“Hey, I love you,” he says. They are both getting dressed in the car. He has his legs bent and has to shift his hips from side to side to get his pants on. She is shutting the clasp of her bra. Now that they’re done, it feels cold in the car.

When she was waiting tables the summer before at one of the tourist hotels, he was bussing and washing dishes. When he saw her wiping the soap spots off the rim of a glass with the edge of a linen napkin, something in the nimble way she held the glass, her small, very white finger rolling the edge, caught his eye. He looked from those fingers to her arm, up the long, slender side, to her neck; she wasn’t even facing him but was turned sideways toward the tall windows opening to the late evening light. That was how they did it, setting up for breakfast after the dinner shift. Out in the lobby the elderly clientele sat talking softly. Someone was heaving up the old staircase, making the wood steps cry. The hotel was like that, creaky and old. Helen Keller had stayed there, years ago, on a speaking tour. Next he saw the back of her hair, pinned up, dark black, whirling around to the base of her neck. And later, at the funeral, standing before the empty casket, he remembered that first summer. For X, at that time, it was an extremely simple thing to fall in love. “I know damn well I’m in love,” he told a friend that night, smoking cigarettes at the end of the pier. It felt like a love of extreme depth, and it seemed mirrored by the long, shimmering breadth of unmoving water that opened up past Little Traverse Bay into the larger lake.

It was the way she held the glass; she was alone, the rest of the shift left an hour ago, and she stayed—he presumed—for the extra five bucks setup duty offered.

“Don’t go,” he says in the car. “I mean stay down here. What the hell. Your old man’s not going to, well, I mean what’s he going to do?”

She kisses his neck. “My father needs me back…” She speaks sadly, moving away from him, sits a second, and then begins to wiggle into her long green coat while he takes the side of his hand and, bending up, tries to swipe some of the frost off the inside of the windshield. All of the windows are covered with frost. He sweeps his side clean and leans across her lap to do hers. Then he climbs silently into the backseat and, using an old rag, circling it vigorously, makes portals in the back windows.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to bring it up,” he says in a persuasive tone. The lies he told were usually small ones about his physical prowess (he said he could run a sub-five mile—he couldn’t; said he could high-jump six feet—he couldn’t).