“It’ll be over before you know it,” I said. “Don’t think about it.”

“Turn up the thermostat,” she said. “Turn on the air conditioner. Not the air conditioner. Just the air, just the fan.” She didn’t have her contacts in, and she was talking to the wall about two feet to my right, to a dark drape where I’d been standing a few seconds before.

I said, “I’m looking for the switch.”

“I like the noise it makes. It calms me, it soothes me, it reminds me of summer and puts me to sleep.”

“I’m over here,” I said.

“I like the smell.”

“All right,” I said. “Jesus fucking Christ. Point the light over here so I can see.”

I held her and kissed her and told her not to worry—I hated her father, too. I hated my own father more. He was a dickhead. These fathers left a lot to be desired. Linda’s face had broken out mysteriously that afternoon, and it was bumpy to the touch, like a rhinoceros. Her breath smelled like hot liverwurst, and while we slept she kept heaving the covers off us onto the floor, her skin was about a million degrees.

SATURDAY MORNING WE were ready. The father wouldn’t be here till later, so when there was nothing else to do we got dressed and sat in the living room and stared at each other. Every few minutes the dog walked through. I heard his claws tapping on the kitchen’s tile floor, his slobbering sounds, his collar clanging into the food bowl a hundred thousand times.

They pulled into our driveway at four in the afternoon. The sun was still shining. We stood at the open front door. Her father got out of the car first. He smiled and waited as the maid came from around the other side to join him. I’d met him once a long time ago, at a diner in Connecticut; we’d shaken hands and had coffee, a month before our wedding, which he wasn’t invited to attend. Here again was Phil’s famous face—Phil Shore, the guy from the television-network evening news—smiling and pointing at his daughter and me.