I only heard Dad allude to his second son’s sexual orientation once, during the late eighties. It must have made a big impression on me, because those were my blackout years, and I called home as seldom as possible. I wanted my dad to know I was still alive, but I was always afraid he might hear my oncoming death, which I had pretty much accepted, in my voice.

“I pray for Connie every night,” he said during that call. “This damn AIDS thing. It’s like they’re letting it spread on purpose.”

Con had avoided that and looked awesomely healthy now, but there was no disguising the fact that he was getting on, especially sitting next to his friend from the Botany Department. I had a flash memory of Con and Ronnie Paquette sitting shoulder to shoulder on the living room couch, singing “House of the Rising Sun” and trying to harmonize . . . an exercise in futility if there ever was one.

Some of this must have shown on my face, because Con grinned as he wiped his eyes. “Been a long time since we were arguing over whose turn it was to bring in Ma’s laundry off the line, huh?”

“Long time,” I agreed, and thought again of a frog too dumb to realize the water in his stovetop pond was growing ever warmer.

Terry and Annabelle’s daughter, Dawn, joined us with Cara Lynne in her arms. The baby’s eyes were that shade our mother used to call Morton Blue. “Hi, Uncle Jamie. Here’s your grand-niece. She’s one tomorrow, and she’s getting a new tooth to celebrate.”

“She’s beautiful. Can I hold her?”

Dawn smiled shyly at the stranger she’d last seen when she was still in braces. “You can try, but she usually bawls her head off when it’s someone she doesn’t know.”

I took the baby, ready to hand her back the second the yowls started. Only they didn’t. Cara Lynne examined me, reached out a hand, and tweaked my nose. Then she laughed. My family cheered and applauded. The baby looked around, startled, then looked back at me with what I could have sworn were my mother’s eyes.

And laughed again.

 • • •

The actual party the next day had much the same cast, only with more supporting characters. Some I recognized at once; others looked vaguely familiar, and I realized several were children of people who had worked for my father long ago and now worked for Terry, whose empire had grown: as well as the fuel oil business, he owned a New England–wide chain of convenience stores called Morton’s Fast-Shops. Bad handwriting had been no bar to success.

A catering crew from Castle Rock presided over four grills, dealing out hamburgers and hotdogs to go with a mind-boggling array of salads and desserts. Beer flowed from steel kegs and wine from wooden ones. As I chowed down on a bacon-loaded calorie-bomb in the backyard, one of Terry’s salesmen—drunk, cheerful, and voluble—told me Terry also owned Splash City in Fryeburg and Littleton Raceway in New Hampshire. “That track don’t make a cent of money,” the salesman said, “but you know Terry—he always loved the stocks and bombers.”

I remembered him working with my father on various incarnations of the Road Rocket in the garage, both of them dressed in greasy tee-shirts and saggy-butt coveralls, and suddenly realized that my hometown, country-mouse brother was well-to-do. Perhaps even rich.

Every time Dawn brought Cara Lynne near, the little girl held her arms out to me. I ended up toting her around for most of the afternoon, and she finally fell asleep on my shoulder. Seeing this, her dad relieved me of my burden. “I’m amazed,” he said as he laid her on a blanket in the shade of the backyard’s biggest tree. “She never takes to folks like that.”

“I’m flattered,” I said, and kissed the sleeping baby’s teething-flushed cheek.

There was a lot of talk about old days and old times, the kind of chatter that’s fabulously interesting to those who were there and stupendously boring to those who weren’t. I steered clear of the beer and wine, so when the party moved four miles down the road to the Eureka Grange, I was one of the designated drivers, trying to find my way through the gears of a monster King Cab pickup that belonged to the oil company. I hadn’t driven a standard in thirty years, and my inebriated passengers—there must have been a dozen, counting the seven or so in the truck bed—howled with laughter each time I popped the clutch and the truck lurched. It was a wonder none of them tumbled out the back.

The catering crew had arrived ahead of us, and there were already food tables set up along the sides of a dance floor that I remembered well. I stood there looking at that expanse of polished wood until Con squeezed my shoulder.

“Bring back memories, baby brother?”

I thought of walking onto the bandstand for the first time, scared to death and smelling the sweat that came roasting up from my armpits in waves. And later, Mom and Dad waltzing by as we played “Who’ll Stop the Rain?”

“More than you’ll ever know,” I said.

“I think I do,” he said, and hugged me. In my ear he whispered it again: “I think I do.”

 • • •

There were maybe seventy people at the home place for the noon meal; by seven o’clock, there were twice that many at Eureka Grange No. 7, and the place could have used some of Charlie Jacobs’s magic air-conditioning to augment the lackadaisical ceiling fans. I grabbed the sort of dessert that was still a Harlow specialty—lime Jell-O with bits of canned fruit suspended in it—and took it outside. I walked around the corner of the building, nibbling away with a plastic spoon, and there was the fire escape beneath which I had kissed Astrid Soderberg for the first time. I remembered how the fur parka she had been wearing framed the perfect oval of her face. I remembered the taste of her strawberry lipstick.

Was it all right? I had asked. And she had replied, Do it again and I’ll tell you.

“Hey, freshie.” From right behind me, making me jump. “Want to play some music tonight?”

At first I didn’t recognize him. The lanky, long-haired teenager who had recruited me to play rhythm guitar in Chrome Roses was now bald on top, gray on the sides, and sporting a gut that hung over his tight-cinched trousers. I stared at him, my little paper bowl of Jell-O drooping in one hand.

“Norm? Norm Irving?”

He grinned widely enough to flash gold teeth at the back of his mouth. I dropped my Jell-O and hugged him. He laughed and hugged me back. We told each other that we looked great. We told each other it had been too long. And of course we talked about the old days. Norm said he’d gotten Hattie Greer pregnant and married her. It only lasted a few years, but after a period of post-divorce acrimony, they had decided to put the past aside and be friends. Their daughter, Denise, was now pushing forty, and owned her own hair salon in Westbrook.

“Free and clear, too, bank all paid off. I got two boys by my second wife, but between you and me, Deenie’s my darlin. Hattie’s got one by her second husband.” He leaned closer, smiling grimly. “In and out of jail. Kid’s not worth the powder to blow him to hell.”

“What about Kenny and Paul?”

Kenny Laughlin, our bass player, had also married his Chrome Roses sweetie, and they were still married. “He owns an insurance agency in Lewiston. Doin good. He’s here tonight. You didn’t see him?”

“No.” Although maybe I had, and just hadn’t recognized him. And maybe he hadn’t recognized me.

“As for Paul Bouchard . . .” Norm shook his head. “He was climbing in Acadia State Park and took a fall. Lived two days, then passed away. 1990, that was. Probably a mercy. Docs said he would have been paralyzed from the neck down, if he’d lived. What they call a quad.”

For a moment I imagined our old drummer pulling through. Lying in bed with a machine to help him breathe and watching Pastor Danny on TV. I shook the thought away. “What about Astrid? Do you know where she is?”