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promise you that."
    Fred laughed.
    "What about the music?" Glen said.
    He'd scored a hit, he could tell. Fred took in a breath, released it. Said, "I don't know what you mean." He wheeled and walked away.

    The house was empty without Eloise. He lived on Ritz crackers and KFC. He left the radio, the television on, tried to keep sound going in the empty rooms, but inevitably it all died away into grayness.
    He turned the music up on his headphones, introspective Bach cello suites, complicated as crossword puzzles. He scoured the Internet, hometown paper microfiches, talked to old neighbors, every source he could find. Looking for anything about the four. Anything and everything.
    Their existence had been charmed, he discovered. Parents had died early, leaving two in the care of permissive guardians. Fred's parents had been wealthy and aloof, Penelope's wealthy and extremely attached. He remembered they'd given her a baby-blue Mustang convertible for her sixteenth birthday, remembered seeing them all jammed into the car, Penelope at the wheel, Derek beside her, Casey next to Fred in the back seat.
    All of them were only children.
    Their teachers agreed that they got the grades they wanted to, but that sometimes they seemed to be doing the minimum. All spoke of their "independent" manner, and there were some disciplinary incidents.
    Derek had given him a business card. When Glen called, he agreed to meet in a coffee shop. It was a rainy day, flickering between misty and a harder torrent as though unable to decide. A strong wind pushed the rain under passing umbrellas; they tilted to combat it. One blew inside out and fluttered past, its owner struggling to reverse it.
    "Whatever happened to the Peaches of Immortality?" Glen said.
    Derek froze for a second before saying, "What?"
    Glen pressed. "Your band from high school. I always remembered hearing you play. You guys could have gone professional."
    But for some reason, Derek relaxed. "That's a shitty life, really," he said. "Being famous is overrated." He said it with authority, and Glen wondered what Derek had done in the intervening years.
    So it wasn't the music. But something about what he had said.
    Standing out on the curb, he checked his theory. "The peaches of immortality," he said, testing it.
    Derek stared at the street, expressionless.
    "What does it mean, Derek? What are the peaches of immortality?"
    Derek sighed. "Oh, it's this one," he said, abstractly. "Why bother? But okay. The peaches of immortality? Think of them as something a thinker stumbled upon, and gave to a couple of friends. Not immortality, not really. But something like it. A chance to live forever, certainly, but not really forever, to loop back through one's life over and over again."
    "That sounds horrible," Glen said.
    Derek fixed him with a hawk-like eye. "Do you really think so?" he said. "Really? A chance to go back and fix mistakes, to nudge destiny so it gives you all it can?"
    The cab pulled up, splashing Glen but not Derek, who was sheltered by a trash can.
    "I need to talk to you about this some more," Glen said. "Where can I reach you?"
    Derek shook his head. "I'll call you in a couple of weeks. I don't have much time left with Penelope, I want to spend as much of it as possible with her."
    "Is she ill?" She had looked fine, if subdued, at the baseball game.
    "She commits suicide this month," Derek said. "Usually after the 15th, never before the 12th." He swung the cab door and hopped in, rolled away. The puddle surged at Glen, infiltrating his shoes with a wash of cold water.

    Glen was at his favorite restaurant, an Italian place named Tropea. It had been a favorite for him and Eloise, and he hadn't dared come back until then.
    He saw a profile, a fall of golden hair across the restaurant. Despite everything, his heart surged.
    He forced himself to look away. This was all part of the ... plan? Scheme? Machinations? He absorbed himself in picking his bread roll apart into shreds.
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