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“Please eat,” Marci said. “You'll be up here for real Thanksgiving too, big boy,” she said to Jimmy, “unless you spill on the couch.”

“This is so good, Mrs. Ralston,” Sonny said. She sat beside Frank on the ottoman, her plate on her knees.

“It's Marci, please.” Marci told her.

“I better make my announcement right now,” Frank said, stabbing the air with his fork. Faces lifted in alarm, and the quiet was so strange that Frank said, “Hey. It's just this. Gentlemen, I am a liberty taker, and I have taken the liberty of entering us into the battle of the bands up at the world-famous Pronghorn Bar and Grill outside Gillette. I applied using twenty-five dollars of my own money, because the deadline was yesterday. I'm hoping you will all join me in thinking this a worthy, kick-ass venture that would be more than any of us has had lately, meaning the last thirty years, more or less.”

“The what?” Craig said. His mouth was full of turkey. “What?”

“Let's just do it. Who's driving?” Jimmy said. “I'm in. Not that there's much of me.”

“A battle of what bands?” Craig said.

“You play two songs.” Frank said. “There's prizes.”

“When is it?” Mason asked.

“In three weeks. The day after Thanksgiving. Friday.”

“You want to?” Mason asked Craig.

“What the hell is it with this fall?” Craig said. He lifted and drained his wine. “I want to do everything.”

“Suddenly all our practice assumes a focus,” Jimmy said.

“Two songs,” Craig said. “Hell, we knew six or seven in the glory days.”

“Six,” Mason said, “We knew all the words to nine, at least Jimmy did. And this would be one of them.” Mason went to the CD player and adjusted the volume louder as the Zombies sang “Time of the Season.”

“You know this?” Jimmy said to Larry.

He shook his head no. Mason and Frank were already singing along. Kathleen joined them. Craig mouthed the drumbeat, and Jimmy took the lead, his ghosted tenor blending with Kathleen's: “‘With pleasured hands . . . promised lands . . . It's the time of the season for loving!'” When Jimmy stopped, his heart was pounding in his arms, and he closed his eyes.

“We're in,” Frank said. “Life on Earth is in. On the application I put that we'd had a professional career sometime ago, but we'd taken a little time off for personal reasons.”

At this Jimmy Brand laughed out loud, the first time in a year at least, and it shocked him to laugh as if something had burst in his face, and he rode it out and along, his head against the back of the couch until he was coughing. “Oh god,” he said settling down. “Oh god.”

“Battle of the bands,” Craig said again. “That is a road trip. Marci, you up for that?”

“We'll see. I may have to work.”

“Let me see.” Craig rose and stepped around the room pouring wine. “You can either road it with a dangerous rock 'n' roll band, hang out, tell people near and far that you're with the band, or you can go to work at a museum. A tough call for the modern woman. Kathleen, tell me what it is about the modern woman? What does the modern woman want?”

“The modern woman wants exactly what the modern man wants.” Kathleen swirled the last of her wine in the bright stemmed glass. “She wants to put out the fire and rescue everybody, and then when it's safe, she wants to go back in and wait to be rescued. I know we're among friends, but it hurts to tell the truth.”

“Is that it?” Craig said to Marci. “How do I arrange it?”

Marci turned quickly to Jimmy Brand, who had pushed his food around and eaten a bite of everything but not much more. “Jimmy?”

“I'm okay. It's a wonderful meal.”

“Elizabeth, my wife, would have said a woman wants to have fungus-free toenails and the chance to dance once a season,” Mason said.

“I've got that,” Marci said, kicking her stockinged foot into the air. “It's like everything else. They say there's a cure, but there's no cure.”

The basket of hot dinner rolls made a trip around the room hand to hand, and Craig brought in the gravy boat for a tour. “Take notes on this, Larry. It could save you some trouble.”

“Could but won't,” Frank said.

The coffee table was as laden with dishes as a table gets. If one more were pushed onto the surface, another would fall off the other side. They all looked at it as if it were some strange altar that had arisen for rites not fully explained. Mason crossed his legs and sank deeper into the couch, his wine in two hands on his lap. “I am well nourished,” he said. Marci nodded at him, and he said, “What?”

“No ‘what,' you innocent boy. You've had enough time to get your innocence back four times. What happened to you?”

“I played to win—that's what happened.” Mason set his glass down carefully and looked up. “Everything I did. It was just me. When I got to Minnesota for school, I don't know whether it was because I was insecure or scared or arrogant, which I have certainly been since, but everything I did, I did to win.” He looked around at his friends. “You know me. I studied people and I watched. I learned how to dress and I learned what to say, and as I met people, one by one, I won them. I made myself important to them in some way. The guys in the dorms, my professors, all my professors, the staff of the union building, the newspaper, the frat guys, and every single girl I ever met.”

“You were an asshole?” Frank said. “I don't get it.”

“Mostly,” Mason said. “I got close to these people, mirrored something they needed. I was a good listener, and I was about half bright. They took it, as I did sometimes, as friendship. Something. The women took it as love. Don't mistake this. I didn't set out to hurt anybody. I was good to everyone. I had the three P's: I was prompt, polite, and I came with small but tasteful presents.” Mason drank his wine. “So yeah, an asshole. You think I can get over it?”

“Prompt?” Frank said. “I didn't know that counted.”

“Were you in love, ever?” Marci asked Mason. Everyone had sunk further into the couches. Jimmy Brand pulled his knees up with his hands and rearranged his legs.

“You okay, Jimmy?”

“Soaring,” he said. “What's your answer?”

“The answer is I don't know,” Mason said. “I should know in another month, living in my campsite on Berry Street. Here's the big news for me: I've never really been alone before. I see that somewhere in law school, first or second year, right in the thick of assembling my career, collecting options, tending them, keeping them open, I lost myself to what I thought I should be. I couldn't tell, even writing briefs, when I was acting. It all felt vaguely real. From time to time, I'd close an argument with the same notions, wording, and then I began to hear myself in restaurants saying the same thing to somebody, good things I mean, true for me, but nevertheless, the same. So I constructed a persona, and I think
he
was in love. He was certainly a fucking success. With Elizabeth, I kept hoping I could shove him aside, get close, get . . . what? Get in it, instead of next to it. I loved her as well as I could, which was probably as poorly as anything I've done.”

Marci went to Mason's chair and put her hand on his shoulder.

“You're a little tough on yourself, Mason.” Jimmy said. He was speaking quietly. “I think this is the astringent version you've given us.” Marci now reached and turned down two of the lamps

“Thank you,” Jimmy told her. “My eyes are something else.” He turned to Mason. “You've done a lot of good.”

“We're talking,” Mason said. “I'm glad to be here.”

Frank spoke. “I'm sorry you're sick, Jimmy.”

“I feel good tonight, Frank,” he answered, “But yeah, I'm sick.”

Kathleen stood to take a dish into the kitchen, and Marci said, “Let's don't. Let's leave it and sit here with these people.” She whispered, “The dishes will keep them here. It's been so long.”

“The butter,” Kathleen said.

“Let's leave the butter out too,” Marci said.

“Remember that time you guys came to the hospital with the guitar?”

“I do,” Jimmy said.

“What a year,” Frank said. “It's hard to believe you're here.” The silence that followed held them. Frank stood and drew a pint from the small keg on the counter. “Anybody else?” he said, getting no takers. “What is it, Jimmy? You know I just don't know. I can't see it from here. How did you know? Did it creep up on you, or did you always just know? Did you know in the day?”

“Jesus, Frank,” Mason said.

“No,” Jimmy said, “it's good. Frank said it: we're talking. Mason started it. What do you want to know, Frank?” Jimmy settled in and put his arm on the back of the deep couch.

“Wasn't Winger gay?” Mason said to Frank. “You knew him.”

“Winger, Big Bob, who bartended for me for six or seven years, not to mention Duane Boorman, and Tim's brother. I've known plenty of gay guys, okay?” Frank said. “But I've never, ever talked to one about it. Have you?”

Mason looked at Frank. “This isn't truth or dare.”

Everyone watched Frank push his beer onto the tabletop, shifting dishes two then three deep. When it balanced, he lifted his palms. “Let it go,” Frank said. “I'm just not as evolved as you, Mason. You got out of town, had a big life. Jimmy, I'm so goddamned glad to see you again, no shit.”

Jimmy pointed at Frank, his face a joyous smile. “When we showed you that guitar, you were scared of it.” He nodded at Larry and continued. “We took him a bass guitar in the hospital, and he looked at it like it was a torture device.”

“It was, for a while,” Frank said.

“Only for our audiences,” Craig said.

“A good bass player is key,” Jimmy said, “and Frank was.”

“Is,” Sonny said, and everyone turned to her. “He still plays pickup with some of the bands.”

“A ringer,” Craig said. “Good deal.”

“I knew in high school,” Jimmy said. “I knew it, and I knew it wouldn't pass.” He folded his hands in his lap and spoke again softly, just over the Zombies singing “Tell Her No.” “You take it as a kind of unhappiness for a while. I've talked to a lot of people about this.”

“You wrote about it,” Mason said.

“You're a misfit, which is exactly what everyone is for a while. Everyone. Then you see your friends start to sort themselves out, get married, like that. I was alone for a long time. I knew what it was, and I was surprised when others started to see it in me. Pleased. I spent almost five years in St. Louis, working for the
Street Sheet
, learning to write, and I met some people at the paper who were great. It was incredibly sweet to belong.”

“What were you doing?” Frank said. “You mean dating?”

“I saw a lot of people way before anybody got sick. Yeah, it's dating.”

“When two gay guys go out to dinner, who pays?”

Marci laughed, and Mason rolled his eyes. “For god's sake.”

“No, really,” Frank went on. “Who pays?”

Jimmy was wide awake now, his fatigue burning in his knees and back; he could feel himself smiling. “The answer is the same for all of us, Frank. Whoever has come courting. That's universal etiquette. And etiquette is everything. Daniel, my partner, loved to quote the movie
Gigi
. ‘Bad table manners, my dear Gigi, have broken up more households than infidelity.'” Jimmy regretted the joke immediately, but he was out of breath now.

The moment tipped on them all, but Craig Ralston righted it with “You mean if I knew which fork to use, I could have a girlfriend?”

“You can't have a girlfriend,” Marci said, standing. “But you can help me with the pies.”

In the kitchen she quickly set out platters of pie and topped some with ice cream as Craig held it all on a tray. With him standing before her like that, she pointed the ice cream scoop at his face. “You want a girlfriend?” It came out as she knew it might: serious, awkward. Not even a joke. What was she saying? But it felt good to say, scratching some spot within that she didn't even know was sore.

“Oh, yeah,” Craig said. “Then I want to take her to a dinner party where you glare at me all night long. No thanks, one woman is plenty.”

As he spoke, she looked into his face, knowing her secret was open to be read. She could not control her expression. It was a moment like she'd never had before; she could feel Stewart's hands. His face had been right there, his breath, and he had said,
“
Oh my, you are so fine
.”
Her heart was beating. If she spoke again, one life would end, this life, and she wanted trouble like that—she wanted everything out and said.

“Marci,” Craig said, indicating the tray and nodding at the corner piece of pie, “put another scoop on that one for me, will ya? You're hoarding the ice cream.”

When she did that and he went back into the other room, Marci stood still until ice cream dripped from the scoop onto the hardwood floor.

In the den, pie ruled. Plates of it balanced on knees and in hands, floated over all the other dinner wreckage.

“This is Kathleen's pie,” Frank said. “No question about that.”

“Both are,” Marci came in. “We'll have tea in a minute.”

“Can I have some tea, Nurse Kathleen?”

“You're asking me after you chugged that beer? You can have some decaf.”

“Yes, you can,” Marci said. “How are you feeling?”

Jimmy was eating the moist pumpkin pie with a spoon. “I'll be no help with the dishes.”

“That's what they use me for,” Larry said.

“What did your partner do?” Frank asked Jimmy Brand.

“He ran a restaurant downtown, and he wrote freelance travel pieces,” Jimmy said.