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technical, it had gone a little further than that. The two of them were once paired off in a game of Seven Minutes in Heaven, one Saturday night in the vacant apartment over Erin White’s parents’ garage. Even though Helen had to bend her knees slightly to kiss him, Hamilton was—and she probably would have remembered this just as vividly even had he not gone on to become a brooding object of desire all over the world—a fantastic kisser, relaxed and confident and patient, and she remembered her shock and curiosity about whom he’d been practicing with, even during the kiss itself. He tried to get under her skirt, just as they all did, but she only had to knock his hand away one time, which struck her as gentlemanly, almost romantic. “You have nice lips” was what he had said to her after; again, not much, except when considered in relation to the soulless things other eighth-grade boys usually had to say to you after you pushed their hands out from under your skirt. She and Hamilton were never alone together after that night, though, and four months later Helen’s father announced that they were moving. She’d stayed in touch for a few years with a couple of the old Malloy girls who were still in touch with Hamilton when he started to get famous, but she’d never laid eyes on him again, at least not without buying a ticket like everybodyelse. She’d made out with Hamilton Barth: it was a story Helen told only her closest friends, not because it was so private but because she worried how lame it would make her sound, this seven-minute brush with greatness from a quarter of a century ago. She certainly wasn’t going to trot it out for Harvey, whom she’d known for all of half an hour.
    “How about that,” Harvey said softly. “Are you still friends with him?”
    “No,” Helen said. “I mean, it’s not that we’re not friends, or that we stopped being friends. I hope he’d still remember me fondly, if he ever even thinks about the old days at all, but we haven’t been in contact for a very long time.”
    Harvey’s ardor cooled visibly. “Well, in all honesty, he’d be kind of a big fish for a little operation like ours anyway. So, Helen, here’s the skinny, as we used to say around here. I’ve really enjoyed meeting you, and in all honesty I think you could learn to do this job just fine over time; but I have two more people coming in today who actually know how to do the job already. One of them used to be at Rogers and Cowan, for Pete’s sake. So I really wish I could help you, but honestly, at this moment it doesn’t look too good.”
    “I understand,” said Helen as she rose, and in fact she did understand. She saw how she looked—earnest, naïve, unremarkable—to this sweet older man, and to the whole world of prospective employers at large. He edged around his desk and escorted her to the door, still brushing at crumbs on his torso. “Thank you for your time,” Helen said. “That’s a sharp tie, by the way. A present from your wife?”
    He looked down at it, as if he’d forgotten he had it on, and smiled. “Yes it was,” he said. “That was our last birthday together. Of mine, I mean. She passed away that summer.”
    Here she was feeling so comfortable around him, Helen reflected two hours later on the train home, that she’d forgotten the cardinal virtue of knowing when to keep one’s idiot mouth shut. He still wore the ring, though, which was interesting, and excused her mistake a little bit, but did not excuse her opening up a subject like that when she knew nothing at all about him. No wonder the professional worldseemed so closed to someone like her. The fourth interview had been so mortifying she was already having trouble remembering it. She was back in the house and in casual clothes ten minutes before Sara got home from school.
    The two of them ate dinner together, at opposite ends of the table. A chicken breast with a ham-and-cheese roll-up under the skin, some yellow