“I could tell. Sorry we’re late.”

“Sounds like a story.” O’Neil laughs at something Arthur can’t see. “Mom there?”

“In the shower. Have you had your fill of fun already, or do you still want to eat?”

“When didn’t I? The stuff they serve here is like army rations. Want to know what they gave us last night? Salmon loaf and pea-cheese sauce. We thought it was a joke, like Eat this, and that’s what you’ll do: you’ll pee cheese-sauce.”

“Lovely,” Arthur says, laughing. “Bring Sandra, if you want. We’re all pretty excited to meet her.”

“Sandra who?” His son lets the question-a joke, Arthur realizes-hang for a moment. “Kidding. But she’s got a rehearsal. It’ll be just me, I’m afraid.”

Thirty minutes later they go downstairs to find O’Neil in the lobby, sitting on the sofa and reading from a stack of alumni magazines on the coffee table. He has dressed up a little, wearing pressed khakis and a navy wool blazer with a slender black necktie hanging loose around his throat. But what Arthur notices first is the haircut. O’Neil has always worn his hair long, in loose curls that hang over his ears. All of that is gone, replaced by a spiky crewcut. Their boy rises, smiling at the sight of them, and catches them both in a long-armed hug.

“Honey,” Miriam says mournfully. “Oh, God, I know I shouldn’t say anything. Your hair?”

O’Neil grins self-consciously and runs a hand over his scalp. “It was funny, but I just woke up one day and thought: I have to get rid of all this hair. I actually skipped a class just to go to a barbershop.”

Miriam reaches out to touch his hair but stops herself, stroking the air just inches from his head. “Well, it can always grow back,” Miriam says.

“All the guys on the team are getting it cut like this now,” O’Neil says. “Some of the girls too.”

“I think it looks great,” Arthur chimes in. “Very 1962. I think I had one just like it.”

O’Neil smiles. “See, Mom? That’s the idea.”

The steakhouse where they usually go will be too packed by now with the parents’ weekend crowd, so they agree to eat at the hotel, taking seats in the bar while they wait for a table. Miriam, pleading exhaustion, orders a club soda, and Arthur his usual Dewars and water; when the waitress asks O’Neil what he wants, he thinks a moment, and then asks for a club soda too.

“You know, the hardest thing for most of the guys on the team is not drinking,” he says, chewing a mouthful of peanuts from a bowl on the bar. “They catch you, you’re off, no question.” He reaches into the inside pocket of his blazer and produces a photograph. “That’s Sandra.”

The girl in the photo is younger looking than Arthur expected, and a good deal prettier. The photo is of the two of them, standing arm-in-arm before a brick building that Arthur recognizes as O’Neil’s dormitory. Her hair isn’t brown, as he imagined, but a bright shade of blond that verges on red, a red that reminds Arthur of certain autumn leaves-though the picture, he realizes, was taken months ago, before the summer had gone. The grass at their feet is lushly green, and they are both dressed for warm weather and sunshine, O’Neil in his nylon running clothes, Sandra in white tennis shorts and a T-shirt. On her head, covering most of her hair and dimming her eyes and brow into shadow, she wears a baseball cap-navy blue, with a red B for the Boston Red Sox. The way the shadows fall makes Arthur think that the photograph was taken just before sunset, and the two of them are on their way to dinner, or to change for dinner. Sandra is small, the top of her head rising only to O’Neil’s shoulders, and a bright splash of freckles dresses her cheeks and nose, which is button shaped and turned slightly upward as she looks into the photographer’s lens. Arthur knows he should say something about how pretty she is, and when he does, his son smiles with happy relief.

“Sox fan, I see,” Arthur adds.

O’Neil shrugs. “I guess. Really, she just likes hats. She’s what you would call a hat person.”

“She’s in a play?” Arthur asks.

O’Neil frowns in confusion. “No. Well, she has been, but she isn’t now. What gave you that idea?”

“You said she had a rehearsal.”

“Oh. I did, didn’t I.” O’Neil nods. “Actually, it’s a jazz band. She plays the trombone, if you can believe it. You’ll hear her tomorrow night.”

Arthur laughs at his son’s embarrassment, though he also knows that this is exactly the kind of thing he likes about her. What does anyone like? Freckles, the curve of hair where she tucks it behind an ear, the sound of her voice when she tells a joke, her great, gleaming trombone in its velvet case. O’Neil has had girlfriends before, but this, Arthur knows, is different; he is entering the web, the matrix of a thousand details that make another person real, not just an object to be wanted. Beside him Miriam, looking at the photo, hasn’t said anything.

“Hey,” Arthur says, “the trombone can be very sexy.”

“I don’t know how she does it all,” O’Neil says. “There’s field hockey and band. She’s starting this year, so next year she’ll probably be varsity, and she’s on the lacrosse team too. Then, she’s, like, a straight-A student, doubling in bio and English, with all her premed courses on top of it.” He shakes his head, amazed. “Some days it’s all I can do just to get out of bed and go to class.”

“Seems like she’s a good influence,” Arthur says. “Don’t you think, Mimi?”

Miriam manages a smile and passes the photo back to Arthur, who hands it to O’Neil. “She sounds like a lovely girl,” Miriam says.

“It’s true,” O’Neil says, and laughs at himself. “God knows what she sees in me.”

They each have two drinks before they are seated at a table and order dinner. The hour is just nine, but already O’Neil is yawning. Every time this happens he apologizes and makes a joke about how they’re not really boring him, it’s just the running, all the workouts this past week for tomorrow’s race.

“You don’t really have to come,” he says, smearing a piece of bread with cheese from a crock on the middle of the table. “We’re going to get hammered, anyway. We’re completely overtrained. You should go to the field hockey game instead. Sandra’s just JV, but those girls are really good.”

The food is so bad it’s actually funny-everything overcooked and drenched with heavy sauce-and in the end, O’Neil eats most of what’s on his parents’ plates in addition to his own. An amazing performance: he caps off the meal with a slab of chocolate pie while Arthur and Miriam share a pot of watery tea. They offer to drive him back to his dormitory, but in the lobby he changes his mind; the walk will do him good, he says, to help him digest all of it before the race, which is at one o’clock the next afternoon. Arthur goes up to their room and returns with a hat and scarf, to keep him warm on the walk home.

“I meant what I said,” O’Neil reminds them, winding the scarf around his throat. “You really don’t have to come. There’s not much to see even if we do okay. You’ll be pretty much just waiting around to watch me drag up the rear.”

“We’re here to be with you,” Miriam says. She steps up and hugs him, quickly. “There’s no way we’re missing it.”

From the doorway they watch him trot down the walk, head hunched down against the cold, not looking back.

“He’s probably going to see her,” Miriam says.

“Wouldn’t anybody?” Arthur asks. “You saw that picture.” He gives a little admiring whistle. “Holy moly.”

A silence falls over them. Miriam hugs herself against the cold air moving through the open door. It is certainly cold enough to snow; under the lights of the hotel Arthur can see shimmering puddles of ice just beginning to form on the flagstone walkway. Finally she says, “I’m sorry.”

“What for?”

“This morning.” She shrugs. “In the car. All of it. I’m not being a good sport, am I?”

“You’re the mom. You love your kids. There’s nothing to be sorry about.”