“Better now,” she said. “I had thought I had finished with these scenes. Probably I’ll be doing it—not very frequently—for the rest of my life, no matter what happens to me or who I marry, wondering about the what-might-have-beens. People’s lives take such severe turns. Once I made a conscious effort to associate a song with a person—Jimmy, as a matter of fact. The song became a standard. Even when Colin was alive and I heard that song, my mind would respond on cue. We do so many stupid, sorry things.

“The day he died. No, the evening before. We went to a movie. I wasn’t in production clothes then. We met downtown, under the Proctor marquee on State Street. He had the car and I had come down by bus. It was warm and we put the top down. There was plenty of time before the last show, so we drove through town out to the Point. We parked on the ocean side, with the sun at our backs. There were some people there, a couple of them rolled up in blankets. We necked. He talked a little about his day. He had seen two clients, a jeweler and a wholesale produce man. He told me he had seen the biggest, darkest strawberries. I asked him why he hadn’t asked for some. It wasn’t the season and they were hard to come by. He said he didn’t want to be bothered—it would mean a debt, even if only a small one. He was like a baby about strawberries in heavy cream. I made a note to look for some. We necked some more and went to an Italian restaurant near my old neighborhood for dinner.

“We both had veal parmigiano and drove back to—wait! There were kids in the car! That’s right, in the parking lot outside the restaurant. I wanted to go right over that. I haven’t thought of them in months. There were three of them, fifteen or sixteen, big kids, sitting in the front seat. One of them had his knee up on the dashboard.”

“Stay where you are, Norma,” Colin said. She stood by the trunk, behind him. The three boys turned to them, the one behind the wheel grinning.

“Nice car, Dad.”

Colin opened the door. “Get out—fast.”

The boy made a face and moved slowly. “Don’t rank me, Dad. I like the car.”

Colin grabbed him by the collar and jerked him out onto the ground. Colin put his foot on his neck and pressed his face into the pavement. “I could kill you now, you little bastard.”

“Okay! Okay!”

“Tell your friends to stand clear.”

They moved toward the gate.

“Norma, get in the car.”

The boys hustled out of the tiny lot. When he got in, she patted his leg.

“How do you like that?” he asked her.