My cousin Sel and I grew up together back home in Great Warrington. She was a long, skinny funny looking kid and she doesn't look too different now. My folks always thought it was kind of cute or something that it was Sel who wanted to grow up and be a movie star-a very famous and beautiful one somehow and that I only wanted to be a writer. It used to make them say there was no God and things like that and laugh a little bit.

The folks at home, I mean the whole darn town, kind of flipped when Sel met Dave in college and brought him home to show him off and marry him. None of us understood, except me maybe, after I got to know Dave, how she, our poor little homely Selma ever got herself attached to a guy like Dave who is just about as good looking as both of them are good and wonderful. As I say, it shocked us a little, but everybody was glad for Sel, really glad. The year they lived at home did a lot for folks by way of making them believe in people again. I suppose it was because Sel and Dave both had that lean, unpretentious kind of decency and warm heartedness. And well-there was always something just plain beautiful about the love between those two people.

I came East about a year before they did to take the job on the paper. There is very little you can't learn about loneliness in the big city in a year. So I was pretty glad, four years ago, when Dave got his teaching appointment at an Eastern school and he and Sel moved out here two blocks away from me. We get along great, the three of us. Dave loves to talk and so do I. And Sel loves to cook and have people eat it and compliment her to death about it. And that's the way it's gone these four years. We try to spend at least one evening a week together and they are happy times. And now, there is little Davie too. I love them an awful lot.

I still love them in spite of the thing about Kevin and the shadow.

It was a spring evening, yes, that's what got poor Sel started, it was spring. She had made that Indonesian dish with the spiced chicken that Dave and I are mad for and both of us were just sitting there kind of pushing it away like fiends and not noticing the very special kind of happy look on Sel's face that night. We loved having what we considered "strange" food at crazy hours of the night. And so I sat there eating and thinking only of the goodness in my mouth and about the wonderful thing I had finally decided to tell my cousin and her husband. The beautiful thing which I wanted them to know about, finally, after three years of a dreadful secret.

It is horrible to have to make a beautiful thing a dreadful secret, horrible for anyone. And I knew them so well now, really knew them. There was almost nothing that we wouldn't talk about to each other. And I knew about all the silly things they, Sel and Dave, had consciously kicked out of their lives. All the extraneous, troublesome paraphernalia of polite society, of convention, that they ignored. I knew about the way Dave, good sweet Dave, who for the life of him couldn't understand why anyone would WANT to wear a beard, had stood up and made that fabulous speech once at a teacher's meeting when somebody had actually gone to the trouble of offering a motion that a certain young instructor be "obliged" to shave off his much loved brush, because the motion-maker thought it was bohemian and unbecoming to the teaching profession. Dave had really given it to him. Without even threatening to grow one himself. And then there was the time I was really proud of my cousin and her husband when they took turns sitting up with that nice young couple across the hall during the time

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