The first thing, granted, was something that I probably already knew but wasn’t fully ready to admit—the way you hang on to old sweaters you’ve outgrown, or the way you ignore certain lingering glances from certain friends. The fact of the matter was I could still get plenty angry, even if I never picked up another tennis racket in my life.

The second thing was a bit of a surprise. I was an okay swimmer, and I might’ve been a great tennis player, but I would have been an ASTONISHING baseball player. A pitcher, to be specific. I’d need to work on my aim, that was true—but not everyone can throw a key lime pie at their best friend with enough force to shatter an entire picture window.

Footnotes

20 Regular limes, it turns out, are actually known in the biz as Persian limes or Tahiti limes and are actually a cross between key limes and lemons—that is to say, the lime we most commonly think of as a lime is actually a hybrid, a triploid cross, to be specific, being that key limes and lemons are both citrus crosses as well. They’re sweeter than key limes, tend to be seedless, and grow on bushes without thorns. I found this to be fascinating; indeed, when I returned home, I wasted about twenty minutes reading all about them when I could have been cleaning the Lily Pad or prepping food or doing any number of tasks that would have helped the party not be a disaster.

21 I’d never actually eaten pâté, but this seemed like a good time to start.

22 In fact, no, it was not intensive purposes, though plenty of people believe that to be true. Intensive purposes is an example of an eggcorn—a word or phrase that sounds like and is mistakenly used in a seemingly logical way for another word or phrase, e.g., expresso instead of espresso. Nip it in the butt instead of nip it in the bud. But—I digress, lost again in the details of language.

EIGHTEEN COURT LANE,
or Dog Therapy

There was glass everywhere. And pie.

“We’re dead,” said Touchstone. “We’re dead, we’re dead, we’re dead.”

Glass across the porch. Glass inside the house. Glass in Henry’s dead plants I’d only just now realized how much we’d failed to water, and so they had turned brown and shriveled. Glass in the frog blanket; glass still trapped in the window, hanging like stalactites, like jagged teeth, like a booby-trapped tomb. Glass on the couch that we’d moved closer to the window the first morning, where Ros and I had once taken a tandem nap, sacked out like two dogs in a sunbeam, the summer spread lazy and endless before us.

“Shoes,” said Phoebe. “Who’s wearing shoes?”