He showed me his office setup. I saw that he had a new computer. There was also a laptop, two cell phones charging, new carpeting, and a big leather couch.

“Jesus,” I said. Dave waved me on through. The living room looked different. “Check this out,” he said, leading me toward the kitchen, and as we went through it I could already sense a big change—there was all this light, it looked totally screwy—and then we turned the corner, and there was a big, glass-walled addition they’d put onto the back of the house. There were plants and a leather reading chair and a glass dining-room table. The floor was made of tiles. “Wow,” I said.

“Great, huh?”

“Yeah,” I said. “You didn’t say anything—why didn’t you tell anyone anything?”

“I wasn’t sure it would happen,” he said. “It was kind of down to the wire. It got sort of tricky. The builder is a client.”

I nodded. We looked out the window to the yard. I said, “Is that a trampoline?”

“It’s a minitramp,” he said. “Denise works out on it.”

“Aha,” I said.

“She’s got to have that thing to work out on every day.”

“Sure.”

“I don’t want her using it now, because of the baby,” he said, and he smiled. “Anyway, it’ll have to go someplace else. We’re putting in a pool there.”

“A pool? In the ground?”

He had his hands behind his back, staring straight ahead at the yard. With his baseball hat and his sunglasses, he looked like an army colonel.

“Right out there,” he said. He kept looking straight out.

“Fuck, man, what are you selling—drugs?”

“Image,” he said. “I make a boring business into something you can love.”

Denise showed me to the guest room. It was still the guest room then, but soon it would be the nursery. I could already picture the little Finster in his room here, spitting his cookies on the floor.

She said they had had some tests done that day at the doctor’s. They were waiting to hear. “We want to make sure everything is in the right place. We don’t want any surprises.” I said, Of course. She leaned against the doorjamb, her long black hair pulled back. She had on a sweater and blue jeans. I asked her how everything else was. She said it was what she’d always hoped for, they were happy.