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the Liquor Stop Gas Shop for a bottle of red. I am in my house shoes and pajamas—”
    “Looking like a crazy person.”
    Smidge dug her fingers into the cup to scoop ice into her mouth. “Like I rode away from the sanitarium,” she said as she juggled the minuscule frosty cubes over her tongue. “On my bike. Anyway, I end up buying a six-pack and I’ve got it in my basket and as I’m headed back I start wondering if it’s too late to catch Sweet and Lowe’s show over at The Pantry.”
    The Pantry was a dark bar with a huge back patio and rows of damp, musty wooden benches adorned with piles of overflowing ashtrays. Nightly, a band crowded onto the matchbox of a stage and played so loudly all conversations were held just shy of screaming. You never went home from The Pantry without a damaged larynx.
    “Smidge. Tell me you didn’t go to The Pantry on your bike in your house shoes!”
    I was only mostly sure that “house shoes” were the same thing as slippers. I understand what the people of Ogden say and do, but it’s neither my native tongue nor my first instinctwhen it comes to communicating. For instance, I would never say “I drove my bike,” even if it were a motorcycle.
    Smidge patted me on the hip. “I parked my bike up to a post like I was hitching a horse, hid my six-pack in a bush by the back door, and waltzed into The Pantry just in time to hear Lowe sing ‘Midnight Train to Georgia.’”
    I would never think to do these things, to wander around looking for fun while intoxicated and wearing pajama pants. If I tried half the things Smidge could get away with, I’d no doubt be arrested within twenty minutes. But in the end, it was always just another funny story for Smidge.
    “I’m kind of jealous,” I admitted.
    “You should be,” she said. “Because the lovely Lowe had me come up onstage to help her sing.”
    I gave her a brief but challenging stare. “She had you?”
    “I mean she was already up there singing, and there was a second microphone, and space on the stage and—I don’t know. It happened. Plus, Sweet has a crush on me.”
    I could imagine Smidge standing onstage in her taco-covered pajama pants, hair twisted into some bedtime knot, belting away like she was the one they all came to see. Most likely, the only people in the bar who weren’t cheering her on were the ones who never even noticed Sweet & Lowe had a surprise guest.
    “Anyway, I take a bow, the crowd goes wild. Obviously. Then I head over to the bar to finish my drink, and who’s sitting there but your buddy Tucker Collier? And guess what he said?”
    “‘Can I request some Skid Row?’”
    “He said, ‘If you could kindly do me a favor and stand stillfor a moment, I need to call your husband to inform him that you are neither dead nor kidnapped.’”
    Smidge had left her house wide open with all the televisions on. Just like I’d always imagined was possible, Henry came home to find that busy, empty house and assumed someone had snatched his wife.
    “Had he already called the police?”
    “No. Once he knew Tucker was on his way to The Pantry, he figured he ought to find out first if I was there. If I had been kidnapped I could have been dead before he even bothered to check on me, so I’ll make sure to be mad at him later for that. But the moral of this story is, my husband must really love me, because I don’t know why else he hasn’t killed me yet.”
    Henry loved Smidge in a kind of old-timey way you rarely see men love women anymore. Not just in the way that he looked at her like she was always telling the most fascinating story, or how when he came home from work, the first thing he did was bend down toward her until his head rested in her lap and she rubbed the back of his neck with her hand. It wasn’t in how they made each other laugh, or how he would cook until she begged him to stop feeding her. It wasn’t in the way he brought home flowers every Friday.
    Henry’s love was in his