Before Elsie, he would sometimes drive back to Willow, looking for the action among his old friends and rarely finding it. He saw Willow now, having left at twelve, with an exile’s eyes, as a small provincial place where life—the social life of his own classmates, the bunch at the playground half grown-up—went on without him, out of sight: a deserted village. His grandfather’s chicken house was losing some of its asbestos shingles, he could see as he cruised by in the alley that bent around their old house. Not that he was certain to have been happy had his family stayed. Adolescence reshuffles the cards. As a child he had been more spectator than actor, valued primarily as a loyal follower, an admirer—of Buddy Rourke, of the girls he scarcely dared imagine naked.