“Amazing!” he said, casting a curious gaze over the kitchen, almost clairvoyantly polite. “Your house is, like, incredible.”

Jen smiled. Still holding the spinner, she took the opportunity to look around the room through her guest’s eyes. Her kitchen, with all its cozy nooks, pleased her. The tile floor and weather-beaten table and antique bread box were hard-won totems of domestic order. She watched, oddly thrilled, as David crossed the room and put the ice cream in the freezer as if he already felt at ease inhabiting her space.

“It’s a great place,” he said. “I bet it was a lot of work, huh?”

“It was pretty run-down,” Jen admitted.

“I wouldn’t know where to start.”

Jen was glad to recount the highlights of her past years’ struggles: replacing the roof, taking out the mirrors that had been glued onto every wall, remodeling the bathroom, and turning the caving-in garage into a studio. She explained how her mortgage was less than most people paid in rent and how the property value had already at least doubled since she’d moved in. It was a kind of pitch for herself, she realized, revealing a pride she hadn’t been aware existed, and David made appropriately enthralled sounds of attention throughout—his appreciation even for the mundane details of home refurbishment apparently genuine. As she went on, the plastic lettuce spinner in her hands dripped water onto the floor until a small puddle had formed, and finally it occurred to her that she was basically rambling. At last, she rummaged around quickly for something to tie off the thought.

“I guess I’m just building the architecture of the life I want,” she said. “Hoping it shows up here someday.”

“Ah ha,” David said. He was staring out the window at a swaying fig tree in the side yard. Casually, he reached over and picked up a shallow ceramic bowl from the windowsill. Jen sensed she had said too much. David had detected the intensity of her need and already was preparing to flee. The bowl was filled with colored pieces of glass, and he tilted it under the light.

“My mom has a thing like this,” he said. “A little bowl.” He talked with a slight drawl, almost Southern in its languor. “Last time I was over there she had it filled with water and a bunch of unstruck matches. She said she wanted to throw the matches away. She didn’t want them to spontaneously ignite in the garbage though.” He turned and glanced at Jen sideways. “Is that pretty, or just paranoid? I don’t know.”

Jen shook her head and smiled, wondering if he had heard anything she said in the last few minutes at all.