The man who called himself Jerry Nolan took a small plastic bag out of his golf jacket pocket and extracted two pieces of cheese for the pugs. Al and Peg fell to silent gobbling and then remembered the reason they liked him.

“Ah, you remembered,” I said. I looked out at the driveway for his car. “You rode a bike.”

He nodded. “I live close, and it’s a nice evening,” he said.

“It will be dark when you leave,” I said.

“The bike has lights,” he said.

I took his jacket, ushered him into the living room, and offered a glass of wine or a cocktail. He said he didn’t drink. I wished he did, because the way he grinned at nothing was making me nervous. I got myself another Chardonnay.

After some stilted exchanges about the desert life and his job at the local riding stables, we sat down to dinner, Carlo and I at either end, with Gemma-Kate facing him across the table. He ate like a gentleman and managed table conversation, which I tried to steer from general to personal as the meal went on.

How unseasonable the temperatures were all over the country. Predictions of an early cold snap after an Indian summer.

How we were in the dry part of the year and couldn’t expect any rains until late December.

When the rattlesnakes went into hibernation, September or October?

When we had all moved to Tucson, and what brought us here.

Then I asked Jerry where he had come from, and he said Mississippi. Maybe he saw me react, and changed his story. Originally, he said, before Florida. Wouldn’t say where in Mississippi, but instead segued into being baptized as a Catholic. Drifted away from the church, he said.

“Brigid and I go to an Episcopal church,” Carlo said. “You should come sometime. There are lots of Catholics there.”

“How can you tell?” Jerry asked.

“They always want you to know,” Carlo said. “Where were you baptized?”

I happened to glance at Jerry, and he had the look of someone who had just been dealt a straight flush. I watched him.

“At St. Anthony’s,” Jerry said.

“I used to be an altar boy at a St. Anthony’s,” Carlo said. “In Kansas City.”

“That’s the one,” Jerry said. “Small world.”

Between Mississippi, Kansas, Florida, and now Arizona, Jerry had gotten around in that small world, I thought.

“I should say so,” Carlo said. “You and I are around the same age, I bet. We might have both been baptized by Father Victor Santangelo. Vic was very important in my life.”

I saw Jerry lick his lips and swallow. Rather than take the next question and ask how Santangelo was important in Carlo’s life, he turned the conversation to when Carlo had become interested in astronomy.

Carlo said it was a recent hobby.