Well, Bobbie Jean was no freak. That was the first surprise. The second was that, after spending twenty minutes in her company, I found my previously low opinion of Eberhardt’s taste and mental health climbing several notches to hover around normal. The third surprise was that by the time we left in my car for the East Bay, Kerry and Bobbie Jean were not only getting along but on their way to becoming fast friends.

Bobbie Jean resembled Wanda Jaworski in no way whatsoever. She was in her late forties, slender, attractive in an unflashy way. She had shag-cut brown hair lightly dusted with gray, and a normal-sized chest, one that would not support a couple of midgets performing an Irish jig. She was quiet, intelligent, frank. She owned a nice wry sense of humor and spoke with only the faintest of Carolina accents. And she did not paw Eberhardt in public as Wanda had done, or refer to him as “Ebbie” or “Sugar Buns.”

If she had any flaw, it was the one she shared with him: Up until now she had shown poor judgment in her dealings with the opposite sex. Her first husband, whom she’d married at age eighteen, had left her after fourteen months and gone off to Texas, where he intended to fulfill a lifelong dream of making big money as a laborer on the Galveston docks. (“He had a head this big,” Bobbie Jean said at one point, holding her hands about six inches apart. “My God, even as young as I was, how could I have married a man with a head the size of a cantaloupe?”) A few years later she’d met and married an electronics engineer, and eventually moved out to the Silicon Valley with him and her two young daughters. The marriage had been rocky all along, but she probably would have stuck it out for the sake of her daughters, she said, if she hadn’t found out that hubby was having an affair with one of his co-workers-one of his male coworkers.