I didn’t speak to Tim during our walk home. He asked if I was all right. I said nothing. He wondered if I’d had a good time. He asked if I was mad.

“Mad is a child’s word,” I said. “Can we just not talk?”

Apparently not, because one block later, Tim started up again: “Hey, didn’t it feel like we were invited as some kind of entertainment?”

“And didn’t you play your part perfectly?”

“The clown?”

“Clowns are funny. You were something else. Shakespeare couldn’t have dreamed you up.”

“I think Philip Ashworth will survive.”

“Of course he’ll survive. He doesn’t give a damn what you think of him.”

“I think he liked my irreverence.”

I sighed.

Watching Tim attempt battle with Philip Ashworth and his friends had made me almost irreconcilably sad. Tim had never seemed smaller, like a schoolboy outnumbered and outsized, circled by bullies, except this time I found myself rooting for the bullies. David deserved to be crushed by Goliath. And this time David was.

“We were guests,” I reminded him as we walked home. As usual, my legs moved faster than his, and he lagged. But I felt he was testing me to see if I would slow down and walk with him. I didn’t. I may have even increased my speed.

TIM

THAT NIGHT, WHILE TAKING A COLD SHOWER, I KEPT REPLAYING ONE PARTICULAR moment from the Ashworth-Brody dinner party—not that bumbled exchange when I’d interrupted my wife, nor how the light from the fireplace had bathed Anna’s face, not the all-alone feeling I’d had during the long silence after I asked the question, not even the flash of relief I felt when Anna gave her poetic and perfect answer—no, what haunted me was the surprising moment after the putting on of winter coats when I turned to Anna Brody, offered my hand to shake, and she pulled me into a hug.

Instinctively, I employed my preemptive strike. Start patting from the moment of contact. This way, when she pats you, you’ll know you patted first.

The hug that night was nice and long, and what was funny—or maybe not—was how the more I patted, the more Anna Brody didn’t.

THREE

KATE

POOR TIM.

The call came in the middle of the night. His sister, Sal, forgetting, I suppose, the time difference, was phoning from the Australian outback, where she and her lover, Red, were in the middle of a monthlong camping trip. “Called when I could,” she told me. I passed the phone to Tim, who was now sitting up in bed.

Bad news likes to come at night.

“What happened?” he said into the receiver. He listened. Then, as if punched in the stomach, he said, “No, no.” He said so many nos, I wondered who had died.

I turned on my bedside lamp. Tim grimaced, either from what he was being told or from the sudden light, or both.

After hanging up with his sister, he called the airline, bought an open-return ticket (not cheap) for the following morning’s first flight to Toledo via Chicago. I helped him pack. His best suit. (Really, his only suit.) Enough clothes for three days. Tim couldn’t understand how it was that his sister had gotten the news first. Especially considering how findable he was. “Why didn’t they call me?” he asked as he zipped up his suit bag. “She had to be tracked down. In Australia!” I tried to comfort him, but whatever I said seemed to be wrong. I stopped midsentence when he covered his ears with his hands.