“Oh, quit it.” Roxy knew this was genuinely an issue for her brother, who was as cute as a bug but suffered from PPST: piss-poor small talk. No matter how relaxed he was, how confidently he started the evening, the minute an attractive girl spoke to him, his tongue turned into a wooden spoon. He could no more make lighthearted and humorous conversation of a seductive nature than he could have sprouted a jet pack and blown out of there. His looks were a big initial draw, but then—as his best friend in college had bluntly pointed out—he choked in the clutch. This was great for the friend because he was less attractive but quick and funny, so going to a bar with Bob was like bringing a golden retriever puppy; girls simply materialized. While Bob blushed and answered in monosyllables, his friend turned on the charm and got lucky a lot more frequently than Bob did.

“Are you watching the game?” Bob wished he’d never reached out to his sister. She meant well, but her encouragement reminded him that he needed encouragement, and it was giving him a stomachache.

“Don’t change the subject, but yes.” Roxana sighed. “What’s the girl’s name?”

“Laura.”

“Grandma’s name?” Roxy sounded uncertain. “Great, another layer of weird.”

“Really . . . let’s change the subject.” Bob’s voice was quiet.

Roxy relented. “Could you believe that double play?”

Bob leaned back into the sofa, relieved. “When? I only turned on the game thirty seconds ago. What did I miss?”

“Oh,” said his sister, settling into her own couch, miles away. “Get comfortable, I’ll bring you up to speed.”

EIGHT

The next morning after she’d run, showered, and dressed, Laura made herself a cup of tea and called her grandmother.

Laura’s grandmother (her father’s mother) lived three blocks away from Laura’s childhood home. Every summer her parents went away to do fieldwork—Laura’s mother ran a longitudinal study on family groupings in London’s Trafalgar Square (pigeons, not tourists), and her father returned to the Andes each year to anxiously count endangered puff-leg hummingbirds—and Laura’s grandmother would move in to take care of the kids. Barbara Costello was not a scientist like her husband and son, but only because her slender generation of female scientists stopped working when they got married and became mothers; people assumed their brains fell out along with their placentas.

“Hey, baby,” said her grandmother, clearly glad to have a distraction. “Did you find a job yet?”

“Nope, I’ll get right on it after I finish breakfast.”

Her grandmother laughed. “Don’t tell prospective employers you burned down your apartment building.”

Laura made a face. “Mom told you, huh?”

Her grandmother laughed again. “Are you kidding? When she called, it took me a while to work out you weren’t in the hospital.”

“I wasn’t even there when the fire started, Grandma.”