I just wanted a second shot at a first impression—to have him walk into The Hotspot and sit at the neighboring table and watch the band—so that when the soloist began to bray and Tinker gave me that bewildered smile, I could take him in without assumptions. For this little piece of information from Wallace told me something that I should have known all along—that as Tinker and I had come of age, we hadn’t been on opposite sides of a threshold; we’d been standing side by side.
