“But why are boys always, you know, so anxious?”

“It’s just the way they are physiologically. I suppose psychologically too.”

Innocently, a sincere girl in search of knowledge: “Are older men that way?”

“Sure older men are. Not too old but older.”

“I’ve wondered about that. Like young girls who marry older men.”

“Well, if they’re too old-”

“There was a movie star recently-I can’t think of his name-he’s fifty and the girl I think is twenty-two. That’s, gosh, twenty-eight years difference!”

“If they get along, have mutual interests, a rapport, then why not?”

“Uh-huh. I guess so. If they love each other.”

Now watch the serious, rationalizing father turning it over in his mind in the dark car with the dash lights and the radio low and her tan legs in the short shorts. “What are you, seventeen? That would be only eighteen years difference between us,” he would say, knocking anywhere from three to six years from his age. “Could you imagine-say in a couple of years, and if I weren’t married-could you imagine you and I going together?”

“I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

“But it could happen, couldn’t it?”

“Gee, I guess it could.”

Within one December to April season, six after-the-party, half-in-the-bag fathers, who lived within a mile of one another but were not acquainted (she made sure of that), had reached the verge and realized the clear possibility that cute little Nancy Hayes with the cute little figure could be more to them than a babysitter. Three escaped: they did nothing about it; they seemed interested in her; they liked talking to her; they teased themselves with the possibility of her; but they did nothing about it.

Three did not escape.

One of them, taking Nancy home, turned off the road before reaching her street and rolled dead-engine into the willows that grew along a deserted stretch of canal. He pulled her to him across the console-glovebox between the bucket seats, with the faint sound of Sinatra coming from the instrument panel, and with a sad, aching look in his eyes kissed her gently, lingeringly on the mouth. When they parted, Nancy nestled close and put her head on his shoulder.