“I know, but he loves them. They probably won’t do much damage now. I mean you never hear about teenagers having clogged arteries, or being on statins. I have to pick my battles.”

“If he and Kiera are up there listening to music on their headphones, isn’t that sort of lonely?”

“No, they’re probably texting each other.”

“Oh.”

“I know. It’s weird, isn’t it? How talking isn’t so big anymore. But in the new way, they’re super-close. Some of what they’re about is making themselves look bigger together than they would be alone. I hate how scary school is now. Maybe the scariest place outside of those warlord areas in Africa. You have to have a buddy. Being alone attracts trouble.” A longish pause, then Neale says, “Euwww. Very bad under here. Can you hand me that tuppery thing? I’ve got a real mess going.”

Cate shoves the plastic container into Neale’s fluttering, gunk-covered hand. She knows she will likely receive this same container, rinsed out and filled with cookies, at Christmas. Neale’s housekeeping tempts the fates, all of them. From the outside, which is even worse than the inside, the house looks like the house in Psycho. It’s an artifact of Neale’s marriage. She and Claude were going to be urban pioneers in their dicey neighborhood. They were going to rehab this crumbling monstrosity. And then the marriage was over and Claude was off to India, leaving Neale in a perpetual state of disillusionment. Also only a block over from a sketchy patch of halfway houses and vacant lots with their own furniture, home to a vibrant drug marketplace staffed by serious guys in enormous jackets. But she’s staying. Partly a political statement, partly out of stubbornness. She’s the guy who makes them build the new freeway around his shack.

She emerges with the leftover container, now half-filled with what looks like shoe tongues boiled in sludge. “Where does this even come from? It’s like someone is running a workshop down here while we’re asleep.”

She’s the soul of do-it-yourself, a continuing student at YouTube University. She has taught herself to rewire lamps, fix the toilet when it runs on, glaze windows. She does her own oil changes. This is a stare-down of small challenges. Of course, it’s also about the financial pit, staying a ways shy of it. She has small savings and a going business with her yoga studio. And now with the new healthcare, she and Joe have decent insurance. The policy she had before only covered catastrophes, and even those had catches and loopholes. Because she’d had fibroids in her twenties, they’d only insure her from the waist up.

“Maureen’s taking me to some foodie restaurant tomorrow night. It’s trending, apparently, whatever that means. I haven’t even heard of the place. She had to get the reservation a month ago.”