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on the bias by a trim slate path. The two men had eschewed any fencing or border shrubs, and the only plants they’d removed on the property when they moved in were some overly groomed and desiccated arbor vitae. At the northern corner, toward the house, a wise old pepper tree, small in leaf but broad in shade, offered gracious supervision. And to counterbalance the pepper tree, to come under its tutelage, Carlo (the better gardener) planted a modest stand of plum trees at the south, by the street and front path, adjacent to the driveway and garage. These plum saplings,six in all, had grown fast this last year they’d been in the ground, although they remained very uncertain of themselves, at an awkward age, and needed with some regularity to be trimmed up.
    He had clipped a few new twigs and untied all the twine binding the trunks to their stakes, and he was kneeling in the dirt, in the process of retying the bands so they were neatly parallel and taut, when he stopped what he was doing for the tenth time in the last hour. Why had he let Tom Field take his place on the tennis court?
    In the moment, back in the office, he hadn’t known what to do. He couldn’t very well tell Robbie not to invite a seemingly fun friendly man with random car trouble to join them—Robbie might have suspected something. But then Carlo should have insisted he still wanted to play and gone to the park, too, if for no other reason than to keep tabs on what Tom might say—and what, he had to wonder now, had Tom said? Why wasn’t Robbie home yet?
    That Robbie would want to make a fast friend of a stranger like Tom wasn’t surprising, because whenever the two men used to travel to Europe, Robbie was always the one who approached scarved widows sitting alone in hotel bars, reliving their honeymoons, or the professors in cafés marking up guidebooks, or the young dark rakes smoking unfiltered cigarettes while writing first novels. Carlo never minded Robbie’s transient biergarten friendships—he never was made to suffer any subtraction of loyalty, engagement, or lust. If anything, Carlo fed off Robbie’s gregariousness, because while Carlo wasn’t shy professionally, outside of their practice, were it not for Robbie they would inhabit a world of two people total, them alone. And then Robbie also had a historyof befriending the strangers he would start talking to at openings here at home, or in restaurants, or when infrequently they went out to a bar. It was easy for him, given his innate solicitousness, and at times it seemed like Robbie had too much affection to dispense, more love than could be contained in his life with Carlo, and Carlo didn’t like seeing Robbie wounded when inevitably the new friendship lost air. They were younger men mostly—Tom fit the mold—and usually Robbie provided distraction between their romances. They phoned Robbie late and came to rely on his confidence, and (to give them collectively the benefit of the doubt) maybe they thought because Robbie was settled, he wouldn’t need anything in return. Fortunately he could never be jammed into a darker mood for very long.
    That said, the stakes were different now and Carlo had no idea what Tom’s game was—well, blackmail came to mind.
    He pulled off his work gloves and dropped them by the ball of twine and clippers. He went inside ostensibly for a glass of lemonade but once in the kitchen, he noticed Robbie’s plain canvas sneakers kicked off by the dining table and stared at the way one was caught in the angled afternoon light, its heel fraying, laces fraying, tongue and toe shaped according to his lover’s foot—how well he knew this foot, its arch, veins, and freckles; how to hold it so as not to tickle Robbie—
    And suddenly a squall: Carlo gripped the counter with both hands to steady himself while he cried. Hours earlier he’d felt good, like a turnaround might finally be in the making—but now? Now he was not so sure. Now he found himself