“No regrets. No fears. Just grateful to be alive and enjoying nature all day long.” Then she giggled. “God, I just remembered what I said to Carleton.”

“I’m sure he’ll remind you.”

“He’s really not so bad.”

“If you say so.”

“C’mon, Sam, it’s not that bad, is it? You like some of these people.”

“Yeah, I actually do. But most of them aren’t here tonight.”

“It’s summer. A lot of them are on vacation.”

She yawned and tilted her perfect head back. When we went to high school together her name was Wendy McKay. Because of the Mc in her name and the Mc in mine we sat together in homeroom where, eventually, she was forced to talk to me. She’s admitted now that proximity alone had forced her to converse. We were social unequals. She was from a prominent family whose gene pool had endowed her with shining blonde hair, green eyes, and a body that was frequently imagined when teenage boys decided to seek the shadows for some small-town self-abuse.

She married into the Bennett family believing that her husband loved her. Unfortunately, as she learned all too soon, he’d still been in love with a girl he’d known all his life. After he was killed fighting in Vietnam, it all became moot.

As we had both passed thirty, we didn’t try to delude ourselves. She’d gone through a period of sleeping around and drinking too much. She’d ended up spending a lot of money on a shrink in Iowa City. I’d come close to being married three times. We wanted to be married; we even wanted to have a baby or two. But unlike me, Wendy wanted to go slow. So I kept my apartment at Mrs. Goldman’s even though I spent most of my nights at her house, shocking numerous guardians of local morality.

“Am I drunk? I can’t tell.”

“A little.”

“Damn. Don’t let me do anything stupid.”

“Why don’t we make a pass through the house once more and then head home?”