She took the olive oil and opened a cabinet and placed it inside. “I could do it, Bobo, but it would be easy for me. Not so easy for you. I told you my family already believes I’m in a delayed midlife crisis and anything I do that’s flighty, but relatively sane and harmless, is fine with them. With Peter, it would be, ‘France? Sounds great. Want me to call my travel agent for you?’ With the children, it would be, ‘Have a great time, Mom. Don’t worry about anything here. We can take care of everything, including Dad.’ And they would all see me off, waving like a pack of wild cheerleaders at a football game, acting as though they had planned the whole escapade.”

She paused and smiled foolishly. “I put the olive oil away. You need that, don’t you?” She opened the cabinet and took out the olive oil. “Maybe they’re right. Maybe I am losing it.”

“Maybe it’s just the opposite,” I said. “Maybe you’re finding it.”

She kissed me lightly on the cheek. “Thank you. I’ll accept that. Now, cook. I’m hungry.”

We prepared and cooked the dinner together and made make-believe plans for a make-believe trip to France and Germany and Italy. We were performing a game that both of us knew was merely a game. Amy plotted that we would be like lovers who meet in Paris on the Champs-Elysées, drinking wine at a sidewalk café. Both divorced, she projected casually, both eager to put their pasts behind them and to begin new lives with new lovers, or maybe with old lovers newly found.

“Then we rent a car—a Mercedes—and we begin driving,” she added enthusiastically. “No maps, no plans. We just drive and we stop where we stop. And maybe we stay for the night, or for a week. We stay as long as we want to stay.”

“Who drives?” I asked.

“We both do.”

“I’ve driven in Europe,” I objected. “Cruising at a hundred miles an hour is not my idea of relaxing, even in a Mercedes. You can drive.”

“Fine. But we have to rent a convertible. I love the wind in my hair.”

We talked of stopping at roadside rest stops and eating sandwiches purchased in small villages from small delicatessens, and drinking the wine of the region out of crystal glasses that we would buy in Paris and carefully pack after each use. We talked of visiting art galleries and ancient churches, of festivals and pageants, of reading histories from monuments and plaques. We talked of lovemaking in the sparse rooms of cheap boardinghouses and of partying with strangers in strange taverns.