Roadside Crosses

living room, more wine was passed around. Boling lounged back in a deep armchair, joined by Raye the briard. Martine laughed—Raye was a bit bigger than a lapdog—but the professor insisted the puppy stay.
    Maggie plugged in and, with the gravity of a recital pianist, sat down and played four songs from her Suzuki Book Three, simple arrangements of pieces by Mozart, Beethoven and Clementi. She hardly missed a note.
    Everyone applauded and then went for cake, coffee and more wine.
    Finally around 9:30, Steve and Martine said they wanted to get the twins to bed, and they headed out the door with the children. Maggie was already making plans to enter Dylan and Patsy in Raye’s dog classes.
    Edie gave a distant smile. “We should go too. It’s been a long day.”
    “Mom, stay for a while. Have another glass of wine.”
    “No, no, I’m exhausted, Katie. Come on, Stu. I want to go home.”
    Dance received a distracted embrace from her mother, and her comfort from earlier diminished. “Call me later.” Disappointed at their quick retreat, she watched the taillights disappear up the road. Then she told the children to say good night to Boling. The professor smiled and shook their hands, and Dance sent them off to wash up.
    Wes appeared a few minutes later with a DVD. Ghost in the Shell, a Japanese anime science fiction tale involving computers.
    “Here, Mr. Boling. This is pretty sweet. You can borrow it if you want.”
    Dance was astonished that her son was behaving so well with a man. Probably he recognized Boling as a business associate of his mother’s, not a love interest; still, he’d been known to grow defensive even around her coworkers.
    “Well, thanks, Wes. I’ve written about anime. But I’ve never seen this one.”
    “Really?”
    “Nope. I’ll bring it back in good shape.”
    “Whenever. ’Night.”
    The boy hurried back to his room, leaving the two of them together.
    But only for a moment. A second later Maggie appeared with a gift of her own. “This is my recital.” She handed him a CD in a jewel box.
    “The one you were talking about at dinner?” Boling asked. “Where Mr. Stone burped during the Mozart?”
    “Yeah!”
    “Can I borrow it?”
    “You can have it. I have about a million of them. Mom made them.”
    “Well, thanks, Maggie. I’ll burn it on my iPod.”
    The girl actually blushed. Unusual for her. She charged off.
    “You don’t have to,” Dance whispered.
    “Oh, no. I will. She’s a great girl.”
    He slipped the disk into his computer bag and looked over the anime that Wes had lent him.
    Dance lowered her voice again, “How many times have you seen it?”
    He chuckled. “ Ghost in the Shell ? Twenty, thirty times . . . along with the two sequels. Damn, you can even spot the white lies.”
    “Appreciate your doing that. It means a lot to him.”
    “I could tell he was excited.”
    “I’m surprised you don’t have children. You seem to understand them.”
    “No, that never worked out. But if you want children, it definitely helps to have a woman in your life. I’m one of those men you have to be careful of. Don’t you say that, all you girls?”
    “Careful of? Why’s that?”
    “Never date a man over forty who’s never been married.”
    “I think nowadays whatever works, works.”
    “I just never met anybody I wanted to settle down with.”
    Dance noted the flicker of an eyebrow and a faint fluctuation of pitch. She let those observations float away.
    Boling began, “You’re . . . ?” His eyes dipped to her left hand, where a gray pearl ring encircled the heart finger.
    “I’m a widow,” Dance said.
    “Oh, gosh. I’m sorry.”
    “Car crash,” she said, feeling only a hint of the familiar sorrow.
    “Terrible.”
    And Kathryn Dance said nothing more about her husband and the accident for no reason other thanshe preferred not to talk about them any longer. “So, you’re a real bachelor, hmm?”
    “I guess I am. Now there’s a word you haven’t heard for . . . about a century.”
    She went to the kitchen to retrieve more wine, instinctively grabbing a red—since that was Michael O’Neil’s favorite—then remembered that Boling liked white. She filled their glasses halfway up.
    They chatted about life on the Peninsula—his mountain-biking trips and hikes. His professional life was far too sedentary for him so Boling would often jump into his old pickup truck and head out to the mountains or a state park.
    “I’ll do some