Because of the way Johnny and I are with each other, people make insidious comments. Nasty things I will leave to your imagination. It’s always been that way, ever since we were kids. We touch, we hold hands, we go places together. You’d think the Italians, with their love of family, would understand this kind of thing, but their minds, too, roam the gutter.

There are reasons Johnny and I are so close.

We grew up in Houston, in one of those aging suburbs meant by the original developers to look like Palm Springs, except the houses were smaller, without central air, and the effect—of all those sharp angles hovering over the shrubbery—was of a place that didn’t quite exist. We didn’t fit in. We weren’t Texans, not really. Our accents were wrong. Our mother was from a little town outside Chicago—a good family, she insisted—but Johnny’s father had ditched out before he was born. Afterward, my mother married an oil engineer. That man was my father. I don’t remember much about him—just a vague shape, a face hovering over me—but there were other men after. Some of those men were good to us, some weren’t.

Like I said, there are reasons Johnny and I are so close.

My mother did what she could. She found money for private schools. When Johnny was older he had to go away for a while, but he caught up with me later, in Dallas, when I was in college.

That was where the incident occurred . . . that ugly business I didn’t much want to think about . . .

It involved a young man, the close-cropped type you see at places like SMU . . . thick shoulders, gray eyes . . . polite on the surface, like all those Texas boys . . . yes, ma’am, no, sir . . . but brazen underneath . . . I was used to that, but this one, there was something off . . . Not in the usual way but somehow else . . . not entirely stable . . . Johnny brought him over after a long night in a bar, high as a kite . . . That’s how I met him . . . His family had money. He liked to buy me things . . . jewelry . . . clothes . . . but eventually, well . . . He was obsessive and had a hard time letting go . . . He followed me to the grocery, to class . . . He paced around outside my apartment building . . . Johnny tried talking to him, telling him it was over, to let me be. They got pretty loud . . . pushing and shoving . . . The guy disappeared for a while . . . Then late one night he came back . . . he got into the building . . .

The maintenance woman found him the next morning, around dawn, heaped on the concrete, in the service alley six floors beneath my balcony.