huge silver urn at the other end of the ballroom, he realized that a small happiness was taking hold somewhere within his chest, maybe his rib cage. It was opening, like a tiny flower.
“I’m sorry,” Jeb said during a pause between songs. “I drink too much.”
Bruce looked at him. It seemed unbelievable that he had forgotten Jeb’s presence for even a second.
“Champagne and Scotch—plus a couple beers before the ceremony. Bad combination. The champagne at these things always gets me.”
“Yes,” Bruce said.
Jeb watched him. His lashes, almost transparently blond, seemed to reflect light. The sheen of sweat on his face tinted his skin a pale, lambent green, and Bruce could see the pocks in his complexion up close, as if they’d been magnified. He fought to hold Jeb’s gaze.
“Do you ever talk to Toby Van Wyck?” Bruce asked suddenly.
“Naw,” Jeb said. “I lost touch with him.”
Bruce nodded.
“I do think about him, though,” Jeb said.
“Me too.”
“He still in Florida?”
“No idea.”
“I remember all that happening,” Jeb said. He leaned forward. “I remember the memorial service. We had those rubber bands that we were playing with and nobody minded.”
“Yeah.”
“They found her, you probably heard that. I’m sure you heard that.”
“I did.”
“Incredible,” Jeb said.
Stories, shared, could inspire love, Bruce thought after. Jeb Jackman, prematurely middle-aged, doughy, pickled, he was all right.
(When Bruce first told Charlotte Toby’s story, the parts he knew, he kept details to a minimum, and refused to fuel her pity with too many observations of his own, because by that time he knew that her pity, while extravagant at times, could be fleeting, that she could be distracted from it. The facts he included were as stark as he could make them: Toby’s mom had gone missing, there had been publicity, his father had remarried quickly, Toby had moved to Naples with his father and stepmother, though they occasionally returned to the Westchester house in the summers, and in Bruce’s junior year of high school Mrs. Van Wyck’s remains had been found. She had been buried at the edge of an abandoned car lot on Long Island, unearthed when the lot was cleared to make way for a senior-living condominium development. The forensics people who identified her had confirmed that she had died from blows to the head and chest, and the police had charged Viri Minetti after all, based on some evidence linked to the body that Bruce couldn’t quite remember. Confirmed, forensics, unearthed, blows. Newspeak was the language he had learned it in, and he doubted there was any other language to use that was any more comprehensible, so he stuck with it. Holy, Charlotte would say, her eyes filling so automatically with tears that Bruce thought her acting for a moment, then despised himself for the thought just as quickly as he’d had it, nodded, and looked back at her, half proud that something he described could move her so. Holy.)
Bruce reached—awkwardly, his elbow bent to avoid dipping his cuff into the flame of one of the candles—for Jeb’s hand, shook it again. He didn’t feel surprised when Jeb tightened his fingers around his—a firm handshake would be rote to him and didn’t necessarily signal particular regard. Then the moment was over, and they both let go and faced forward again. Bruce rested his chin on his palm. He had never said anything to Toby about Mrs. Van Wyck, the disappearing into nothing. This was a pain that surfaced, from time to time. But what he would have said if he had known how—this he was never sure of.
Bruce’s fingertips curled around the lower part of his face and brushed against his top lip. He thought that they smelled strangely sweet.
“Good to see you,” he said to Jeb. “Really good.”
“Right back at you,” Jeb said.
They watched the girl together, until one or the other of them excused himself to make a trip to the bar.
AT THE END of that night, Bruce approached the waitress. He told himself that he meant to apologize to her, in case she’d felt harassed. He came upon her standing at the bottom of a back staircase, outside the kitchen. She was talking to a man and a woman, who were leaning into each other, passing a cigarette back and forth. The waitress had one elbow hooked around the newel post of the banister and held a mug of something steaming in her other hand. She stood with her back to him. She laughed at whatever the man had said—a low, gravelly laugh that