“How did you know I was hoping?” This question was rhetorical. Anticipating expectation (and its dark twin, frustration) was one of Matthew’s specialties. It was no small part of what made him an in-demand DP and now a successful commercial producer. He was also accommodating. He did his best to make people (and, yes, including her) happy. He said yes with so little resistance, so that when he said no—and with how he said it—you didn’t question him. You believed that whatever you wanted was not remotely possible.

“Do you know what?” Sarah asked, as they made their way down another winding road and the lake disappeared in the rearview. “I realized recently that of all the things that I find funny, enraged people rank highest.”

“Should depend on who’s angry.”

“True.”

“I have to say, I never find your anger funny.”

“Never?”

He shook his head.

“Well, that’s probably because I’m so scary.”

Here came Matthew’s wry half smile, the one Sarah teased him was born in East Texas, where he had lived until he was eleven. His Texan half smile tended to emerge when they were at least two hours outside the city. He claimed this was absurd; but there it was.

THERE WAS A RIVER—or was it a creek?—running under a footbridge that led into town. The houses overlooking the water were built fairly close together, some more ramshackle than others. The drooping telephone wires, the creek and the footbridge, the fat mutt lying in a driveway and a seemingly forgotten ladder overturned on a browning lawn, the leathery skinny woman, smoking and pushing a baby stroller full of groceries—it was all offset by lush ferns, daylilies, old stone walls. It was an enervated aesthetic, a bit of a dump. She liked it.

Arman and Kiki’s rental was a white farmhouse with a small barn and a shed on about a quarter of an acre. Matthew parked on the street and they got out of the car; he took both of their bags from the trunk. The sound of a lawn mower was mildly irritating, as was the smell of fertilizer. There’d been a patch of lawn in the Brooklyn garden they’d shared years ago. It had pooled with rain or sometimes had been brown and scraggly, but there was at least one spring day that Sarah remembered when the grass had been green and not too buggy and Leda had stretched out, not caring about soiling a purple dress. She’d pointed up at the laundry lines that remained throughout the neighborhood from the days when no one had dryers.