“Tell Alissa we all missed her.” Just Alissa’s name, its kissy sibilance, gave a gentle jolt to Owen’s mind, and the image of a subcutaneously padded back divided by a spine with tender extremities. He had a feeling of comradeship, of consorting with other veterans of the same campaign, as he moved through this crowd, his fellow townsfolk for fifteen years, a loving and loved feeling that bounced back not just from the women he knew but from the downtown merchants in their slippery polyester suits, the jeweller and the liquor-store owner, the surefooted roofer doubling as bartender at a white-covered table, and the sturdy nurse, now retired, who eight years ago, when Owen had his appendix removed, would bestow upon him the mercy of more Demerol in the dead of the night. Hospital orderlies and receptionists brought some brown and olive faces to this festive throng. He couldn’t find Phyllis in it, though her fair head usually floated a few inches above most others. He had loved her, initially, for being tall, tall and female and young. Her curious apparent absence gave him a premonitory stab of guilt; he felt unworthy of his happiness, confused by it. This guilty bliss is life?

Shadows were lengthening. The air was turning chilly. Vanessa, who as co-chairperson had already given an efficient speech of many-sided thanks into a defective, squawking portable sound system, came up to him. She wore a teal-green shot-silk pants suit and had at her side a handsome man in a reversed collar. “Owen dear, I’m not sure you’ve met the Reverend Mister Arthur Larson. He’s rather new at Epiphany Episcopal but was a splendid help with the special contributors in his flock. He helped us pin them down.”

The clergyman shook Owen’s hand. His grip would be, Owen intuited, exquisitely adjusted to the gender and size of the gripped, to his or her economic significance in the town, and to the strength of the presumed friendship with influential Vanessa. Owen received a warm but not fervent squeeze. Reverend Larson’s handsomeness seemed something evenly sprayed on, a water-resistant layer of it, from the satin shine on his narrow black shoes to the leathery lustre of his wind-buffed face, that of a weekday outdoorsman. The shirt beneath his collar was not the usual sooty black but a suave dove-gray; the thick hair on his head reminded Owen, in its resilience and tightly matted knit, of some middle-sized, tufty-backed, curly-tailed dog. Larson was still in his thirties, and firm but unassuming in demeanor. This was a man whose way was secure within the Lord’s way.

“Owen,” he said, repeating the name from Vanessa’s introduction, as if fixing it to a roll of remembrance in his mind. His eyes were kindly glints bracketed by the beginnings of creases. Owen liked him; he liked most clergy, for holding off the unthinkable while we dally through life.