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fingers between hers. She turns away and without looking returns the pressure.
    “Oliver,” she says later as he puts on his jacket, reaching for his keys on the table. “I like her.”
    He turns to her. April stands at a distance, arms crossed in front of her. He puts his hands in his pockets and feels the
     button there, silky and pearl-shaped. He almost forgot to return it.
    “Bernadette suits you,” she says. “I think you’ll be happy.”
    “Thank you,” he says hoarsely.
    He waves at her, since it is apparent she is coming no closer, and lets himself out.

Chapter

3
    O LIVER DRIVES IMPATIENTLY. if he wants to make his tax law class by nine, there is no chance of stopping home for a change of clothes. The expressway
     into the city is throttled; the traffic here is just as bad as in California. Why couldn’t he and Bernadette have chosen someplace
     simpler for their graduate work? He turns off the traffic report; he has already passed all possible turnoffs for alternative
     routes. For better or worse, he is committed to the road he is on.
    Buddy permeates Oliver’s thoughts, not in distinct memories so much as a pervasive remembrance of his pigeon-toed walk and
     bashful smile. Gone, he is acutely present. Oliver feels off balance. In practical terms, Buddy has not been part of his life
     for years now, so why does he feel like an amputee? He glances at his watch; it is unlike him to be late. He has an irrational
     fear that this singular tardiness is the beginning of a permanent change, and he will never get to class on time again.
    Maybe it was this disorientation that contributed to his lapse in judgment last night. On one hand, April needed someone with
     her, but did it have to be him? He could have taken her to his father’s place, or Bernadette’s. Then he would have nothing
     to explain to Bernadette or himself. As it is, he doesn’t plan to mention anything; his second inconsistency of the day, and
     it’s barely nine in the morning.
    As traffic merges into the tunnel, Oliver becomes aware of a melody in his head. Has it been there since he first woke up?
     Haunting and hypnotic, it feels like a Beethoven piece, but it’s not. Who, then? The car in front of him stops and Oliver
     brakes hard.
Oh, God,
he thinks, it’s his own song, one of the last he composed at eighteen. As soon as he realizes this, the song strikes him
     as juvenile and repetitive. He does not want to remember it, but there it is, wrapping itself around his thoughts like roots
     circling in an overgrown pot.
    Police lights whir at the mouth of the tunnel. A green Maverick lies crumpled against a guardrail. Cars inch by, straining
     for a view. Oliver catches a glimpse of two paramedics hunched over someone with skinny calves and gaudy shoes, a teenager,
     maybe. Then Oliver is inside the tunnel, its yellow tile walls arched around him.
    April. He remembers one of the first awkward moments between them as adolescents. He was at his summer job, watering the Blue
     Star juniper, the hose snaking to life in his hand, when he caught sight of April under the nursery awning, bending to smell
     a gardenia. Perhaps it was because he did not recognize her at first that he was able to see her, the April Simone his friends
     saw, with her long legs and tanned shoulders, wearing cutoff shorts and a tank top that exposed the curve of her spine, the
     edge of her shoulder blade, the supple crease of her underarm. Her dark hair was pulled back in a makeshift knot, sweaty tendrils
     glued to the nape of her neck. Oliver didn’t notice at first that the spray from his hose had veered onto the walkway. When
     April looked up, revealing her face, he turned away.
    From the time they were fifteen until eighteen, April faithfully came by the music studio where Oliver practiced five nights
     a week, to listen to him. She came straight from her father’s bar, where she spent the afternoons busing tables and running
     the dishwasher. Her father’s