The Men from the Boys by William J. Mann Page B

full-time. It was a gutsy move, especially for somebody who grew up working-class. I was taught some basic truths by my parents, among them: You don’t leave jobs where you get steady paychecks and health insurance. All I could hear was my father’s voice: “You’re doing what? How you gonna pay your bills?” I hadn’t budgeted for the car insurance, had completely forgotten it, in fact. I’d made sure that a freelance check was coming to cover my share of the rent, that a couple of book reviews would pay for my student loan that month, and that the minimum payment on my ridiculously high credit-card bills would be taken care of by a long political essay. But there was nothing earmarked for my car insurance, which caused the whole delicate house of cards to come tumbling down.
    Lloyd stood helplessly as I twisted like a tornado. Then he shifted into crisis management, precisely what he did all day at the hospital. “Come on, Cat,” he said, “settle down.”
    In the oven the salmon was burning. Now that I was working from home, I was trying to break away from casseroles and microwave pizzas. I wanted Lloyd to look forward to a nice meal, but now it was smoldering behind us. He eased me into a chair and rescued the fish, turning off the potatoes and bringing the water for the corn on the cob back to simmer. “I’ll take care of things here,” he said, sending me out for a walk through Copley Square to calm down.
    The evening was salvaged. The salmon was not as rare as we liked, but Lloyd was happy. I regained my composure, even offered to clean up, thanking him for saving the day. He went to bed early. That’s when I found, under my dinner plate, the sealed, stamped envelope for the insurance company and the detached slip with “Paid” written across it in Lloyd’s handwriting. There was a Post-it note stuck to it, too, with the message: “Yes, in fact, sometimes money has been known to fall from the sky.”
    And over on the mantel, my grandmother’s ceramic German shepherd had been painstakingly glued back together.
    â€œHey, Cat,” I hear now, and I look up to see him.
    Lloyd, shirtless, green-eyed and beautiful—same as he ever was.
    â€œHey, Dog,” I answer.
    We kiss each other: light, dry, puckered lips. I’m glad to see him: always am, even after just a few days of separation, that same old kick to the heart, the kind of kick my father used to give the furnace to get it going. “All it needed was a little kick,” he’d say, and it’s true for me too.
    â€œMissed you, Cat,” he says.
    I don’t know when our nicknames began, or how they came to be. It seems they’ve always been there. Javitz hates it when we call each other “Cat” and “Dog” in front of him. “Dawlings,” he says, making a point, “what was cute the first time becomes annoying the fifth and positively nauseating the tenth or the eleventh.”
    Ah, what does he know? I touch my Dog’s face. “I had a dream about you last night.”
    â€œYeah? What was it about?”
    â€œI can’t remember much, but we were at my mother’s house,” I tell him. “I was sitting with my parents in the living room, and my mother was talking about getting new paneling. I was telling her that she should just rip the stuff down and go for the exposed brick.”
    â€œSo where was I?”
    â€œThat’s where it gets weird. You were in my old room, where we used to have a record player—it was plastic and bright orange, I remember—and you were standing over it, playing ‘(I Never Promised You a) Rose Garden’ by Lynn Anderson.”
    He laughs, that happy little boy laugh that I love so much, the laugh he had when I first met him, when we both were young. “I had that forty-five,” he says. “Used to play it all the time.”
    â€œSister Mary Bridget