I

Professor Emeritus Edward Bennett found that he had inadvertently taken one of those short naps that herald the onset of old age. He was startled awake by his wife’s cell phone, the one with the “Ride of the Valkyries” ring. After a time it fell mercifully silent. Bennett sat with his fingertips pressed together in the darkening study, musing on Gwen’s renaissance. In late middle age she had become the hare, while he calcified sleepily in his library.
He checked his watch, an ancient Timex. She would be wrapping up her PFLAG meeting in Endersburg right about now. His lips tightened as he shut down the involuntary thought of his son that always rose up in him, the looming destination of every PFLAG train of thought. Who would have thought that a little instruction on the clarinet would have started his boy down the pansy-strewn garden path? “Nobody,” he told himself, shaking his head. “There was no way you could have known.”

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