Chapter 10 - Sweet Haven

“LUTH,” Daniel said. “Dear, are you all right?”

Luth found herself at the dining table, the television on, ignored, at her back, the breeze from the electric fan giving her a measure of relief each time it swung in her direction. Dinner was on the stove, she could smell it, and Cecilia was laying the table. It seemed only an eyeblink since she and Narita had sat here over their late-morning coffee. Where had the day gone?

“Luth, isn’t it time we talked?” Daniel said in his gentle minister’s voice.

Her eyes focused on him with difficulty.

“I have a plan,” he said. “I will go and speak with Emily. She is our friend, no matter what you say. I will persuade her, Luth, to readmit Naia, perhaps even allow her to graduate from high school this year. The poor child has finished all her final exams. She has a term paper just waiting for the teacher to accept it. Emily will listen to me, Luth. She isn’t the type to end a girl’s future just like that, with one stroke of the pen; she is a caring, wise person at heart—”

When she heard the word caring, Luth snapped. “Go away!” she screamed. “Get out of my sight. I don’t care, I don’t care what you do, you fool. You betrayed us, you brought that wretched family back into our lives!”

Daniel started. What was that look in his eyes, was it rage, was it hatred to match hers? Then he turned away, muttering, “All right, I’ll leave, woman, and you’ll be sorry.”

Luth snatched a tumbler from the tabletop and hurled it at him. It was a tall plastic Coca-Cola giveaway, the one he liked to have his kalamansi juice served in, and it bounced lightly and uselessly off his back. Cecilia froze in the act of laying spoons, not daring to pick up the tumbler as it clattered about the floor. Luth began to cry. One moment she was standing there, in stark and righteous anger, and the next moment she was slumped in a chair, her mouth making loose vowel sounds. She cried alone, abandoned by her husband and the maid, avoided by the granddaughter she had raised. She rose on creaking knees and made her way to the refrigerator. The last three slices of cake sat on a plate, waiting, daring her. Her cholesterol count had shot up in recent years; her doctor had warned her about diabetes. But in that moment, all her resources focused themselves on drawing out the plate, easing a fork out of the dish rack, cutting herself a dark, rich gob. The tears rolled through the corners of her mouth and mixed with the chocolate.

Someone was standing in front of her, a narrow form dressed in black, despite the summer heat. It was Narita, chic and strange in her pixie haircut. Narita leaned over, tried to take Luth’s hands. “No, no, no,” she said, shoving her daughter away. The plate of cake clattered to the floor. Narita stooped and began to gather up the pieces. If only she had been this good as a child, Luth thought bitterly.

“Tell me,” Narita said.

Luth tried to say no, but the single syllable emerged distorted from her mouth.

Narita, on her knees, fixed her with a gaze that was stark and practical and entirely devoid of judgment. “Tell me,” she said again.

WHEN she thought back, trying to discern the beginning of their troubles, Luth’s mind inevitably stopped at that lunch with the Hollands in August, though she supposed the disease had begun, festering unrealized beneath the surface of their lives, long before that day. For weeks Daniel had been restless, temperamental, coming home long after dinnertime on Mondays and Thursdays, the days he met his graduate classes. It had grown increasingly difficult to get him to do things around the house. His behavior was erratic: the piles of term papers remained unsorted, but the car gleamed, washed and waxed. Luth ought to have suspected something—he’d taken to a very youthful tobacco-and-vanilla-blend aftershave—but a certain melancholia had gripped her, consumed as she was with worry for Antonia, who complained in bitter e-mail bursts about her adoptive country and the language lessons she had been pressed to take. Naia, too, had been difficult as of late. Bristly, secretive, flaring up violently at her grandfather. “Stupid old fart!” she would scream. Luth once heard him shout back, “I can disinherit you!” recalling the caustic words he had flung at Antonia and Narita when they were girls.

It was Daniel who had sprung the lunch invitation on her. She had not had anything to do with the Hollands for ages, and her first thought had been to turn it down. Rinky and Emily had had three whole decades to make her honest acquaintance—what had taken so long? The only thing her husband would say was that it would be an introduction to family counseling, which they and their granddaughter were in need of. “What counseling?” she had demanded. It sounded suspiciously religious. She had known Daniel long enough to discern an agenda of some sort. What it was, she could not be certain this time. But he had persisted, and exhausted at the prospect of another argument, she had said yes.

The Hollands occupied one of the two-story wooden homes on the Sweethaven campus, homes originally built for the American missionaries. Rinky had inherited the right to that house from his father, who had inherited it from his; thus, the grandson of that first Holland enjoyed the rootedness of a plantation heir, treading the floors and staircases of his childhood, parking his Toyota over flagstones where he had once hidden baseball cards and a secret agent diary.

The house was patterned after the homes the Spanish lords had built in the nineteenth century. Guests were entertained on the second floor, where the family slept and where all the official business of the household took place; the ground floor, a dank space where once carriages had been kept, was where the servants slept, where the household laundry was dealt with, where the cars and bicycles were sheltered for the night. As Luth ascended the polished outdoor staircase, Daniel ahead of her and Naia in tow, she could not suppress a traitorous feeling of delight. She had not been invited to eat at the Hollands’ in years, and had always come with a group of Sweethaven colleagues, for some fellowship gathering or other. She was prepared to note down every detail of the experience, from Emily’s choice of curtains to the varnished conch shells that sat at every second riser, all the way to the top of the stairs. Wasn’t this practice vulgar? It had been a fad on campus in the 1970s—the native look, it had been called.

And at the top of the stairs, in a porch completely screened against the infernal insects, the welcoming committee waited, husband and wife, falling over each other to greet the guests, one picking up as soon as the other had spoken, to stave off the long, awful silences between Daniel and Luth. “Oh, it is so good to see the two of you together. Luth, you never come to our parties!” “Isn’t she slim?” “Slimmer!” “And this must be Naia.” “Oh, this is Naia? What a big girl you are now, Naia.” “Naia, speak up, don’t be scared of me; today I’m not the principal, I’m only Ms. Emily.” “Haha, she’s shy.”

“Shy” was what strangers concluded when they met the child for the first time. She had small, precise features, and at that stage in her life she rarely smiled.

“How old are you now, Naia? You’ve certainly grown into a beautiful young lady!”

“She’s fifteen.”

“Fifteen? How interesting. You are in the same year level as our youngest, Brent.”

In a dull voice, the girl spoke at last, “I’ve seen him around.”

“You’ve seen him around,” Rinky says, taking over. “Hahah, yes, your son certainly gets around, doesn’t he, Emily?”

Laughter, Daniel joining in, Luth managing a smile.

Naia was unmoved. In manner, she was what unimaginative people called demure. She looked from one adult to the other, and they sparkled and twitched in their attempts to impress her.

A door opened, and a teenage boy emerged. This was Brent, thought Luth. She had a hard time remembering their names—the girl was Tammy or Tabby, the middle child Noah or Adam. The boy stood there, his face blank and his spine very straight, like a cadet on the parade ground. Something flickered in Naia’s eyes. She raised her head and, rather expectantly, wet her lips. The boy came toward them and, without warning, took Daniel’s hand and raised the back of it to his forehead in the traditional way of greeting one’s elders.

“Brent,” said Rinky, furious at the gesture.

The boy’s face broke into a beautiful smile. In an instant, all was forgiven. “Good to see you, Uncle Dan.” Smoothly, he took the hand Daniel held out and clasped it in a firm and sincere handshake. He greeted Luth the same way. He did not touch Naia, but nodded to her—“Hi.”

“Where’s your brother?”

“Downstairs, in the bathroom. Tammy-Shalom’s in the kitchen. Shall I get her?”

As the boy strode off, Rinky said, “I apologize for that. He’s going through a phase.”

“He was just trying to be funny,” Daniel said.

“He thinks all native practices exist to be mocked.”

“Youth is a time to make mistakes,” Daniel persevered. Rinky smiled. The two men shared a moment of conviviality, united by cliché.

“Naia, what’s the matter?” whispered Luth. “Do you need to urinate? Do your shoes pinch?”

The girl shook her head. Her gaze was fixed stolidly on a potted plant.

“Well, now here they are!” exclaimed Daniel. “What did you do, Rink, to deserve such children?”

“I don’t know, I guess I was just lucky.”

In the pleasant living room with its potted ferns and book-lined walls, they stood awkwardly, speaking around Luth in an easy, perfect English that belied the tropical landscape beyond the picture window, their teeth bared in smiles. Four adults and four young people: “children,” as the campus kids were referred to in Sweethaven, a fiction that tactfully ignored puberty, bad skin, and the first inklings of real-world failure. The Holland three were undeniably handsome, thought Luth grudgingly. Though Tammy-Shalom was suffering the consequences of an American college diet, and Adam was chubby from Jollibee fries, no one could fault their white complexions and the sharp angle of their little noses, and even though their eyes were identically small and almond-shaped, this enhanced, rather than detracted from, their Eurasian appeal. Brent was a scrawny, dark thing, but there was potential in his face as well: the lines of his nose were clean, and his skin was shining and flawless.

“How are you finding Wesleyan, Tammy? You like the winters? When do you return?”

“Oh, don’t get my daughter started, Dannie, you’ll regret it.”

Laughter, Daniel turning to her brother: “What about you, Adam? How do you find Manila?”

Rinky’s smile wavered. “Manila is an acquired taste.”

“It sucks, to be honest,” the young man said.

Luth frowned, unseen, at the unfamiliar expression.

“You’re only saying that because you flunked out of the world’s easiest course,” said Brent.

There was a painful silence. Luth cast a glance at the elder Holland son. He stood awkwardly, hands jammed into the pockets of his khakis, one sneaker-clad foot stabbing at the polished wooden floor. His jaw was hard with rage. He was in his early twenties, old enough to marry, actually, and instead here he was, obliged to suffer his parents’ rituals for as long as he lived in their home. She thought him quite capable of breaking his brother’s neck.

Emily stepped in: “Well, that’s all over now. Adam’s a businessman.”

“I have an editing service with an Internet shop,” the young man mumbled. “I help the communications students with their theses. Visuals. Graphics.”

Brent rolled his eyes.

“Wonderful!” cried Daniel. “You will be the next Silicon Valley millionaire.”

An intriguing aroma wafted out from the kitchen.

“Shall we sit down to lunch? We must not disappoint Sebia. Her pot roast will get cold.”

“Pot roast?”

“Oh yes, no adobo in this house, at least not today. Today is special. I hope pot roast isn’t too heavy for you, Dannie, Luth.”

“No, no, it’s perfect.”

“It’s a hot day, after all. We thought there might be some rain, a bit of a breeze this morning …”

“No problem.”

“We can send Adam downstairs for the portable air-conditioner. I’m afraid it’s a bit low-tech. Runs on ice cubes.”

“This electric fan is excellent.”

“Dannie, would you like to be over there? Luth, you sit here. Tammy-Shalom and I like to stay as close to the kitchen as possible. Naia, sweet, you sit on my right. I want to get to know you. Perfect. Sebia? Let me help you, Sebia. There, everybody, doesn’t that smell wonderful?”

“Oh my.”

“Tammy-Shalom has made us her signature salad, with real lettuce, and those are pieces of feta cheese—have you tasted feta before, Naia?—and these are mashed potatoes, and some buttered vegetables, and cucumbers, and try some of these cheese fingers.”

It was one of those excruciating meals where Luth had to constantly figure out when to use her knife. Why couldn’t these people eat with spoon and fork like everyone else? She switched utensils from hand to hand, lost a forkful of peas. The simple act of eating, of taking her cue from one or other of the Holland children, involved all her concentration. The voices of Tammy and Emily surrounded her like gentle sparkling rain. Rinky and Daniel could barely get a word in. They complained out loud in a manner so smooth Luth knew they were joking, and as soon as coffee was served, rose bearing their cups and entered Rinky’s office. The two boys excused themselves and disappeared. Luth nudged Tammy, whispered, and was pointed to the guest bathroom, which turned out to be done up in ruffles and potpourri. One could tell a lot about a family by their bathrooms, she thought. Her face in the molded-frame mirror looked startled and gray. She was in a charade, she fretted, borne along by the glib voices about her, the only one—with the possible exception of Naia’s—with no concept of the objective.

When she returned to the table, determined to tell Daniel she was ready to go home, she discovered it completely cleared of dishes, of food, of people.

“Tita Luth,” Tammy said, appearing at once at her side. “Let me show you my Grand Tour album.”

She had a child’s voice that belied her age and her education and her size, and a manner Luth thought of as pert—attributes that had probably driven more than a handful of young men crazy.

“Where’s Naia?” Luth demanded, refusing to be charmed.

“Oh, somewhere in the house. With my mom, I expect.”

“She’s supposed to take her throat medicine now.”

“We went to Europe last spring on a school trip. Go on, Tita Luth, you can turn the pages, I used superglue on the leaves and twine and stuff, and the glitter won’t come off of the page, I guarantee. Isn’t that cute? I’m teaching myself layout. This is Sammy, Sammy Park, he’s my best buddy, and you can’t really see it in this picture, but this is us at the Mannekin Pis. Do you know what that is? Oh, okay, no problem, I don’t blame you. Yep, Tita Luth, that really is a bag, it’s this Louis Vuitton thingie just sitting in the middle of the sidewalk, like five stories high—but you’re jumping; you’ve skipped the red boudoir …”

And this was Tammy, thought Luth, Tammy-Shalom—this chubby girl in her mid-twenties with skin bleached pale as a radish and hair cropped and dyed a color that she insisted was auburn—laughing, chatting, distracting Luth from the business that was taking place in unknown corners of the house. This was Tammy in the Thalys, which was apparently a high-speed train between Paris and somewhere; these were Tammy and Sammy and a geranium and a houseboat; this was Tammy channeling Anne Frank. And over in the extreme left margin of the picture was the cute Frenchie who served Tammy at the Relay in Charles de Gaulle …

But what was “channeling?” What was “Relay”? Luth had no idea, but was mesmerized by the laughing eyes, the tinkle of the practiced American accent. Minutes dragged by, and gradually she realized that she was listening to another sound: the rise and fall of a male voice beneath the girl’s monologue, coming from the direction of Rinky Holland’s office. Tammy, too, seemed to be listening, making a deliberate effort to ignore the voice as it broke into harsh and stretching sobs.

“Enough, hold on, enough,” Luth ventured, and as the rhythm of the young woman’s words intensified, she roared, “Will you stop?”

Tammy slammed the scrapbook shut. Her face was tight and dismayed.

“I am not interested in your Europe,” said Luth. “I don’t care.”

In the sudden silence, the man sobbed on. It was none other than her husband.

Luth fumbled, misplaced her English, dropped a clutch of photographs. She stared at the girl, and Tammy stared helplessly back.

Other than the incredible sounds Daniel was making, there was nothing to be heard. It was as though everyone else in the house were eavesdropping on them, with baited breath.

“Where’s Naia?” Luth demanded, gaining her feet with an effort. She looked around with fear at the closed doors that led off the living room. The certainty began to build that the child was in trouble; no, worse than that. Making trouble. Getting herself into a fix. Life was moving too fast for Luth to control: one night the previous week, Naia had come home late, long after she and Daniel had eaten their dinner and the six o’clock news had segued into the nightly telenovella. Luth had watched in astonishment as the girl banged through the front door and headed straight for the bathroom, and in those first moments it did not occur to her to ask why she was empty-handed, where her bag and books were. And where was her blouse? As Naia emerged furtively from the bathroom, Luth saw that her singlet was damp and streaked with dust. Her skirt was crumpled and wet as well, as though she had rinsed something out and put it in her pocket. As the girl brushed past, Luth caught the smell of sweat and dust, and mud somewhere on her person, as though she had been running in the cogon, but there were no cuts on her skin, or grass seed on her clothes.

“I got into a fight,” Naia had mumbled, and shut the door to her room. Luth’s suspicions grew until she felt her head was going to blow, but just as she was priming herself to storm Naia’s bedroom, the girl’s voice, weak and sad, called from within, and she found her granddaughter curled up on the bed, her cheeks flushed from a forty-degree fever.

“What fight? Where?” Luth demanded. This was exactly what she’d been dreading. The girl had collided head-on with jealousy, violent and female, the wages of being a majorette. In the yellow light of the bedside lamp, she fancied she saw a red mark on the girl’s cheek. Naia shivered and burrowed into the quilted spread, resisting Luth’s efforts to pull down the covers and investigate.

“I’m so cold,” she whispered. She had taken a shower; her hair was wet. She had neglected to comb it out. Luth made scolding, clucking noises as she smoothed out the tangles. Where was Daniel? In his office, wasting his time on the Internet, no doubt. Never there when you needed him. He ought to have been here by her side, taking down the facts, so he could draft the necessary long and angry letter of complaint to the girl’s teachers. This had been their standard means of dealing with trouble, when Narita and Antonia were in school.

Now Luth stood and stared into the face of Tammy-Shalom, this carrot-haired creature who had surely been planted in the living room to distract her, forestall the possibility of Naia’s rescue.

What had her granddaughter said, that night last week, when annoyance was the only emotion Luth had allowed herself and she had demanded to know whom the fight had been with.

Naia’s lips had been bitten, swollen, her voice a husk. “The girls,” Luth had caught, and then “held me down.”

And then, a few unintelligible syllables later, what sounded like “demons.”

SUDDENLY Emily was back in the room, face white and eyes sparkling with what looked like triumph.

“Mom,” Tammy said, a plea for help.

“Go now, dear,” said Emily. “Go sit with Naia.”

Tammy rose and, her eyes worriedly on Luth, left them. Emily took Luth’s hand. When she spoke, her voice was professionally calm, and her words were about Daniel.

“Your family is in crisis, my dear,” she said. “Dannie was in to see my husband the other day. They talked for hours. Rinky wouldn’t tell me why at first. But I managed to get the story out of him.”

Luth fixed Emily in her stare, the glare that had brought fear into the hearts of a generation of fourth-graders. Luth tried to tell Emily this was none of her business, but her tongue would not obey her. The other woman was simply too beautiful, too perfect, with her large and solicitous eyes and that air of utter confidence in her superiority.

“Luth, Dannie has sinned. He took the love of a young student and used it to satisfy his basest desires.”

Now that it was laid out so bare—the reason for her husband’s short temper, his sudden enthusiasm for grooming, his unaccountable moments of good humor—Luth felt hollow, emptied out. She snatched her hand from Emily’s and averted her face.

“You’re silent,” Emily went on. “It’s as if you already suspected.”

Luth felt it safe to nod.

“But he’s sorry, very sorry. He has accepted that he sinned. At least we can be thankful for that. The important first step.”

What? she thought. What was Emily talking about? Once, when Luth was young, a woman had put two bullet holes through her husband, and his mistress, too. Caught in flagrante, and the whole town had cheered. The wronged woman had gone free, because that was the law.

“It was one of his graduate students,” Emily offered.

They stood there, listening as Luth drew deep, measured breaths.

“It seems, Manang, that one of the biggest issues in Dannie’s life is the absence of intimacy. Not physical, which of course we all know about, but spiritual, a soul connection. He has said to us that, over the years, you seemed to turn away from him, and toward Naia and your daughter Antonia, creating a home in which he, as man of the house, was excluded.”

Now was the time, she thought, to turn on her heel and leave. I told her off, the meddling bitch, she would boast to her co-teachers on Monday. Then it occurred to her that she had no friends, no intimates among her colleagues in whom she could confide. Antonia had been her sounding board. Tears came to her eyes at the thought of her younger daughter. She abandoned me, Luth thought. I am stranded.

“But the victim in all this is Naia, Luth. She’s been getting into fights. Acting out. I’m afraid the boys have noticed her, and not without encouragement; it seems that majorette’s uniform has gone to her head. And such a sweet, loving child; how she and Brent used to play after Sunday school. I could hardly believe what happened last week, how she fought her classmates like one possessed.”

Luth started, alert, suspicious, remembering.

“She attacked her teacher, and some missionaries who had come to heal the class.”

“Missionaries?” Luth croaked.

Emily hesitated for a moment, then proceeded with the same self-assurance. “We believe in academic freedom at the high school, dear. For me, the Social Studies class could only have been enriched through their input.”

Luth, uncomprehending, waited for what would come next, but apparently Emily had more on her agenda.

“My dear, how long since Antonia left? Nearly a year, isn’t it?”

“She left a year and a half ago,” Luth said, automatically supplying the answer she gave to all those inquiring about Antonia’s whereabouts. “She lives in Europe. She is a landowner.” She did not say “farmer.” It did not have the proper cachet. Antonia driving a tractor! She was damned if she would give Emily more reason to laugh.

“It must have been a major change for you. She must have been a very important person in your life.”

Who had told her this? Daniel? Naia? How dared they?

Emily was searching Luth’s face. At the indignation there her voice grew gentler, even more subtle. “Antonia isn’t really Naia’s mother, is she?”

There’d been no legal turnover of the child. There had never been any need. Luth didn’t reply.

“We never acquired a habit of gossip in our family. So I thought I’d make sure. Naia’s mother is Narita, your older daughter, isn’t it? The one who went away.”

She hated the way Emily was walking her through what was common knowledge at the university, as if to spite her.

“I suppose Antonia did most of the parenting. It must have been traumatic, for Naia to be abandoned all over again, and right at this crucial age. A teenage girl needs a mother, desperately.”

Antonia had never explained. Not to her, nor to the child. Perhaps she had thought the choice was obvious: a woman past her first youth takes whatever opportunities come her way. And hadn’t it been a settled fact, in their family, that Antonia was too good for Donostia, that it was incumbent on her to seek a better life someday?

If I let loose one word, I will hang myself, thought Luth.

“Come,” Emily said then, beckoning with a graceful and magnanimous hand. Luth cast a glance at the door to Rinky Holland’s office, which had remained closed all this time. No sound emanated from behind it. Emily moved, through the screen doors, from the living room and out into the porch. She stood waiting for Luth, lit from behind, against lush Boston ferns and mounds of decorative asparagus, perfectly turned out, her tailored blouse and Capri pants and sequined slippers in complementing shades of pink. Luth stomped toward her, followed her through the porch and down the gleaming outdoor staircase, then through a white-painted, though humbler, door. The ground floor of the Holland home was distinctly shabbier, as with most of the older faculty residences close to the center of the campus. The concrete floor was cold and uneven, and the walls were of woven bamboo slats, though here a plywood layer had been established all around, for privacy. Luth caught the comforting odor of detergent, of drying laundry, of bleach, but there were other smells, too. Boy smells, she thought. Musky sweat. And expensive recreational smells. An atmosphere of old tennis rackets and softball mitts, Nike trainers and golf clubs.

The Holland brothers were bent over a billiard table, examining a configuration of three balls. Brent, the dark one, was stretched over the cue. Adam’s expression, as he watched his younger brother, was at once vacant and intent.

As she stood in the doorway, Luth heard one of them say, “Hang out? That’s all they do, hang out?”

The other replied, “Yeah, they’ve got this mansion in Almagro with two PlayStations and a pool.”

“Think we might get a ride in that Cessna someday?”

“Fat chance. It’s a couple of thousand bucks a pop. Aviation fuel.”

In the corner, completely ignored, was Naia. Perched on the edge of a revolving office chair, her body twisted in indecision, half-facing a running computer, half-turned to the boys. Her legs were askew, her feet in their cheap kung fu shoes restlessly scraping the concrete. On her face was an expression of annoyance and misery. Luth knew a small tantrum was in the works, but that the girl was too uncertain of her position to let loose even a hint of what was going on in her chest. Naia’s eyes rested hungrily on the cue, on the balls. She wanted to join the game. She wanted to handle the forbidden: billiards was not a pastime for ladies. Luth watched the changing expressions on the small, hard face. What Luth felt was dread, that young girls could crave the impossible with such passion. She thinks she is a boy, Luth marveled. No, she thinks she can deal with them as an equal.

She would never be their equal. They might have all grown up on the same university campus; she and Brent might have both been seniors—he a cadet officer, she a majorette second-class, dressed all in white. Stars in the microcosm of high school. But with a Yankee ancestor on one side and a Spanish one on the other, with their mother’s pineapple fortune and a sister on scholarship on the East Coast, the brothers were too good for Naia. It boiled down to class. Everything boiled down to class.

“Come on, Naia,” Luth said. “We’re going home.”

Something in the girl’s face closed up. “I can’t, Lola. I start my first session with Auntie Emily today.” She cast an anxious look over Luth’s shoulder, at the Holland woman, who smiled in response.

And Luth felt the enemy scrambling up the walls, knew her fort was being overrun.

“Very well,” she said. “I shall leave you, then. Be back in time for supper.”

“Maybe,” Naia said. “It depends on when Lolo wants to go home. I’m riding back with him in the car.”

“Naia,” Luth murmured. “You don’t have to do this.”

The girl sighed, and her eye fell once more on the brothers, one of whom had just dispatched several of the multicolored balls. “But Lola, I do. It’s part of my punishment. Auntie Emily and I made a deal. After six sessions of counseling they’ll allow me back into the band. On glockenspiel. If I do six more, I get to be a majorette again. You want me to be a majorette, don’t you? You paid for the uniform.”

Luth did not have time to mull over the logic of this deal. Emily was gently steering Naia back up the stairs. In the living room, the two husbands were sprawled. Tammy was diligently pouring them Cokes. She cast Luth a glance inexplicably filled with malice, then disappeared into the kitchen.

Luth sat numb. She listened to her husband as though to a newscast in a foreign language. She observed him crying.