a luncheonette, of all places. Would you be able to meet me for a bite, say in about an hour?” She hesitated. “I actually have a little proposal I want you to consider.” It was over two decades since I’d said almost the same words to her, and I wondered if the sad irony did not escape her.

With Gail off to Emeryville for the day, I didn’t have a ready excuse for why I couldn’t see her.

The entrance to the strangely named Centaur Luncheonette was successfully hiding from potential customers behind the elevator bank of the Brogan office building, located at Broadway and Eighth Street. Nancy was in the last of the shop’s five booths, as she’d said she would be.

She looked a little older. Well, it had been how many years since I’d last seen her—nine, ten? She was nicely dressed in a brown suit of a thin wool, probably part of her wardrobe from the East Coast that had been able to make the segue to California.

She saw me and offered a slow, sympathetic smile. She looked down at the tabletop and back up again. A reflex of hers.

I sat down across from her. “Hello, Nance. Have you been waiting long?”

She folded and unfolded a serviette like a shopgirl in Gimbel’s scarf department. “I just got here myself. You look good, Ray. Not very different at all.” She confided to the tabletop, “It’s different for women.”

I assured her, “Nance, when you were seventeen, you were thrilled you could pass for twenty-one. Be thrilled that at thirty-seven you can pass for twenty-six.”

“In the dusk with the light behind me,” she said, looking down. When she looked back up, she caught me searching for the wedding band someone else had bought her.

I asked, “Where’s your ring? The Second Mr. Nancy is having it polished?”