I guess that was why I started worrying. I knew you went to the cemetery this morning.”

“That all went fine, though,” I say, and in most ways it did.

Vicki takes a Merit Light out of her little purse and lights up. She is not the kind of girl who smokes, but likes to smoke when she’s nervous. I reach a hand across her plump thighs and pull her closer to me, leg-side to leg-side. She lowers her window a crack and blows smoke that way. “When’s your birthday, anyway?”

“Next week.”

“Okay, that’s what you’re supposed to say. Now when is it really?”

“That’s the truth. I’m going to be thirty-nine.” I snake a glance down to see if there’s adverse reaction to this news. We have not discussed my age in the eight weeks I’ve known her. I assume she thinks I’m younger.

“You are not. Liar.”

“I’m afraid it’s true,” I say, and try to smile.

“Well, maybe I’ll make you a present of an eight-track, and tape you all my favorites. How’d you like that?” There is no more reaction to this news about my age. There are women I know who care about men’s ages, and women who don’t. X didn’t, and I have always counted that as a sign of good sense. Though where Vicki is concerned—her possible reasons for not caring are probably related to a bad first marriage and a wish to hook up with someone at least kind—it is another in a burgeoning number of happy surprises. Maybe we’ll get married in Detroit, fly back and move out to Pheasant Run, and live happily like the rest of our fellow Americans. What would be wrong with that?

“I’d like that fine,” I say.

“You weren’t mad at me for bein out in the car like a tart?”

“You’re too pretty to be mad at.”

“That’s about what them dimwits thought, too.”

We approach the Turnpike, take our ticket and start north, above the flat, featureless bedrenched Jersey flatlands—a landscape perfect for easy golf courses, valve plants and flea markets.

The reason Vicki is worried that I would be mad at not getting to come to her door is because she knows I love the tribal ritual of picking her up for our dates, even if I’m hoping to spend the night. Usually I am formal and bring a gift, something I quit doing long ago when X and I went on outings. Though it’s true that X and I lived together, and such things are easy to forget. But with Vicki, I usually bring something down from New York, where she has only been once and claims she can’t abide. For her part, she is always almost ready and pretends I hurry her, runs to the bedroom with straight pins in her mouth, or holding her hair up in back, needing to stitch a hem or iron a pleat. We are throwbacks in this, straight out of an earlier era, but I like this nervous and over-produced manner of things between us. We seem to know what each other wants without really knowing each other, which was a dilemma between X and me at the end. We didn’t seem to be tending the same ways. Though it may simply be that at my age I’m satisfied with less and with things less complicated.

Whatever the reason, I’m always happy when I am invited to spend the night or just an hour waiting in the pristine and nursey neatness of Vicki’s little 1-BR condo, on which her dad holds the note, and which the two of them furnished in a one-day whirlwind trip to the Miracle Furniture Mile in Paramus.

Vicki made all her own choices: pastel poof-drapes, sunburst mirror, bright area rugs with abstract designs, loveseat with a horse-and-buggy print, a maple mini-dining room suite, a China-black enamel coffee table, all brown appliances and a whopper Sony. All Wade Arcenault had to do was write a big check and set his little girl’s life back on track after the bad events with husband Everett.

Each time I’m inside, all is precisely as it was the time before, as if riveted in place and clean as newsprint: a fresh Nurse magazine, a soap opera archive and TV Guide shingling the piecrust table. A shiny saxophone on its stand unused since high school band days. The guest bathroom spotless.