Days of Dissent
Stephen Kennedy Cook
I. May, 1971
Pitch a penny, watch it spin
Heads you lose and tails I win
Follow us to the rising sun
All the way to Washington
The angry red light atop the obelisk blinked at me with a hypnotic rhythm. In the morning mists, the solar disk silhouetted the Capitol dome, turning it from white to black. The air smelled wet and thick with river decay and ripening pollen. I stopped mouthing the dumb ass ditty that had rattled my brain since we left Chicago and switched on the radio, where a live-talking DJ shut up long enough to play Country Joe and the Fish, “Be the first one on your block to have your son come home in a box.” By the time the Fish finished, I’d rolled past the bronze buffalo on Memorial Bridge.
Hordes poured from busses and vans as I hunted for a spot to park Dana’s battered Beetle in a lot next to the Lincoln Memorial. They flowed around us, a current that pulled and repelled like the poles of an electro-magnet. Fearsome in afros or hair to the shoulders, wild mustaches and beards, and faces gaunt from study and drugs, they were no older than we. Red-checked bandannas tied about foreheads and necks gave then the look of latter day pirates. Like us, they wore patched and embroidered blue jeans, heavy boots, blue pea coats or green canvas army jackets stenciled with black peace signs or the clenched red fist of resistance.
The drive from Chicago had left me worn, gritty and greasy. Dana popped from the car as soon as it stopped and whooped with joy on the parking lot’s pavement. His copper colored curls flashed in the rising light. Pixie eyes and a mouth turned up at the corners gave my friend a look of perpetual bemusement.
“Hey there people!” he shouted to the throng. “Sweet home Chi-town has arrived. Cain’t start no trouble without us.” He whooped again and walked around the tiny car to open my door. “Didn’t I tell you, bro’? You’re a lucky puppy that I talked you into coming. You’ll thank me when you tell your freakin’ grandkids how you kicked ass at the Days of Dissent.”
We’d grown up together, two white boys on Chicago’s South Side. Somehow the same forces that made me a depressed neurotic shaped Dana into the coolest guy I knew, cool in the specific sense of that time: unfazed, perfect without trying. Dana “got political” during the 1968 Chicago Convention in the same way that some people get religion. He turned his talents to recruiting every person he knew -- especially me -- into the “kick-ass arm of the people’s revolutionary movement.” When I said I’d come with him to Washington just to observe, he told me, “Can’t just come to see, got to be.”
A woman’s loudspeakered voice echoed eerily against the blocky stone buildings surrounding Washington’s Mall. A tide of thousands washed over the streets and parkland toward the sound of her voice, too distant to be understood.
People packed the Mall a half mile solid from Constitution to Independence. Dana threaded through the gathering mass, pulling me after him, greeting people he’d never met with embraces. We got as close to the speaker as we could, yet we could barely make out her words. I remember the spicy smells of unwashed bodies and Patchouli oil.
“Dissent, people dissent. D-I-S-S-E-N-T. Know what that spells, people? Huh? Dis-
sent. It spells I-aint-gonna-take-your-war-no-more. No!” The crowd roared. The frizzy haired woman standing at the microphone was white but she talked as black as Rap or Eldridge.
“Dissent, people. Who knows what that means? Huh? Means I-aint-gonna-take-your-
racism-no-more! DIS-SENT, dudes! Means don’t dis’ me no more or you gonna get sent!” Another roar, louder this time as the throng warmed up in the dawn.
“Dissent! Means close down the war or we’ll close down the government! This is the day, people. The Days of Dissent. The Days of Dissent have come! There’s no turning back. Power to the People!”
“Power!” the crowd roared back and she stepped down to let another speak, a white youth who would run for Congress twenty years later as a Republican. After him came the Black Panther who had been chained and bound in a Chicago courtroom during the trial of the Seven. No one listening to him that morning dreamed he’d end up a barbecue chef in Philadelphia.
The throng paid little attention to the words. We listened to the speakers’ rhythm, nodding our heads and shouting at the right moments, losing ourselves in it. Claps and chants rippled through the crowd like the thunder of a gathering storm.
Heads I win and tails you lose
If we make the evening news
By ten the sun had warmed the earth enough to free the smells of wet soil and mown grass. Our friends at home would be stretched out on a lawn reading a book or napping in the intoxicating air on a morning like that but we had no time for spring.
From the platform the speaker gave a signal that Dana and I did not hear. The masss moved as one toward the northern end of the Mall where Constitution Avenue passed between square gray government buildings. We poured onto a street cordoned off by a row of squad cars flashing their lights and a blue line of riot-helmeted police wearing fatigues.
In the distance we could see the White House. I wondered if Nixon was watching us from behind its shaded windows. Antennas bristled from the roof that held machine guns and Stinger missiles, according to Dana.
The march route marked by flashing police cars and police on foot and horseback led away from the White House toward the Capitol end of the Mall. At the sight of the President’s house the mass stopped spontaneously. An angry roar erupted from thousands of throats, growing louder as those behind us took it up.
Beside me Dana howled longer and louder than most. His eyes flashed with excitement and he could not stand still even when the march halted. He scampered through the ragged ranks slapping backs and giving hugs, as if by touching others he could share the runaway energy that charged his body.
The march started up again, not turning on its assigned route but heading straight for the police line. I closed my eyes and I was on the highest roller coaster in an amusement park. The restraining bar had just lowered to lock me in. No longer could I escape. Ahead the track soared to straight to the sun until it fell into loops of terror. All I could do was hang on and grit my teeth.
Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh
Dare to struggle, dare to win!
The chant began in a single bullhorn and echoed back from ten thousand voices. Fists jabbed at the sky. Viet Cong flags with their yellow stars unfurled for the TV cameras. From Georgia came a wagon pulled by mules and the Hog Farmers from California danced around us in their whacky clothes and painted faces.
A monkey-like man with a whispy beard inched his way atop an equestrian statue. He carefully mounted the horse’s back, sat behind a forgotten Civil War general, and stripped naked. A woman joined him and like a pair of nude circus riders they posed together in the sunshine.
Only a few yards separated us from the police. An officer on horseback bellowed at us through a bullhorn to remain orderly. Ahead the crowd took up an angry shout, but I could not make out the words. Dana took me by one hand and formed those around us into a phalanx of bodies clasped together and moving relentlessly forward into the maelstrom.
Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh!
Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh!
Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh!
The first gas canister sounded like a distant pistol shot when it exploded. I flinched and looked around me. Instead of running from the sound and the smoke, the mass moved toward it.
“It’s not tear gas, man,” screamed someone. “It’s CS!”
“CS!” shouted another. “It’s CS!” I had no idea what CS was.
Bandannas went around noses and mouths. I had none.
The gas stung our eyes and throats but didn’t stop the mass from advancing on the police line that separated us from the White House fence. The second or third whiff made me cough. Up close, the gas became tiny white crystals sparkling in the sunlight. I remember thinking that it didn’t smell any worse and looked prettier than Calumet City on a windless day. Now and then a brave fool picked up one of the smoking canisters and heaved it back at the police lines to the crowd’s delight.
The streets belong to the people!
The streets belong to the people!
The streets belong to the people!
Behind Plexiglas shields and plastic helmets, the police linked up and moved forward to clear the street. The front line stopped. Dana’s phalanx dissolved. In the gas and the chaos, people began to panic. Some fell to the ground, gasping for air. Others doubled over and vomited or sat down in the street, unable to move. Those who fled ran into each other or into the police line. Threatened, several swung nightsticks. Blood flowed from foreheads and tears from eyes. An order was given and more sticks fell. Police grabbed struggling protesters by the arms and legs and hauled them back through their ranks to be arrested. Soon the mass backed away and once more a no man’s land of twenty yards separated the two sides.
Above helicopters circled. Clouds of white gas made it look as though war had come to the nation’s front door. Television cameras mounted on nearby buildings zoomed in on the action. Microphones picked up the screams of sirens and wounded. Parents watched their children rioting in the streets of Washington and tried to understand.
The shock of the first encounter wore off quickly. We grew accustomed to the gas and we learned to give the police their space. Back and forth across Constitution Avenue the tide surged all day hours but never got any closer to the White House. A steady stream of gassed and bleeding youths made their way to groups of soft-eyed men and women wearing red cross armbands. By four exhaustion consumed both sides and the action ceased.
“Man, you blew me away,” said Dana as we dangled our sore feet in the shallow water of the Reflecting Pool. “Robby Right On, that’s who you are. You’re a righteous dude.”
I still remember how his praise made me glow. I had met the test and been accepted. For the first time in my life, I felt full membership in my generation and it was glorious high.
Pitch a penny, watch it fall
In the middle of the Mall.
Heads I win and tails you lose
Til I get those homesick blues.
In the evening we joined a group from Florida in a ramshackle camp called Peace City pitched near the Tidal Basin and the Mall. A bottle of sweet Annie Greensprings wine from the Floridians passed around the circle. Like warriors after their first battle, we told our stories of the day, small deeds that through time would grow into legends. We talked until the sun set.
I wasn’t surprised when Dana left the circle and returned with a woman. Her name was Fiona Thompson. She had an English accent, a slight figure and blond hair cut short like a boy’s. Fiona worked for the British Ambassador as an au pair to his two children. She’d come to witness the demonstration.
Dana told stories of Chicago’s streets, the Convention and the Days of Rage, the trial of the Chicago Seven and the sit-ins that shut down the schools. Fiona listened enraptured. As hard as I try, I cannot recall the features of her face except for the way her eyes laughed easily. In the dusk we dined beneath a fringe of pink blossomed cherry trees on granola bars and brown rice cooked over a Coleman stove.
From the Floridians, we learned that the first day had been a feint to confuse the authorities and to sort out fellow travelers. On the morrow the real D-Days would begin. The secret plan was to close down the city of Washington by blockading the choke points of a city built for carriages: the bridges across the Potomac, the circles designed by Pierre L’Enfant. When government employees could not get to work, the government would be forced to close until Nixon ended the war.
We ended the night at Fiona’s Georgetown apartment, the converted basement of a Nineteenth Century town house on a quiet street of gas lights and shade trees. When she invited Dana into her bedroom, I took the living room couch.
I awoke early morning to see her standing above me, taking off a terrycloth robe. She had left Dana in the night to come to me. We made love on her couch, neither of us speaking, afraid to break the spell. Without saying a word she returned to Dana. The next morning I wasn’t quite sure that it hadn’t been a dream.
Dana ran into someone he knew from Chicago who knew someone who knew someone else high up on the Days of Dissent steering committee. Seems they needed a courier, someone they could trust with a car, to deliver strike orders to the headquarters of units camped out all over the city. In Dana’s car, we kept watch in the afternoon outside a church basement where the shadowy leaders met secretly to draw up the targets and assign them to cadres of protesters. By six, we were one of two couriers navigating through rush hour traffic with duplicate sets of orders.
With the help of a drug store map we located each of the camps by midnight. A misty spring rain softened the night air and fogged the windshield. I rolled down the window, stuck my face outside and sniffed the air like a dog, smelling the exhaust and the sensual perfume of lilies of the valley. Washington’s streetlights threw a warm yellow light that somehow seemed friendlier than the harsh blue-whiteness of the South Side.
Find a penny for good luck
Watch your back, you better duck
Heads I lose and tails you win
Round and round we go again
We returned to Fiona’s to sleep when the route was run. Again that night she invited Dana to her bed and again she left him early in the morning to come to me. This time she didn’t leave. At first light she went for a paper and day-old bagels and returned to me. We ate them with coffee and talked until Dana awoke. He seemed to guess nothing about our secret tryst, nor did we tell him.
The nearest D-Day target was Key Bridge, a long bridge over the Potomac that feeds into Georgetown. We set off on foot, not sure what we would find. Dana was unusually quiet, as if he had a premonition of the coming disaster. By the time we arrived, Days of Dissent had failed.
The police and army had arrived first and cleared every demonstrator from the bridge. The same happened at every site and by nine a.m. traffic flowed smoothly throughout the city. Somehow the cops had learned our targets and were waiting when the demonstrators showed up. Every jail in the city quickly filled so they shipped the rest to RFK Stadium.
In disgust, Dana arranged to have himself arrested and sent to RFK. I stayed with Fiona the two nights he was in there and took his place in her bed while he spent the time huddled beneath a Red Cross blanket near the fifty yard line. I’d been with only one woman before her and she must have found me to be a challenge.
Dana and I drove back to Chicago before the first rumors began to circulate about Dana in Washington. Someone powerful fingered him as the spy who provided the target sites to the authorities. When it was discovered that the other courier’s list included only ten of the twelve sites that the police shut down, his guilt was assumed.
Toss a penny in the sky
Heads I live and tails you die.
Who’s the loser fair and square
When death brings peace and life despair?
A week after we returned home I joined Dana for a beer at a Hyde Park pub called the Golden Eagle. From the moment he arrived, something had him very upset. At first I was worried that he had found out about my affair with Fiona. I knew he had called to invite her to visit him in Chicago. Had she let something slip?
I was relieved when he told me what they were saying about him in Washington. His eyes snapped angrily about the room as he talked and his jaw clenched when he sipped his Special Export in the dusky light. We drank late, made a dinner of beer and french fries, and said good night a block away on 54th Street about eleven.
That was the last time I saw Dana. Half an hour later he stumbled into the courtyard of his mother’s apartment building four blocks away where he died in her arms, bleeding from more than twenty stab wounds inflicted to his throat and chest by a six inch blade. The next day, tears streaming down her face, she scoured clean the flagstones stained with his blood. The police had no difficulty retracing his bloody steps to the site of the attack, a trash choked lot halfway between Dana’s mother’s house and the spot we had parted.
The absence of clues, witnesses and motive puzzled the investigating detectives, two white men from the West Side who wore their hair slicked back and shoes with pointed toes. My long hair placed me on their suspect list. They called me into their district headquarters for a polygraph test, to which I foolishly agreed. They strapped me to a machine and questioned me at length about Dana, including our relations with women. My metabolic reactions registered enough movement on the graph paper to create confusion and heighten their suspicions. For a week afterwards they called me every day or so with questions, often ones I had already answered, to see if they could trip me up. Mysteriously their calls stopped and I never heard another word about their investigation.
II. May, 1996
I left Chicago a year after Dana’s murder and ended up living in Washington after bouncing around the country for several years. A nervous breakdown a decade ago ended a failing marriage and a frustrated career in journalism. Since then it’s been severe depression, institutionalization at St. Elizabeth’s, halfway jobs that put food in my mouth and halfway houses like the one I live in now.
Fiona Thompson phoned me yesterday. She’s flying in from London this evening and wants to see me. I had not heard from her in all the intervening years. I have no idea how she located me or what she wants from me.
Her call reminds me that this is the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Days of Dissent. I cannot keep my mind from wandering back to those events and opening old wounds that never healed. I awake in the darkness, dress and walk two miles to the Mall.
By the light of another May dawn I kneel and touch the gritty pavement of Constitution Avenue to feel again the way it felt when I dropped to the ground to avoid the gas. When I close my eyes I still hear the chants, the screams, the cries of sirens. I sit on the curb and I narrow my eyes so that only slits of light enter. The scene around me shifts back in time, like an old film strip of washed out colors and jerky motions that flicker in the half light. I see again the young marchers, the television cameras, the grim police, Dana’s beaming face.
Why are there tears in my eyes? The doctors say that the scar tissue on my soul is a good thing. It’s there for a purpose. They’ve told me to leave it alone.
I rise and walk away. A grove of flowering trees planted since that time beckon me. Along Constitution Avenue near the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, veterans sit at a table to sell pins, patches and big black POW-MIA flags. I sit on a park bench and watch a father and son browse for souvenirs. The father’s belly bulges over his belt and the son wears a rock group tee shirt and an dangling earring.
“This wasn’t here in those days, you know,” I overhear the father say. “None of these trees. No Vietnam Memorial, of course. But this is where they gathered for the Days of Dissent twenty-five years ago.”
I am not the only one who remembers!
“They came down the street right here, a hundred thousand of them. The gas was flying like a shit storm and the police started breaking heads, yes they did. I was there. I saw it.”
They walk away from the souvenir stand and I follow them. Had he lived a happy life? I wanted to find out.
“Cool,” says the son.
“Over there they carried Viet Cong flags and chanted Ho Chi Minh.”
“You didn’t believe that horseshit, did you?” asked the boy.
“Are you kidding? Gimme an M-16 and I woulda showed them what I thought of Ho Chi Minh.”
I stop walking and soon they’re out of earshot. It is now noon. My reverie pulls me away and I follow my feet to Georgetown, a long but pleasant amble that ends in blocks of elegant Victorians planted with azaleas and tulips.
In twenty-five years I have never returned to Fiona’s apartment and I don’t remember the exact address. I find the street and the building still sports flower boxes and fine brickwork on its eyebrows and doorway. I close my eyes and memories flow into me when I run my hand over the bricks as if they have lain enchanted in the masonry waiting for my touch.
I hear the noise of a front door closing. I look up to see Dana Cartwright walking up the steps from Fiona’s basement apartment. He looks just as he did the day he returned from incarceration at RFK. He is still young and vibrant, though his face is streaked and his tee shirt and bell bottom jeans are filthy from a night on the ground. The vision doesn’t frighten me. In an odd way, it seems quite natural. If there are such things as spirits or ghosts -- a question I’ve never much explored -- there could be no more fitting time or place for Dana’s to appear.
“Have you seen Fiona?” he asks me in a matter-of-fact way, as if she’s just gone out for breakfast rolls. No question could upset me more. I take a step back from the apparition. Has he found out about us at last?
“I-I. No,” I stammer and my voice quivers a little. “Haven’t seen her at all. Nope.”
“Nothing’s really changed, has it?” he asks.
I have no idea what he means. “Umm. What the hell is going on?”
He walks up the steps from the basement and sits down on the building’s front stoop. “Maybe you should tell me.” He flashes the famous Dana smile, white teeth and dimples.
I stay standing before him. “Well, I’m got less hair and more belly,” I joke. Fact is, I’ve only a wispy fringe of collar-length hair left and I’ve added fifty pounds around the middle. “Guess you don’t have to worry about male pattern baldness.”
“No, man,” he laughs. “Sure don’t. You’re going to see her this evening?”
“Yes,” I say.
“Good. That’s what I want to talk to you about.”
“Oh.” Fear prickles the back of my neck.
“Haven’t you figured her out yet after all these years?
“Fiona? Figured what out?”
He laughs. “Jeez and I used to think you were such a brain. That she was the spy, of course, the one who gave the targets to the cops. Yeah. At first, I thought it was you. Kinda made sense. I mean, you were so tense about D-Days and everything. Even after the first day, you didn’t lighten up. Too weird for words, man. That’s why I had to have a beer with you that night. To look into your eyes and see if you were the one.”
“I wasn’t.”
He laughs. “Jeez, man, I know. That’s not why I’m here.”
“It’s been twenty-five years,” I say.
“Well bake me a cake. There’s something else you need to know before you see her. You see, I knew all about you guys, man. I mean, you don’t think it was her idea that first time, do you?”
“First time?”
“Man, don’t lay that trip on me. It’s me, Dana, your main man. I sent her to you, dude. She was your reward. For crossing the line that day. You know, sort of a rites of passage thing?”
My reward? “No wonder she spied on us.”
“Hey, she didn’t have to go to you. Jeez. She wanted to. The second time, now that was her idea. As for her spying, I didn’t know about it at the time.” Dana stands up from the stoop and yawns. “Listen, I gotta go. You take care. You haven’t been taking very good care, man. Gotta do better.”
I back away to give him room.
“You’ve been stuck in time, man, stuck in the past. That’s not good.”
“I’ve had my problems,” I admit. “But I’ve tried to do my best to remember, to honor those days. The things we believed in, the things we did. I’ve tried to keep the faith. Seems like everyone else has forgotten.”
Dana smiles. “I know you have, man, but look at what it’s done to you. I never had a chance to move on with my life. If I had, I don’t know where I might have gone with it except that I woulda moved on with the times. I mighta ended up like that fat dude on the Mall, lying to his kid.”
“He was lying?”
“Sure was, man. His name is David O’Hara. He was a member of the People’s Banner, the secret hit squad. He’s the guy they sent to Chicago to kill me.”
Before I can digest what Dana has said, he’s gone, just there one minute and gone the next.
III. Fiona
Despite its name, the Public Eye seems a good choice. It’s a quiet restaurant with decent food handy to the downtown hotel where Fiona is staying. Best of all, they know me and I can count on a secluded table.
The maitre d’ brings Fiona to my table. I recognize her instantly, for the years have been kind. Hair silver, no longer blonde, still is cut short but stylish. Her figure is trim from diet and exercise. Lines wrinkle her forehead but her complexion still glows youthfully and her eyes light up just as I remember. She wears a tailored business suit that flatters her legs and an expensive perfume. I notice no wedding band.
She gives me a hug. We order cocktails. She inquires about me politely. I tell her very little of the tragedy that my life has become.
“It’s been a long time,” I say, to kick things off.
“You must think I’m bizarre to call on you after all these years. Especially since I never kept in touch at the time.”
She drinks her martini nervously and I say nothing. “I’m buying, by the way,” she says.
I nod in thanks and drink my beer.
“You see, I couldn’t get in touch with you,” she says. “I was not what I seemed. But I liked you a lot and if conditions had been different, who knows?”
Her question can’t be answered, so I don’t try.
“I’ve come to tell you that, and more. You’ve a right to know.”
“I’m not quite sure what you’ve told me so far.”
“Robby, people will tell you that I was the spy, but it’s not true. It’s soon going to come out that I was working for the FBI in those days, and that part is true. I’m mentioned in a pending book based on files that have recently become available through the Freedom of Information Act.”
“Why? What did you do?”
She avoids my eyes. “Nixon thought the ambassador secretly supported the anti-war movement. He wanted all the dirt on him that I could get. So they hired me. I got a lot.”
“You spied for Nixon on your own nation’s ambassador?”
“I’m no more English than you are. In fact, I’m Irish. The Bureau found me at Georgetown University, set me up with my cover and trained me thoroughly to play the role. It paid my way through college and I had a job the day I graduated. I don’t live in London. I never left Washington. But I wasn’t the D-Days spy.”
My head spins. She didn’t make love to me because she wanted to -- nor because Dana sent her to me. I was her mark, a source for information. She’s ripped open the soft tissue of my soul. I’m surprised to feel no pain. When the shock wears off in a minute or two, then it will start to hurt.
“You, you did it for the money?”
“No, I did it for the anger. It was the only time I had to be young. I felt cheated, Robby. My twenties were to be my dream years, the time when this little girl from a little place you’ve never heard of would wear pretty dresses and dance all night on the arms of handsome, wholesome men. Then she would marry one of them and raise babies. But no. You people had to fuck it up. My world became a raging inferno of drugs and politics, hate and tension. I lost the only chance I would ever have in my life to be young.”
“You still sound angry.”
“I’m still trying to deal with it.”
The waiter hovers over my shoulder and we order. She wants grilled tuna and I ask for a rare steak with french fries.
“It was the only youth I had, too, Fiona. It was the only time any of us had. I guess it didn’t work out very well for either of us.”
“Well, don’t blame me. I fought with every ounce of energy in my being to save a piece of my dream, just a small corner where I could go and live the life I’d planned. But even that was impossible. Everywhere, everything, everyone was for the war or against the war. There was no time to be young, to kiss on a street corner, to make love on a golden hillside in the springtime. No. Springtimes were for demonstrations. Hillsides were for rallies. Streets were for people. Except for this person.”
She speaks with such startling vehemence that a couple at an adjoining table stops talking to eavesdrop. Fiona notices and calms herself.
“So why are you telling me all this now, Fiona? Why did you search me out? I don’t get it.”
“Robby, you’re not the only one who’s stuck in time.”
Her use of that term surprises me. Has she too seen Dana’s ghost?
“No, I didn’t give the list of targets to the Bureau. There never was a spy. The Bureau didn’t need one. Those steering committee jokers were so badly organized and their security was so lax, we just had to pay attention. Hell, anyone who drives to work in Washington could figure out where the targets would be.”
A frightening thought occurs to me. “Did you know steering committee suspected Dana of being the spy? Did you know about the Red Banner?”
“Hey, there was no Red Banner. That was just Movement tough talk. I’m the one who tipped him off when he called to invite me to visit him in Chicago. I told him to be careful. So what does he do? He goes out drinking with you until all hours of the night and gets himself killed. What else could I do? When Dana died, I felt so guilty. I managed to get the Chicago police off your case, it was the least I could do.”
I don’t know what to say so I say nothing. I think of the fat father at the Vietnam Memorial. Our food arrives and we eat in silence.
“They arrested some street punk a year later,” she says. “They found Dana’s ring on him.”
For some reason, I feel better. Perhaps its knowing the truth after all these years.
“Hard to believe it’s been twenty-five years since all of that,” I say.
“Yes,” she says. “I think that’s long enough to mourn, don’t you?” The check arrives and she pays it with a gold card.
“I think so,” I reply. “Do you think that there’s time left to dream again?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “I thought you might have the answer.”
“I don’t know either. I’d like to find out. Can dinner be on me next time?”
The smile in her eyes gives me my answer.
