“I had made deviled eggs.” She remembered again all the aspects of the party she always remembered—the grooved aluminum-edged serving table, the worryingly fancy punch bowl, those quick eyes behind thin glasses that belonged to this man who introduced himself as Harry. “We talked in the kitchen, with everyone all around us.” They traded jokes so quickly. “And we were married less than a year later.”

“No! The other guy must have been so pissed!”

“He got over it like that. Grant Hart, my god. He was married before your father and I were.”

“Really?”

“Really. I think he thought I wasn’t so smart. I had just graduated from secretarial school; that seemed more practical than trying for college. And Grant, I remember him coming home in the evenings and finding me typing these papers, and he always had a smile as though I had been made for just this, and everything in the world was as it should be with me typing out other people’s thoughts.”

Ben didn’t know if he had ever heard her talk so much at one time, especially about herself, and he wondered whether she hadn’t been talking very much to other people recently.

“And at that party, your father…We were talking about things we had both read, right by the finished drinks, and I think he was probably just trying to make conversation, but he said, ‘What else might you want to do other than secretary work?’

“I guess I could have taken that as an insult. That he thought what I was doing was trivial. But I think that question was almost enough for me to decide to marry him. And after we were married, almost everyone else I knew stopped working to raise kids, but he asked me if I’d like to go back to college. And I said, yes, I really would like that.

“And when I told him I was thinking about getting a master’s, and a PhD…I couldn’t have even said the word ‘scholar’ with a straight face when I met him. Let alone ‘anthropology scholar.’ But, he just always seemed to think, why couldn’t I do those things.”

“Yeah, of course.”

“I haven’t thought about that in a while.”

Ben remembered again his father’s encouragement on the squash court. But also with tenderness Ben remembered the change in his father’s face as he fixed his hair in the mirror: a slight arch in the eyebrows, a compression of the lips, a set of the eyes—his unconscious act of trying to convey handsomeness. He had taken on this look when talking to another person’s fiancé!

“So what’s her name?” his mom asked.

Ben briefly considered lying. “Alice.” He paused. “Unlikely we’ll be married in a year.”

His mom laughed, and Ben closed his eyes with the pleasure of hearing that laugh.

“All right, we can put something in your account.”