The charitable crowd’s clamor rose as it soaked up more cheap champagne beneath the fifteen-foot painted phallic image, displayed for months on the hospital façade, of a thermometer whose red of pledges had finally mounted to the very top. Owen spotted the rueful face of Imogene Bisbee, in her Emily Dickinson hairdo, wistfully searching the crowd for someone who would quicken her life into romantic meaning. She would have to wait, he said to himself, for there was no more room in his life, with Trish apparently still on his hook. He scanned all the donor faces, sallow and giddy in their bath of cool spring sunshine, hoping not to find Karen Jazinski among them. Ed, a big contributor from the company’s funds, might have brought her along in an E-O entourage, and if sensitive spying eyes saw Owen and Karen standing together they would spot the magnetic current, the telltale electricity, between their bodies.

But he did not see her. Instead, Ian Morrissey came up to him, his goatee whiter and the hair on his head longer, befitting his recent decision to become an easel “art” painter and reduce magazine illustrating to his spare time—just the really tempting commissions, he bragged, from old buddies in the trade. He announced, “Alissa’s stuck at home with Nina, a fever of one hundred one, throwing up half the night.”

“How old is she now?” Owen asked, politely.

“Five, for Chrissakes. Makes you feel ancient.”

Owen suggested, ironically, “You should have brought her here to the emergency room.”

Ian didn’t hear irony, unless it was his own. “Naa, basically she’s healthy as a horse. Built like a little brick shithouse. The spitting image of my father, it turns out. He was a stonemason, I’m not ashamed of it.” Stale champagne flavored his breath, exploded bubbles.

Owen felt a pang, imagining Alissa and the small girl and this flatulent blowhard together, a holy trinity, like his parents and himself on those Sunday walks in Willow. “Well, I hope she feels better,” he told Ian.

“She’s bound to. Like I say, tough as nails. Both of my grandfathers lived to be ninety.”