3.

We all eat bagels together in the kitchen. Mom’s about to bring one up to Milton, when I tell her that she’s only making things worse by waiting on him, that at the very least, she should make him come down a flight of stairs to eat. So she yells up to him, and he does come down, but only long enough to put some cream cheese on a bagel and eat it in three bites.

As we finish loading the dishwasher, Mom asks Tom if he’d mind changing the sink’s water filter for her, which is the kind of thing he’s great at and doesn’t mind doing. She doesn’t have a new filter in the house, though, so he volunteers to run to the hardware store to get one.

After he leaves, Mom and I go upstairs to look through our old picture books and see if there are any I might want to take before she gives them all away to the local hospital. The bookcase is in the hallway, which is poorly lit, so we have to take the books out one at a time and tilt them toward the light to see their titles.

I’m putting aside the books I think I might want to read to my own kids one day (a couple of Dr. Seuss’s, all of Maurice Sendak—whom I always secretly felt related to because our last names were so similar—and a bunch of random books I liked for one reason or another when I was little, most of which are so worn their spines are loose and their pages in danger of falling out), and after a while, Mom says, “You’re awfully quiet.”

“Am I?”

“I know I’ve thrown a lot at you today: the move, selling the house, the divorce.…You’re so capable, I forget sometimes how young you are.”

“I’m not that young anymore, Mom. I’ll be twenty-five next week.”

“That’s still incredibly young.”

“It’s really not. And I’m fine with your selling the house. It hasn’t been my home for a while. I have my own home.”

Her face darkens, and she shakes her head unhappily. “I wish…”

“What?”

“You know how I feel about this. You should be living on your own at your age or with a roommate. Or even at home with me. But not with Tom. I know I’ve said it before, Keats, but you need to grow up before you settle down.”

“You’re right,” I say and she looks surprised. But then I add coldly, “You’ve said it before. And you’re wrong. I’m happy living with Tom. I feel lucky. You should be happy for me.”

“I’d feel a lot better about Tom if you’d take a break from him for a while and spend some time on your own. Just so you can see what independence feels like. You were so young when you started going out with him, and you’ve never—”

I cut her off. “I know how old I was. But I’m not going to reject someone who’s perfect for me just because I happen to have met him a little on the early side.”

“I thought I was all grown-up when I met your father, but I really wasn’t. I was too young to settle down and so are you.”

I twitch my shoulders irritably. “Tom is nothing like Dad.”

“True.”

I don’t like her tone. “God! You are such an intellectual snob!”

She considers this for a moment. “You know, Keats, I find it interesting that you leapt to that conclusion from what I said. That might reveal more about your feelings toward Tom than mine.”

I grab my hair in my hands and tug hard with a moan. “Can you just leave me and my relationship alone? I’m the one here who’s fine. I’m the one who’s in a loving, long-term relationship. You’re the one getting a divorce and dating every guy over the age of fifty in the greater Boston area and telling everyone in the whole world about it, except for me.”

“Whom have I told about it?” She seems genuinely bewildered.

“You told Jacob before me,” I say. “Jacob. He’s not even a member of our family, and you told him first.” I sound like a baby, but I can’t help myself.

Her expression clears. “Oh, right. I forgot. We were just spending so much time together, and it sort of came up. And I knew he wouldn’t care one way or the other. I guess maybe I waited to tell you because I was a little nervous about how you’d take it.”

“But I’m fine with it! I’m fine with the divorce and your selling the house and even with your dating. I’m fine with all of it.” It occurs to me that I’ve used the word fine a lot in the last minute with increasing hysteria.

She squints at me. “You don’t sound fine.”

“Well, I am!” It doesn’t help my argument that I’m practically shouting. I take a deep breath and say more calmly, “What about the other kids? Have you told them you’re dating?”

“I can’t imagine Milton or Hopkins would care either way. But I did let Hopkins know that we’re going through with the divorce and selling the house. I’m hoping she’ll make it back in the next couple of months to go through her stuff and help us pack up.”

“That would be good,” I say, but I’m dubious. Hopkins is always so busy. She does try to come home each year for Christmas, but it’s usually a twenty-four-hour kind of thing. We don’t overlap much then because I spend most of Christmas Day with Tom’s family. It’s important to him to be with them, and it’s important to me to be with him, and anyway, they’re a lot more religious than we are, so Christmas means a lot more to them.

A few years ago, I did ask Tom if we could spend the day with my family, just for a change, and he agreed, and then I was embarrassed and horrified by how little my family did: I had forgotten what it was like at home, had spent too many years celebrating with the Wellses to remember how pathetic my family was at celebrating anything. The others were all still asleep when Tom and I arrived at nine in the morning. Eventually they woke up and stumbled downstairs, one at a time, at which point there was an unenthusiastic and sleepy gift exchange. Then we ate some French toast that my mother had burned on one side and undercooked on the other, and by eleven in the morning, everyone had retreated back to his or her computer, which is when Tom said to me, “We could still make dinner with my family.” So we left.

Now we just stop by the house briefly on Christmas morning to drop off some gifts and continue on, settling down with his family for the rest of the day.

Can you blame us? Here’s what Tom’s mother does for Christmas: A few weeks before, she decorates their entire Brookline house with wreaths and cinnamon-scented pinecones and candles and red bows. On Christmas Eve, she arranges white-and-silver gift-wrapped presents under a white-and-silver ornamented Christmas tree. The immediate family (which has included me for years) gathers at nine on Christmas morning to exchange gifts while enjoying fresh hot coffee and huge slices of some sweet almond coffee cake she bakes every year. People squeal and emote over their gifts, and everyone hugs everyone else at some point during the morning. The extended family arrives gradually. If the weather’s decent, we all go for a walk together; if it’s not, we play games by the fire until Tom’s mother calls everyone together to sip eggnog and spiced cider while we exchange even more presents. After that we sit down to an enormous dinner of ham and asparagus and freshly baked biscuits, and before we move on to dessert (five different kinds of cakes and pies), we sing Christmas carols around the tree. Did I mention the baskets of fresh tangerines and whole nuts that we crack ourselves? Or the chocolate truffles? Or the—

You get the idea. His family wins, hands down. It doesn’t even matter that at some point after we’ve all had a couple glasses of wine, Tom’s mother gets maudlin and his sister gets sullen and his father gets disgusted and the cousins whisper behind everyone’s back.…It’s still the closest thing I’ve ever known to the kind of Christmas you see in movies. So we end up with them, not with Mom and Dad.

Which means I hardly see Hopkins the one time of the year she comes to town—just long enough to hug and say that we both wished we could spend more time together. But it never happens.

* * *

Jacob says he’s going to bring a load of books over to my dad’s apartment, and I offer to go with him since I haven’t seen my father in a while and I want to check out his new apartment.

Tom is back and on his knees working on the water filter when I tell him I’m heading out with Jacob. His head emerges from under the sink. “You’re leaving?”

“Only for an hour or so. Jacob can bring me right back here. Or drop me off at home if you want to take off.” I haven’t actually checked with Jacob to see if he can take me home (it’s pretty far out of his way), but he’ll do it if I ask him to. “Unless you want to come with us to Dad’s?”

Tom stands up, and reaches for a dish towel to wipe his grimy hands on. “No offense, but I don’t really want to spend my weekend hanging out with your father. He’s not the easiest guy in the world to talk to.”

“Okay. I’ll meet you back home then.”

“We’re going out with Lou and Izzy tonight,” he reminds me.

“I know. I’ll be back in plenty of time.”

He gives me a kiss on the cheek. “Tell your dad I say hi.”

* * *

Once we’re inside his battered Honda Civic, Jacob tells me I can put on any radio station I like. Well, any AM/FM station—he doesn’t have satellite.

I fiddle with the dial and settle on a Top 40 station.

Jacob raises an eyebrow. “You like Lady Gaga?”

“I do.” I want to sound defiant, but it comes out sounding defensive instead.

He shakes his head in bemusement. “Sometimes I wonder where you came from, Keats.”

“Most people in this country love Lady Gaga,” I say.

“I know. I just don’t expect a Sedlak to.”

I shrug: guess I’m still the little red-haired freak.

Jacob’s an awful driver: too slow when he’s going straight, too abrupt when switching lanes. Other drivers honk at him throughout the twenty-minute trip, but he doesn’t seem to notice.

He has his own parking space in the garage underneath my father’s building, which is just a block or so away from Memorial Drive. I’m impressed by the location: Dad’s not only in the heart of Harvard Square, he’s right on the Charles River. “How did he find this place?” I ask as we ride up to the fifth floor, the boxes stacked in a corner of the elevator.

“He didn’t. Your mom did. She knew someone who knew someone who was selling and asked me to check it out.” The elevator doors open, and we start unloading the boxes into the small, well-lit hallway. “At first your father wasn’t exactly enthusiastic—”

“Well, of course he wasn’t. He wanted to stay at home with her.”

“On her advice, I didn’t tell him why we were coming here, just said that he had a meeting.” We finish moving boxes and let the elevator doors close behind us. “It was an ambush: I got him in the door, and then the real estate agent and I double-teamed him. Even so, I doubt he’d have gone for it if your mother hadn’t shown up and made it clear that his days in her house were numbered.” He takes a key out of his pocket.

I watch him as he unlocks the door. “I think I’ve underestimated you, Jacob. I always thought Dad ran your life. Maybe it’s the other way around.”

He looks over his shoulder at me. “You seriously think he runs my life?”

“You’re at his beck and call, aren’t you?”

“It’s not like that,” he says. “I’m not his errand boy or anything. I like the work I do with him and for him. I wouldn’t stick around if I didn’t.”

I feel vaguely chastised and fall silent.

He opens the door and calls out a hello.

There’s an uncertain “uh…Jacob?” from down the hallway.

We maneuver the boxes into the apartment, and I look around while Jacob closes the door behind us. There’s nothing particularly special about the space. We’re standing in a medium-sized living room that has a hallway leading off from one side and a small kitchen off to the other. But the windows on the far wall are large, and you can actually see some of the redbrick Harvard houses and a tiny slice of the river. “Wow,” I say, moving closer. “That view.”

“I know,” says Jacob, joining me by the window. “Nice, isn’t it?”

“Bet Dad doesn’t even notice.”

“We set up an office for him in the second bedroom.” He leads me into the hallway. One door off of it is open and through it I can see a narrow bed, still unmade, the quilt slipping off. There’s something incredibly sad about how messy and small the room is, about how my father’s life has been reduced to an unkempt bed in a claustrophobic room.

Jacob doesn’t seem to notice the pathos of it all—he’s already knocking on the other door and then opening it with a comfortable self-assurance I envy. “Larry?” he says. “Look who I brought with me.”

My father is hunched over a computer at his desk. His neck and shoulders curve forward just like Milton’s. Dad’s heavier than Milton and his hair is mostly gray, but give Milton another fifty years and they’ll be identical. Dad’s wearing reading glasses way down on his nose, and as he turns to look at us, his eyes are bleary under eyebrows that have recently grown straggly.

I haven’t seen him for a couple of months, but he looks a lot older to me.

He swivels toward me in his chair, and I come over and kiss him lightly on the forehead.

“Keats,” he says, and I wonder which of us is more relieved that he got my name right the first time. When we all lived together, he frequently called the three women of our household interchangeably by any of our three names. “What a lovely surprise.” When he says things like that, they always sound sarcastic, but I think it’s just the way he talks: he actually does seem (mildly) pleased to see me. “To what do I owe the unexpected pleasure?”

“I wanted to check out your new place.”

He gestures grandly around the room. “A veritable palace, isn’t it?”

“I like the view.”

He shrugs and I know I’m right: he couldn’t care less about it.

“We brought some boxes over from the house,” Jacob says. “Mostly books and papers.”

“Excellent,” Dad says. “More useless detritus from a misspent life.”

Jacob doesn’t respond to that, just starts gathering up the dirty plates and half-empty mugs of tea that are scattered everywhere. Dad may have been living here only a few weeks, but his Sedlak slovenliness is already on full display.

There’s a small sofa near the desk. It’s heaped with books and stacks of papers—and more plates and cups—so I perch on the arm. “How’re you doing, Dad?”

“As you see.”

“Are you teaching this semester?”

“One graduate seminar.”

“How’s that going?”

“The way it always goes. My students began the class eager and excited to work with the iconic Professor Sedlak, and then disillusionment sets in. I am not what they expected. I am not Aristotle. I have no interest in their moral development. I teach theories of government and expect them to do the reading on time.” He shrugs. “The disappointment is mutual. They’re not what I was hoping for, either.”

“Anyone want coffee?” Jacob asks brightly.

“I do,” I say, jumping up a little too quickly. I follow him as he leaves the office, carefully balancing a tower of dirty dishes between his two hands.

* * *

I stand in the doorway of the kitchen and watch Jacob make coffee with the ease of someone who knows where everything is—who probably unpacked and arranged it all himself, come to think of it. “He seems kind of depressed.”

“Yeah, I know.” He glances over at me as he pours water in the machine. “It’s good you came. He misses you guys, but he’s not the type to express that out loud.”

“No kidding.”

“He is who he is, Keats. He’s not a warm and fuzzy guy, and he never will be. But he loves you, and he’s more aware of what’s going on with his kids than you’d think.”

“How do you know that?”

He measures out the coffee into the filter. “He asks me about you all the time. He gets worried about things like any father.”

“What makes him worry about me?”

“Nothing in particular. Just the usual stuff. You know.”

“I really don’t. Tell me.” He’s still silent. “Don’t make me threaten another book, Jacob.”

“It’s just the normal dad stuff. Like ‘Is she happy with her job? Is that guy really right for her?’ That kind of thing.”

“Normal dad stuff,” I repeat. “So…he also asks if Hopkins is happy with her job? And her boyfriend? Oh, wait, she doesn’t have one. Does he talk about that? About how she hasn’t had a boyfriend since college and how Milton’s never had a girlfriend or even gone out on a date? Or am I the only one who worries him? Because I’m not as smart as they are?”

Jacob shakes his head uneasily. “This isn’t a competitive thing, Keats. And I wasn’t quoting him verbatim. I was just trying to convey to you—”

“Forget it.” I start opening cabinet doors. Inside, they’re almost entirely bare, except for a bunch of Museum of Fine Arts mugs and a brand-new set of plain white dishes (four each of plates, bowls, teacups, and saucers) and several boxes of Swee-Touch-Nee tea, which my dad drinks all day long, brewed strong with lots of milk and sugar. He taught my mom to drink it like that. I give up on the third cabinet and turn back to Jacob. “Is there anything good here? I really need something sweet right now.”

“Instant oatmeal?”

“Get real, Jacob.”

“You mean like cookies or something? I haven’t done a big grocery run yet. Sorry. But I can go out right now and get you whatever you want.”

I hesitate, then say, “It’s okay. I’m fine.”

“It’s no problem. Coffee’s all set to go, and I can be back with a doughnut or cupcake or something before it’s even done brewing. Just tell me what you’d like.”

“It’s okay.”

“How about a glazed chocolate from Dunkin’ Donuts? You like those, right?”

“Yeah, but you don’t have to get me one. I’ll live.”

“Just give me five minutes.”

I watch Jacob race out of the apartment, and I feel a little guilty. It’s so easy to take advantage of him.

The coffeemaker is hissing gently but it has a while to go, so I head back to my father’s office.

He’s typing at the computer again.

“Hi.” I return to my perch on the sofa arm. “Am I interrupting?”

“Never,” he says. “And always.” He smiles, and I see for a second a ghost of the handsome younger man he once was, the one who my mother claims every female grad student had a crush on. He swivels his chair around so he’s facing me and pats me awkwardly on the knee. “Tell me what’s up with you these days.” But before I can speak, he says, “Did your mother tell you she’s selling the house? You were born in that house, you know. All three of you grew up in that house.”

“But it kind of makes sense for her to sell it now, don’t you think?”

“How unusual,” he says. “Someone’s actually asking me what I think about all this.” He leans back in his desk chair. There’s a small tear in the shoulder seam of his blue dress shirt. “I have to admit that I feel a bit blindsided. My plan was to be carried out of that house in a coffin. Preferably dead, of course.”

“Of course.” We’re politely jovial with each other—it’s what we do best.

“But the decision has been made and here I am.” He glances around. “Where’s Jacob? I don’t hear the pitter-patter of little feet anywhere.”

“I sent him out for dessert.”

“You sent him out?” he repeats, one crazy eyebrow soaring. “Does he work for you now?”

“Well,” I say, “he works for you and you’re my father, so by the transitive property, he works for me, right?”

“That is a fallacy.”

“Says you.”

He looks mildly taken aback. “Excuse me?”

“Nothing. I was just joking. Did you know that Hopkins may come home soon to pack up her stuff? We should try to have a family dinner if she does.”

“Such a complicated term, family,” he says with a grim chuckle, and it suddenly occurs to me—really occurs to me for the first time—that my dad’s heart might actually be broken. I don’t know what to say to that. We’re both silent for a moment, and then he says, “Do you know how long it had been since I’d last lived in an apartment? Over thirty-five years. I keep hearing people moving around me. Up above, down below, on all sides. I’m surrounded by strangers.”

“You’ll get used to it.”

“I don’t want to get used to it,” he says sulkily.

“Have you tried a white noise machine?”

“No. Maybe I should.”

“I can pick one up for you if you like. I’m always running errands for work anyway.”

“Ah, still being challenged on the job, I see. I’m so glad you graduated magna cum laude from one of the Seven Sisters for this.” His foggy hazel eyes peer at me from under those craggy eyebrows, like they’re trying to pin down something that refuses to come into focus. “You’re too smart for this, Keats. If you want to spend time in academia—lord knows why, but it does seem to draw us in—go back to school, a real school, and get a PhD.”

“That’s the last thing I want to do.” My cell buzzes in my pocket. I fish it out and peer at the text from Tom.

U on ur way yet? Dinner’s at 6:30.

I text him back. Soon. I lean back so I can slip the phone back in my jeans.

“Please don’t let me distract you from your important communiqué,” my father says icily. He hates texting, goes ballistic when he catches students glancing at their phones during class.

“I’m good.”

“At what?”

Fortunately I can hear the apartment door open at that moment. I call out to Jacob, who materializes a second later, bag in hand. “Who’s up for a doughnut?” he asks cheerfully.

“I’ll have mine with my coffee.” I stand up. “Dad?”

“Go ahead. I’ll join you in a second.”

But he doesn’t ever emerge, so Jacob and I have our doughnuts in the kitchen without him, and then I stop by the office to say good-bye before Jacob drives me home like I knew he would.

* * *

When I get there, Tom is watching the Red Sox play the Royals on our living room flat screen. “It’s going to be a long season,” he says, looking up with a sigh when I let myself in. “We’re already stinking up the place. Glad you’re finally home. We’re going to meet Lou and Iz at their place and then decide where to eat.”

“I need to shower. I smell like my house.”

“Okay, but make it fast. How was your dad?”

“Old.” I don’t mean it as a joke but Tom laughs.

“That’s what happens when you have kids in your fifties.” Tom’s father is twenty years younger than mine and looks like an older, slightly beefier version of his son: his hair’s still dark and thick, and the cragginess in his face is pretty handsome. If Tom ages the way his father did, he’ll continue to be the best-looking guy in the room for the next forty years.

They’re good pals, Tom and his father. They have season tickets to Fenway Park, and even though they see each other every day at work, they’re still eager to go to games together or play golf on the weekends. It’s sweet.

Dick, his dad, started his linens laundering business thirty years ago and gradually built it up from a small family venture to a huge industry that services most of the hospitals and hotels in the greater Boston area. Tom worked there every summer during high school and then joined full-time when he graduated from BU. He’s a vice president now, but everyone there knows he’s being groomed to take over the whole company. His sister Anna doesn’t want anything to do with the business—​although she’s happy to live off its profits in New York City—​but Tom says he’ll welcome her into the company if she ever changes her mind.

He also says he hopes our kids will want to join him there one day. I don’t say anything when he talks about that. I’ve always daydreamed about having a kid who becomes a famous novelist or screenwriter or something like that. But if running a laundry-washing business is good enough for the guy I plan to have kids with, it should be good enough for those kids. Right?

* * *

We see Izzy and Lou almost every weekend, probably because we like both of them, which is unusual for us. In general, I tolerate Tom’s friends more than I actively like them—a lot of them acted weirdly condescending toward me when Tom and I first started dating and I was only fifteen, which maybe I shouldn’t blame them for, but it didn’t exactly endear them to me. I don’t have all that many friends of my own, because for the last ten years Tom’s taken up all of my free time. While the other girls at Smith were spending their weekends carpooling to parties on nearby coed campuses, I was riding the bus back to Boston to be with Tom, so I just didn’t forge the same kind of bonds the other girls did. And the few I did get close to, like my roommates, settled in other parts of the country. But Tom and I are together pretty much every night anyway, so I don’t particularly feel like I’m missing out on companionship.

And like I said, we spend a lot of time with Lou and Izzy.

Lou goes all the way back to high school with Tom, and he’s a good guy, dependable and honest and basically pretty easygoing, but the one I really like is Izzy, who’s halfway between my age and the guys’. She’s cute and blond and sweet and kind and would pretty much do anything to keep everyone around her happy. After she graduated from high school, she continued to live at home, taking classes at a local community college, so she could help her parents care for her older brother who was born with some kind of serious brain damage and can’t talk or feed himself or go to the bathroom on his own. She lived at home until she married Lou, and even now, a few years later, she still spends one day each weekend back there, driving the hour it takes for her to get to and from Salem, just to give her mother a few hours’ relief from the constant drudgery of caring for Stanny.

Her desire to please occasionally tips over into mild insanity, since she hates to disagree with anyone about anything. For instance, once we were all discussing a movie we had just seen, and Lou said he hated it because it was boring, and she said, “I know! I almost fell asleep!” and then I said, “Really? I thought it was incredibly tense,” and she said, “I know! I still have goose bumps!” and no one but me seemed to notice that in her rush to be agreeable she had contradicted herself in fewer than ten seconds.

You forgive Izzy for stuff like that, because it comes from such a good place, from such a genuine desire to make everyone around her feel understood. She’s unlike the people I grew up with, unlike my very self-centered and argumentative family: she’s proof that not everyone thinks being right is more important than being nice.

It takes us about fifteen minutes to get from our apartment in Waltham to their tiny house in Needham, and as we pull up I see that Izzy’s strung small white lights along the latticed roof of the front porch. They twinkle cheerfully in the dusk, and I point them out to Tom, who says, “She knows it’s not Christmas, right?”

“They’re pretty.”

“Yeah, I guess,” he says, and we knock and less than a minute later Tom’s on the sofa with Lou watching the game.

Izzy makes a face at me and says, “I’m starving but the game’s tied.”

“We’ll never get them out of here now,” I say.

“At least there’s wine in the fridge—we can have our own party until they get hungry enough to get up off their butts.” Izzy has a very slight southern accent. She’s originally from Georgia, but her parents moved to Salem when she was in high school. She still dresses like a southerner, always dressier than the occasion demands. Tonight, even though it’s just us and we’re not going anywhere special, she’s got on tight, new jeans, spike-heeled black leather strappy sandals, a silk tank top, and a small fitted jacket. I’m wearing comfy jeans and a cozy, oversized boyfriend cardigan, and I feel shabby next to her.

It’s not a fair contest, though: I grew up in a household where my mother and older sister never used a blow-dryer or read a fashion magazine. What little I know about primping I’ve had to teach myself.

She pours the wine and asks me about my day, so I tell her my family news.

“That’s how your mother told you she was divorcing your father? Just in the middle of a conversation about something else?” She shakes her mane of long blond hair in disbelief.

We’re sitting at their small square table, glasses of wine and an open bag of chips in front of us.

I nodded. “Then when I was just a little surprised, she acted like I was overreacting.”

“God, I’d be sobbing all over the place if my parents got divorced.”

“I’m not actually all that sad. That marriage was over a long time ago.” I realize I’m quoting Jacob, but since Izzy doesn’t know him I don’t bother telling her that.

“Still, they’re your parents.” Her big blue eyes—fanned by thickly mascaraed eyelashes—are tender with sympathy. “My parents fight all the time—​I’m talking huge screaming matches—​​but I can’t imagine they’d ever actually leave each other. They can’t, because of Stanny.”

“What’s funny is I can’t remember my parents ever fighting. They were actually always pretty polite to each other.”

“Maybe that was the problem. Maybe they needed to scream more.”

“Maybe.” But I can’t picture it. Ours has never been a house of raised voices. Cold, contemptuous, sarcastic, sharp voices, yes. Raised, no.

I tell Izzy I really like the lights out in front, and she says that Lou poked fun at her because they looked like Christmas lights.

“Tom said the same thing,” I admit.

“Those two,” she says, more fondly than irritably. “They’re like peas in a pod, as my mama would say.”

“Well, I love the lights.”

She offers to show me some of the other little improvements she’s been working on, and as we walk around the house, she points out a faux-marble finish on a cabinet, a decoupage kind of thing on a mirror frame in the powder room, and a headboard she’s made for their bed by stapling fabric over layers of wood and cotton batting. It’s the kind of artsy decorative work that no one in my house could even think of doing: I can’t remember my mother ever even getting our windows washed or our walls painted, and she definitely wasn’t standing around with a sponge full of paint faux-marbling anything.

I murmur admiringly as Izzy points it all out, feigning more enthusiasm than I’m actually feeling. It’s pretty enough, but all these crafts are a little—

I stop myself before I can finish that negative thought. It’s the snob in me coming out, making me want to criticize something that’s perfectly lovely, just because it’s the kind of thing other people do, not my cerebral, crazy family.

I tell Izzy she’s amazing and the house looks fantastic, and she smiles, pleased.

We end the tour back in the living room. The guys actually notice our arrival, but only because it’s between innings and there’s a commercial on.

“Where have you been?” Lou says to Izzy, accusingly. “We’re starving.”

Izzy cuffs him on the shoulder and turns to me, laughing. “Can you believe these guys?”

“No.” I reach out my hand and haul Tom to his feet. “I really can’t.”

We go to a restaurant where the baseball game is playing on a TV over the bar. The boys sit on the side of the table facing the TV. Izzy and I sit on the other side and share a huge salad.