back the second the yowls started. Only they didn’t. Cara Lynne examined me, reached out a hand, and tweaked my nose. Then she laughed. My family cheered and applauded. The baby looked around, startled, then looked back at me with what I could have sworn were my mother’s eyes.
And laughed again.
• • •
The actual party the next day had much the same cast, only with more supporting characters. Some I recognized at once; others looked vaguely familiar, and I realized several were children of people who had worked for my father long ago and now worked for Terry, whose empire had grown: as well as the fuel oil business, he owned a New England–wide chain of convenience stores called Morton’s Fast-Shops. Bad handwriting had been no bar to success.
A catering crew from Castle Rock presided over four grills, dealing out hamburgers and hotdogs to go with a mind-boggling array of salads and desserts. Beer flowed from steel kegs and wine from wooden ones. As I chowed down on a bacon-loaded calorie-bomb in the backyard, one of Terry’s salesmen—drunk, cheerful, and voluble—told me Terry also owned Splash City in Fryeburg and Littleton Raceway in New Hampshire. “That track don’t make a cent of money,” the salesman said, “but you know Terry—he always loved the stocks and bombers.”
I remembered him working with my father on various incarnations of the Road Rocket in the garage, both of them dressed in greasy tee-shirts and saggy-butt coveralls, and suddenly realized that my hometown, country-mouse brother was well-to-do. Perhaps even rich.
Every time Dawn brought Cara Lynne near, the little girl held her arms out to me. I ended up toting her around for most of the afternoon, and she finally fell asleep on my shoulder. Seeing this, her dad relieved me of my burden. “I’m amazed,” he said as he laid her on a blanket in the shade of the backyard’s biggest tree. “She never takes to folks like that.”
“I’m flattered,” I said, and kissed the sleeping baby’s teething-flushed cheek.
There was a lot of talk about old days and old times, the kind of chatter that’s fabulously interesting to those who were there and stupendously boring to those who weren’t. I steered clear of the beer and wine, so when the party moved four miles down the road to the Eureka Grange, I was one of the designated drivers, trying to find my way through the gears of a monster King Cab pickup that belonged to the oil company. I hadn’t driven a standard in thirty years, and my inebriated passengers—there must have been a dozen, counting the seven or so in the truck bed—howled with laughter each time I popped the clutch and the truck lurched. It was a wonder none of them tumbled out the back.
The catering crew had arrived ahead of us, and there were already food tables set up along the sides of a dance floor that I remembered well. I stood there looking at that expanse of polished wood until Con squeezed my shoulder.
“Bring back memories, baby brother?”
I thought of walking onto the bandstand for the first time, scared to death and smelling the sweat that came roasting up from my armpits in waves. And later, Mom and Dad waltzing by as we played “Who’ll Stop the Rain?”
“More than you’ll ever know,” I said.
“I think I do,” he said, and hugged me. In my ear he whispered it again: “I think I do.”
• • •
There were maybe seventy people at the home place for the noon meal; by seven o’clock, there were twice that many at Eureka Grange No. 7, and the place could have used some of Charlie Jacobs’s magic air-conditioning to augment the lackadaisical ceiling fans. I grabbed the sort of dessert that was still a Harlow specialty—lime Jell-O with bits of canned fruit suspended in it—and took it outside. I walked around the corner of the building, nibbling away with a plastic spoon, and there was the fire escape beneath which I had kissed Astrid Soderberg for the first time. I remembered how the fur parka she had been wearing framed the perfect oval of her face. I remembered the taste of her strawberry lipstick.
Was it all right? I had asked. And she had replied, Do it again and I’ll tell you.
“Hey, freshie.” From right behind me, making me jump. “Want to play some music tonight?”
At first I didn’t recognize him. The lanky, long-haired teenager who had recruited me to play rhythm guitar in Chrome Roses was now