“Maybe you should be honest with him sometime.”

My office is about the size of two prison cells. It’s furnished with two desks and two chairs I bought over the years at county condemnation sales. There are two filing cabinets that I bought at Sears and a bookcase that I’d had growing up. Since our desks faced each other, Jamie didn’t have any trouble watching me.

“I wouldn’t want to hurt his feelings. Plus I really can’t think of anything wrong with him.” Those gentle blue eyes stayed on mine. “You look mad or something, Mr. C.”

“I’m just thinking he shouldn’t talk to you that way.”

“But he’s going to be famous someday. With his band. I’ll be sitting home in front of the TV and there he’ll be on Dick Clark. The Surfer Bums. It’s such a great name. That’s why we go to all those beach movies at the drive-in. So he can learn how to dress like a surfer and stuff.” Then: “But he always laughs at me because I get so scared. You know, when Frankie and Annette have all their fights I worry that they’ll never get back together.”

Oh, Jamie, goddammit. You could do so much better than that asshole.

“And I like Annette so much that when he says her breasts are bigger than mine it doesn’t really bother me that much, Mr. C.”

The “Mr. C,” by the way, comes from the Perry Como TV show. She thought it was pretty cool how all the people on the show addressed Como that way. No, my name doesn’t start with a “C,” but that’s a minor detail to Jamie.

“Are you still giving him money?”

She blushed. “Well, he needs to buy surfer clothes. He has to go to Cedar Rapids to buy them. Things’re expensive there.” She’d asked me to advance her money a few times, which I’d been happy to do until she told me what it was for.