“Goddamn it.” Hardy laid his arm up over his eyes, shielding the sun. “Goddamn it, Eddie.”

The problem was, why was he feeling now like he had to do something, anything at all, to make some sense out of this? He shouldn’t have let Eddie, or Eddie and Frannie, get inside of him.

He hadn’t seen it coming, so hadn’t been prepared for it. He’d thought he’d kept them outside enough-acquaintances, not friends.

Eddie was gone, and nothing was going to change that.

Still, something nudged him, hurting, almost like a cramp, or a screw turning in his heart.

He moaned and sat up in bed.

The beginning-

Four and a half years before. New Year’s Eve. Frannie McGuire, still a few months shy of the legal twenty-one but damned if Hardy was going to card her.

With madness raging all around and only swelling as the night wore on, Frannie nursed a few rum and Cokes at the bar. Hardy, in what he called his fun mode, pounded down everything in sight-beer, scotch, tequila, gin. Yahoo!

And nobody to drive that party animal Hardy home except the quiet little redheaded very much younger sister of his boss Moses.

Sitting in front of his house, then, the party over-really over -and enough juice in him to forget that all of his own kid stuff was in his past, that he didn’t care about any of that. Not coming on to her, but spilling his guts-the whole thing-and finally passing out, he guessed, without so much as kissing her or even trying, waking up a cold dawn, his arms around her waist, his head cradled in her lap on the front seat of his old Ford.

And before he dropped her off back at her dorm, she said, “I hope I meet someone like you, Dismas, before life eats him up. I’d marry him in a minute.”

She did.

His name was Eddie Cochran, and after about three dates she appeared with him at the Shamrock. Took Hardy aside and whispered, “Remember what I said,” as though she’d only said one thing to him before in her life.