There wasn’t much nuance to it. I was just going to drop by the radio station around ten, casually, you know, just to help Ally file her records. This was an obvious DJ-groupie move. But I had no problem with obvious. Time was tight. This was boy-say-go time. It was one of those times when, in the words of the old Depeche Mode song, tomorrow won’t do. I spent Sunday afternoon walking around some of my old haunts in Charlottesville, kicking through the winter slush on Main Street, listening to the radio on my Walkman. I ended up sitting in the McDonald’s at the Barracks Road Shopping Center. How many evenings had I sat here over the years, back when I couldn’t face the idea of going home to my empty widower apartment? It stayed open until midnight, when practically everything else in town was closed by nine, so this was a place where I had killed time on countless weekend nights, in the not-so-distant past. I ordered two hamburgers and fries, just like in the old days, then sat at the corner table by the window, looking out into the empty mall.
