Romance novels are birthday cake and life is often peanut butter and jelly. (Janet Evanovich)

On his birthday we drove up to the ranch and I told him it was ours. He was confused with a polite sort of surprise about his confusion.

“What will we do with it?”

“Whatever we want to do with it.”

“Will we live here?”

“Maybe in the summer when you’re not in school.”

So that’s what we did. We packed up and moved to the ranch for the summer.

Lilia came to visit one weekend with a storehouse of stories. She was always amusing. She had long thin brown hair and a bang cut straight across the front. She worked in an office and she would start counting down the days until her next vacation the day she returned from her last vacation. She was a slight girl and she was pretty in that my-nose-is-too-big-for-my-face sort of way. Her real name was Delilah but she had changed it herself to something less frumpy. When she explained that to me she caught my interest and I’ve been interested in her ever since. There was always some second-rate scandal and some embarrassing situation she had got herself into. She had good stories, not as wild as the ones I could tell her but wild enough to dull my appetite for adventure.