I called out with a false enthusiasm only Kate would catch, “Now, that’s progress!” Across the table, Kate smiled. We’d been seated at opposite ends of an absurdly long, oval cherrywood table in the narrow dining room of the Wellfleets’ 1860s Federal-style brownstone.

“Meat, anyone?” our host said, appearing with a large ceramic platter covered with generous slabs of prime rib.

“Beef, honey. Beef sounds better.”

“Here’s the rare, the medium-rare. Well-done is coming up.”

I looked over at Kate and made a face as if to say, “Can we go now?” But she stared off blankly, and I knew where her thoughts were: with the boys, and how tomorrow was her first day of work, and how she hadn’t wanted to leave them minutes earlier, how she’d bathed them and dressed them in their matching pajamas, their hair wet, smelling of strawberry shampoo, and how, more than anything, she wanted to be home with them, cuddling with them, forever home.

Meanwhile, our hostess was in midmonologue: “Just for the sake of argument, let’s imagine a small chemical weapon is detonated in the center of the Heights, say at Starbucks, and only this neighborhood is wiped out. There goes most of the brains of Wall Street, much of publishing; gone are some of the brightest lights of this brightly lit city. That cartoonist for The New Yorker, that food critic for the Times, the managing editor of The New York Sun . . .”

“Janice, what on earth are you talking about?”

“I’m saying there’s no place quite like the Heights. Barton and I have lived everywhere. London. Sydney. Hong Kong. Berlin when it had the Wall. And honestly, there’s no place I’d rather live.”

Everyone sitting around the table seemed to agree.

Our hostess: “The history alone here . . .” Then, turning to me: “Who am I talking to? You are well aware of the history here, aren’t you?”

I shrugged.

“Excuse me, why is he so well aware, as opposed to, say, you or I?”

“Because he’s a history teacher—”

“Was. I mean, I’m not presently—”

“He was a fantastic history teacher—”

I started to protest.

“You’re modest. He’s modest. He was the premier history teacher at the Montague Academy for the last umpteen years!”

“What does he do now?”

“He’s a stay-at-home dad.”

“I wish I’d have done that.”

“Done what?”

“What he’s doing.”

“What, who?”

“This fine young man to my right . . .”

“Tim—I’m Tim Welch.”

“And do you know what he’s doing? He’s being a dad.”

“And finishing his dissertation,” Kate added.

“So he stays home with the kids?”

Kate, passing a plate of asparagus: “Yes, when they’re not at preschool . . .”

“More beef! Here’s the well-done!”

“How great that you can do that, that you can afford to do that.”

“Well,” I said, “you’d do it, too, if your wife got a job with Bruno Schwine.”

A pause. No one seemed to recognize the name Bruno Schwine.

“Bruno who?”