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looks like she’s going to puke when the recognizable souvenirs jiggle around in the pickling solution, and one of the men with her looks away like most men do when they think they’ll appear queer to show any interest. They all laugh, though, and the regulars join in, including the ones at the back of the room that don’t necessarily know what’s funny.
    Laughter’s the last thing Hoop thought would bring on one of his regular summings-up, those backward looks that keep him pointed in the right direction. But for some reason it does today, probably because today doesn’t have to be just about sadness. Won’t hurt any to remember the good parts even though there aren’t enough of them to cancel out the bad stuff that’s making him leave town.
    He downs the shot, takes several swigs of beer, and drifts away on a powerful wave of remembering. He starts at the beginning, when Audrey Shantz stood out for being the only cheerleader who didn’t point and laugh when he carried the ball eighty yards in the wrong direction during the 1973 Bimmerman-Paradise football game. She didn’t call him Hula Hoop either, or laugh when mockers rhymed his name with “poop.”
    He’s close to grinning when he recollects that she always gave him an extra helping of buckle whenever she volunteer waitressed at the annual Town of Paradise Wild Blueberry Festival, and that as a paid waitress at the lunch counter in Paradise, she always treated him the same as the white customers and never gave him a dirty look those times when he couldn’t afford to leave more than a quarter tip.
    He chugs down the rest of the beer and harks back to the best part, the part where Audrey didn’t make fun of him like others did when a girl’s bike was his only way of getting around. And if she ever did catch on to why he was willing to pedal all the way from Bimmerman to Paradise three and four times a week, she didn’t scoff and sneer at him like most girls did if they thought he was sniffing at their skirts.
    He signals for another shot and beer before he can be tempted to take a wallow on the dark side of those memories. Enough of that’s been done already—done nearly to death, starting on the day two years, four months, and exactly one week ago when it was found out that the rock star was still alive after they cut him from the wrecked truck and hauled him off to the hospital in Portage St. Mary.
    That wasn’t terrible bad news at the time because those in the know were saying that Mr. Big Deal Colin Elliot was unresponsive—the polite word for brain-dead—and likely to remain so, which could’ve been seen as worse punishment than being entirely dead. But starting with six months or so ago, when trashy newspapers started rumoring that the rock star was coming back to life over there at his castle in England, and more recently, when respectable newspapers started saying that a song written by the rock star was entered in some kind of big competition, the old urgings fired up and had to be answered to.
    Hoop opens his wallet and removes money for the bar tab without disturbing the newspaper clipping that’s stored in with his meager supply of banknotes. He’s read it a dozen times over by now and can recite by heart what it says about the award show they have every year out there in California—the televised show where they give out the ugly figurines called Icons to people like Colin Elliot who’s favored to win one this year. He can feel the power of the clipping without touching it or reading it again. And the slip of paper tucked in next to it, the one with Cliff Grant’s phone number written on it in large numerals—he doesn’t have to eyeball that again to know its worth, to recall the celebrity chaser who took the most pictures of Audrey and came through for him once before.
    He makes this second shot last, sips at it as he estimates how much bother he’ll have to put up with in order to pay for past failures, and it looks like the