“The brother-in-law’s an art collector,” he said. “He collects dogs. Anything that has to do with dogs. He’s got carved dogs, stuffed dogs, wooden dogs, paintings of dogs. He’s even got a dalmatian-covered sofa. It must not be real. Or maybe it is—who knows?” Dave looked at me. I shrugged. He went on. “They have this lamp, and the base of the lamp is a dog pissing on a fire hydrant, and a boy squatting next to it.” I laughed. He said, “I hate working for these guys.”

Denise kissed the back of Dave’s hand. “I’m sorry,” she said.

He said, “You know what I do? My secret for success with them? I throw away my intelligent ideas. I don’t even bother showing them, and I write the corniest crap I can think up. We’re doing a promotion with the muffler chain, so this morning I said, ‘Instead of calling it a sale, let’s call it a carnival.’ It was the most idiotic thing I could think of. I said, ‘We’ll decorate our stores like the Mardi Gras.’ So Carlo calls the Meathead and the grandma in and we all have a Sambuca at nine o’clock in the morning.” Dave laughed.

I said, “Sambuca?”

“He needed help with the concept. The grandmother doesn’t even fucking speak English. She’s from Romania or someplace.”

Dave leaned back, laughing, stretching with his hands over his head. His baseball hat fell off, backward. He’d become almost bald, and his hair was all stuck down. “What’s an eighty-year-old grandma gonna know about mufflers?” he said. He was giggling in a high-pitched voice. His eyes teared, and he smeared them with his fingers. He stretched, sticking his chest out, and the needlepoint chair he sat on creaked, and then a noise came from underneath it—a screech like wood being pulled apart. He sat forward. He said, “Shit—am I breaking this chair?”

Denise smiled, but she didn’t move.

He said, “Has it always wobbled like this?” He shook it.

Denise said, “It’s very old. It’s not worth anything.”

“I’ve got to get away from those guys,” he said. He rubbed his head. “They’re destroying my brain.” I nodded, listening to him rave. “I hate this kind of work,” he said. “What a waste of a year.”

My tea had cooled then, so I drank it. “It sounds like you want to quit,” I said. He looked up at me. “So why don’t you quit and stop crying?”

“Oh, fuck you.”

“O.K. Sorry, forget it,” I said.

“I can’t quit,” Dave said. He stood up and took a tissue out of his pocket. He unfolded it and blew his nose. I watched him. He had no energy. Outside I heard a lawn mower running somewhere.