Names shall be changed to protect the guilty.
Incidentals in general shall be changed.

Dean is a cantor at my church. I saw him for the first time well over a year ago, probably a year and a half. I was coming to Mass one afternoon, through the side door, and he was bright and cheerful, just waving at me like we were old friends. He did this a lot. And then, some time around Lent—when I had so much crap to deal with in my life anyway, that if I wasn’t a writer I wouldn’t have noticed this—Dean got rid of his glasses, popped in the contacts, started walking a little more upright and sort of went cold.
I have no idea what that has to do with anything. I’m just documenting events in their proper sequence and keep in mind that at the think I knew Dean’s name.
Well, to make a year long story short, in one of those fun “small world” situations Dean turns out to have been friends and fairly close friends with one of my best friends and so the other night she comes into town, and in a few precious moments we’re invited to his house for dinner on Saturday night.
Dean is skinny and ordinary looking, a boy who has a little too much fun working in a church, and not in the least someone that either one of us believes will be able to show us a good time. Maura and I are both sure that we will be back at my house by nine, drinking wine, smoking cigarettes and feeling slightly disappointed over the night that turned out lame, the night we expected to be lame but… hell, hoped might be a little fun. The night Dean had chicken or hot dogs for dinner along with really awkward conversation. The night that was, while time killing, scarcely out of the ordinary for two Midwestern Catholic twenty-somethings.