I never marry.

VII. Walk Your Own Stiff Plank, Sir

It is 2:28 p.m., August 7, 1957, in a pastel department store, and it’s about to happen because Dan has got to pee.

Through Hi-Fi Stereo, past Glassware and Rec Room Needs, he wanders into the men’s room at our state’s flagship J. C. Penney store.

I admit, out in the open: I wish I’d been there then. I wish I could have saved him from the high price of desire fueled by decades’ sickening secrecy: the erectile trend is further crazed by the late-summer heat of Carolina. Barring my helping Dan out or my feeling Dan up, I guess I wish I coulda just watched….

People later praised the two-way mirror. Some Falls gossips swore that’s how cops caught Dan, and on movie film. Others claimed that this unlikely toilet had become a secret breeding place for capital-area inverts. (If, of course, they could breed.)

My own belated adult guess is that: A restless Dan chanced into the absolute right bathroom on the absolute worst day.

If only he hadn’t already seen Snow White four times. If only it hadn’t been 1957, when you could freely park your kids in any movie house.

There were many reasons Falls condemned their ever-popular Dan R——overnight. The following is one:

Dan’s children came out of the cinema, blinking, scared after seeing the witch’s poisoned apple eaten. They felt spooked by so spiky a green villainess. (Always, in fables and life and the Disney movies, Evil’s more photogenic than any sappy virgin dumb enough to bite an apple so obviously laced with chemo. An apple this good-looking dares you not to eat it. So you really shouldn’t.)

Dan’s kids, perhaps with buttons of popcorn strayed into their fine silver-blond hair, were first surprised then shocked, next hurt—not finding Dad.

“He said meet right here, right? And at four. I’m sure.”

Imagine them staring at the mall’s terrazzo flooring—still influenced by the movie’s wishfulness. Just because they wanted it, couldn’t their dad break through this paving, hands on hips, head tipped back, and, rising, laughing?

The kids felt mainly ready for the long nap home in the back of their Plymouth wagon still new-smelling, somehow male-smelling. Cross, then bored and—when an hour’d passed—irked with a first hiccup of com-pletest fear, the youngsters finally sent their oldest brother on a mission. “Go and scout out that dern dad of ours, Dan Junior. The car’s still parked, so he’s here, okay. Hope he’s not sick or somethin’. But, naw, Dad’s never sick.”

If, in Falls, these kids had been stood up, some other parents—friends of Dan and Julie (his wife)—would have spied the familiar pretty R——features. They would have noted his kids’ worry. They’d have noted how children of such different ages—usually quite eager to appear not with each other—clung together now. But, see, this mall stood in faraway cosmopolitan Raleigh, and life was harsher there and faster and so crowded. And no one knew them.