“You know what my dad does?” she says, but doesn’t wait for him to answer. “He trades futures. I still don’t know what that means, in part because he never told me. Because he was always the sort of father who thought it was his job to go to work and so he did. But I was always super into the idea of it.” She looks out toward the woods, the barn, away from Martin. She’s been thinking this for a while and now she wants to talk, to put words out and see what happens once they’re out. Martin is a low-stakes space to try them out. “My dad surfed when he was a teenager. The only Black guy out there, he used to say, laughing—the only times he ever talked about being the Black guy were when he was trying to be funny. He never really told me anything about what it was like to be him, to grow up as him. My mom hated mess and sand. Even though we lived in California, we never went to the beach. It was northern California. My dad grew up in Santa Cruz. He was smart, you know? His parents were well off, and he went to Yale. He got this big job trading futures and worked long hours and made a ton of money, and when he got home he took his shoes off at the door just like my mother wanted, he went into their room and changed out of his suit into shorts and a collared polo shirt for dinner. He made a drink for himself and my mom, and we ate. I used to think maybe she tricked him into a whole life he never even meant to have. She told him to marry her. There was some story about how scatterbrained he’d been when they first got together, and he made some comment about how he’d not be functional without her, and she said, Well maybe you should marry me, and that was it. He’s spent his whole life just doing what she says and I have no idea who he is besides that. I’m forty-two. He’s seventy-four.”

Martin lights another cigarette and takes a single drag, then hands it to her. She nods, accepts it. “When we’re young we think we’ll just choose the lives we’ll have, the people we’re becoming, but so much of it just happens. You can live a whole life without choosing anything at all. Maybe not Henry. Maybe Henry is the only one of us who’s done this, but I want us to make more choices.”

Martin takes the cigarette. “If you find out how,” he says, “you let me know.”