“People don’t want to hear about life and death,” she said.

“Of course not. Why would they?”

“They want to be entertained.”

“Which is where your boss comes in. The Wilbur Mills of Lynn Beach, caught with an escort service babe. Eating fried clams, if I remember correctly.”

The squirrel ran across her face again. “He’d been in a terrible marriage for years.”

“Even so. As a citizen of Massachusetts I felt personally embarrassed. I mean, the guy has to pay for a woman to eat clams with him? What kind of governor is that? Taxpayer money, besides.”

“He’s done some good things.”

“I know it. I just-”

Adam was advancing on our table. With both hands I waved him away. He smiled at me. He winked. Janet and I stopped talking about the governor and shared the food-I wasn’t afraid; I never got sick, almost never-and worked our way through the meal and the talk kind of easily. She had somehow taken my natural urge to be too polite-devastating on a first date-and shoved it over the side of the table. She went stretches of several minutes without coughing at all, then started in again. It didn’t seem too bad really, just the tail end of a nasty cold.

Instead of asking the usual questions about brothers and sisters and parents, she said, “Everyone has a mess in their family. What’s your mess?”

“I’m pretty sure my sister works as a kind of call girl in Reno. She says she does therapeutic massage, but I’m pretty sure she’s talking about a certain kind of therapeutic.”

“Really? Does she like it?”

“I never asked. She has some methedrine problems and that’s made her a little hard to talk to. Unless you talk very fast. My brother is a Trappist monk in northwestern Connecticut. To balance things out.”

“Nobody ever married.”

“Not yet. What’s your mess?”

“My father was working on the Mystic River Bridge and either fell off a staging or jumped. We were never sure. Thirteen years ago today, actually.”