3.

It is the evening following my introduction to Felice. Max and Sylvia and I are seated in their tile and hardwood kitchen. After a day of matching drapery and wallpaper colors, Sylvia wears running shorts and sweatshirt; Max’s sleeves are rolled back from cooking. Feigning life as usual, I continue consuming vindaloo pork, basmati rice, and an Indian beer called Kingfisher while Max asks (to stop talking circles around Gordon and Greta), “So you still thinking of getting the house repainted?”

They are seated opposite me at the rectangular table, an arrangement uncomfortably suggestive of an interrogation. Dain thinks so in any case. Perched naked as a Raphael cherub on gray formica, he raises his eyebrows. The exposure of my marginal life to the cleansing power of a girl’s smirk has made me less patient with the likes of Max and Sylvia. For like Dain, they could not but misunderstand my sudden fascination.

I tell Max, “I guess it slipped my mind.”

Sylvia drinks beer and looks at me quizzically. “So whatever came of that woman you hit?”

There is no explanation more innocent than the truth. Dain nods sagely, and I tell them (excluding the emotional details) about Elaine’s visits.

“So that was the woman’s daughter in the car?” Max asks.

“Oh God!” Sylvia starts, covering her mouth with her napkin. “Speaking of kids, Max tell Joe what happened today.” (I could kiss her for this diversion. Dain crosses his arms.) “Max is doing this artists in the schools thing. They pay him to show kids how to paint. Max tell him.”

“Now remember,” Max begins, “I’m talking about six-and seven-year-olds.” (Sylvia sighs.) “We’re about done when I ask if they have any questions.”

Sylvia: “Listen to this, Joe.”

“This little girl—one of three Heathers, sweet and really smart—she asks why do doctors kill babies.” He sets down his beer and looks at each of us, fists on the edge of the table. “I’m mumbling through a quick exit when three or four of them jump in.”

“Joe, there’s this cell of pro-lifers.”

“You can’t believe the stuff they said. One boy started crying. The little guy thought there were doctors running around cutting people to pieces.”

“Max thinks it’s the demonstration coming up. They must go to meetings with the parents.”

I offer sincerely, “That is frightening.”

Max: “I actually think maybe they were coached. You know, hoping I’d say something their parents could get into the papers.”

“And these kids liked Max. That’s what’s really screwed up.”

Bemused, Dain crosses his little legs. I push green beans into a log jam against my rice. The last thing I need is to imagine a phalanx of Christian soldiers roaming the streets.

He returned to me shortly after Felice and Elaine had gone. It was not like the visitations when I was a boy. I had just done what before I’d only fantasized. I’d written notes on the title pages of a dozen books. Then I mounted the stairs to my study, feeling calm and empty, and sat on the couch for nearly an hour. I wondered how Dain might view my predicament. Then I saw him seated beside me. He was wearing the hospital pajamas he’d died in, printed with circus animals on light blue. I imagined him offering a consoling look. And I was comforted.

He had always been with me in spirit when writing, echoing each ironic chuckle in my own mind. Yet there was something strangely substantial about him, something I suspected I could not fully control. I wondered if a unified consciousness had roused him, in defense of his accustomed turf. In my mind, I asked him, “I’m glad you’re here. But when could I ever trust you not to sabotage my life?”

“Why would I do that?”—his eyes yellow and twinkling.

“Let’s be honest, after all these years.”

“All right then. You know I will. And you know why.” (I waited.) “You love me, Joe.” (I refused to answer.) “You miss me. And in any case I give you a private life, as mother calls it. Something no one can find, even in the back of a locked file. No little Lolita’s going to replace me.”

“I’m not trying to replace you.”

“So why does she make you so nervous?”

“I don’t know.” I looked into the treetops. “It’s not her, really. I feel fine in her presence. It’s the thought of the attraction … what others might think—”

“You don’t need her as long as I’m here.”

“It’s not the same.”

“No. With me you can’t commit a felony.”

“Don’t twist things. It’s just that, whatever good she can do me—it can’t be at her expense.”

“Oh no?”

And then he vanished. But when I found him sitting on the pass-through, he appeared ready to make up. I have cut and poked a green bean into my mouth. There is one of those brief pauses in which conversation could go anywhere: an Evangelical takeover, my paint job, or back to Gordon and Greta. I take the opportunity to play the hand I devised while driving here. “I read today about a man in Arkansas who wants to marry a twelve-year-old.” I joust another bean. “The mother apparently is in favor, as is the girl, or so they claim. I guess a cousin is trying to stop them.”

“And the mother wants it?” Sylvia asks.

“That’s pretty sick,” Max says.

I imagine Dain pursing his lips. I imagine him thinking, “This was certainly no help.”

“You know the Edwardians were a bunch of fairies.”

“Is that right.”

“Oh Christ, you couldn’t pay me to pick up my keys in Bloomsbury.”

“Mmmm.”

“Hey. What’s with you?” He peers. “You look like you lost your balls in a bet.”

It is eight-thirty, Tuesday morning, and I am seated across from Angus Nelson in the Shore Leave Grill. Nailed to the gray film over the loganberry fountain, there hang photographs of the cook and owner, Ralph Jaworski, shoulder to shoulder with his World War II KP platoon. The waitress, Betty, is sitting against the cash register painting her nails an abalone blue.

Angus leans over his plate and whispers, “I know this very nice lady—”

“No.”

This is the regular rhythm of our conversation. Angus rakes the underside of literary history. I fend off his attempts to cement a personal bond.

Angus and I met after a reading and slide show at the museum auditorium. While mothers crowded for autographs, he pushed several children aside, pinning one little boy against the refreshment table. My first impression was of a man dislodged from a shipwreck. The hair in his nose and ears was matted like black coral. Then his mouth opened, revealing a rank wind of flattery and years of cheap dental work.

What, then, bound me to him?

As long as I have been writing books and scribbling them with unspeakable sentiments, in every request for an autograph, in every crowd of faces in classrooms and lecture halls, I have awaited the reader who in perusing the text of one of Otto’s or Wally’s mishaps, will discover illuminated all of my marginalia—the reader whose eye will act as flame to that invisible ink. In the suggestive twinkling in his eyes, I had to wonder, was Angus Nelson the one?

Terrified at the prospect, I fled down the hall of Botticellis and Warhols towing Angus and the mother of a little girl who either would or could not untangle her fingers from my belt loop. By the time we reached my car his motives were clear. Having left the university under accusations of sexual harassment, he was applying for part-time work at a community college. The dean was a fan of my books. I refused to write him a recommendation. But after phone calls and a midnight appearance at my doorstep, it became clear: Abandoned by friends, colleagues, two wives, and a daughter selling Grateful Dead T-shirts on the streets of Prague, Angus Nelson was simply, profoundly alone. Our Tuesday morning breakfasts have been ritual ever since. In Angus Nelson I find too the limit of my own degeneration; I see a face swamped in the abyss of bitterness into which I hope I can never sink. The problem this morning is deciding whether Felice Kraipolous tempts me into or away from that precipice.

I pick at a mound of eggs and potatoes. Angus drinks coffee and maintains a wetly ruminating silence while Betty fans her nails watching an episode of The Jetsons.

My heart suddenly beats wildly. Purged into my sudden affection for a thick-skinned preadolescent, the dark side of my life—I see now—is only the farther beyond my control. And then Angus says without more preamble than another gulp of coffee: “I think some year Jerry Lewis oughta cancel his telethon and just get all those kids laid. I mean they’re not gonna live long enough to get cured anyway. Give ’em some real fun for once. Kids got drives too, you know. I mean what do they get, all the sympathy and no payoff. Some kid not even born yet’s the one gonna survive. It’s like Agamemnon’s daughter all over—what’s her name?—like this ritual sacrifice. I mean think about them for once, instead of his tax write-off.”

My eyes remain glued to George Jetson, who has managed to attach himself with super-ion glue to Astro’s tail. The dog thinks he means to play. Outweighing George pathetically, he proceeds to slam father Jetson around the glass walls of the living room as George yells for “Elro-o-o-o-y!”

Ralph laughs. Betty approaches the coffee pots.

I laugh too. A mere titter at first, it flares into a guffaw that draws eyes.

It is as though Angus had read out loud from the margins of Wally Warthog’s last encounter with the wily farmer. I take a breath, opening my lungs to unsuspected depths watching George Jetson whipped from the dog’s tail.

In cold truth, I think Angus may be right. Yet I do not feel implicated in Angus’ blasphemy. And how terrible can my attachment to Felice be when my nature is so distinct from the likes of Angus Nelson? I breathe slowly and look back at my potatoes. “I read in the Post there’s a new edition of Forster’s letters out. From a university press.” I breathe again, suppressing another thankful guffaw. Angus looks at me curiously. “From Chicago I think.”

Wednesday morning Max calls. Gordon showed up drunk at his graduate seminar on Pope Alexander VI. The students walked out of the classroom and into the office of the chair. Max proposes bringing Gordon to my house to talk. I agree tentatively, inventing a possible trip to meet my illustrator in New York.

I spend the remainder of the day working out story lines for a book titled Henrietta Hippo Learns to Dance. Stretched naked on his side just below the ceiling, Dain shakes his head. “I don’t understand you. You’re getting positively sincere.” Then his skewed grin: “I mean, what would mother and father think?”

I will not let him goad me into self-doubt: “Father’s dead.”

“So am I.”

“And mother’s going away to Albany, to interview for that lobbying job. This may be all over before she comes back.”

He shakes his head. “Does that deserve comment?”

“You tell me.” I manage a smile. “Tell me so I can fail to give a damn what you think.”

Elaine calls at noon. I work so hard to sound detached yet amiable, it’s only after I hang up that I realize—I’ve agreed to meet them Saturday morning, at the zoo.

I find them at the edge of the park, which has an open view of the buffalo pens. Joggers and cyclists drift by, while across the mildly rolling green, a few old men and boys swing at golf balls. I woke at five worrying about what to wear. I have settled on old corduroy trousers, brown loafers, argyle sweater. The sun is burning through a morning fog, opening patches of that scrubbed blue that follows less friendly weather.

They are watching two buffalo snort out a confusion in the pecking order. Felice’s legs are thin and fragile, and I am wishing I could pick her up and carry her when—a few steps before I announce myself—the words come into my head as though whispered behind my back: “You could marry the mother.”

The simplicity of this thought plasters a smile across my face. A smile so glowing that when they turn, both mother and daughter have to laugh. Thus we pick up precisely where we left off in my kitchen. The girl’s face, I see now in daylight, is harassed by a patch of acne the size of a raspberry, near one corner of her mouth. My heart cramps imaging the anxiety this must cause her. Elaine’s hand ventures and lightly touches her daughter’s shoulder. Felice does not resist this intimacy, and Elaine’s true motive for inviting me becomes clear.

I am, like my books, a mediator. A neutral and amusing bridge between mother and daughter; I am access to a relationship Elaine wants desperately with Felice. Seeing this, my smile widens.

“You’re sure happy,” Elaine says. She wears Birkenstocks and heavy gray socks, jeans and her suede jacket. Felice is dressed almost precisely as I first saw her—contributing to the impression that she has sprung from my own imagination. Her T-shirt today sports a head half human and half machine above the words, “Consciousness Is Technology.”

“Being near buffalo does something to me,” I tell her. “It’s a furry male thing.”

Felice confides to her mother, “He’s crazy,” and it is all I can do to resist reaching out to stroke her clear, pale brow.

The moment we are through the gates a calliope starts up beyond a stand of trees. Children run back and forth bearing pink and blue torches of cotton candy while heavy American families sit over sodas and meatball sandwiches. The music dips and whistles us back to childhood and I feel my very being, my mildly falling gut, the strained sockets of my eyes growing light and fluid.

Careful not to appear too enthusiastic, Felice leads us to the bear pens. Elaine and I stand back to watch. We talk about other zoos we know, about the zoo in Philadelphia, and Philadelphia itself where her cousin works in a parking garage. Then she describes her own job as a part-time masseuse in a women’s health center … in one of those associative trains that clacks along the more smoothly for one’s attention dwelling elsewhere. For we are both fascinated at the child Felice has suddenly become. Watching the bears scratch themselves, she swings side to side from her hands cupped over the rail and laughs when a keeper throws bread and the beasts sit up. She too is two people—hard and soft. Yet she is so utterly unself-conscious of the transition, I cannot decide which child touches me more deeply.

Our eyes rarely leave the girl’s spindly limbs darting from one cage to the next. And it occurs to me, as I describe dragging my mother from an antiwar riot, then my father’s heroic defiance of McCarthy, it occurs to me as I listen to the dramatic cadences of my own voice, that I am already courting Elaine Kraipolous, and that she seems more than happy to be courted.

It is a truism trumpeted in popular movies, novels, and television: A cynic like myself can only be saved by a woman in touch with the primacies of the heart. But I was not in love with Elaine Kraipolous. It would be lovely if it happened since it would legitimize all of my protective feelings toward Felice. But that was just the problem. How would I separate what attraction might grow between us, from the longing to serve this child? For it was only within the triangle completed by Felice that Elaine and I were drawn to one another.

We are seated on a bench, dappled with sun through trees. Felice is at the souvenir stand, deciding what to buy with the five dollars I have given her. Then something Elaine says snags my full attention.

“… and I told that son of a bitch if he ever touched her again I’d kill him myself.”

“Your husband hit Felice.”

“He broke the skin on her arm. She’s got a scar.”

I am instantly filled with her rage. “My god.”

“That was it.” She holds her fists upturned in her lap, crushing a small bag of corn chips. “Felice and me were on the bus to Oakland that night. We were lucky we even got out.” She squints at me. I try to appear as harmless as possible. “I can take care of myself, believe me. But he’s pounding me on the shoulders and the back of the head right there in front of the apartment and I’m trying to get the suitcases in the cab. Felice was yanking on the back of his shirt, screaming at him to stop. That’s the sad thing.” She looks back at her daughter. “She really loved him. But that’s getting better, she’s getting wised up. She maybe isn’t the sweetest kid in the world but she isn’t stupid.”

Felice has chosen a tiny plastic telescope on a gold string. After panning flamingoes and tortoises, she points it in our direction and waves. I wave back. Elaine chews the inside of her cheek. “I think she’ll be okay. She’s got this boyfriend who’s a little prick but I figure that’s just a phase.” She smiles crookedly. “God knows, the things I used to drag home just to piss off my mother.”

We watch Felice run to the edge of the antelope pen. There she lifts up a little boy so he can see over the rail.

And amid the cries of chimps and lions declaring dominance, Elaine’s protection of her child, against Felice’s own father, draws all of my respect. She says, “I’m sorry for gabbing.”

“No,” I assure her. “Felice told me he’s dead.”

She stares at the chip bag. “I didn’t mean to dump this on you.”

But there is something else. Something she does not know me well enough to reveal. Felice lets the little boy slide back to the ground. Then she turns to us. For a moment the world shifts into slow motion.

As she approaches, I rise and, without thought or hesitation, take the girl’s shoulder gently in hand. She simply reaches up—utterly unself-conscious—and gives two delicate pats, her skin unbelievably tender, as though indulging some mildly retarded Uncle. Then she sits beside her mother. Elaine is delighted. She seems to interpret my gesture as what it was: a sincere, if hopeless attempt to compensate for her father’s betrayal; an attempt to say, We’re not all so bad.

I see in Elaine’s face my own impulse to take this moment one step too far and wrap an arm around her daughter’s shoulder. Then Felice lifts the telescope from her chest, spies at me through its large end, and asks for more money to feed the geese.

I still can’t explain it, how we had this effect on each other in threesome. Defenseless to her desires, I concede gently, “I guess I could finance food for a goose.”

Felice pops from the bench wearing a disarming smirk that says she’s getting away with something.

“Boy are you shy,” Elaine smiles.

Felice only sticks her hand closer. “Give.”

After she has run off, I ask Elaine, “You coming?” I discover my own hand drifting toward hers, but she suddenly looks weak.

“Thank you,” she says. I stare at the hyenas beyond the refreshment stand. “This has just been so great, you know?”

One of the big females circles and plops herself down in the dust. My hand returns to my pocket. I nod toward where Felice has disappeared—“Come on.”

We catch up to her on a little wooden bridge where she is throwing food to bad-tempered geese. She hands us each some brown pellets and we toss it piece by piece, to see which birds can catch it from the air. The calliope starts up again and the feet of children running across the bridge are like strokes on an untuned xylophone, echoing from the water while the geese gobble the food thrown in arcs from our palms. I look down at Felice’s delicate head craned over the rail, then up to find Elaine gazing at me. The tiniest trail of tears, from the tip of one underlash, has caught in the line skirting her mouth.

She does not turn away. If I will not take the words, I should see what this day means to her. Her mouth blossoms back, revealing her small, even teeth, and I want to return her smile, when I see him in the distance.

On the back of a stone bench. Dain sits grinning.

My head jerks away. I begin throwing the food at the birds, bouncing it from beaks and buoyant feathers.

“Don’t hit them,” Felice scolds.

Her disapproval so unsettles me, the remaining feed falls from my hand. In a flurry of water and feathers, the geese lunge for the food, pecking viciously at each other. Attention turns to us like leaves in a sudden breeze.

Felice screams, “They’re fighting!”—something shattered and hysterical in her voice.

Elaine reaches out and touches her shoulder. The squabble has already started to calm, and soon there is only the occasional spiteful peck as the birds return to open water. But the spell has been broken. Felice’s shoulder shrugs back violently, throwing off her mother’s hand. She snaps the telescope from her neck and casts it after the birds.

For a moment, like a magician trying to renew a charm, Elaine’s fingers float in the air behind her daughter’s head. But Felice only hangs over the rail, kicking pellets into the water.

We watch the telescope turn in a current. I tell them I have to get back and we follow Felice. At the gates, Elaine’s hand briefly touches my arm, then she walks ahead, after her daughter.

I watch them skirt the grass, under the chestnut trees. Squirrels, frantically preparing for winter, flee at their approach and then reconverge as Felice stretches the distance ahead of her mother’s despairing gait. I watch until the squirrels must scatter twice.

Rachel and Isaac have been kissed and hugged and tucked into bed. While Cindi does dishes, we men sit slung across each end of the couch, drinking Genesee, watching a tape of Midnight—with Claudette Colbert and Don Ameche—rewind.

Despite its unfortunate ending, the visit to the zoo has helped settle my thoughts. I know now what I have to offer Elaine and Felice. And this knowledge makes judging my own motives less pressing. Yet from a desire to be scrupulously sure, I cannot resist casting the scene in the worst possible light. (Dain, lying on the rug with his hands behind his head, represses a look of skepticism.)

Blatant victimization can put Will into a blue funk for days. For his sake I age to fifteen the bride in my razorback melodrama.

“I guess it could be a pretty bad situation,” he says while Don Ameche jumps from the ground to standing, and fried food pops miraculously from the patio floor into the pan with which he is now hit. (Their senile VCR will only reverse with the picture on screen, like an old man mumbling backwards through memory.) “Course you never know. Maybe that old guy, if maybe he never had a wife or kids maybe he’s trying to get her kind of as a daughter and doesn’t know it.”

“He could marry the mother. Or try.”

(Watching black-and-white time suck backwards, Dain scoffs.)

Pondering this option, Will observes Claudette. She is seated with several others, talking over breakfast. Occasionally she forks eggs and sausage from her mouth onto her plate, and spits coffee into her cup. Whenever the cup is full, a waiter glides in and draws the black up into the pot.

“I guess that’s so.” Will’s mouth twists to one side. “You sure hate to think it could be sex.”

I suddenly wish I were seated at that celluloid breakfast table, able to command my stomach to ooze all black liquids from its walls.

And then it occurs to me, not the answer, but the central question: Amid the staged confessions, through the daily passion plays on talk shows and tabloid journalism, how does one resist becoming the censor of one’s own most ambiguous emotions? How will I understand my attachment to Felice without invading its vital organs with a knife?

(Dain has no comment. He is on his best behavior knowing he risks erasure after the episode at the zoo.)

I tell Will, “People do jump to conclusions.”

His soft eyes are distant on the TV, troubled with the troubles of the world. “That’s so maybe. But who knows.” He drinks from his beer. “One way or the other I guess the guy’s got problems.”

I say it, spewing the black: “Not as big as what the girl could face.”

He nods. Pauses. Nods again. He inspects his beer as though a specimen of the world’s moral makeup. “I guess there’s a lot of that kind of thing these days, huh?”

He looks to me for wisdom. Dain waits too. He bends his head back, staring upside down.

I have always managed to ease Will’s passage through the world’s moral disorder. I drink from my beer. He waits, his big legs extended, arms hiked on the couch back, his entire body open and vulnerable. I listen to Cindi washing dishes, to the rush of clean, hot water.

“Maybe people just talk about it more than they used to.”

Dain’s eyes roll. But I flex my jaw and he goes back to watching the screen. Will’s head tilts. “I guess that could be it.”

The water stops as Will calls to Cindi to come see the movie. She enters with the dish towel on her shoulder, a strand of hair pasted to her forehead, smiling her tough and enduring smile.

“You two look pretty darned comfortable.” (She is happy I’ve offered no signs of another breakdown.)

“A couple lazy old dogs,” Will beams. She plops herself on the couch between us, bone tired from housework, and the last trace of flu. She lays unself-conscious hands on our knees. Will hits Play. Attached hand to leg through Cindi’s shoulders, we become silent with watching.

I lay my hand over hers. Our fingers lace.

(Call at 11:23 P.M.)

Max: How’s tomorrow night?

Joe: Did you tell Greta you were planning this?

Max: I want her to know we’re trying to help, if that’s not too terrible. I’m also not that concerned with what Gordon knows, to tell you the damn truth. It’s Greta I’m concerned about. (Long Silence.) So how about tomorrow.

Joe: I have plans.

Max: It took a lot of talking to get Gordon to agree at all. Sylvia and I are losing sleep over this, you know that don’t you?

(Long silence.)

Joe: Tuesday then.

Max: (Pause.) I can’t Tuesday. Wednesday.

Joe: Fine.

Max: Seven. I’ll bring Gordon for a beer at seven. (Pause.) He likes Heineken.

In my car, Felice rolls down the window though the evening air is biting. Her hair whips like a tattered rag.

“You’ll get pneumonia,” I tell her.

She glares daggers. “We’re supposed to be bonding. Don’t be such a dad.”

She is right, of course. It was to let us get to know one another, to steel the bond proved so fragile at the zoo, that Elaine first invited herself over to make dinner and then realized she’d forgotten to buy soda for Felice. So far the evening has proceeded in fits and starts. Without car repairs or Felice to talk about (not at least in her daughter’s presence), conversation between Elaine and myself has been forced and artificial. And regretting her performance at the zoo, Felice seems determined never again to be so easily won over.

I tell her, “I’m game if you are.”

Her cheeks chill to red. She rolls her window back up. It has occurred to me that her charm at the zoo may have been a jealous ploy, simply to deny me her mother’s full attention. I will find a moment to tell Elaine this, to prove how much her daughter cares.

“Look,” she says, “it doesn’t matter to me what you guys do. If you push each others’ buttons, just go for it and leave me alone.”

But her body is a lie-detector: Her feet fidget on the floor, her hand clenches the arm rest. And I am forced to wonder what desire she’s repressing, if she may have found some room in her heart for me.

I ask calmly, “If we did like each other, would that bother you?”

“It doesn’t bother me.”

We stop at an intersection. “I’m not going to intrude any further than you’re ready for.” An old woman struggles toward the curb. “Your mother doesn’t want that and neither do I.”

She sighs through her teeth—a release of tiny air brakes. “It’s no big deal to me.”

The light changes. “I don’t mean to be a threat.”

Her head rears back. “You don’t threaten me.”

“Felice—”

“I think you’re really weird. My mother likes you for some stupid reason but I don’t.”

I smile, and cannot take the smile off: “I don’t believe that.”

“You think everybody has to love you ’cause you write those stupid books. God, you’re so fucked up.”

“Felice. Please.” But now she is on her guard, sovereign in her feelings if nowhere else. I tell her flatly, “You don’t know me and I don’t really know you.”

“So what? What’s so terrible about that?”

I say nothing. She chews her lip. I tell myself, it is in her own interest to force an opening: “Your mother talked to me about your father.”

She seems suddenly unable to breathe. Then she chokes out, “Shut up! Just—shut up … You don’t know anything. You don’t know shit about me—so just shut your fucking mouth!”

We reach the store in silence. When I return to the parking lot, I can hear heavy metal buzzing the closed windows of my car, thudding the air like a constricted heartbeat. I open the door and the sound whacks my chest.

As we drive, I realize the appeal of this music. It numbs the senses. It antidotes the need for speech.

My mother, blessedly, is still out.

Felice runs upstairs to my flat, slamming all three doors in my face. Yet in my dining room, I discover her tight in her mother’s arms. Elaine’s hands stroke her daughter’s head. Her eyes burgeon with tears. She looks at me, wondering how I have recast the spell.

Feeling slightly hollow, I manage a wan grin. “We like the same music.”

She is too touched to hear the absurdity of this. “Is that right?”

Felice whispers to her. I go into the kitchen and put away the soda. I hear them speaking in low tones, in the gentle communion of life long intimacy. And then a laugh, at my expense perhaps. And I am struck into stillness.

Not only do I want to hold nothing of myself in reserve from this mother and daughter, allowing the text of my hopes and bitter marginalia to bleed into a comfortable gray, I will do whatever is required to make them happy. And I have felt this toward no one else. Not my mother. Not even Will and his family if only because their happiness is so plentiful. There is always a trade involved, always something I expect in return, if only a sense of welcome. But I do not expect this now, not even in my own kitchen of sparkling tile and simmering tofu. It can be hatred of me that forces them into each other’s arms, and it is enough—so long as I can do some service. It is indeed a romance in the grand, melodramatic style.

There is a pause in their voices. Before they enter, as I am taking plates from the cupboard, I look out the side window.

Sitting on the eave of Phil Kluge’s house, he is merely a naked silhouette, outlined in moonlight. I imagine his voice as it might sound in some translucent afterlife. He is nodding slowly, nodding wisely.

Humbled by the delicacy of a child’s heart, he sees now. At least for this moment, Dain is again my confidant, and whispers, “This is good, Joe.”

I set down the plates and open the napkin drawer. He nods again, speaking for the shadows: “I know it’s a little shaky sometimes. But this is okay.”