‘Close only counts in horseshoes,’ Olga said. ‘Boyfriend.’

Ollie made his slow way toward the door opening on the Evergreen Wing, cane tapping its unmistakable one-two-three rhythm. He didn’t appear at lunch, and when he didn’t show up for dinner, that day’s duty nurse checked on him and found him lying on the coverlet of his bed, with his talented hands laced together on his chest. He seemed to have died as he lived, peacefully and with no fuss.

That evening, Dave tried the door of his late friend’s suite and found it open. He sat on the stripped bed with the silver pocket watch laid on his palm, the cover open so he could watch the second hand go around in the little circle above the 6. He looked at Ollie’s possessions – the books on the shelf, the sketchpads on the desk, the various drawings taped to the walls – and wondered who would take them. The ne’er-do-well brother, he supposed. He fished for the name, and it came to him: Tom. And the niece was Martha.

Over the bed was a charcoal drawing of a handsome young man with his hair combed high and spangles on his cheeks. On his Cupid’s-bow lips was a smile. It was small but inviting.

IV

The summer came full, then began to ebb. Schoolbuses rolled down Maryland Avenue. Olga Glukhov’s condition declined; she mistook Dave for her late husband more frequently. Her cribbage skills remained, but she began to lose her English. Although Dave’s older son and daughter lived close by in the suburbs, it was Peter who came to visit most frequently, driving in from the farm in Hemingford County sixty miles away and often taking his father out to dinner.

Halloween rolled around. The staff decorated the common room with orange and black streamers. The residents of Lakeview Assisted Living Center celebrated All Hallows with cider, pumpkin pie, and popcorn balls for the few whose teeth were still up to the challenge. Many spent the evening in costume, which made Dave Calhoun think of something his old friend had said during their last conversation – about how, in the late eighties, going to the gay clubs had been too much like attending the masquerade in Poe’s story about the Red Death. He supposed Lakeview was also a kind of club, and sometimes it was gay, but there was a drawback: you couldn’t leave, unless you had relatives willing to take you in. Peter and his wife would have done that for Dave if he had asked, would have given him the room where their son Jerome had once lived, but Peter and Alicia were getting on themselves now, and he would not inflict himself on them.

One warm day in early November, he went out onto the flagstone patio and sat on one of the benches there. The paths beyond were inviting in the sunshine, but he no longer dared the steps. He might fall going down, which would be bad. He might not be able to get back up again without help, which would be humiliating.

He spied a young woman standing by the fountain. She wore the kind of shin-length, frilly-collared dress you only saw nowadays in old black-and-white movies on TCM. Her hair was bright red. She smiled at him. And waved.

Why, look at you, Dave thought. Didn’t I see you not long after World War II ended, getting out of your boyfriend’s pickup truck at the Humble Oil station in Omaha?

As if hearing this thought, the pretty redhead tipped him a wink and then twitched up the hem of her dress slightly, showing her knees.

Hello, Miss Yummy, Dave thought, and then: Once you did a lot better than that. The memory made him laugh.

She laughed in return. This he saw but could not hear, although she was close and his ears were still sharp. Then she walked behind the fountain … and didn’t come out. Yet Dave had reason to believe she would be back. He had glimpsed the life-force down there, no more and no less. The strong beating heart of beauty and desire. Next time she would be closer.

V

Peter came into town the following week, and they went out to dinner at a nice place close by. Dave ate well, and drank two glasses of wine. They perked him up considerably. When the meal was done, he took Ollie’s silver watch from his inner coat pocket, coiled the heavy chain around it, and pushed it across the tablecloth to his son.

‘What’s this?’ Peter asked.

‘It was a gift from a friend,’ Dave said. ‘He gave it to me shortly before he passed on. I want you to have it.’

Peter attempted to push it back. ‘I can’t take this, Dad. It’s too nice.’

‘Actually, you’d be doing me a favor. Because of the arthritis. It’s very hard for me to wind it, and pretty soon I won’t be able to at all. Darn thing’s at least a hundred and twenty years old, and a watch that’s made it that far deserves to run as long as it can. So please. Take it.’

‘Well, when you put it that way …’ Peter took the watch and dropped it into his pocket. ‘Thanks, Dad. It’s a beaut.’

At the next table – so close Dave could have reached out and touched her – sat the redhead. There was no meal in front of her, but no one seemed to notice. At this distance, Dave saw that she was more than pretty; she was downright beautiful. Surely more beautiful than that long-ago girl had been, sliding out of her boyfriend’s pickup with her skirt momentarily bunched in her lap, but what of that? Such revisions were, like birth and death, the ordinary course of things. Memory’s job was not only to recall the past but to burnish it.

The redhead slid her skirt up farther this time, revealing one long white thigh for a second. Perhaps even two. And winked.

Dave winked back.

Peter turned to look and saw only an empty four-top table with a RESERVED sign on it. When he turned back to his father, his eyebrows were raised.

Dave smiled. ‘Just something in my eye. It’s gone now. Why don’t you get the check? I’m tired and ready to go back.’

Thinking of Michael McDowell

There’s a saying: ‘If you can remember the sixties, you weren’t there.’ Total bullshit, and here’s a case in point. Tommy wasn’t his name, and he wasn’t the one who died, but otherwise, this is how it went down, back when we all thought we were going to live forever and change the world.

Tommy

Tommy died in 1969.

He was a hippie with leukemia.

Bummer, man.

After the funeral came the reception at Newman Center.

That’s what his folks called it: the reception.

My friend Phil said, ‘Isn’t that what you have after a fucking wedding?’

The freaks all went to the reception.

Darryl wore his cape.

There were sandwiches to eat and grape drink in Dixie Cups.

My friend Phil said, ‘What is this grape shit?’

I said it was Za-Rex. I recognized it, I said, from MYF.

‘What’s that shit?’ asked Phil.

‘Methodist Youth Fellowship¸’ I said.

‘I went for ten years and once did

a flannelboard of Noah and the Ark.’

‘Fuck your Ark,’ said Phil.

‘And fuck the animals who rode on it.’

Phil: a young man with strong opinions.

After the reception, Tommy’s parents went home.

I imagine they cried and cried.

The freaks went to 110 North Main.

We cranked up the stereo. I found some Grateful Dead records.

I hated the Dead. Of Jerry Garcia I used to say,

‘I’ll be grateful when he’s dead!’

(Turned out I wasn’t.)

Oh well, Tommy liked them.

(Also, dear God, Kenny Rogers.)

We smoked dope in Zig-Zag papers.

We smoked Winstons and Pall Malls.

We drank beer and ate scrambled eggs.

We rapped about Tommy.

It was pretty nice.

And when the Wilde-Stein Club showed up – all eight of them – we let them in

because Tommy was gay and sometimes wore Darryl’s cape.

We all agreed his folks had done him righteous.