He moved indolently through the traffic toward Fenway Park now, changing lanes occasionally so he could study Brent’s earring. It was very small, a fleck of reflected light that could have been a diamond or a piece of silver; Wilson was a bit farsighted. In Kenmore Square after a game recently he’d seen a bare-chested man with a chain strung from his ear to his nipple, and at a White Hen Pantry every morning he bought coffee from a girl who had a ring in her nose. She was a pretty girl, too. It was some kind of rebellion against that, he supposed.

One day he struck up a conversation with her and discovered she was a senior at Boston College, which was a Jesuit school, if he remembered correctly. They became friendly, and eventually he asked her what her boyfriend thought of the ring; she told him that her boyfriend was the one who’d bought it for her. Wilson poured his coffee and wondered about the world. She saw the expression on his face and reached over the register to touch his arm. ‘We’re a different generation,’ she said to him, in a voice that wasn’t unkind, and there was so much in that gesture that Wilson had the crazy instinct to reach back across the counter and take her heart-shaped face in his hand.

Turning at Beacon Street now, he decided there was no reason Brent shouldn’t wear an earring, as long as it was a fashion among young men his age. It obviously wasn’t true anymore that only homosexuals wore them. One of the chop salesmen at work had recently told him that there was a whole code among homosexuals involving where the earring was placed – which ear and how high – but this salesman was well known as a Neanderthal. Wilson changed lanes: Brent’s appeared to be a diamond.

‘So,’ Brent said, turning to face him, ‘Is there anybody in your life?’

‘Drive, lady,’ Wilson muttered out the window at a car turning left. Then for a block he pretended to be distracted by the traffic. It always brought him up short for a moment, that at the age of fifty-four he would be asked questions about lady friends by his grown son. Brent was still looking at him.