How does she do it? How does she always seem to know when I need something like a home-cooked Maltese dish whose name I cannot pronounce? Could anyone else intuit this? I doubt it. When I think about how she is always doing these things I am nearly overwhelmed with guilt about the way I have lied to her.

And—God help me—about how I’ve involved her in this thing with Deke.

“You’re too good to me,” I say, meaning it more than she knows.

“Very true. But later,” she says, putting the bags down on the table, “you might be afforded the opportunity to express your gratitude.”

When she wraps her arms around my neck, and tilts her face up to mine, pursing her lips into the shape of a pink-brown butterfly, prekiss, I amaze her by emitting an agonized shriek.

“Sorry,” I say, displaying my ear. “I got...hit by a, uh, foul ball.”

“Ouch,” she says, squinting at it. “It looks awful.”

“It only hurts when my heart beats.”

“It’s got some... strange markings on it. What is that?”

“What’s what?” I say innocently.

“Those things. Like a pattern.”

“Oh, that must be the stitches from the baseball.”

“It doesn’t look like stitches. It looks like some kind of weird cross-hatching. Like diamond-shaped or something.”

“Oh yeah,” I say, trying to think fast. “It was a, uh, minor league ball.”

“Hunh. Well, let’s put some ice on it. And get you some Tylenol.”

For me, trying to treat an injury with an over-the-counter analgesic is like trying to extinguish a forest fire by spitting at it, but I dutifully swallow the pills and do my best to act relieved by it. I make a deeply satisfied, gustatory sound, as if swallowing a particularly refreshing carbonated beverage, and smile with gratitude.

Charlie bangs around in the kitchen, reheating the dinner while whistling to herself, but she seems to know something else is wrong, and when I decline her offer to practice constrictor knots on the line she brought over she can’t help asking.

“Yeah,” I confess. “Today I lost a . . . prospect. The team was really counting on this one. And he got away. Thanks to the fucking—” I nearly blow it. By a fraction of a second I choke back the r in Rat Burglar.

“Yankees?” Charlie says, saving me from myself. “Again the damn Yankees?”

“Yeah. Fourth fucking time this year.”

Contemplating my dim and dangerous future provokes from my gullet a pathetic, waterlogged sniffle of grief.

“Hey,” Charlie says, “it’s O.K. Things will change. I know they will.” Then her expression brightens; she has an idea. She inserts the video of sailing disasters and fast-forwards. “Hey. Look at it this way. No matter how bad it was today, it can’t be as bad as this guy’s day.”

The screen shows an enormous oceangoing sailboat, maybe seventy feet, clippering along at top speed, making a beeline, in broad daylight, for an immense cargo ship. The voice-over informs us that this is the perilous result of “entrusting your passage to an auto-nav system while entertaining your spouse belowdecks.” Seconds later the ships collide, the smaller one shattering into a million pieces of jagged composite, as a terrified, naked couple leap over the stern while orange life preservers rain down from the deck of the steamer like some kind of life-sized ring-toss game.