I didn’t know. Linda’d been “retired” for a year. Not working had done this to her. I don’t know what you’d call it, but here was the result. I said, “I gotta go.” It had been hectic times like you sometimes have at an ad agency, where everybody’s going nuts and you rush and rush and the guy you need stays at lunch for three hours. While I was waiting for him to come back I cut off the chewed-up end of my pen cap with a toenail clipper and a piece flew into my eye. It still hurt.

Linda said, “How would you feel if your father was coming to visit us?”

“I don’t know.” I rubbed my eye. I heard her breathing on the other end. I said, “Is somebody coming to visit us?” She said yes. “Who?”

“My father.” She read me a letter that said he’d be at a wedding near us and thought it would be good to come see our new house. She’d called him back and told him O.K. He’d be here late Saturday. In the letter it said he was bringing “the maid.”

She said, “Oh, why is he coming?”

We were living this quiet little life. We had this beautiful house that we built out of her “inheritance.” It’s not an inheritance—an inheritance is money from a dead person. This was from him. And we didn’t “build” the house; we paid somebody else and they built it. It’s up there, out of the way of danger, on the edge of a valley of rolling green farms outside Philadelphia. It was everything we’d ever wanted, and we acted happy there. I called her Bunky, she called me Cheese.

“Cheese,” she said. “I hate my father.”

We had a glorious yard, a beautiful pool, sliding glass doors leading out to a patio, lawn chairs with pillows, a dog, a special electric fence to keep the dog from running away, a thing on his collar to shock him if he tried, track lighting in the kitchen, a marble pastry block. We had a thing to dry the lettuce after you wash it. We had a bug-electrocuting mosquito light. We had a Chevy Tahoe Blazer, and a two-door BMW. We had money, her money. We didn’t have to worry about what we bought. We bought the woods behind the house and ran back there with the dog and came home with twigs and leaves stuck to us. We met an interesting group of people when we moved in, all our neighbors who’d built elegant houses out here like ours—the men worked in the city and the women were all psychologists. We had them over and they had us over, talking and drinking French red wine till two in the morning—it was a fucking blast, discussing famous celebrities roughly our age over roasted chicken, everything great.