he name on his tag reads BRAD, but Giles has seen him wear JOHN on occasion, and once even LORETTA. Giles presumes the second was by mistake and the third a joke, but the misnomers have introduced enough uncertainty that Giles is reticent to use any of them. He definitely looks like a Brad: six-foot-one, six-foot-two if he’d quit slouching, a face of forthright symmetry, straight teeth bordering on horsey, and a whipped-cream dollop of blond hair. His eyes, as melted-brown as the chocolate from the burned-down chocolate factory, brighten when they see him. Giles swears they do.

“Hey, there, partner! Where you been?”

Brad’s voice is broadly, unspecifically southern, and Giles becomes mired in its syrup. Hair worries engulf him: the gradient of his toupee, the crop of his mustache, the hazards of ear and eyebrow stragglers. Giles puffs his chest and snaps off a nod.

“Well, good afternoon to you.” Too professorial; he unscrews it. “Hey yourself, partner.” Who does he think he is, a schoolboy? “Very nice to see you, indeed.” Three redundant greetings. Just perfect.

Brad stilts a hand to the counter and leans onto it.

“Now what might be your pleasure?”

“It’s so difficult to say,” Giles gushes. “What, if I may ask, would be your personal recommendation?”

Brad drums his fingers. His knuckles are scuffed. Giles pictures him pitching firewood in a forested backyard, wood flakes alighting upon moist, minor abrasions like golden butterflies.

“How you feel about key lime? We’ve got a key lime that’ll knock you back to Newark. It’s that one there, top floor of the tower.”

“My, that is a vivid green.”

“Ain’t it? I’ll fix you up with a nice, hefty slice, what do you say?”

“How can I spurn such a tantalizing hue?”

Brad scribbles the order and chuckles. “You always got the best words.”

Giles feels a blush rise up his neck. He battles it back with the first thing that pops into his brain.

“Tantalizing comes from the Greek. Tantalus, one of Zeus’s sons. A troubled boy, to be sure. Rather famously, he sacrificed his son and served him up to the other gods. Not unlike carving up a pie. But it’s his punishment we commemorate. He was cursed to stand in a pool, hungry for fruit that was pulled away each time he reached up, and thirsty for water that ran away each time he kneeled.”

“He chopped up his kid, you said?”

“Yes, though the point, I think, is that Tantalus was not permitted the escape of death. His fate was to suffer knowing that everything he wanted was right there in reach, but he could partake in none of it.”

Brad chews over this, and Giles feels his blush resume its northerly creep. He’s often marveled at how a single painting can say so much to so many people, and yet the more words one uses, the more likely it is for them to turn on their tellers and expose them. Brad, he is relieved to see, chooses to abandon classical analysis. He spikes the order on a spindle.

“I see you got your paint bag there,” he says. “Working on anything good?”

Giles knows it’s an old man’s poppycock to make-believe that this or that cordial question throbs with furtive significance. He’s sixty-four. Brad can’t be older than thirty-five. Well, what of it? Does that mean Giles can’t enjoy the spar of good conversation? That he can’t feel good about himself as he has so rarely in life? He lifts his portfolio as if only now noticing it.

“Oh, this! It’s not much. The launch of a new food product is all. It seems I have been entrusted with captaining an ad campaign. I’m en route to a meeting at the agency, as it happens.”

“No kidding! What kind of food product?”

Giles opens his mouth, but the word gelatin feels flaccid.

“I probably shouldn’t say. Confidentiality agreements, you know.”

“Is that right? Lord, that sounds exciting. Drawing art, secret projects. Lot more exciting than slinging pies, I tell you.”

“But food is the original art! I’ve always meant to ask. Are you Dixie Doug himself?”

Brad’s guffaw is explosive; it tussles the bangs of Giles’s toupee.

“I wish I was. Then I’d be sitting on top a whole hill of cash. Let me tell you. This here ain’t the only Dixie Doug’s. There’s twelve of them. It’s called ‘franchising.’ They send you this brochure, see. Lays out the whole shebang. Paint color, decorations. Dixie Dog, our mascot. The whole menu, even. They do studies. Find out what people like, scientifically. They truck it across the country, and we serve it up.”

“Intriguing,” Giles says.

Brad looks about, then leans closer. “You want to know a secret?”

There is nothing Giles wants more. He’s harbored enough of them to know that receiving a secret from someone else magically lightens both parties’ loads.

“This voice? It isn’t even real. I’m from Ottawa. I’ve never heard a southern accent in my life, besides movies.”

Feelings settle inside Giles, ice into a glass. He may have failed to confirm Brad’s name, but he’ll come away today with a superior prize. One day, he is certain, Brad will share his real voice, some exotic Canadian lilt, and then—well, that will have to mean something, won’t it? Carrying his portfolio bag proudly, waiting on bright green pie, Giles feels more a part of the world than he’s felt in ages.