PATRICK He’ll meet her out on the road at the foot of the hill by the tree where the accident hap-pened. The first time he’s seen her since my Ordination almost a quarter century ago. He says he’s just go-ing out for a breath of fresh air, but that fools no one. He came back to Chicago to renew a love affair that’s been dead for thirty years. A second chance. They’ll prob-ably mess up the sec-ond chance like they did their first chance. My best friend and the woman I’ve loved since she was in eighth grade. Obscene fantasies fill my mind, actions in which I’d never engage with her in the real world. Does she know how much I desire her? Does she know that my imagination now automatically undresses her? Women usually know, don’t they?

She must know. Yet she glows whenever she is with me. So she does not object.

Is it not my turn? Have I not taken care of her through the years? Did I not urge her to leave her sociopathic husband? Do I not have some rights in the matter? Have I not been a priest long enough? Is it not time to break away from the insane Church and its stupid cowardly leaders?

The smell of blossoms is overpowering tonight, like the empty flower car returning from a cemetery.

I had my turn too and I lost my own first chance. It’s only fair to give him his second chance before I take mine.

If I’m really serious about leaving the priesthood and I’m not in some dumb mid-life crisis.

It’s all fantasy isn’t it? Jane and I could never be lovers, could we? Surely not.

Am I sure of that? I don’t know. I’d like to find out.

Anyway I must give the two of them my best possible ad-vice. They are entitled to their second chance without my trying to spike it. The Lake seems sinister and brooding tonight, dark and restless out there. Water. Baptism. the symbol of life and death and new life. It meant life for Leo and Jane once. Then death. New life? Maybe.

What does it mean for me?

Three times I might have possessed Jane -- that evening here at the house, the day she told me she was pregnant, and that dazzling night in Rome. What I thought was respect overcame my desire. Now I wonder if I am a coward just like Leo, a wimp who is also an occasional hero.

I can tell that I am still special for her by the way she smiles at me and the lilt in her voice when she talks to me. I’m not out of the running yet. Does anyone know how I feel? Even my preternaturally perceptive sister-in-law?

I don’t know. Only once did she speak to me about my feelings towards Jane and that was long ago. LEO

In those rare moments when I am honest with myself, I have to admit that I accepted the offer from the University and returned to Chicago because I had heard that Phil had walked out on Jane. Finally. Yet I’ve made no attempt to see her until this im-probable stroll on a May evening with the odor of spring so dense on the night air that it re-minds me of the pungency of that luxuriant Brazilian rain forest I was in a couple of years ago, the smell of ra-pacious fecundity.

Will I find her? Will she find me?

Will the old magic still be there? Or, as seems more likely, will we find that at the age of fifty -- almost fifty for her -- we are not the same persons we were at the age of twenty? Will an en-counter, even on a lovely and ro-mantic night, dash cold water on the foolish dreams we had when we were young?

That’s the likely scenario. Academic that I am, I analyze and reanalyze and come up with the same conclusion: You can’t go home again.

But why else am I here but that I am try-ing to go home again?

The place has changed, the road is paved now, The subdi-vi-sions are crowding in from the other side of the lake. The street lights are newer and brighter -- old gaslights long since gone -- but the road seems darker, perhaps because the trees are so much taller and the foliage so much thicker. The Old Houses have been re-modeled and repainted and look faintly modern and commonplace instead of elegant and romantic as they once seemed to me. The glitter and the romance have vanished. Or were they ever here? Do not we humans spread a nostalgic sheen over the site of our adoles-cence and our first love and make it more dazzling in our memories than it ever was in reality? And don’t we thus run a risk of pro-found disillusion when we dis-cover how ordi-nary it is when we try to come home again?

She is likely to have changed too. Plain Jane instead of Magic Jane. Maggie, who is her ally, insists not, but she is a preju-diced witness.

What if she hasn’t changed? What if it’s gasoline that gets poured on the embers in-stead of water?

Will the fury and the guilt of the past come back to haunt us again? Or the ghosts which lurk on this road, the ghosts of dead friends? Can I have her, if I want her, without putting those ghosts to rest?

Will I have to find out what happened that night?

The last time I saw her was at Packy Keenan’s Ordination. She already had two chil-dren and was probably ex-pecting a third. She looked terrible. I was still trapped in my fury and was barely civil.

When we meet tonight, if we meet, will I be anything more than barely civil? I feel the rage stirring within me again. JANE

I know what I’m doing. Unless Leo has changed com-pletely, he’ll wander towards the tree where our friends died and I’ll meet him there. He will be expecting me. He always was an in-curable romantic even when the romance was with death.

Only a few days before the accident, he had asked me to marry him, more or less. I didn’t say no, but like a fool I didn’t say yes either. I talked about a lot of foolish objections and prob-lems with our families of which I didn’t even realize I was aware. Then on the day of my twentieth birthday I betrayed him. He never for-gave me. Instead he ran out on me just at the time when I needed him the most.

He’s the only one who thought he made a fool out of him-self. The others all thought he was a hero. When I heard what he said at the jail, I was terribly proud of him.

I would have married him before he went to war on a day’s notice if he’d asked me. He didn’t ask.

What will he think of me? An old woman -- almost fifty, worn out by an unhappy marriage, unable to satisfy her husband sexually, and unable to save two of her kids, and probably a third? I was pretty good looking at twenty but that was long ago.

Not counting doctors, three men have seen me naked -- my husband who quickly lost interest, another man whom I unintentionally terrified before I was marred, and Leo. He didn't see much in that fragmented moonlight, but I think he liked what he saw. If he should get another look at me, will he still like me? Or will he be disappointed?

Will he guess that I think a lot about ending my life? He al-ways knew what was go-ing on inside my head.

He was so sweet at Packy’s Ordination, same gentle smile and so nice to young Phil and poor Brigie, my two lost kids. And as friendly to me as though we’d seen each other the day before. He didn’t look like a man whose soul had been torn apart by war.

Maggie Ward Keenan, who thinks she knows everything, says that Leo and I should have a Catholic summer, one in which we allow the summer heat to rekindle the warmth of the love which once existed between us. She quotes a liturgy from some place about the bride being buxom and bonny in bed. Well I suppose I’m buxom enough but not very bonny in bed. Not much practice in a long time.

I tell myself that my husband is wrong when he says that he fools around because I’m not very good in bed. But I wonder often whether maybe he’s right. Would I have been any better a lover with Leo?

Or with Packy? If he had not been committed to being a a priest I might have married him after Leo died. That night in Rome ten years ago we were so close . . . I must not think about that.

Would I be any better with him if we made love tonight?

Was that an adulterous thought? I would have confessed it a few years ago. Now I’m not sure that Phil and I were ever re-ally married.

Maggie quotes some poet called Friar Thomas of Hales about cuckoos singing in early summer. I don’t quite know what that means.

Maybe she’s right about being Catholic. We do know in our hearts that our lover is kind of like God to us. I wish I could really believe that. I certainly was not God to my husband nor he to me.

If I invite Lee back to our empty house, would he come? Should I try? Would You want me to?

I bet You wouldn’t object all that much. I think You al-ways wanted us to be together.

The scent of the lilacs and the jamsine and the flowering crabapple trees reminds me of the scent of a wedding mass.

Now I wish he’d never come back to Chi-cago. I wish I was not walking down the hill on this road with its terrible memories, hunting for him like a horny teenager searching for her latest crush.

Leo was my first crush, even before my crush on Packy. I was his first crush too.

I hope he likes me.