“You’ve gotta get to sleep,” he said. “I bet Kyla wakes up early.”

“Ugh, she better not,” Violet said. She went to the kitchen and filled a glass of water from the tap. “I’m locking my door.”

She seemed to have already put her vague offer aside; it probably hadn’t had the significance he’d given it. He probably should have just stayed. That would have been a normal, friendly thing to do. Proof that he didn’t harbor some ulterior motive. What year was it that he was so concerned about propriety? If it had been the sixties, like it should have been, or even, hell, the nineties …

“Let’s do something soon,” he said. “Please?”

“For sure, for sure,” she said. “Oh wait!”

She picked up a book off the coffee table. Morgan Calder. Some Other Way of Living.

“Tell me how it ends?” she said. “Please?”

He opened the book to the pensively half-smiling author photo on the jacket. The guy still had most of his hair, but at least he was old. In ten years, he’d be really old, and Derek would only be thirty-five.

“My expectations,” he said, “are out of control.”

“If you hate it…” she said. “Well, try not to hate it.”

He paged through the book under streetlights on the way home. First paragraph: way too long. How many clauses did one man need? Last sentence: something about a Carolyn “emerging carelessly” from a car. Indeed. There was no inscription. No underlining. No marginal notes. It was petty, he knew—definitely not worthy of the midwestern rookie of the year—but it felt so fucking good to drop the book in the trash can in front of his building. He would buy her a new one if she asked for it back.

The Changed Party

I was eating a plum over the sink when my eight-year-old daughter Amanda slipped into the kitchen and started picking through the trash. She pulled out some crumpled plastic and pieces of old food, examining each item carefully before setting it on the counter. My plum dripped dark red drops into a coffee cup filled with water as I struggled toward a casual intervention.

“What are you doing there, honey?” I said.

“Checking to see if I threw anything away by accident,” Amanda said. She held up a yogurt carton and shook it deliberately over the counter, sending tiny purple splatters across the tile.

“Are you missing something?”

“I don’t know, that’s why I’m looking.”

The logic was just short of airtight. Amanda had woken up in the middle of the night a few times in the past month, coming into our room to tell us she was worried she’d left something behind at her day camp or at a friend’s house. Lisa or I would walk her back to her room and go through her possessions, accounting for everything of value, but it didn’t seem to settle her. This was an escalation.