"If that's true, then my father wasn't in the same league as Mr. Abbey's." Anna looked at me while she said this. Her eyes moved freely over my face. I half-liked, half-didn't-like the inspection.

"Then it is true? Your father was Stephen Abbey?"

I picked up a cold sparerib and took a bite. I wanted to play down my answer as much as possible, so I thought that a mumble through a mouthful of meat would be a good place to start.

"Yes." Chomp chomp. "Yes, he was." I looked hypnotically at the rib and my greasy fingers. Chewing was easy, swallowing wasn't. I ulked it down with half a can of Coke.

"Do you remember when me and your father took you to see The Beginners, Anna?"

"You did?"

"What do you mean, 'You did?' Of course we did. We went over to that theater in Hermann and you had to go to the bathroom the whole time."

"What was it like, Mr. Abbey?"

"You tell me, Ms. France." I gave a two-second nasty-sly smile that she picked up and shot back at me.

"Two people with famous fathers right at the table with us, Dan." Mrs. Fletcher clapped her hands, then, laying them flat on the table, rubbed them back and forth as if sanding it.

"Anna, you gotta get me more rolls again!"

She stood straight up, looked down the front of her overalls, and brushed off some crumbs. "Why don't we talk about this some more, okay? Would you two like to come over to my house for dinner tonight? Around seven-thirty? Eddie told you the address and how to get there, didn't he?"

I was stunned. We all shook hands and she went off. Dinner tonight at Marshall France's house? Eddie? The hippie kid we'd given the ride to? There was no way he could have gotten to that barbecue before we did.

We drove Mrs. Fletcher over to her house, which was on the other side of town. It was great. To get there you went up a flagstone walk that cut through a garden of six-foot-high sunflowers, chestnut-size pumpkins, watermelons, and tomato vines. According to her, the only kind of garden she could see was one that you ate. She didn't hold with roses and honeysuckle, no matter how good they smelled.

You climbed four broad wooden steps to the kind of shaded porch you dream of drinking iced tea on in the middle of August. Real Norman Rockwell stuff. There was a white hammock big enough for ten people, two white rocking chairs with green cushions on the seats, and an all-white dog that looked like a baby pig.

"Now, that there's Nails. He's a bull terrier, if you don't know the breed."

"Nails?"

"Yeah – doesn't his head look like one of those wedging nails? Marshall France gave him that name."

I've never been crazy for either dogs or cats, but one look at Nails and it was love at first sight. He was so ugly, so short and tight-skinned – like a sausage about to burst its casing. Eyes on either side of his head like a lizard's.

"Does he bite?"

"Nails? Lord, no. Nails, come here, boy."

He got up and stretched, and his skin got even tighter. He walked stiff-leggedly over to us and lay right down again as if the effort to get there had done him in.

"They raise these dogs in England for fighting. Put 'em in a pen or a pit together and let them tear each other up. People do crazy things, hah, Nails?"

The dog's face was expressionless, although his eyes were following everything. Little brown coal eyes stuck deep into a white snowman's face.

"Go ahead and pet him, Tom. He likes people."

I reached out and hesitantly tapped him twice on the head as if he were a bell at the front desk of a hotel. He moved his noggin up to my hand and pushed into it. I scratched him behind an ear. I got such a kick out of that that I put my bag down and sat down next to him on the porch. He got up, climbed halfway into my lap, and plopped down again. Saxony handed me her wicker basket and went back down the steps into the garden to look at the tomato vines.

"Why don't you two stay out here for a couple of minutes while I go in and straighten things up?" She moved across the porch and went inside. Nails raised his head but decided to stay in my lap.

After Anna had left us at the barbecue, I told Mrs. Fletcher that we'd like to take her "downstairs" for a few days, and that if things worked out we'd rent it from her by the week. She agreed and told us again that she didn't mind our not being married. I gave her fourteen dollars in advance.

Next to her house was a huge yellow, turn-of-the-century icehouse. It was both ominous and pleasing to look at. Solid and unmoving, yet so out-of-place eyen in a sleepy little town like Galen, where I was sure you could still get some kind of candy for a penny. The old lady said that they had been using it for storage right up until a few years before, when a couple of rafters rotted through and fell, killing two workmen from town. A "bunch of fags" from St. Louis came down to look at it to see if it would be possible to convert it into an antique shop, but the people in Galen let them know that they didn't want them there or their icehouse converted, thank you very much.

As far as my feelings toward Saxony went, I was so buzzed out by the things that had happened that I didn't think about asking her why she'd revealed so much. But while I sat there petting Nails and looking at the icehouse, I made an assessment of what had been accomplished, and I had to admit that we'd gotten a hell of a lot further in one afternoon in Galen than I'd have ever thought possible. We'd arrived, found a place to stay, met some of the townspeople and Anna France in one swoop, and – wonder of wonders – were going to her house for dinner that night. So how wrong had Saxony been? Or was it all luck that had landed us so firmly on our feet in the Land of France?

4

"That's a picture of my husband, Joe. I hope you two don't mind pictures of the dead around you. I'll take it down if you want me to."

Mrs. Fletcher had her hands on her hips and was squinting scornfully at Joe. He looked like Larry of the Three Stooges. I could easily imagine what their life together had been like.

"This was his study, see, when he was alive. That's why I got his picture in here. There's his little TV set, his radio, the desk where he wrote all his policies and letters…." She swept across the room and pointed out his TV, radio, desk. There were diplomas and certificates on the walls, photographs of him holding up a big fish, touching his son's shoulder at the boy's graduation, being made an Elk. There was a green waist-high bookcase against one green wall which was filled with copies of The Reader's Digest, Popular Mechanics, Boy's Life, and a few books. One of the certificates on the wall thanked him for being a scoutmaster in 1961. A circular red-and-green rug covered most of the floor, but Nails lay down near me on the exposed part of the dark wood as soon as we entered the room. He and I were getting along like old pals. There was another comfortable-looking rocking chair by the window. Standing there, I could easily see being very content in a room like that. The bay window looked out on the still-sunlit vegetable garden in front.

There were three other rooms besides the study. A bedroom where everything was white as a glacier and smelled like lavender, a parlor with giant old Victorian furniture that hulked everywhere and would probably make me depressed sometime, and a combined kitchen-dining room that was big enough to hold the Democratic Convention. For thirty-five dollars a week, I wondered if they had any openings in English at Galen High School. Move in here with Saxony, get my Missouri teaching certificate, and teach days at the school, research and write the book at night if things finally did work out with Anna…. Nails put his head on my foot and brought me back down to earth.