He never even properly said good-bye to most of the people he knew here. He did not speak to them, and barely thought of them, until yesterday evening, when he pulled up in front of their skewed and occasionally smoking homes in his crumpled and U-Haul-orange-streaked car with this strange, wiry, tanned woman who, whatever strengths and shortcomings she might have, was not Charlene. So, taking everything into account, it was not precisely the way that Emily Post would have orchestrated a reunion with out-of-touch friends. The evening’s tour is still a flurry of odd, emotionally charged images in his memory, but he’s beginning to sort it out a little, to run the numbers as it were, and he would say that of the people he ran into yesterday—people he had exchanged dinner invitations with and loaned tools to, people whose personal computers he had debugged in exchange for six-packs of good beer, whom he had seen important movies with—that at least three-quarters of these people have really no interest whatsoever in seeing Randy’s face again as long as they live, and were made to feel intensely awkward by his totally unexpected reappearance in their front yards, where they were throwing impromptu parties with salvaged beer and wine. This hostility was pretty strongly gender-linked, Randy is sad to conclude. Many of the females wouldn’t talk to him it all, or would come near him only the better to fix him with frosty glares and appraise his presumed new girlfriend. This only stands to reason, since, before she left for Yale, Charlene had the better part of a year to popularize her version of events. She has been able to structure the discourse to her advantage, just like a dead white male. No doubt Randy has been classified as an abandoner, no better than the married man who up and walks out on his wife and children—never mind that he was the one who wanted to marry her and have kids with her. But his whining alert starts to buzz when he thinks about that, so he backs up and tries another path.