Lying there, I could feel Linda’s warm skin through her nightgown as she hugged me. My stomach was full from all that dinner and drinking, and I was tired and shitfaced and falling asleep, and I shoved her to the other side of the bed. When I opened my eyes again my wife was staring at me, shaking her head, smiling. I said, “You O.K.?” She nodded. She looked demented. I said, “I have to go to work in the morning.” She got up—it made the bed bounce—and started brushing her hair out.

She said, “I love my daddy.” She came over and sat on my leg, and pulled out matches and lit a candle. She kept moving and waking me up. She was like a big, hot cat next to me. She said, “I’m happy, Cheese.”

When I woke up again, Linda was repeating my name, tapping on the skin of my upper lip with her index finger. I jumped. She said she wanted to go for a walk in the woods in the middle of the night. I blew out the candle. I told her to be quiet or I’d kill her; it was late, and tomorrow was going to be a heavy day at work. “Please, Bunky!” I said, but she begged me, so I got up and pulled the quilt off our bed and we stepped outside through the sliding glass doors and lay in the grass under our bedroom window. She pulled up my T-shirt and licked my stomach, and put her head down my pants and sucked on my completely flat penis for a while, until she gave up and laid her head on my gut. The mosquitoes were hovering over us, not touching our skin. It was cool out there. I held her face. We fell asleep and woke up later with dew on us. We crawled back inside, and I moved the alarm ahead from six to seven.

WHEN I GOT to work Monday, there was a message from Millhouse saying I should go to his office. He waved me in, sitting on the edge of his desk. Chip, our account supervisor, and Laura, the personnel manager, came in. Dean—Millhouse’s partner and our lawyer—followed them with folders and sat on the couch.

Millhouse said, “The video department’s a loser for the second year in a row. We’re dumping it.” Everybody was quiet.

“Oh, God,” I said.

He said, “The structure of business is changing anyway.” They were watching me. Chip jumped in and explained that, instead, I’d be overseeing “virtual-media services.” He wanted me to write a brochure. I should talk about our mission, he said, and he thought I should mention technology and computers. He said, “Make it sales-y.”

I said, “Do what?”

Chip said, “I need it by Thursday.” He looked at Millhouse and back at me. “Don’t worry. You’ll figure it out.”