Isabelle blushes to have both sets of eyes on her, each of these men under the impression that she is down here for him when in truth she has come down in the hopes of making her mother worry. Go answer the door, please. Go water the tree, please—transparent requests; there seemed no reason at all why she should be banished from the kitchen and Jimmy’s company, but since she had been, she’d wanted to leave the apartment entirely. She has brought a dictionary with her, and memorized the definition of mystic: one who claims contact with an order of reality transcending the world of the senses and the ordinary forms of discursive intellectual knowing. She’s not entirely sure what this means, but it is a good thing, she can tell that much.

“I hope you’ll come visit me again,” Brian says.

“Shall we go up?” her father asks, extending his hand toward her.

II

From his seat at the dining room table, Wilson can see through the room’s glass doors his duffel in the foyer, packed and ready to go to New England. And if things had gone as he’d envisioned, it would be well on its way there now, and he and Ruth and Isabelle would be in the car eating the sandwiches they’d have picked up from the deli for the drive, and they’d be listening to Garrison Keillor on the radio.

Ruth sits at the other end of the table, six leaves away; they never use the dining room, and the table is still extended from last Christmas. She has set the table with the real silver and put new candles in the candlesticks and cooked the filet mignon that she had sent Wilson out to get the moment he’d come home, before he’d even taken off his coat. Knives click against the china as they eat.

“Good meat.” Jimmy sits along the length of the table across from Isabelle, each of them with room for two or three on either side. He chews loudly, his hands in fists around his silverware.

“It is good, Ruth,” Wilson says—almost calls it down the table. “The potatoes are good, too.”

Ruth looks from Wilson to her brother and smiles.

“Should get these knives sharpened, though,” Jimmy says, brandishing his fork against his knife. He brings the knife closer to his face. “This Mother’s silver?” he says.

Ruth glances at Wilson and then down at her plate. “It is,” she says.

“Huh. Wondered where that got to.”

“Jimmy!” Wilson says loudly, shifting in his seat, racking his brain for a topic, any topic. “Have your travels ever brought you to Africa?” he says.

Jimmy’s knee bumps the table as he crosses or uncrosses his leg. The plates rattle and the wine in their glasses sways. “Seventy-five,” Jimmy says. “Kenya.”

“I was there in seventy-five,” Wilson says. “Isn’t that funny.”