responsibility seemed a breeze.

Patti shared the latest jokes, and as a table radio played, she sang along to the Top 40, knew all the lyrics. Red was swept away. For a while he forgot about the trauma of being kidnapped. That night he lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, thinking about Patti, Patti, Patti! He whispered her name as he'd often prayed a Hail Mary. Lying in the dark, he felt as though he were sailing through outer space, a human Telstar, sending out love signals to her.

"What if," he wondered, "Frankie died in a car crash? And what if, by some crazy coincidence, my parents died in a car crash? I'd be an orphan, and Patti would adopt me, and in time, marry me!"

He saw heronly a few more times before she graduated and moved to Hartford, CT, a job at Travelers Insurance, another bright coin in the secretarial pool. She forgot about Frankie, got engaged to Herb.

Then Red thought about another long ride, in the Bicentennial Summer, that Gerald Ford twilight time between Vietnam and the Iran Hostage Crisis. Early one June day, Jack suggested a drive to visit Patti at her condo, part of a sprawling complex on former Connecticut farmland. For once, Red didn't hesitate. "Wow! I haven't seen her since, well, you know, way back then!"

Gathered in the condo basement that evening, Don Kirshner's Rock Concert on, Rory Gallagher and bandmates just getting warmed up, Red chatted with Patti's current fiancé, Sam Dolan, a town councilman who was aiming