“I know, looking at her now. But it’s true, as a little girl she’d get all agita about the littlest things. You know how she handled it? Clothes. She couldn’t control school or the kids, but she could decide what she was going to wear. The whole year she was in kindergarten, every night I’d wash the same jeans and T-shirt, and every morning she put them back on. Socks, too. She didn’t care that the other kids had fancy clothes with Elmo and Miss Kitty and sparkles. None of that mattered to her, she just wanted to be comfortable in her clothes.”

“Okay,” John said, “but I don’t get it. I have never complained to Angie about what she wears.”

Fran made a pffft sound that meant he had misunderstood her point.

“Pay attention, you’ll get my drift sooner or later. So once she got into grade school, things got a little better, but it took time. We’d go shopping and she’d pick out the plainest things, T-shirts, jeans, sweaters. I’d pick up a dress in a color that would look good on her and she’d turn her back on it. So we’d take the clothes home and hang them up in her closet and they’d be there for months, sometimes as long as six months, before she’d put something new on.”

There was a pause.

John said, “She did this—”

“She still does it, with everything. Shirts, shoes, jeans, later on dresses and skirts. Like, she can’t put something on until she gets comfortable with it. But once she gets used to something—”

“She never gives up on it,” John said, thinking of the Nirvana T-shirt hanging over her footboard.

“That’s it,” Fran Mangiamele said. “She’s a cautious person, and you’re a change. A big change. She likes the look of you hanging there, but she needs time to get comfortable. That’s what went wrong last time, you rushing things.”

“You’re talking about somebody who cut her hair and dyed it blue on a whim, to shock me.”

“Hair grows out,” Fran said. “Nice and easy and gradual, it comes back, no matter what you do to it. You can count on it, but you can’t rush it.”

“Ah,” said John, a little confused but also intrigued.

“So get to work, and call me back when you two have got things fixed up. Believe me, I’ll be waiting by the phone.”

John’s house was beautifully furnished, comfortable, well laid out, preternaturally neat, and so unlike Angie that she could hardly imagine living here. If that ever became an issue, a prospect that suddenly seemed less likely, especially after she found the suit bag hanging on the back of the bedroom door with the words Grant-Rose wedding on the slip.