It wouldn’t be fair to call Daz a slug. After all, he had been a third team all-conference striker in college, and he was still slim and fleet. However, getting him out of his apartment in the morning had always been a considerable task. There was the ringing the doorbell seven times before going in with my key part. There was the, don’t you remember we have that meeting at 9:30 part. There was the, I really don’t give a shit what your hair looks like part. Then there were the inevitable battles with toothpaste choices (Daz was the only person I ever met who kept multiple flavors of toothpaste in his bathroom), Cap’n Crunch (the only thing he deigned to eat for breakfast), and Power Rangers (which appeared on ABC Family at 8:30 every morning and from which Daz took surprising delight for someone his age).

On most days, by the time I got to his place to pick him up, I’d already read the relevant sections of the Times and the Journal and surfed three or four entertainment, media and business sites on the web. About a year ago, it finally dawned on me that I could sleep fifteen minutes later in the morning if I brought my bagel and coffee with me so I could have breakfast while I waited for Daz to get ready. On certain days I thought it might be smart to bring a lunch as well.

It was this way from our first days in the City. The only difference at the beginning was that we were in the same apartment and Daz sometimes dragged himself out of bed earlier if I made enough noise or if I did something like flick water on his face after my shower.

The other difference was the nature of our living quarters. The place on Avenue B had been only moderately better than sleeping on the street. The lobby was tastefully adorned in crack vials, hypodermic needles, and spent condoms, and our “doorman” was a sixty-something guy with more jackets than teeth who squatted in front of our building. My mother came to visit exactly once, sneered at my decision to live here rather than commuting from a garden apartment in Hastings, and told me that if I wanted to see her in the future, I knew the Metro-North schedule. She didn’t even give me her little faux kiss on the cheek on her way out the door. This irked me until I thought about the possibility of her being propositioned by a male prostitute before she could get a cab out of the neighborhood. I imagined her scandalized expression and smiled.

A year later, when we were recruited as a team by The Creative Shop, we made our first “big move.” It was a walkup in Hell’s Kitchen – not exactly Fifth Avenue, though a huge improvement over what it had been only a few years earlier – but the space was a lot better and a much higher grade of junkie and hooker hung around outside. When we got our first major bonus checks – one of several to come our way in the past few years – we knew it was time to find someplace a little more respectable, someplace where we could have a party and not worry if our guests could make it in and out of the building alive.

It was my father’s accountant who first suggested we consider buying. The thought had never even crossed my mind, though admittedly we did a terrible job of managing the money we made and got brutalized on our 2011 tax returns. He also told us that if we bought, we had to buy separately to get the most bang for our tax deduction bucks. It was an odd thing to think about. We had lived together for eight years at that point and while we knew we’d eventually find romantic partners to move in with, the notion of no longer being roommates for financial reasons seemed incongruous. In the end, though, it really did make the most sense. And with Daz at 89th and Broadway and me at 91st and West End, we were nearly roommates anyway.

“Who do we have a meeting with this morning?” he said, coming out of the bathroom with a toothbrush in his mouth. He had different colored toothbrushes for the different flavors. The gray brush meant fennel.

“It’s just us.”

“Us? Like you and me?” He returned to the bathroom to spit.

“And Michelle and Carnie and Brad and Chess.”

“Sounds like the meeting we had at Terminal 5 last night.”

We’d all gone there to see Beam, an incredible British trance rock band.

“Except this time we’re going to have a serious business conversation and it won’t look as cool if your head lolls back and forth.”

“And what will we be talking about again?” He’d asked this question from his bedroom, where he was almost certainly trying to decide if it was a red flannel shirt day or a blue flannel shirt day.

“The Koreans.”

“Motorcycles, right?” he said, sticking his face out the door.

“Cars. Affordable luxury for twenty-somethings.”

“Twenty-somethings want luxury?”

“They do if it’s affordable.”

“That’s why you’re the word guy and I’m the picture guy. I wouldn’t have a clue how to pitch this.”

“Good thing I’m around then, huh?”

He disappeared back into the bathroom, meaning we were somewhere between eight and fifteen minutes of departure time, assuming I kept him away from the Power Rangers.

I finished my bagel and scrolled through my Twitter feed. Not finding anything to capture my attention, I stood up and walked around the apartment. The morning crowbar exercise notwithstanding, we spent much less time in Daz’s place than we did in mine. This was primarily because I had the better toys – the sixty-inch TV, the foosball table, the multiple gaming systems, the Bang and Olufsen stereo with full theatre sound (the potential of which I never got to exploit because of the co-op rules) – and also because I actually kept food in the place. Daz hadn’t done particularly much with his home space. The obligatory Crate and Barrel couch and coffee table, the Mondrian print squaring off against the Dave Matthews Band poster, the formal dining table that he never explained why he bought (I don’t know; maybe he wanted me to have my bagel and coffee in comfort), the airbed he propped up against the wall next to the couch rather than deflating, and not a hell of a lot else.

Other than the air hockey table. And the massage chair. The latter was Daz’s first significant purchase once he bought his place. I asked him why he wanted one – he never seemed in need of a massage – and he gestured toward the chair to suggest that I give it a try. Once I did, I understood immediately.

I sat there now and set the chair to knead. I would have loved to have one of these in my office, but one of the unspoken deals Daz and I had was that we wouldn’t spend a lot of money on something the other guy already owned. What was the point? I kicked the massage level up to medium and switched from kneading to tapping. I thought about taking my shoes off to use the foot massager and then checked the time on my phone instead.

“I mentioned that the meeting was today and not in August, right?” I said, my voice vibrating from the thumping my back was receiving.

“I’m done,” he said, walking over to stand in front of me in blue flannel. “Just a quick one-on-one with the Cap’n and we’ll be out of here.”

I turned off the chair and got up. Daz opened the box of cereal and poured it directly into his mouth. “Let’s go,” he said, taking a swig from a milk carton and grabbing his keys.

I gathered my stuff and we made our way out the door. Daz locked the two deadbolts and my eye fell on his keychain – a plastic hot dog that he’d burned with a cigarette lighter in honor of our first (and only) camping trip. He’d toted that thing around for the last ten years.

“I think Michelle and I had a little thing last night,” he said as we walked out onto Broadway to begin our search for a cab.

I laughed. “I was with the two of you the entire time. You didn’t have a thing.”

“No, I think we might have. It was an eye thing.”

“An eye thing as in she saw you and said hi?”

“Don’t be a schmuck. I can tell the difference, you know. I think she kinda likes me.”

“Daz, everyone kinda likes you. See that woman who just stepped in front of us to steal our cab? I’ll bet she likes you. You’re a likable guy. I just wouldn’t get my hopes up about Michelle if I were you.”

“She came to my office just to see my drawings the other day. She’s never done that before.”

“Daz, reachable goals, remember? Reachable goals.”

“I think you might be surprised here.”

“Surprised wouldn’t begin to describe it. Stunned speechless maybe. Or shocked to the point where I needed a defibrillator.”

He regarded me sternly. “Why do you think I couldn’t get a woman like Michelle?”

“Did I say that?”

“Pretty much exactly that.”

“You’re misunderstanding me. I’m speaking specifically about Michelle. A woman like Michelle – you know, gorgeous, smart, clever, burgeoning career – you could get a woman like that. Anytime you wanted, probably.”

“But not Michelle specifically. Translation, please.”

“A translation isn’t necessary. Right now, the only thing that’s important is that we find some way to get the hell downtown.”

Eventually we took a gypsy cab, one of those out-of-town car services that roamed around the City skimming off fares from Yellow cabs during rush hours. I hated doing this – I was very loyal to my city – but at 9:05 on a weekday, it really was the best we could do.

“If we left earlier, we wouldn’t be riding in a fifteen-year-old Impala right now, you know,” I said.

“If we left later, we wouldn’t be doing this either.”

“You know, it’s a good thing you’re an artistic genius. Otherwise you’d be working at Burger King. No, you’d lose your job at Burger King because you’d always be showing up late. Then you’d be out on the street collecting bottles to exchange for cheap liquor.”

“Never happen.”

“You don’t think so?”

“Nope. Cause you’d be around to drag my ass out of bed so I could keep my job making french fries.”

“Don’t be so sure.”

“Of course you would.”

Yeah, of course I would. If I could be relied upon for anything, it would be making sure that Daz got to work at a reasonable hour. Beyond that, as it turns out, I was lacking in an entire suite of skills best friends were supposed to have. However, he would never be homeless as long as I was around.
We rode in silence for a couple of minutes, bucking and stopping every eight seconds or so as traffic dictated. Then something caught Daz’s eye and he pulled out the sketchpad he always carried in his backpack and started drawing.

“What are you doing?”

“That jogger we passed gave me an idea.”

I hadn’t even noticed a jogger. “An idea for what?”

“For the Space Available campaign.”

Space Available was a custom-built closet company whose account we recently acquired. How a jogger related to this escaped me.

“Let me see,” I said, leaning toward him in the seat.

He pulled the sketchpad back. “Not yet.” He smiled over at me. “I want to show it to Michelle first.”

“She’ll never love you like I love you, Daz.”

“There’s another thing we can all be thankful for.”

He drew for a bit longer, and while I knew there was a very good chance this brainstorm of his wouldn’t produce anything – so many of our ideas didn’t – I was curious. I tried to angle my eyes over without appearing too obvious, but Daz was doing a great job of blocking my view. Finally, he closed the sketchbook and returned it to his backpack, glancing out at the street as though there was nothing to this.

“Traffic’s a bitch today,” he said. “We really should have left earlier. You gotta get on the beam, Flaccid.”

Putumayo was stuffed with patrons and was as loud as Miea had ever experienced. Of course a table was available for her party. Hensis had called ahead to make sure that was the case.

Okay, Miea thought, as the host seated them, I don’t mind throwing my weight around a little.

The table was in a corner to the right side of the stage with a clear view of the enormity of musical equipment on it. The stage was so full of paraphernalia Miea wasn’t sure how the performers were going to fit onstage, let alone play their instruments. She hadn’t heard of the act they’d come to watch. Were the musicians very small, maybe even invisible?

A waiter came and Camara and several of the others ordered a variety of intoxicants. Miea ordered a barritts, her favorite soft drink. She had intoxicants on occasion but never in public (and they were very much in public; Miea had never taught herself to ignore the many heads that turned in her direction whenever she entered a place).

Dyson, in a show of support, ordered a barritts as well, as did Sinica. Miea was a little surprised that Sinica was sitting with her at the table. Usually, both he and Hensis positioned themselves elsewhere when she was out. She glanced around and found Hensis on the other side of the room.

Not long after their drinks arrived, the lights went down, and the band – all normal-sized people – walked onstage, stepping gingerly around the mass of equipment. Without saying a word to the audience, the musicians swung into their first song. As was typical of tzadik, the beat, performed by three percussionists, was propulsive. The wash, however, performed by three string players, was tender, almost plaintive. About a minute into the first song a musician stepped to the edge of the stage and blew into an instrument that Miea had never seen before. It had a neck that curved upward to a long, flat opening. Miea expected the instrument to make a rich, reedy sound, but what came out was chittering, almost like the call of the tiny purisma.

Miea leaned toward Dyson. “What is that thing?”

“He calls it a barsuk. He invented it – that’s what’s getting them so much attention. Amazing, isn’t it?”

“Amazing.”

The barsuk player stepped back after a long bit of improvisation, and two surprisingly tall women began singing in unison. At first they seemed only to be vocalizing, but soon Miea discovered a pattern in their phrases; they were singing backward.

“What kind of machine lets them do that?” she said to Dyson.

“It’s not a machine. They’re doing it themselves.”

“They’re singing backward together?”

“Can you imagine how much practice that takes?”

Miea simply shook her head in wonder. Looking around, she noticed that the audience seemed transfixed. Some were dancing, some were shouting, but all seemed in thrall. Except Hensis, who maintained diligent watch, as did Sinica. And a man in the other corner of the room. And a woman standing about twenty feet behind her. Each bore the unmistakable attentiveness of the royal guard. Had her parents increased her security detail without mentioning it to her?

The song continued for easily twenty minutes, introducing new sounds and counter-rhythms as it progressed. Finally the music seemed to converge. What were once layers became a unified blend, and then, with an explosion of percussion, the song ended. At its conclusion, one of the percussionists threw a drumstick into the audience – straight in Miea’s direction. Delighted, she reached out for it, only to have Sinica dive across the table to intercept the stick before it got to her, knocking over her barritts in the process.

Instantly, Hensis and one of the other people she assumed to be a guard converged on the stage, drawing a great deal of attention to themselves. The band seemed intimidated by this and the percussionist who’d thrown the drumstick held up his hands to show he’d intended no harm. By this point he’d recognized Miea and seemed mortified by what he’d done.

The concert continued a few minutes later once it became clear to Miea’s bodyguards that she had never been in danger. The muttering among the crowd ended as a new song began. However, Miea found she couldn’t give herself to the music as she had before.

Hensis and Sinica had never overreacted like this before. Obviously her father was much more concerned about what was going on with the Thorns than he’d acknowledged to her.

For essentially my entire life, bringing all of my siblings under one roof required an official “get-together.” My sister Darlene, who is twenty years older than I am, moved out of the house before I could walk. That fall, my brother Matty went off to college. By the time I could add two numbers, Denise was doing considerably more complex calculations at Dartmouth, where she prepared for her now-storied corporate career.

My mother used to refer to me as her “wonderful surprise,” since she became pregnant with me when she was in her early forties. Denise, twelve years my elder, would refer to me as “the accident” whenever she was forced to babysit me in her teens. There was no question that I was completely unplanned. And while my mother, who would have “gone pro” as a parent if such a thing were possible, tended to me with the pleasure of someone who had been offered a free second ride on a roller coaster, it was difficult for me not to feel like a bit of an appendage in the family. This became even truer when Darlene and Matty both got married and had children in close proximity, giving me a niece and a nephew much nearer to my age than any of my brothers or sisters. I was too young for one group and too old for the other. I was a man without a generation.

My most vivid recollection of family gatherings when I was young was the sound. Darlene telling colorful stories about life in “the real world.” Matty regaling us with profundities gleaned from whichever class was capturing his imagination at the moment. Denise suggesting that neither of them knew what was really going on, in tones much too cynical for someone her age. My father engaging each in debate with a voice that spoke of both authority and admiration. My mother calling down to the den from the kitchen on a regular basis to make sure that everyone had everything they needed. And all of this taking place at extreme volume. I found the entire thing both entertaining and daunting.

My image of that time always has me looking up at the family as though each member were a towering, pontificating mountain and I were standing at the foothills. I was enormously impressed with their ability to express themselves, to cajole one another, to generate so much spirit. I was envious of the attention my father gave the opinions of his older children, and the obvious joy he took in being able to converse with them in this way. It was easy to fade into the background when everyone was over at the house. I had nothing to say that was nearly as important as what they were all saying, and even if I did, I had no idea how to project my voice over the din. I was the little one. My thoughts came too slowly. By the time anything of even passing value entered my mind, the conversation had moved on. I suppose this is one of the reasons that I became a writer. It was a way for me to state my case without risking interruption.

Over the years, the number of get-togethers declined dramatically. Darlene’s husband Earl got a management position with a textile company in Orange County, California. Matty and his wife Laura moved to Pittsburgh for a while, and then to Chicago about ten years ago. Denise moved to various apartments on the Upper East Side before buying a condo overlooking the Hudson River. That put her about fifteen miles away from my parents’ house physically and several continents away emotionally. Denise had obviously taken my father’s oft-repeated advice that she needed to be her own person to mean that she should stand in virtual isolation from the rest of her family.

I’m not sure why things with Denise bugged me so much. I suppose it had something to do with the fact that we actually spent a fair amount of time together under the same roof and therefore I expected more from her than I did from Darlene or Matty. I knew Denise was brilliant, I knew her accomplishments were genuine, and I had seen their development closely enough to come to a true admiration for them. But when it became clear to me that my admiration not only went unheeded, but in fact unnoticed, my feelings for her became considerably less charitable. I didn’t want to acknowledge that she adored my father, only that she couldn’t be bothered to visit him when he needed her the most. I didn’t want to acknowledge that she had been extremely generous with my parents, only that she had always been stingy with her time. I didn’t understand how you could do this with people you genuinely cared for.

The last time all of us had been in one place was after Mom died. I remember sitting at the dinner table with them the night before they all left and feeling an uneasiness beyond anything associated with the funeral that had taken place earlier in the day. Through the haze of my grief, I felt that something else was out of skew. I ate with my eyes cast down toward my plate, but with my senses extended outward, as they almost always were when I was amongst these people. I couldn’t get a handle on what was wrong until I finally realized that it was quiet. There was virtually no conversation.

While we had begun to contemplate my father’s frailty, we were completely unprepared for my mother’s death. She had been hale up until the point when she experienced complications from a minor respiratory procedure. She spent a week in Intensive Care and, even though she ultimately returned home, she was never the same. Within two months, she was dead, and it was enough to shock everyone into silence. Her passing wasn’t supposed to happen this quickly. It wasn’t supposed to happen at all for at least another twenty years. I’m not sure what everyone else was thinking that night, but I thought that perhaps it was appropriate that this dinner feel and sound different from all others that had come before. Everything in the family would be changed from that point on.

Since then, we’d all made our attempts to convince my father to give up the house. He wasn’t moving well anymore, he seemed tired and sullen, and we were all concerned that he was going to hurt himself if he tried to keep up with everything he needed to do to live in that space. He wasn’t interested in talking about it, though. My own conversations with him had been brief and perfunctory. To say he was dismissive with me would be to suggest that he considered what I was saying in the first place. I tried various techniques of provocation I’d picked up from his interactions with Darlene, Matty, and Denise, but they seemed different coming out of my mouth, sharper, filled more with sarcasm than persuasion. The others were quietly relentless, though, all trying to find a way to treat him gingerly and respectfully while still getting the point across.

After the Fried Egg Crisis, all bets were off. We knew that we simply had to get him out of there. As an indication of how seriously everyone was taking this, Darlene and Matty flew in, and Denise actually hosted the sibling conference in her apartment. Of course, she was a half-hour late and blew into the room crowing about an employee who would “simply not let her get out the door.” Still, she proceeded to enter the conversation as though she had been conducting it in her head the entire cab ride home. Even when I found her annoying, which was most of the time, I had to be impressed with the way she could make her presence felt immediately.

“I’m just saying that I think a nursing home might be too drastic a move,” Matty said in response to the suggestion Denise entered with. “It’s not like he has Alzheimer’s or needs a wheelchair or something. He’s old and slow, but he’s not three feet from his grave.”

“Nursing homes aren’t only for people who are about to die,” Denise said curtly.

Matty smirked. “Actually, I think that’s the exact dictionary definition.”

Denise shook her head and did that little thing with her teeth. It was like she was grinding them together, except the top level and the bottom never touched. It was code for “I can’t believe I’m wasting time trying to communicate with you.”

At that moment, Denise’s eight-year-old son Marcus entered the room with a book in his hand to ask his mother what she thought the snow symbolized in White Fang. Marcus is the kind of kid who gives precociousness a bad name. Without acknowledging the boy, Denise turned to her husband Brad and said, “I’m kinda into this right now.” Brad escorted Marcus from the room. I’m sure he made some kind of notation of the task in his Blackberry before returning to the meeting however, so he could receive the proper quid pro quo later.

“We could hire him a full-time nurse,” Darlene suggested. “A nurse would make sure that Dad was safe and could offer companionship at the same time.”

“Feels like we’re getting him a substitute for Mom,” Matty responded. “And Dad’s not going to go for the nurse thing.” He altered his voice to my father’s rougher tone. “‘If I’m not sick, why do I need a nurse?’ You know how hung up he gets about any of us suggesting that he can’t do everything he used to.”

“What Dad needs is an assisted living community,” Laura suggested. Of the three siblings-in-law, Laura was the one closest to my father by far. It probably had something to do with my father’s being nothing at all like the man who had abandoned Laura, her mother, and her sister when Laura was eleven. “These places are like apartment buildings – some of them are really nice – and the people who live in them still retain a good level of independence. They just don’t have to worry about things like laundry or cleaning.” She smiled knowingly. “Or cooking.”

“Amen to that,” Denise said sarcastically.

“They’re popping up everywhere in Southern California,” Darlene said. “They’re like Starbucks. I’ll bet it’s the same in New Jersey.”

There were lots of heads shaking and discussions of procedure. How do we research the different facilities? How do we discuss it with Dad? Do we discuss it with Dad, or do we just tell him to start packing?

I got up from the sofa to get more coffee. I hadn’t said a word since the conversation had begun, which meant that I was right on my quota as far as sibling meetings were concerned. It certainly wasn’t that I didn’t have any opinions or that I was intimidated. I had simply fallen into the same pattern that I fell into whenever the group of us got together. I’ve often wondered what the others thought of my regular silence. Actually, what I’ve really wondered was whether or not they even noticed it.

Regardless, I had to stand up, because I needed a moment to gather my thoughts. I had something I wanted to say, something that seemed absolutely fitting to me and that none of them could possibly have anticipated. It required my walking a few steps and then returning to the room, as though I had just gotten there.

I hadn’t put any advance thought into this. Like everyone else in the room, I had given the evening’s agenda serious consideration. But it wasn’t until I was there with the rest of them listening to suggestions that ranged from serviceable to frightening – and all more than a little empty – that I realized there was something more to be done with this decision. Something that offered my father more than just a coda to a rich life. “I want Dad to come to live with me,” I said before taking another sip of coffee and doing a quick scan of everyone in the room.

Denise adopted another of her annoyed expressions. Darlene simply appeared confused. Matty turned to face me head on.

“Right, great idea,” he said sharply.

“I’m serious.” I sipped some more coffee.

“No, you’re not, Jesse.”

“Yeah, I am. You can’t tell me that living with me isn’t going to be better for Dad than living in some elder care facility.”

He screwed up his face as though my suggestion came dissolved in a quart of lemon juice.

“Jess, it ain’t even close,” he said.

I could feel myself getting flustered, my frustrations looping between having no idea how to talk back to my siblings and how easily I lost my composure when challenged by them. I finished the coffee and muttered something like, “I really think it would be a good idea.”

“Babe,” Darlene said, “it’s great that you want to be involved and I’m sure Dad would appreciate the gesture. But I think this assisted living thing makes a lot more sense. You could be a huge help to us here if you scouted around for the best facility in Jersey. None of us can really do it long distance.”

I had been dismissed. I knew my face was red and I knew I wasn’t in any condition to continue the argument. I immediately wished I had thought about this ahead of time and e-mailed my justifications to them before we all gathered. I should have known better than to introduce an idea this provocative without a huge amount of preparation. As a result, I fell back on my traditional role. I simply said, “Sure, whatever,” and left it at that.

I spent much of the rest of the time I was there in my own personal funk. The others were moving forward with the plans. My father’s fate had been decided, my role as advance scout confirmed. If anyone had given any further thought to my pronouncement, they gave no indication of it. I certainly didn’t mention it again.

But I knew there was something right about this, and while I hadn’t even considered it before that sibling conference, my conviction grew exponentially in the days that followed.

Lisa liked going to bars. Since Chris liked Lisa, considered her his dearest friend, he went to bars with her. For him, places of this sort had outlived their usefulness when he graduated college. Did he really need someone else to pour a drink for him? It wasn’t as if his glass of Cabernet was being prepared in any way. If he could choose from a wider selection of wine, he would never choose the one he was drinking now, if he could choose the music, he would certainly choose something less overplayed, and a chair with a back would have been nice. Lisa enjoyed going to these places, though, for reasons she’d never made clear in all the years they’d known each other. Therefore, they went.

“I really think it’s possible I could make my mother’s death look like an accident,” she said wistfully.

“You think that, but the crime scene investigators would get you.”

She slumped dramatically. “You’re probably right. Damned technological breakthroughs.”

“Besides, I don’t think her calling you three times a day is justification for murder.”

Lisa threw her hands above her head. “That’s because you don’t have to take the phone calls. Try listening every day to a twenty-minute summation of last night’s TV shows. Try listening to her petty complaints about her friend Millie over and over and over again. Try listening to her word-by-word recollections of the conversations she has with the produce guy at Stop & Shop. You wouldn’t rush to judgment so quickly then.”

Lisa made an elaborate show of draining her glass—she was drinking Cosmopolitans tonight—and putting it back down on the tabletop.

Chris laughed. “Your mother calls me ‘Honey.’ She can do no wrong as far as I’m concerned.”

“I need a new best friend.”

Lisa signaled the waiter for another drink. She put both elbows on the table and leaned toward him. This pose made her look easily twenty years younger, especially in the dim light of the bar. Chris often wondered what Lisa had been like as a college student. She seemed perpetually in her late thirties, even though they’d met when they were in their mid-twenties.

“What’s new at work?”

Chris sighed automatically. “A woman on my staff who’s on pregnancy leave called yesterday to tell me she’s decided to be a stay-at-home mother, a guy came into my office today to tell me he’s being sexually harassed, and management has decided to limit salary increases to two percent this year. Have I told you lately how much I love being an administrator?”

“You should’ve taken that spot in Rhode Island.”

“It was the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“It was the right job.”

“In the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“The job in Westport, then.”

“It was a start-up. The risks were too big.”

Lisa patted his hand. “You do know that their stock has gone through the roof, don’t you?”

Chris pulled his hand away and gestured with it. “Yes, I know their stock has gone through the roof. Unfortunately, my crystal ball was in the shop the day they offered me the job, so I couldn’t see a year into the future.”

Lisa shook her head, glanced around the room, and pretended to concentrate on the song playing through the sound system. Chris simply focused on his only-adequate wine.

When Lisa’s new drink arrived, she clinked her glass against his, drawing his attention. “So you never get a chance just to wriggle anymore?”

“Wriggling” was Lisa’s pet name for genetic engineering, which Chris had done for fifteen years before being kicked upstairs two years ago. “I haven’t wriggled in centuries. Nope, a Ph.D. in Botany is really only good for one thing these days: budget reviews.”

“You didn’t have to take the promotion, you know.”

“I shouldn’t have taken the promotion. But I did. That ship has sailed. Let’s not have this conversation for the second time in five minutes.”

“Hey, at least you can get a promotion in your job. I’m stuck in the same spot until I retire.”

Chris smirked. “Yeah, tough spot. You sold two multimillion-dollar homes last month, right? As long as you continue to cater to high-end, recession-proof clientele, you get promotions all the time.”

“But no sexual harassment cases.”

“You could always start one.”

Lisa snorted. “You haven’t been down to the offices lately. The only thing I could start is an asexual harassment case.”

Chris laughed in spite of himself. “Speaking of sex, what’s the latest with Ben?”

“I think he’s in Melbourne tonight. Either that or Taiwan. He touches back down on this continent sometime next week. I think he has a drive-by past Connecticut scheduled before the end of the spring.”

“It’s the perfect relationship.”

Lisa rolled her eyes. “Yeah, perfect. We’ve been together for nearly three years and I think we’ve spent less than a hundred days in the same place.”

“And you never fight and the sex is great.”

“True on both counts.”

“What’s the downside?”

“The downside?” Lisa looked around the room and leaned forward farther, as though she was about to impart a state secret. “I think I love him.”

This was a surprise. In all the years they’d been friends, Chris had never heard Lisa say she was in love with anyone. “Really?”

“I’m probably just kidding myself. But I miss him more all the time. I’ve been making him stay on the phone with me longer and longer lately.”

“Like mother, like daughter.”

Lisa reached across and punched Chris on the arm. “That was totally unfair.”

Chris rubbed his arm. “So what are you going to do about these . . . feelings?”

“What can I do about them?”

“Tell him?”

“And screw up what we have? I don’t think so. No, not a chance.” She looked at Chris as though he had three heads. “So I assume since you haven’t said a word about Patty that your date with her went the way your dates usually go.”

Chris cringed at the mention of the latest woman Lisa had fixed him up with. She’d been doing this since a few months after the divorce. Lisa seemed to have an endless supply of women for him to meet and an equally large supply of optimism about blind dating in spite of Chris’s gruesome track record. “I’m afraid so.”

“What’d you do wrong this time?”

Chris pretended to be offended. “Why do you automatically assume it’s me screwing up these blind dates?”

“Are you actually asking me that question?”

Chris knew not to pursue this. “She seemed really nice. She likes books, she likes sushi, and she has beautiful eyes. I thought things were going pretty well for a while there.”

“Until . . .”

“Until I got sad.”

“You got sad? Amazingly, I haven’t heard this one before.”

“There was the thing with the anniversary.”

“Ah yes, the day that will live in infamy.”

Chris shot Lisa a look to say that this wasn’t something to screw around about, and she threw up her hands as if to acknowledge that she’d slipped.

“We should just remember next year not to do something like that around this time,” Chris said. “I’m not very good with it.”

“Sweetie, you have to get past it at some point.”

“I am past it. That doesn’t mean I can’t mark it in some way.”

Lisa nodded very slowly. Chris wasn’t sure if this meant she was acknowledging his point or reproaching him. “How was Becky when you saw her that night?”

Chris shrugged. “Who knows? I might be the last person on the planet capable of answering that question.”

“Teenagers are tough.”

“It wasn’t going to be like this with us.”

“Actually, it probably was. From everything I’ve heard, it doesn’t matter what your relationship is like with your kid before she becomes a teenager. Once she’s there, all the wires get crossed. I know what you mean, though. You guys clicked.”

“Excellent use of the past tense.”

Lisa reached out for his hand again, but this time she squeezed it. Chris squeezed back and made a moment’s eye contact with her. How many times had she propped him up over the years, when Becky was sick, when things had started to break down with Polly, when he moved out? There really was no substitute for old friends.

“You know, for some reason I still think about that fantasy world you guys created,” Lisa said. “What a great way to spend time with your kid. Sometimes, I’ll be showing a house, and I’ll walk into some kid’s room and it makes me think of the two of you telling stories together. That was an amazing thing.”

It was unquestionably an amazing thing. The inspiration for it might have been the rightest moment Chris had ever experienced. It was a week after Becky’s first chemotherapy treatment and the five-year-old had been visibly frightened and confused. She had trouble sleeping and he had already spent several nights up with her trying to find some way to comfort her, some way to ease her mind. Chris had never believed Becky was going to die—his failure to “take her illness seriously enough” was in fact one of the things he and Polly had been fighting about at that point—but he couldn’t think of any way to imbue his daughter with the same confidence.

On their fourth night up together, Chris sat against Becky’s headboard with her head on his chest, their usual position. They hadn’t spoken for at least a quarter of an hour, but Becky was no closer to sleep than she had been when her shuffling in her room had woken him up an hour or so earlier. He hated that this was so scary and disorienting for her. He wished he could simply tell her she was going to be okay and that she would believe this. Her body was telling something different, though.

At that moment, an idea came to him, as though delivered by some otherworldly FedEx guy.

“Let’s make something,” he said, a little surprised by the sound of his voice after the lengthy silence.

“I don’t think I can really do that right now, Dad,” Becky said wearily.

“I don’t mean make something with our hands. I mean with our minds. Do you want to?”

“Make something with our minds?”

“A story. Not just a story, though. We’ll invent a whole world to put the story in.”

Becky pulled back and looked up at him. They’d made up stories before, often on long car rides, usually based on characters from one of the books they’d been reading at bedtime. What he was suggesting here was something different, though, and he could see from her expression that it intrigued her.

“How do we do that?”

“We just start,” Chris said, sitting up slightly. “Right now. What kind of world is it?”

Becky thought for a moment and then brightened, her eyes looking bluer than they had in months. “Let’s make it a kingdom. Like in that book we read the other day.”

“King or queen?”

“King and queen. Together.” She put a hand to her forehead for a moment. “And they have a teenage daughter who is very smart and who makes them very proud.”

Maybe something like your cousin Kiley who you adore?

Chris thought. “Is there magic in this world?”

“Tons,” Becky said broadly. “All over the place.”

“Cows?”

Becky laughed out loud. He hadn’t heard that in a while. “Cows?”

“It’s an important detail. Are there cows and pigs and birds in this world or are there different creatures we never saw before?”

“How about flying pig cows?” Chris chuckled.

“We could do that.”

“And talking fish.”

“How would we hear them underwater?”

“They don’t talk when they’re underwater, Dad,” Becky said as though everyone on the planet knew that already. That she was animated enough to scold him was a huge thrill for Chris.

“Right, of course. So they’re walking and talking fish.”

“They don’t walk. They roll. Well, not roll, really. They just sort of flip around to get where they want to go.”

The conversation continued until Becky, yawning, lay her head on Chris’s chest and fell asleep. The next night at bedtime, they continued inventing pieces of the world, so caught up in this exercise that they didn’t begin to make up a story until the night after that—which was the first night that Becky slept through in more than a week.

They called the kingdom Tamarisk—named after a tree Becky loved from one of the picture books on plant life Chris had bought her—and it evolved in numerous ways over the years. As Becky got older, the fish stopped talking and she replaced flying pig cows with creatures of sheer imagination with names that Becky seemed to take particular pleasure in determining. When she was nine, she decided that there should be an internal logic to the naming process. Chris came home from work one evening and she handed him a list of rules governing all Tamariskian nomenclature. However, some things about it had never changed. The same king and queen still ruled over the land, they still called the nemesis to the south The Thorns even though this didn’t follow the naming rules, and the sophisticated, beautiful, gutsy, and brilliant teenage princess still starred in most of the adventures.

Rather than becoming less important after Becky had gone into remission, the nightly visits to Tamarisk became more of a highlight to the day. If Becky had a sleepover or Chris had a business function, they found some way to hook up over Tamarisk even if only for a few minutes.

Then, with a suddenness that was more shocking than the end of his marriage, it was over. The day he moved out, Becky declared that she would never tell another Tamarisk story. Chris was certain this was part of her reaction to the divorce—he sensed a kind of hostility in her that day that he’d never experienced with her before and couldn’t fully understand—and that in time they would go back. It had never happened, though, and the years of creation between them took on a mythical status, as though it was legend rather than real life.

“It was an amazing thing,” Chris said with the kind of shrug that indicated he was anything but reconciled about this.

“Life is long, sweetie.”

“What does that even mean?”

“It means that our relationships go through movements. Like in a symphony. You’re in a fugue period right now with Becky. That doesn’t mean that a month from now, or three months from now, or three years from now you won’t be someplace else with her entirely.”

“What if the fugue is the last movement?”

“It’s not. Even you don’t believe that.”

“Let’s say I don’t want to believe that.”

“If it’s important for you to make that distinction.” Chris looked at Lisa and chuckled. She glanced down at her watch and said, “I’m sorry, but we’re all out of time for your bitching tonight. The rest of the evening will be dedicated to my issues and you telling me how fabulous I am.”

Chris pantomimed prostrating himself to Lisa. “As you wish, milady.”