“Yeah—it’s great. She thinks the American dream is still on. I get so fucking tired of wise-ass sourpuss Easterners, who think everything worth doing was done before 1750, always taking cheap shots at America and LBJ.”

“Another Texan.”

“Damn right. Johnson’s done more for blacks in two years than Saint Franklin Roosevelt did in twelve, and still all these knee-jerk liberals keep knocking him, calling him a redneck.”

It occurred to Owen that Ed considered himself a redneck, Bronx-style. A girl from Texas would see him as the suited-up electronic empire-builder he was. “When do we all meet her?” Owen asked.

“Soon, O. I’d like you to be my best man.”

Owen blushed. “With pleasure, Ed. I’m tickled pink, as they used to say.” It smelled a bit as if he was being restored to society’s good graces, after his Faye episode. He wasn’t sure he wanted to be restored. “When is the, the happy event?”

“We thought soon, May, maybe. Later than that it gets stinking hot down there. Then we come up here and have the Eastern summer before the long winter. She’s never experienced a Northern winter. The only snow she’s seen has been on mountaintops, on the San Gabriels.” Already Ed was sounding pompous, a consumer of geographies and climates.

The waitress came and offered dessert or coffee. Ed thought he’d try the prune-fig brownie, with whipped cream, and a cappuccino. Owen settled for mint tea. He asked Ed, “How did you do all this courting? I never knew about it.”

“You haven’t been paying much attention,” Ed said, for the third time jabbing in the direction of Owen’s private life. Owen was still not, the Middle Falls consensus was, “over” Faye. “I’ve been down there, she’s been up here a couple times. Phyllis has met her.”

“She has?” Mint tea, hot water barely tinted green, was put down before him; Ed’s brownie looked as heavy and rich as chocolate cake, wearing a toppling squirt of whipped cream. Saliva sprang from Owen’s inner cheeks. Was this to be the rest of his life, self-denial? He said, “She never said anything to me.”

“I asked her not to. She liked Stacey a lot,” Ed told Owen, squinting as if daring him to object.

Ed had sought Phyllis’s approval, and she had given it, all without her husband’s knowledge. We all have inner lives, Owen thought: secrets to protect. The recognition seemed to click into a segment of his own liberation.