I smile. “No. No, I had to take the test before the story—I’d have to have been good enough that day to be read to that night.” A memory comes to me of sitting next to my father as he read a book to me, Parakeet Pete, it was called, wondering what about the story made him so angry. I listened carefully to the words, inspected the pictures closely, thinking, What? What is it? But it wasn’t the book. It was the way he saw life, his dark take on everything, the bleakness of his soul. I don’t think I ever once saw him smile. And my mother? She read to me like she swept the kitchen floor: It had to be done, it wasn’t the worst job she had to do; it was, at least, over quickly. It’s funny; it took such a long time for me to understand that my parents never wanted children. I was in my twenties before I realized that nothing I might have done—or not done—would have made any difference. My grades didn’t matter, my interests, my aspirations. Once my mother put a picture of herself as a beautiful fifteen-year-old next to my sophomore year school photo and sighed. But if I too had been beautiful, I don’t think that would have mattered, either. I don’t think so.

Chip goes over to a table, sits down, looks around the room. “It smells good in here.”

“Yes. Books.”

“And it feels good, too. There’s a kind of residue. People have been here. Thinking.”

“Yes.” I feel the same weighty richness in the air. A rough equivalent to the sound the pendulm of a large grandfather clock makes, swinging. Or to the sight of someone’s head bowed over a book, a wash of late afternoon sunlight illuminating the pages. If we were in bed, holding hands, lights out, I could tell him these things.

“Myra, show me those blood vessels, will you? I want to see them. I’m going to just sit down.”

I look at him.

“Just a little tired. Really.”

I find the section on anatomy, pull down a book called The Illustrated Guide to the Human Body. I bring it to the table, find a page with a map of the circulatory system. Chip stares and stares at it. Then he lays his head down on the page. “You know, I used to believe, when I was a little boy, that if I lay my head down on a page and concentrated, everything on that page would transfer into my head.”

“Whereas I thought the technique was to put your head next to a smart person’s, and if they wanted to, they could transfer things from their ear into yours.”

“Come here,” he says. “We’ll try it.”

I laugh.

“Come on.”