Lanky, indolent boys who fumbled their way through adolescence, given to secret hero-worshipping sometimes of one another, bouts of heavy drinking, small impulses of criminality that often climaxed those early years and resulted in short jail sentences or probation, from which they emerged abashed and confused; nothing in their own understanding could account for what they’d done. He’d asked Jake often enough why he’d stolen that car and Jake simply looked puzzled and repeated the sequence of events as though they might account for the theft. As for hero-worshipping, he’d been the hero to that small group in the town up north with whom he’d run for a few years. He’d come to think they admired him simply because he was rich in options they’d never have; they sensed the larger life his family’s good fortune made possible for him. He supposed they’d envied him too. Now, if they knew what had happened to him, they’d get their own back.

“Jake, what’s up?”

“I am, I guess,” said Jake. “Everything’s happened. My old buddy, Carson, and I have split up, and I got done in by a girl, that one you had call me up. And I can’t get work. It’s the damnedest thing. But I can’t get it. You know I’ve always been able to pick up a thing or two to keep me going. I’d saved some money for going east, and now I’ve blown that too.”

He looked miserable. But Max’s sympathy died the moment Jake mentioned the girl. “A girl—Annie,” he said, and saw her vividly as he’d first glimpsed her on the road, her back against the tree trunk.

“Yeah, Annie,” Jake replied, and began a rambling tale of his betrayal, interspersed with philosophical admonitions to himself that combined Brody’s nastiness with a kind of homespun sad wisdom of defeat. “You’re well rid of Brody,” Max interrupted at one point. “He really is no good.” But Jake rushed to defend him: Max had only seen him once, didn’t Max know what an awful life Brody had had? What a loyal friend he’d been? How right he’d been when he’d said the best buddies were always getting into trouble over a girl? Well, Brody had been right about this one, and he, Jake, would just have to lump it, chalk it up to experience, cut his losses.

“Stop!” Max said.

Jake paused. Eva came in with a tray of coffee cups and a pot.

“What happened to her?”

Jake looked at him dully, then at Eva.

“I don’t know,” he said.

Max felt a storm of impatience with both of them, Jake speaking his adolescent drivel, Eva looking so self-satisfied with her fresh nails gleaming over the coffee cups.