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have sent Otis onto the field. His only endangerment would have been from tripping over a bucket or getting a splinter in his butt from the wooden bench.
    His dad said wasting money on a football helmet was out of the question.
    “Well, what do you think?” Otis now asked Sally as he walked into the den with his new Kansas City Chiefs helmet on his head.
    “I think you must get help, Otis,” she replied. “You really must.”
    “You can’t tell I’m bald, can you?” he asked.
    “Otis, you’re close to being in real trouble.”
    Otis smiled through the face protector and went outside with his Daisy rifle and shot off some BBs at a target. It was not easy, sighting the rifle with the helmet on, but he soon figured out an effective way to do it.
    He fired off ten BBs and then, without really thinking about it, let his aim and the gun rise up and to the right, to a floodlight in one of the trees.
    He pulled the trigger. Pow! went the gun. Pop! went the light. Crash! went glass onto the patio.
    Within a count often, Sally was at the sliding glass door, then outside and inspecting the damage. “You’re sick,” she said quietly but firmly.
    Otis couldn’t remember the last time he felt so good.
    He spotted a small brown bird on a tree limb off to his left. Again, he aimed and fired a BB. The bird fell from the tree.
    “That’s it,” said Sally.
    OTIS KNEW THE “quiet dinner with the Gidneys, just the four of us,” was a setup. Sally said it was to have a belated celebration of Mary Gidney’s birthday, but that was clearly not so. Otis knew for a fact that Mary had quit celebrating or even acknowledging her birthdays ten years ago. But Otis went along with the line because he really didn’t mind talking with Dr. Bob Gidney. Through the years, Otis had known many of the psychiatric types from Ashland Clinic and found them to be about the same ratio of jerks and fools as corporate CEOs or most other lines of work, insurance included. Bob Gidney was a good man, neither a jerk nor a fool. Sally enjoyed being with him as well.
    “Hey, that’s some fire engine you have there, Otis,” said Bob as they came back into the den after dinner. The fire engine was on the mantel over the fireplace. “Something left over from childhood?”
    “You might say that,” Otis said. He knew what was going on. Sally and Mary, clearly by prearrangement, had lingered in the kitchen. “I just bought it the other day, though.”
    “That’s what I heard,” said Bob.
    Otis guessed Bob was only a year or two younger, but he always dressed as if he thought he was twenty years younger. Tonight he was in heavy-starched white duck pants, a purple-and-white-checked button-down shirt, and highly polished brown penny loafers with no socks. Otis, who bought most of his clothes from Brooks Brothers and J. Crew catalogs, was wearing khaki chinos, a solid dark blue short-sleeved sport shirt, and white sneakers. Sally often suggested to Otis that he might consider “branching out” and dressing the way Bob Gidney did.
    Bob had grown up in the dressy world of Wilmington, Delaware, son of a DuPont executive, and come to Ashland Clinic from Philadelphia, where he taught at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and maintained a private practice.
    Otis went over to the fire engine and moved it back and forth across the mantel. “Want to push it around yourself, Bob?”
    Bob declined the invitation to play with the fire engine, and in a few moments the two men walked back to the outside entertainment area.
    “I hear you bought a BB gun, too?” Bob asked Otis.
    “That’s right,” Otis said, pointing to a cottonwood. “There’s my target on that tree. I hit eight straight bull’s-eyes this morning—fourteen out of twenty in all.”
    “Good for you,” said Bob.
    “You want to fire off a few BBs?” Otis asked. “It’s really fun. We can play a game of tic-tac-toe with our shots. It’s done the regular way—you can go first.