CHAPTER TWO

My parents were still in the kitchen when Josh and I came in hauling the dinner leftovers and plates. Dad was at the kitchen table with Lulu on his lap. He was mindlessly scratching her chest while she gazed up at him with poignant devotion that dissipated the instant Eliza emerged with her leash, ready for their evening walk. My mom was putting food away, at that moment swaddling three individual spears of asparagus, each in its own blanket of Saran Wrap. She was usually aware of environmental impact, at least for a Boomer, but she had always seemed possessed by some Leftovers Incubus that compelled her to seal up all food in an impenetrable vault, then throw it out two days later anyway since she was sure it had gone bad.

Josh had his own kitchen demons. His system of dishwasher loading had rigorous rules apparent only to him. I sometimes found him correcting my loading after I’d done it, though the dishes seemed to come out no cleaner.

In the first few months of our marriage, it didn’t hit me that he was mildly nuts. Mostly what I did was gaze at him, whatever he was doing, in an awestruck way. How did such a wonder of a man choose me? Or why? It wasn’t a low opinion of myself as much as an exaltation of him. He had the academic distinctions, the decency, the devotion to his daughter. And who could ignore his OMG looks? Golden skin, dark brown hair, and green eyes—not emerald, which would have been too showy, but a subtler jade.

Fifteen minutes earlier, while we were the only two left outside cleaning up, Josh had pressed up against me and whispered what he’d like to do to me, and I’d run my hand down his side and replied huskily, “Soon,” even though we’d done an extended director’s cut version the night before. Now I turned away before any spark of lust could be extinguished by watching him scrape off dishes with his beloved wide yellow spatula—discolored from years of marinara sauce and curry—that he’d dedicated solely to his preloading sacrament.

My dad and I were more alike: methodical when it came to investigatory work, but looser when it came to the rest of life. “Looser” meant anything from indifferent to chaotic. Each of us was content to defer to a spouse who had intense feelings about how to clean sink drain covers.

I sat down next to my dad. “Was it a total shock to you, hearing from April after all these years?” I asked.

He tilted his head and gave it a couple of seconds of thought. “Yes. And no,” he finally said. “Like