“How long has that been?”

“’Bout a year.”

“Jesus,” I said. “I wish I’d known. Sunny didn’t say anything.”

“She came to the hospital every day.”

“You can always count on Sunny,” I said.

“Yeah, she cool.”

Terrence offered me his hand.

“Thanks for coming,” he said. “I mean it, you feel me?”

A deep sadness came over me. I longed for the closeness I’d once felt with Terrence—the sense that we were more than friends, almost brothers. He’d protected and defended me and stood by me for years when he could easily have moved on and left me to be the outcast I’d most certainly have been without him, and it had taken little more than the allure of wealth and the illusion of a better life for me to forget him almost completely, so much that I had not even known his grandmother was dying—sweet, noble Louella, who had looked after me when I was a child, who had made sure I was fed and cared for when I was a solitary latchkey kid in Montague Village, who had never judged me or my mother, who had prayed for us to find our way in the world. I had not even known that Terrence, my first best friend, had essentially been orphaned a second time. And even if I had, I’d likely have done little or nothing for him. And now, here we were, and he was thanking me.

“I’m so sorry,” I said.

I could see in his expression that he knew I wasn’t talking about Louella.

“It’s all good,” he said. “We all got to keep living, right?”

Arch’s truck rolled into the parking lot and turned toward us.

“There’s my ride,” I said.

Arch pulled to a stop at the curb. The passenger-side window rolled down.

“Hey there,” Arch said.

“Arch, Terrence,” I said.

“Pleased to meet you, Terrence,” Arch said. “I’m real sorry about your grandmother.”

Terrence nodded.

“See you soon,” I said.

“Yeah,” Terrence said, both of us knowing it wasn’t true.

An hour later, Arch and I pulled into the parking area at the Harpeth Trace Racing Park, out Highway 100, in Bellevue, where the Tennessee Breeders’ Cup was already underway. Every spring, people descended on the race park, dressed in Sunday morning finery, to get drunk while a horse race was going on somewhere out of sight. This was my second T-Cup, and I’d been looking forward to it almost since the last. Booze, horses, and money—what wasn’t to love? The girls milling around the tailgate parties were a feast of shapely color and shining long hair. Everyone wore Wayfarers. I never saw a horse.