She said something he didn’t catch and then she said, “You there?”

He listened to the breath of the phone. After a minute—a pause—he said, “So what do you want?”

“What do I want? Are you kidding me? Are you drunk? Are you tripping? Don’t tell me you’re tripping, don’t tell me that.”

“I’m not tripping.”

He heard her take in a deep breath, as if she were armoring herself, putting up the defenses so she could troop out into the field and give battle. “You told me you’d be here two weeks after the Fourth. That was over a month ago.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I know.”

“And you ask me what I want? I want you home, with me and Corey, your son—remember him?”

“I am home.”

“Don’t give me that shit. Tell me, how’s your little slut? Has she fried her brains yet?”

He didn’t respond to this. The phone receiver—what was it, plastic?—felt as ungainly as a redwood tree, two thousand years old and hairy with bark, pressed flat to the side of his head.

“What about Ken?” he said. “Don’t you want to hear about Ken?”

“I’ve got news for you,” she said, her tone shifting till it was brisk and mechanical, just the facts, “—I’m not going back there. Ever. It’s wrong, Fitz, it’s a disaster. Look what’s it done to us. To me, Fitz, to me.”

“Don’t say that,” he said.

“I swear to you, I’m not going back.”

“Come on, don’t say that.”

He was going to say I love you, but it wouldn’t have meant anything, not right then, because he was irritated and confused and so far between the salient points in his life he couldn’t begin to imagine how he was ever going to navigate his way back. Corey! he thought then, Joanie! And even before she hung up and the line went dead he was thinking how very, very much he was going to miss them both.