“What time do you finish?” Sarah asked.

Angie thought. “Eight? Eight-thirty?”

Sarah said, “You take the car, swing by the paper on the way home and pick me up.”

“Then I can’t hang out with anyone after,” Angie said. “I was thinking of getting a coffee with someone after the lecture.”

“Who?”

“Someone. I don’t know.” She got all sullen. “Anybody.”

Which of course meant someone in particular. Sarah said, “You want a car, you pick me up.”

“Jeez, fine, I’ll pick you up. I just won’t make any friends at college at all. I’ll go to school, come home, leave it to the people who live on campus to have lives.”

I wanted to steer the conversation in another direction, not only because I hated family arguments, but because my head was pounding. “What’s the class tonight?” I asked.

“Some psych-sociology male/female studies thing,” she said. “I have to do some research paper for, like, ten days from now. About why men are so weird.”

“Interview your father,” Sarah offered.

“And I need five dollars for parking,” Angie said.

Sarah sidled up to me as she put in some toast. I said to her, quietly, “Maybe it’s time to think about getting another car.”

“I can’t have this discussion now,” she said.

“We’re having these kinds of problems every day,” I said.

I squeezed out of the way as she got some strawberry jam out of the fridge. This kitchen was about half the size of the one in our house out in the suburbs, and quarters were close. “We can’t afford another car now,” Sarah said. “We’ve got Angie’s tuition, a mortgage—”

The phone rang again. I grabbed it instinctively, not thinking to look at who the caller was, and already had the receiver in my hand when Angie started to shout “Don’t answer it!”

But she cut herself off as I brought the phone to my ear, the mouthpiece exposed. Angie mouthed to me, “I’m not here!”

“Hello?” I said. At this point, I looked at the call display and saw “Unknown name/Unknown number.”

“Hi. Is Angie there?” Very cool. You could almost tell, over the phone, that he had to be wearing sunglasses.

“Can I take a message?” I said.

“Is she there?”

“Can I take a message?” I repeated.

A pause at the other end. “Who’s this?”

Now I paused. “This is her father.”

Angie raised her hands up, rolled her eyes, mouthed, “Jeez!”

“Oh,” he said. “You wrote that book.”

That caught me off guard. “Yeah, I did. I wrote a few.”

“SF stuff.”

“That’s right.”

“About the missionaries.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“I like that kind of shit. You see The Matrix movies?”

“Yes,” I said.

“First one was great, the other two sucked ass.”

I said, “Do you want to leave a message for Angie?”

Angie, in a loud, angry whisper: “I. Am. Not. Here!”