A friend of Denise’s joined us—a woman Denise had met at the health club, who owned her own vitamin store and wasn’t married. Her name was Jen. She had frosted hair—it stood up on her head like a bird’s wing—and throughout the evening she regaled us with health-food stories. I could see they liked her. She was short and harmless. She talked about the color of healthy urine, and they both joined in, and for a while the discussion at dinner was about urine. Any ailment, anything that ever went wrong with anybody—Jen had had it once, too, and had the answer for it in a vitamin.

In the kitchen Dave said, “Jen’s got an incredible body. Sometimes she comes over and works out with Denise. You should see the fucking outfits she wears.”

“Wow.”

“She gives lessons on the banjo.”

“No shit.”

“You should go for it. Ask her out for tomorrow night.”

“That’s O.K.,” I said. “Pass.”

After we ate the cake, I said good night. It had been a long drive. Dave folded the newspaper and gave it to me. He explained to Denise and Jen that when I was a kid I used to always read for a while before turning off the lights.

SATURDAY MORNING, I woke up at ten and lay there, in the strange bed in the guest room. I’d slept twelve hours. I stared at the walls, glad to be out of my apartment, waiting until I was ready to get up. I’d dreamed a hundred different wacky dreams that night: my parents were sucked up in a hurricane, Kiffany was my sister and had a tattoo on her butt, a tidal wave came and washed Dave’s house away. At eleven, I heard Denise and Dave come in the front door. I went out to say hello. Denise passed me. She’d been crying so long that her face was swollen. She said good morning and disappeared into the bedroom.

Dave went toward the kitchen. I followed him. He filled a glass with water and drank it in one gulp. “Ahh,” he said, and burped a dog bark. I was sitting there in the T-shirt and shorts I’d slept in.

Except for the sunglasses and the baseball hat, he looked like our grandfather. He put the glass on the counter, laced his fingers together and laid them over his stomach, shrugged one shoulder and then the other, like our father, and bit the inside of his mouth. He stayed like that, chewing on it.

“What was that?” I said.

He looked past me, toward the part of the house Denise had gone to, and filled up the glass with water again and drank it.

“You want me to get out of here?”

“No,” he said.

“What’s the deal?”