Prologue

      Behind you was a poster for the DQ Butterscotch Sundae, and next to you were the gleaming, shuddering machines that dispensed the ice cream. Mark catapulted over the counter and gave you a big hug. ‘Here she is,’ he said, clapping his hands on your shoulders. You looked familiar. It was probably that I’d seen you around-at a picnic, in the halls at school, in the bleachers, in the aisles of Charles Kupka’s Drugs, The Finest Apothecary in Western Pennsylvania. You smiled at me and extended your hand, so formal. ‘Hello,’ you said. You smiled with all your teeth. ‘Hello,’ you said again.

      You lived down the street from Mark. When you were little, you stole tomatoes from his garden. He used to chase you with a garden hoe with his eyes closed, chopping and chopping. But then, a month or so ago, Mark was up on a ladder, touching up the eaves of his house with white paint, and a bee came and scared him and he fell off. When he opened his eyes, flat on his back on the grass with the wind knocked out of him, the ladder still tilted against the roof, you were standing there with your wavy blonde hair and your milkmaid face and your wide, vine-ripened mouth. ‘I realized I loved her right then,’ Mark told me. He had been dying to introduce you to me for a while, but I’d been working so much that summer and had hardly been around.

      I don’t know what made me go into Dairy Queen alone the next time, knowing what I knew. Mark had been my best friend since third grade, when we were both punished for sticking chewing gum to the underside of our desks. Perhaps it was because you said hello twice. Perhaps it was because Mark joked, that first time, ‘Now, don’t go stealing her away, Rich. She’s mine.’ I don’t know why he said that-I’d never stolen anything from Mark in my life. But maybe it got into my head,