“Sorry.”

She waved her fork. “He was a good man. I just try to remember the good things.”

On that hopeful note, Abraham returned and we ordered dessert from him the same way we had ordered the main courses. Janet said, “Fruit for me, if you have it. Sweet and no chocolate for the gentleman.”

With dessert we each had another Vietnamese coffee and the last of the wine and we scooted and slipped through the usual conversational alleys and came out okay. Even though she wanted to split it, I paid the check and put in a forty-dollar tip. I’m old-fashioned there: if you do the inviting, you do the paying. And I was in a mood to spend money outrageously. That happens to me sometimes. Walking away from an ATM machine once in Harvard Square I gave a hundred dollars to a street musician. Five new twenties in his hat. I’d had what people call a comfortable childhood, in what they call the middle class, and I’d built up a thriving little two-man carpentry business, and sold some paintings besides, and I had more money than I knew what to do with and it meant almost exactly nothing to me. During the meal, all the normal insecurities and self-consciousness of a first date had somehow been knocked away and, though I didn’t know why that was, I liked it and it made me reckless, nutty. Plus, it wasn’t Jeffrey’s fault that he was Brian.

When we walked out of Diem Bo I wasn’t nervous. It had rained most of that week but the night was unusually warm for September-hot, really-and I felt completely at ease in it, and with Janet, standing on the sidewalk watching women walking dogs, and couples holding hands, and men in suits on cell phones, and taxis and traffic lights, and a moon almost full, and the healthy brick facades of the townhouses there. Gerard and I had gutted a whole floor of one of those townhouses once, tearing out the old and putting in the new, and it had made us feel heroic, in spite of the parking problems.