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water,” she informs me immediately, but her eyes slide sideways, because she knows it won’t last.
    Noah’s looking at the baseball game on the TV above the bar. One of the guys watching the game passes Noah a bowl of peanuts and starts talking to him, man to man, about who’s going to win. Noah moves to the stool closer to him so he can eat the peanuts and see the TV better, and I take his place. The man sitting on the other side of Thomasina has dark hair, smooth olive skin, and a youthful, feminine face. He’s leaning toward her, paying close attention to the dramatic brunette in the skin-tight jeans. Between the music and the television, there’s a lot of noise.
    â€œWas she a bitch, or what?” Thomasina says. “I didn’t say half of what came to mind. But when she ever put her hands on me . . . I could have killed her.”
    The dark-haired man says, “Killed who?”
    â€œPhyllis Rizzo.”
    He finds this amusing, but doesn’t speak.
    â€œHonestly, Pirio. Can you believe she said that stuff in front of Noah?”
    â€œIn front of everyone,” the man obligingly amends.
    â€œOh, well. Every funeral needs a scene,” I say, hoping to move the conversation along.
    A large man sidles up, his eyes locked on mine. It takes a few seconds for me to recognize John Oster, and then the bottom of my stomach falls away.
Whoosh
. Like an elevator plummeting twenty floors in two seconds. You can’t help having this reaction when you suddenly run into someone you used to have intense sex with, no matter how long ago it was.
    He’s changed a lot in a decade. The flaming hair that used to fly around his head is thinner now and neatly buzzed, exposing the white skin of his skull. His hairline’s crept back, too. John Oster’s red hair used to be a reckless celebration, so I can’t help seeing these changes as a loss. More sadly, all the once-sharp bodily angles are rounded, as if it had been decided by the gatekeepers of middle age that they’d be better off padded for their own protection by a layer of fleshy bubble wrap.
    But he’s still John Oster. The gunmetal flash in his eyes; the brash, square-to-the-world stance that seems to be taunting fate—these things are his alone. No one ever called him John: it was always Crazy John, Johnny O, or Oyster Man. He told more stories than Jesus, most of them about daredevil challenges and nick-of-time survival. About things that shouldn’t have happened and did. About losers who got what they deserved. He was bitter, shocking, loyal, and often insincere. He had enemies, but many more friends who respected him for doing and saying the things they wished they could. Occasionally, I was granted glimpses of his soul. Angels and demons were doing battle in there. Most of the time the score was close; occasionally, however, the demons streaked ahead. You could see him getting out of control—the sudden spells of dark brooding; the petty, nasty cruelties; the vicious lack of self-respect. Women thought him sexy, but most of them stayed away.
    He and Ned had grown up together in Southie and were never far apart. When Thomasina and Ned started going out, it seemed reasonable for Johnny and me to do the same. I was drinking a lot back then, even more than Thomasina, and didn’t think too much about what I was doing, just bobbed along like a cork in whatever current was flowing, as long as it was fast. My relationship with John Oster had a kind of discordant poetry to it at first, lasted longer than I thought it would, predictably foundered when it hit our very significant differences, and got ugly at the end. I had heard news of him occasionally over the years, mostly from Ned. The two of them worked side by side on trawlers and purse seiners for a company called Ocean Catch up until Ned quit.
    Johnny drapes a lazy arm around Thomasina’s shoulders in a half-assed condolence hug,