Downstairs he heard Peggy move. Her footsteps crossed the living room, heading toward the stairs. He froze.

Ellis imagined her coming up and reaching for the door.

Why is the door locked? What are you doing in there, Ellis?

What would he say?

What are you doing with my keys?

He paused, listening. She had stopped.

What the hell is she doing? Just standing in the middle of the hall? Screw it.

Ellis reached in and grabbed everything in the way. He stuffed the pile in his coat pocket, then felt for the earrings.

He heard Peggy starting up the steps, and scooped up the jewelry on the bottom. He closed the closet and raced his wife to the bedroom door, opening it just before she touched the knob.

“Still here?” she asked.

He smiled. “Just heading out.”

His heart was pounding as he went down the steps. He gingerly set her key ring back on the little table near the coat rack and walked out. On the porch he put his hand in his pants pocket and felt for the jewelry. Ellis sighed. He’d accidentally grabbed Peggy’s rings along with his grandmother’s diamonds. He’d leave them on the kitchen counter when he got back from the bar, although they obviously didn’t mean anything to her anymore. She’d worn them for eighteen years but stopped about the time she started taking the real-estate seminars. Peggy mentioned that an article had said women Realtors without wedding bands consistently outperformed those who wore them regardless of whether or not they were actually married. Ellis never argued, never put up a fuss because he knew the real reason. She had put away her rings and started her career the same summer that Isley had hung himself in the garage with one of his father’s belts.

Brady’s was a nearly invisible bar on Eight Mile Road. Sandwiched between a video-rental store and a Chinese restaurant in a neighborhood of liquor stores and bump shops, it was the only building without bars on the windows. Brady’s didn’t have windows. The place was just a brick front with a white-painted steel door that clanged on a tight spring.

Ellis stood outside the bar, coughing. He always had trouble going out in the cold, not that it was all that cold yet. November in Detroit, with the moisture coming off the Great Lakes, was just the prelude to six months of bone-chilling misery. Still, his lungs didn’t like the change in the air. These days his lungs didn’t like much of anything, and the coughing came in fits of chest-ripping waves that left him feeling battered. He waited until the wheezing stopped before heading inside.

The interior of Brady’s was about what the exterior suggested: a no-frills bar that smelled like fried food and still reeked of cigarette smoke years after the state ban went into effect. The floor was sticky, the tables wobbled, and the corner-mounted television showed muted football highlights while hidden speakers played vintage Johnny Cash. Without windows, the only light came from the television and a few old-fashioned ceiling lamps, leaving the place a flickering cave of silhouettes.

Warren Eckard sat at the bar, looking up at the television screen and swirling what was left of a Budweiser. Supported by his elbows, he was hunched over the bottle, one foot bouncing to the rhythm of Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues.” Warren was wearing a T-shirt that read: I LOVE MY COUNTRY. IT’S THE GOVERNMENT I HATE. The 2XL shirt was still too small, leaving an exposed band of pale skin muffining out of his jeans. Ellis was just thankful Warren wasn’t letting his waistband droop any more than it already was.

“Warren,” Ellis said, clapping him on the back and taking a seat alongside him.

“Hey! Hey!” Warren turned, grinning at him with an overacted look of surprise. “Well, if it ain’t Mr. Rogers. Wonderful day in the neighborhood to ya, old man. How ya been?”

Warren held out his hand, and Ellis took it, his own disappearing inside that big mitt. It had been decades since the accident, but he couldn’t help noticing Warren’s missing fourth and fifth fingers.

“Who’s the kid behind the bar?” Ellis asked, trying to catch the eye of the bartender—some young fella in a black T-shirt with a toothpick in his mouth.

“Freddy,” Warren said. “He’s Italian. So don’t make any dago jokes, or we’ll both be swimming wit da fishes.”

“Where’s Marty?”

Warren shrugged. “Day off, maybe. Laid-off likely. Who knows?”

“Freddy?” Ellis called to the kid, who was leaning back on his elbows, fiddling with the toothpick between his teeth. “Can I get a Bud?”

The kid nodded and popped the top off a tall, brown bottle frosted from the cooler. He slapped a square napkin on the bar in front of Ellis, set the bottle on it, and then went back to his elbows and his toothpick.

“Lions playing tonight?” Ellis asked, nodding at the television as he peeled off his coat.

“Against the Redskins,” Warren replied. “Gonna get creamed.”

“Way to support the home team.”

“Well, it’d help if they had any decent players.” He drained his bottle and clapped it on the bar loud enough for Freddy to take notice and pull him a new one.

“Maybe you can try out after the baby comes. What are you eight, nine months, now?”

“Very funny, you’re quite the comedian. You know damn well that”—he switched into his best impersonation of Marlon Brando, which sounded more like a sickly Vito Corleone than Terry Malloy— “I could have been a contender.”

“Yeah, well, shoulda, woulda, coulda. Speaking of which…” Ellis withdrew a stapled stack of paper from the inside pocket of his coat. The pages were creased, stained with coffee, and had notes jotted in the margins. The bulk of which was a lot of small text in two columns—much of it equations.

“What’s this?” Warren asked. “More of your geek leaking out? You bringing your work to the bar now?”

“No, this one’s all mine. Been working on it for years—sort of a hobby. You know anything about the theory of relativity? Black holes?”

“Do I look like Stephen Hawking?”

Ellis smiled. “Sometimes. When you’re sitting up straighter and speaking more clearly.”

Warren fake-laughed. “Oh you’re hot tonight.” Turning his attention to Freddy he added, “You hear this guy?—a regular Moe Howard.”

Freddy was pulling a pair of Miller Lites and a Michelob for three women, who had taken seats at the far end of the bar. He looked over, confused. “Who?”

“You know, the Three Stooges.”

Freddy shook his head.

“Jesus, are you shitting me? Moe, Larry, and Curly. Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk. The greatest comedians of our time.”

“What time would that be exactly?” Freddy asked, with a smile that both insulted and charmed.

“Never mind.” Warren had his disgusted-with-the-younger-generation expression on, which never ceased to amaze Ellis, because he had known Warren Eckard when they werethe younger generation.

Warren flipped through the pages, shaking his head the way a cop might at a particularly gruesome crime scene. “I can’t believe you do this shit for fun.”

“You watch football,” Ellis countered. “I play with quantum—”

“Football’s exciting.”

“So is this.”

Warren pointed at the television where a blimp’s-eye view revealed the mammoth FedExField in Landover, Maryland. “There’s more than eighty-five thousand people in those stands, and a hundred million watch the Super Bowl every year. That’s how fun it is.”

“Five hundred million watched Neil Armstrong step on the surface of the moon. How fun is that?”

Warren scowled and sucked on his beer. “So what’s with the egghead papers? Got a point or just showing off?”

“Showing off?”

“You’re Mr. M.I.T and I’m Mr. G.E.D, right?”