But even if it was friendly and nothing else, it was there. Ronny said, “Yep, I guess you’ve got no choice. If your destiny is to ruin girls’ young lives, you need to stay in practice.”

Shaking his head, laughing, Ben said, “You fucker. That’s mean. I kind of like it.”

“You don’t go home for a few more days, right? You still have time, you can find somebody else and probably wreck her life, too.”

“Shut the fuck up.” Snickering. “All right. I feel all cheerful and shit. You’re a weird dude.”

“I’m in good company.”

“Otis thinks you’re some kind of genius.”

Ronny shrugged, spread his hands, looked modest, and Ben slapped his shoulder and then drew the hand away.

“You pulled my ass out of the fire anyway,” Ben said. “I get to keep playing football because of you. You coming back to the dorm next year?”

“Oh, yes. I would not miss the apes of Ehringhaus for anything.”

“Watch it. I might get offended.”

“What, and throw me off the balcony or something?”

“No, I guess not. I need you around to keep my grades up.” Scratching his head, then his elbow. “You still in town?”

“Till the dorm closes. I don’t want to go home till I have to.”

“I got that. Me, too. So maybe I’ll bug you later.” He said it as if he was about to leave but he went on sitting there, next to Ronny on Ronny’s bed. There was something reassuring about the fact. A minute later he said something about his hometown, which was Turtletrack, Virginia, and Ronny chortled at the name and tried to make a joke about it. Ben slid against the wall, leaned his back there, put his feet on the edge of the bed. They talked until they were hungry, then drove to breakfast, along streets alight with new green, and talked some more.

African Violet

RONNY BOUGHT A COPY OF THE Chapel Hill Newspaper to look for jobs in the want ads, then headed back to Cameron Avenue, grabbed the copy of I, Claudius, and sat on the porch with it. A heat had settled over the house and yard in the late morning and his clothes felt heavy and sticky; soon enough the wind picked up and he wondered whether there might be rain. The porch was quiet, though he could still hear horns blaring on Columbia Street, which he could see from the porch, carrying all the traffic along the border of the university and into town, past the Carolina Inn and the row of fraternities. This was the week he would have moved back to Goldsboro if his mother had not found her current true love; there would have been no Ben to remember, no night in the boardinghouse. He wondered what that would have felt like, and how his mother was feeling now, headed so far away from North Carolina, where she had lived her whole life. The newspaper, unopened, accused him a bit from the floor of the porch. But reading the novel a second time was like visiting with an old friend. The writing was supple and evocative; he slipped into it easily and drifted there, in Rome with all the problems of an empire laid at his feet.