“No, they are most definitely not hand puppets.”

“And they’re not large marionette-type puppets with strings?”

“No. They did not appear to have strings. Nor did they appear to be sock puppets. Or Muppets. I think I saw a cow and a horse and maybe a moose, but I wasn’t wearing my glasses, so who knows what was actually in the picture.”

Gary paces with the still-unpeeled cucumber in his hand, waiting for his pill to take effect. “I can’t believe we’re talking about puppets.”

“Yeah, well, this is what we signed on for when we left public school: puppets, and ‘Inhabitancies’”—I hand him the peeler—“which in regular school are just called special ‘units.’”

He stares absently at the cucumber and then at the peeler. “Maybe we should pull him out of there.”

I ignore him. Knowing that we’re behind in tuition—“really really behind,” to quote Grace—and realizing that leaving early might actually be forced on us, and on Teddy, makes me not even want to joke about it. Leaving early is only fun when it’s a choice. And when it doesn’t involve the school that your child likes, even though he won’t admit to liking anything anymore.

“Not to mention an aggressive fluidity with normative surnames,” I add, then explain that when Mr. Noah introduced me to talk about writing, he referred to Teddy as “Teddy Vogel.”

“God.” Annoyed, he starts to loudly chop the cucumber even though it’s just supposed to be sliced. “So did you at least make everyone wear bird merch?” he says, changing the subject.

I tell him that I wore my hat but didn’t bring any T-shirts from the endless stash of giant cardboard boxes in the basement. Then I shrug like I don’t care, even though I care more than I thought I would, more than I want to admit. “Which was a good thing, since there was some kind of emergency in the middle school building and someone came running in to get Mr. Noah at the exact moment I was supposed to start talking.”

“Someone replenished the soy milk but forgot the almond milk?”

I try to laugh, then change the subject to an even tougher one. “I saw Glenn today.”

Despite my halfhearted attempt to sound upbeat, Gary stares at me. “Is she okay?”

“Not really.”

“I thought the chemo was working.”

“I don’t think it is. She looks worse. She looks worse every time I see her.”

He puts the knife and the cucumber down. “I feel like we’ve had this conversation before.”

We have: five years ago with my mother, then three years ago with my father. Each time we’d try to find signs of improvement—however minor, however incremental—that didn’t exist—until the end, which was, sadly, the only improvement.

“Does she know?”

“Of course she knows.” I tell him about our coffee date: the people she scared off, how badly she felt afterward, the way she begged for distraction. Then I tell him about her request that we host the People Puppets. Which feels like a final request. Gary walks over to me, buries both hands inside the sling in the dog’s thick fur, the closest we get now to hugging or touching. “We can’t say no,” I say.