Rebecca throws her arms around me. As she speaks I can feel her chin, shaped exactly like mine, pressing into my shoulder. “I love you,” she says, plain and simple.

The first time Rebecca said she loved me I burst into tears. She was four and I had just rubbed her dry with a towel after a romp in the snow. She was very matter-of-fact about it. I am sure she does not remember but I could tell you that she was wearing red Oshkosh overalls, that there were hexagonal snowflakes caught in her eyelashes, that her socks had come off, bunched and burrowing in the toes of her boots.

This is why I became a mother, isn’t it? No matter how long you have to wait for her to understand where you come from, no matter how many bouts of appendicitis or stitches you have to suffer through, no matter how many times you feel you are losing her, this makes it all worth it. Over Rebecca’s shoulder there are brains of monkeys and eyes of goats. There is a thick brown liver curled inside a glass cylinder. And there is a line of hearts, arranged in order of size: mouse, guinea pig, cat; sheep, Saint Bernard, cow. The human, I think, rests somewhere in the middle.

They have two tapes at the Blue Diner in Boston-the Meat Puppets and Don Henley, and they alternate them over and over, the entire twenty-four hours that they remain open. I know because I have been here at least that long, having noticed the same waitresses repeating their shifts. I can sing most of the words from each tape. I have to confess I had never heard of either, and I’ve been wondering if Rebecca knows them.

“Don Henley,” Rasheen-the waitress-says, refilling my coffeecup. “You know. From the Eagles. Ring a bell?”

I shrug, singing along with the tape. “You’ve got that down,” Rasheen says, laughing. From the greasy grill, Hugo, the shortorder cook who is missing a thumb, cheers. “You got a nice voice, Oliver, you know?”

“Well.” I stir in a packet of sugar. “I’m known for my songs.”

“No shit,” Rasheen says. “Wait, let me guess. I got it. Blues. You’re one of those white-bread trumpet players who thinks he’s Wynton Marsalis.”

“You got me. I can’t keep anything from you.”

I have been on this stool, at the Blue Diner on Kneeland, for so long now that I am not certain I could use my legs to stand. I could certainly have taken a room at the Four Seasons or the Park Plaza Hotel, but I haven’t been overcome with the desire to sleep. In fact I haven’t slept since I left Iowa, three and a half days ago, and drove continuously through to Boston. I would have gone straight to Stow, but in all truth, I’m terrified. She is a supernatural force with which I have to reckon. No, scratch that. She isn’t the problem at all. I am the problem. But it is easier to blame Jane. I have been doing it for so long that it is the first explanation to spring to mind.

The Blue Diner management has been kind to me, neglecting to report me to the authorities for loitering. Perhaps they can see I am a distressed man by my rumpled suit jacket, or the circles beneath my eyes. Perhaps they can tell by the way I eat my food- three meals a day, the specials, reassembled in geometrical patterns on my plate until Rasheen or Lola or pretty Tallulah decides it is cold enough to take back to the kitchen. When anyone will listen, I talk about Jane. Sometimes when no one is listening I talk anyway, hoping my words will find an audience.

It is almost time for Rasheen to go home, which means Mica (short for Mon ica) comes on. I have begun to tell the time by the arrivals and departures of the Blue Diner staff. Mica is the latenight waitress; a dental hygiene student by day. She is the only one who has actually asked me questions. When I told her the story of Jane’s exodus, she propped her elbows against the speckled white countertop and rested her cheeks in her hands.

“I got to go now, Oliver,” Rasheen says, pulling on an armysurplus jacket. “I guess I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Just as she is walking out the door Mica blows in in a flurry of paper, pink uniform, and leatherette coat. “Oliver!” she says, surprised to see me. “I was hoping you’d be gone by now. Couldn’t sleep last night?”

I shake my head. “I didn’t even try.”

Mica waves to Hugo, who, oddly enough, doesn’t seem to sleep either. He has been here the same length of time as I. She pulls up a stool beside me and grabs a Danish from beneath a scratched plastic dome. “You know, I was thinking about you during lecture today, and I think Jane would be very impressed. From what you’ve said, I think you’re a changed man.”

“I’d like to believe that,” I say. “Unfortunately, I haven’t the same conviction as you.”

“Don’t you just love the way he talks.” Mica says this to nobody in particular. “It’s like you’re British or something.”

“Or something,” I say. Although she’s asked, I’ve refused to tell her anything about my life with the exception of the fact that I come from San Diego. Somehow I think that finding out I am a Harvard man, that I lived on the Cape as a child, would crush the mystique.

“No wonder Jane fell for you.” Mica reaches over the counter to pour herself some coffee. “You’re such a kidder.”

After our wedding ceremony, the reverend led us into the library at Jane’s parents’ house. He told us we could probably use a few moments alone; it would be all the peace and quiet we’d have that day. It was a nice gesture but I had no pressing information I had to share with Jane; it seemed to be a waste of time. Don’t misunderstand me: I loved Jane, but I did not care much about the wedding. To me, marriage was a means to an end. To Jane, marriage was a fresh beginning.

When Jane said her vows, she had given a great deal of thought to the ideas behind the words, which I cannot say I’d done at all. And so for those few moments in the study, she was the one who did the talking. She said she was the luckiest girl in the world. Who would imagine that of all the women around, I would pick her to spend forever with?

She said it easily but I think it took her a few months to understand what she meant. Jane settled easily into a routine: taking shirts to the dry cleaners, registering for courses at San Diego State, grocery shopping, paying the telephone bill. I must admit, she was well suited to marriage, making my own experience much better than I had imagined. Every morning she’d kiss me goodbye and hand me a brown-bagged lunch. Every night when I came home from the Institute she’d have supper waiting, and she’d ask me how my day had been. She liked the role so much she won me over. I started to act like a husband. I would tiptoe into the shower when she was washing her hair and grab her from behind. I checked her when she got into the car to make sure she was wearing her seat belt.

We were dirt-poor, but Jane didn’t seem to notice or care. One night over dinner she clattered her fork and knife against the side of her chinet plate and smiled, her mouth full of cheap spaghetti. “Isn’t life wonderful?” she said. “Don’t we just have it all?”

That night she woke up screaming. I sat up, temporarily blind in the dark, and felt my way across the bed for her. “I dreamed that you died,” she said. “You drowned because of a problem with an oxygen tank in your diving gear. And I was left alone.”

“That’s ridiculous.” I said the first thing to come to mind. “We check all our gear.”

“That’s not it, Oliver. What if one of us dies? What happens then?”

I reached around and turned on the light to see the clock: 3:20 A.M. “I suppose we’d remarry.”

“Just like that!” Jane exploded. She sat up in bed, facing away from me. “You can’t just pick a wife off a shelf.”

“Of course not. I just meant that if I happened to die young I’d want you to be happy.”

“How could I be happy without you? When you get married, you make the biggest decision of your life; you say you’re going to spend eternity with one person. So what do you do if that person leaves? What do you do once you’ve already committed yourself?”