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His big shoulders hunched together, and his huge right hand went to rubbing the back of his neck above the collar of the golf shirt. “I tossed and turned most of last night. My daughter’s been trying to convince me to move to Maryland to be closer to my grandkids. ’Bout three A.M. I decided she was right. Nothing for me here.”

Inside the Broiler the lights went on. I saw Johnny Papp chalking the breakfast special on the blackboard behind the register.

“Not leaving right away are you?” I asked.

Schanno picked up on something in my voice and squinted at me. His eyebrows were nearly white as milkweed fluff.

“What’s up?”

“I’m taking Henry Meloux to Thunder Bay today. I could use your help, if you’re willing.”

“So it’s true. He’s got a son up there.”

Johnny Papp unlocked the door and poked his head outside. “Get in here,” he ordered, “before you scare the good customers away.”

I said to Schanno, “Let me buy you a cup of coffee. I’ve got a story to tell.”

The moment I walked into the house I smelled coffee brewing, and I saw that the dining room table was set. Jo came from the kitchen with a small pitcher of half-and-half in her hand.

“Lane and Virginia are on their way over with Sean,” she said. “We’re going to talk.”

“At seven thirty in the morning?”

“Lane found out about everything late last night. He’d have come over then but Virginia convinced him to wait.”

“Jenny?”

“Upstairs being sick.”

“This can’t wait?”

Jo had headed toward the kitchen, but she stopped and turned back to me sharply. “Until when? You’re leaving with Meloux today.”

“What’s with the table settings?”

“Virginia’s bringing coffee cake. I’ve got juice and coffee.”

“Very civilized,” I said. “Should I shave?”

“Just sit quietly and listen.”

Jenny came downstairs, her face drained of color. She’d brushed her hair and put on a little makeup. She wore jeans and a powder blue top.

“How’re you doing, kiddo?” I asked.

“Okay, Dad.” She stood away from me a bit and stuffed her hands in the back pockets of her Levi’s. “How’s Henry Meloux?”

“I’m still working on that. Right now let’s focus on you.” I went to her and took her in my arms. I laid my cheek against her hair.

“I’m sorry about all this,” she said.

“Me, too. But we’ll figure it out, okay?”

“You’re not mad?”

“I’m not exactly ecstatic.”

“Complicates things, huh?”

“Sit down.” I pulled a chair from the table. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”

Jo had come back from the kitchen, and she sat down, too.

Jenny began in a calm, rational voice, but before long she was crying, and it was clear she didn’t know at all what she was going to do.

When I was a cop, people cried in front of me all the time. Because they were scared or grieving or trying to manipulate. It almost never bothered me. Jenny’s tears were like drops of acid on my heart. She slid into her mother’s arms and sobbed.

The doorbell rang. Oh, joy.

I opened the door. Lane Pflugleman was there, with Virginia and Sean at his back.

I’m not tall-just under six feet-and Lane Pflugleman is a head shorter. He’s slender, congenial, though generally quiet, and he wears a mustache, mouse brown going gray, that always puts me in mind of a moth with spread wings resting on his upper lip. I’ve known him all my life. He’d been a couple of grades behind me in school, and I wouldn’t have taken much notice of him except for his wrestling. In his junior year and again in his senior, he took state in his weight class. In Aurora, wrestling wasn’t like football or basketball. It didn’t have the same mystique. There weren’t cheerleaders. There weren’t fast breaks or Hail Mary passes or that sudden momentum that can sweep spectators up in a frenzy of hometown pride. The gym was never packed for meets. In fact, the team as a whole did poorly. Lane was the only bright spot, and he did his glory work in relative obscurity.

I watched him wrestle only once, the year after I’d graduated. I was home on a break from college. My mother was a friend of Lane’s mother, who’d invited her to a meet. She asked me to accompany her, thinking that because I was a guy I’d understand the sport and could explain.

There wasn’t much to Lane Pflugleman. He wrestled at 119 pounds. I’d been a football player. On the football field, Pflugleman would quickly have been reduced to a red smear on the green grass between a couple of white chalk lines. On the mat in the high school gymnasium, where less than two dozen people watched, Lane Pflugleman performed physical magic. You didn’t need to know anything about the sport to admire how he moved, worked his opponent, understood his own body and what he could ask of it. I admired, too, his behavior after he easily won his match. A decent winner.

“Come in,” I said and stood aside.

Sean walked behind his father. He was a tall kid, taller than his father, lean and strong, with thick black hair and a handsome, studious face. He wore wire-rims and had the haunting look of, I imagined, a poet. It was easy to understand why Jenny had been drawn to him. As he passed, he avoided looking at me directly.

“I brought coffee cake,” Virginia said and handed Jo a platter covered with aluminum foil.

Virginia taught math at Aurora Middle School. Jenny had been one of her students. I remembered conferences with her, how pleasant she’d been and how complimentary of Jenny’s work. She was a pretty woman, and it was from her that Sean had gotten his height.

Jenny had dried her tears, but it was obvious she’d been crying. She sat between Jo and me. Sean and his folks took places along the other side of the table.

“Coffee?” Jo asked. “I have orange juice, too.”

Lane said, “Coffee, thank you.”

“Yes,” Virginia said.

“Sean?”

“Juice, thanks.” He spoke toward his lap.

“I apologize for the hour,” Lane said. “I know it’s early.”

“We were all up anyway,” I said.

Things went quiet while Jo brought coffee and juice from the kitchen. She cut and served the coffee cake. In that awful stillness, the kind that often precedes uncomfortable discussions, I could hear cardinals singing in the maple out back. I stared through the window at the grass wet with dew, sparkling, as if my backyard was full of diamonds. I wanted not to be at the table, not to be a part of this torture that would test the love we had for our children and for one another. I knew Jenny and Sean were miserable. Lane and Virginia looked as if they hadn’t slept at all. I was dreaming about being somewhere else, anywhere else. Only Jo seemed calm, but I’d seen her in court take ridiculously bad verdicts without batting an eye, then cry in the privacy of her office.

“I’m glad we’re together this morning,” Jo began. “Sean and Jenny have some difficult decisions ahead of them. The truth is, it’s a tough situation for us all.” She looked at her daughter with great compassion. “You know that Jenny had planned to leave for the University of Iowa in a couple of weeks.”

“Sean was supposed to go back to Macalester,” Virginia said.

“I’m not going.” Sean’s voice was quiet but definite.

“What do you intend to do instead?” his father asked. “Go to Paris? That’s ridiculous, especially now.”

“Is it? People in Paris have babies, too.”

“Is that what you want, Jenny?” Jo said. “To have this baby and take it to Paris?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

Lane cleared his throat. “What I don’t understand is why you weren’t more careful. I’m a pharmacist, for god’s sake. I have a store full of contraceptives.”

“I told you, Dad. We were using condoms, all right?”

“Pregnancy rates with condoms can be as high as fifteen percent. And that’s when they’re used correctly.” Lane eyed Jenny. “Why not the pill?”