Josh laughs. “I do still have to find a job.”

“I thought you said you had leads?”

“I know some people. That doesn’t mean they want to give me a job.”

“I could maybe . . .” Kate used to do design, the interiors of houses but also stores and restaurants. She was good at it. Her boss had called her four different times over the first year of the twins’ lives—the last two she’d let go to voice mail—to make sure she hadn’t changed her mind about coming back. She has a sudden image of putting on grown-up clothes, foundation and mascara, shoes that click as she heads out of the house; she thinks of whole hours in which her limbs aren’t being grabbed at, clothes not being pulled on, sitting in an office, quiet.

“Who would take care of the children?” Josh says. “Make the lunches and the dinners, if you went back to work?”

“Is that a joke, Josh?” What she doesn’t say is: The only thing you ever had to do was keep the fucking money in the bank, and you could not.

“You know what I mean . . . I’m no good at that stuff,” he says. “We still have to eat.”

“You could learn,” she says, trying to stay light, to stay easy. “I have faith.”

“So I’d be your kept man then? My father held my balls all these years, and now you’ll take over till I’m dead?”

Kate thinks about the boys and Bea waiting after school for her to get them, all the plans she had for when they went to Florida, all the places that she’d take them after school. Josh’s dad was an asshole, his mom quiet and submissive, not much help to her two children when his dad got mean and mad. He’s wounded, she thinks now, her husband. It’s her job to help him through. “We’re partners, Josh,” she says.

He pulls into the parking lot. It’s crowded, and he has to drive down eleven different aisles of cars before he finds a spot. She zips her coat, and he zips his, and they both get out and close their doors. Josh presses the button, and the car beeps, and she stands close to him, and he grabs hold of her and brings his face close to hers. She knows that he feels pissed—inside him anger’s churning, slowly unfurling—but to her, the way his face looks clenched and anxious, desperate, he looks sad.

He says: “I can find a fucking job.”