“Who’s that guy she’s talking to?” I asked.

Miss Whitten smirked and took another drag on her cigarette.

“That,” she said, “is my date.”

“How are things back at the kids’ table, Charlie?” Arch asked.

“When I left,” I said, “Rhys Portis was making a pass at Vanessa, but other than that, everything’s fine, I guess.”

Arch chuckled.

“I better go rescue my girlfriend,” he said.

“You won’t tell on me, will you?” Miss Whitten said. “Dean Varnadoe would be appalled if he found out I’d been drinking and smoking with the boys at the board chair’s holiday party.”

“My lips are sealed,” Arch said. “Come on, Charlie, let’s go.”

“In a minute,” I said.

He paused for a beat, no doubt affronted that, for the first time, I wasn’t obeying his commands like a loyal terrier.

“Okay then,” Arch said.

He walked off into the dark yard.

“And you?” Miss Whitten said.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

She held up her still-smoldering cigarette.

“I won’t tell,” I said. “But it’s no big deal, you know. My mom smokes. So does my aunt.”

“Terrible habit. Good for concentration. Please don’t try it.”

She turned back toward the windows.

“Your mother’s very pretty,” she said. “I missed meeting her at parents’ night.”

“She had to work.”

“What does she do?”

“She’s a waitress. At Café Cabernet.”

Perhaps revealing my mother’s humble occupation would make Miss Whitten feel better about what we were looking at, I thought. She, at least, was a teacher, and an artist. My mother had only one thing going for her—never mind that it was the thing that mattered most to almost every man I’d ever known.

“I’ve never been there,” Miss Whitten said. “but I’ve heard . . . good things.”

“People call it Café Divorcée.”

“Who told you that?” she asked.

“Jamie Haltom.”

“How would he know?”

“You’d be surprised what Jamie knows.”

“I’m sure I would.”

She dropped her cigarette on the slate patio, stamped it out with the toe of her shoe, and nudged the butt into the ivy.

“Sorry,” I said.

“For what?”

I nodded toward my mother and Miss Whitten’s date. “I could go get her,” I said. “Tell her I’m not feeling good so she’ll have to leave.”

“He’s not my boyfriend,” she said. “This was a fix-up. He can talk to anyone he wants.”

“Good,” I said. Miss Whitten deserved someone better, I thought. Despite my limited experience of polite society, I knew that abandoning one’s date to pursue another woman qualified as “ungentlemanly.”

“This is our first date, actually,” she said. “Dalton works for Mr. Haltom. Jim, I mean.”

The way she said the name sounded vaguely insulting.

“Does your mother socialize much with the Haltoms?” Miss Whitten asked.