“That makes sense,” he said. “If I was your mom’s brother, I’d have found her by now.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I think my grandparents were pretty pissed at Mom. They were going to send her off and have me put up for adoption. That’s why she ran away.”

“Damn,” Arch said. “I knew I liked your mom, but now I sort of love her.”

“What do you mean?”

“She could have let you go and pretended it never happened,” he said. “Instead, she gave up everything to keep you. You shouldn’t be embarrassed. You should be proud.”

“I never thought of it that way.”

Arch put his arm around me.

“No secrets between us anymore, right?”

“Right.”

He stood up from the bench.

“Let’s go fishing,” he said.

At home, Arch didn’t drink much; he was always exceedingly conscious of how easily even a minor indiscretion could blot his sterling reputation. At weekend parties, when he had a beer can in hand, more often than not, it was full of water from the bathroom tap, so he could maintain control without coming off as prudish. That night at the hunting camp, however, we both got plastered. Mr. Haltom kept a lot of high-end bourbon out at the cabin, and we both knocked back shots the way cowboys do in Westerns.

After dinner, both of us good and drunk, we collapsed onto the couch in front of the hearth. Arch started unpacking his history of conquest, boasting of exploits with a plethora of girls in a multitude of settings. In the woods outside a dance at the sister camp, with a debutante from Atlanta. With a few girls from Steptoe before he’d turned his attentions to Vanessa. With the bored young wife of one of Mr. Haltom’s business associates, who had led him away from the Independence Day celebration at the country club and straddled him in the middle of the eighteenth fairway, just as the fireworks show began. It seemed like an awful lot of experience. But I believed it all, partly because of the conviction with which Arch told his tales, and partly because he seemed like the kind of guy to whom things like that actually happened. If Arch had gone all the way yet with Vanessa, he didn’t say and I didn’t ask. Even drunk, I did not want to hear Arch describe the liberties he may or may not have taken with Vanessa.

“What about you?” he asked. “You done it yet?”

“No,” I said.

“Why not?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Just haven’t had the chance, I guess.”

“Do you jerk off?”

I felt my face turning crimson.

“No,” I lied.

“Really?”

“Yes, really.”