“But I did nothing.”

“You have no idea. They were never going to let me go.”

I tried to place Anna’s accent. It seemed to come from both nowhere and everywhere, as if she’d been born and raised over an ocean at thirty-five thousand feet.

Anna went on, “Oh, I met your husband yesterday. He was a big help with my Sophie.”

“Yes, he said you two had met.”

We both stood there for a moment, unsure what we were doing next. Then Anna said, “Would you like to get a drink?”

“Yes,” I said, forgetting about the boys back home.

At Jack the Horse Tavern, while we waited for our drinks, Anna said, “Your husband is really good with kids.”

“You think?”

“My daughter is very shy. And she took to him right away. The way I took to you. Except I didn’t fall asleep in your lap.”

Our drinks arrived. Anna took a slow sip and continued, “I suppose I should’ve been concerned—my daughter in the lap of a man I’d never met. But when I put it together he was your husband, I thought, Well, of course.”

I wasn’t quite following her.

Then Anna asked, “How did you two meet?”

So I told her about the first time I met Tim Welch from Cayton, Ohio, on the campus of UC Berkeley. How he was skinnier then, all bones, and his hair was short, and when he spoke, he had a sibilant S, so he sounded like a bicycle with a slow leak. That he seemed so excited by the thought of everything, the possibility of everything, and this enthusiasm combined with an excess of energy and a tendency to cry made me certain that the Ohio boy following me around must be a homosexual. “Which was good news,” I told Anna. “Otherwise I’d never have befriended him.”

“Why?”

“Because at the time, I’d had enough of boys and professors, and I was looking for a way to unsmoke all the pot and, uhm, unsex all the sex.”

Anna smiled as if she understood.

“Tim was innocent in a midwestern sort of way. He knew nothing of the world, it seemed, and I knew too much, and because I thought he’d be attracted to his own kind, I felt safe.”

“Of course.”

“But before the start of his sophomore year, he came back two inches taller and ten pounds heavier. He’d even begun to shave selected areas of his face—the chin, above his top lip. He looked sexy in a goofy kind of way. This was bad news for me, because I wasn’t as frosty toward the idea of a relationship, and the one boy I fancied was never going to be interested in me. But then he asked to meet for a late-night ‘ssssnack’ at a local diner.”

I worried I was talking too much, but Anna said, “Don’t stop.”

So I continued: “I arrived late, having spent, to my surprise, too much time primping in front of my dorm room mirror. That night, over cheese fries and a shared vanilla shake, Tim admitted his feelings for me, saying that he had liked me first thing. He said I reminded him of a blond Patty Hearst. I said, ‘Thanks?’ Then he said no, it was more specific than that. He took out his wallet, unfolded a photocopy from an old newspaper, saying, ‘This is because I don’t have a picture of you.’ It was that famous Patty Hearst photo where she was wearing a beret, holding a machine gun while robbing a bank.”