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noticed—and used to tell the non-Catholics they were going to hell. We made a secret agreement. To get out of our bad marriages, we promised to run off together."
    Lydia looked closely at him. She could hardly believe that it was Cyrus Modine—Cy, as he was calling himself now. She had not forgotten this boy who liked to inform his classmates at Townsend Middle School that he'd been named after the founder of the Persian Empire. He was popular and outgoing and Lydia had been drawn to his confidence, which seemed to spring from a sense of safety in the world.
    It was true. They had made a pact to run off together, leave their unhappy classroom-arranged marriages. Lydia's husband, the monosyllabic Newt McArdle, was, at thirteen, well on his way to a life of slumping at bar rails and complaining about the tyranny of women. Their teacher, Mrs. Friendly, who did not live up to her name, had assigned the couple to imaginary jobs—Lydia was a part-time dental assistant; Newt, a factory worker. But the ill-matched pair always argued about their budget. When Mrs. Friendly told them that their make-believe five-year-old daughter had fallen off a slide and broken her arm, Newt objected to Lydia's offer to pay half of the medical expenses. He'd had it up to his neck with his wife earning a salary and told Mrs. Friendly that Lydia was too bossy to be a dental assistant—any dentist in his right mind would fire her without severance. Mrs. Friendly did not much care for Lydia, whose reticence came off as judgmental, so she took this opportunity to reduce Lydia's hours at the dental office from three days a week to one, then announced to the class that any recalcitrance would result in a poor grade. "In marriage and family, life is not always fair," she advised. "We should be wise to brace ourselves for the frequent storms of disappointment."
    Word had gotten around that all was not well with the union of Lydia and Newt. And perhaps because Cyrus was having his own marital difficulties with the proselytizing Angie Bynum, he raised his hand in class one day and said that as regional manager at Parke-Davis he was looking for an assistant, preferably someone in pharmaceuticals. "My ideal candidate," he said, "would be Lydia Warren. I'd like to offer a part-time position, with benefits to cover her daughter's injury."
    Mrs. Friendly, like most women, had a soft spot for Cyrus, but she squashed the hire outright. "That's a generous offer," she said. "But I make the rules."
    Over the next weeks and months this bright, outrageous boy would talk about his proposition: "If you had come to work with me, we would have been more than co-workers." She couldn't tell if he was joking. The slight turn at his mouth could have gone either way. "That's what happens to people who aren't happy at home. They have affairs. Maybe we should have an affair." But the school year ended too quickly. Lydia received a B in the class, her lowest grade before or since. Not that it weighed on her mind. She knew that she'd gained her first admirer, and all summer long she thought of little else but Cyrus Modine.
    Then, in August, out of the blue, her father announced that the family was moving, and not just from Indian Village and the Townsend school district but clear out of east Detroit to a far north suburb. She and Cyrus lost touch completely—no letters, no phone calls. Lydia did not have the nerve to tell him she had left, let alone how she felt, and chose instead to mope around their spacious new house, her memory of Cy expanding into myth.
    She hadn't seen him since 1954. The following year James Dean crashed his Porsche Spyder on a winding Southern California road, colliding with a college kid named Donald Turnupseed. In Lydia's mind, James Dean and Cyrus Modine had developed a similar radiance: the treasured ideal, the eternal boy. In high school Lydia had dated a couple of feeble-eyed strivers who could have easily been Donald Turnupseed. And at