He shut the back door. Had he really not changed in all these years? He thought of Nora’s eighteenth birthday party. Raj, what are we? It had moved him so deeply. No one had ever unequivocally wanted him. When Nora said his name, it seemed truly that someone with that name must, at the very least, exist; might even be desired. As a child he would spend hours imagining himself as ruggedly handsome, laconic, and dangerously impulsive as the men of Ruth’s romances. Brutally powerful, morbidly sensitive, he was the perfect man. Would it ever leave him, that desire to shed himself like a skin, to abandon whatever life he was in, to become, again, a stranger, fraught with mystery and potential? To be anything but this, this skinny, silly, nattering fool, who mugs, teases, touches, and laughs like a little girl.

He never felt in the right way, even with his daughters. Gayle, nearly fourteen now, called him Daddy, addressing him sometimes as if they were strangers. She didn’t like his sense of humor, hated lies. Brittle, anxious, idealistic, life would hurt Gayle deeply, and in anticipation of this he suffered endlessly for her. Lulu, on the other hand, filled him with her childish joy. She ran around brazenly naked, quaffed Kool-Aid, her mouth lurid with it, and laughed like a pirate. She called him Boobie and, whenever he tried quietly to read the paper, would throw herself across his lap, looking up at him as if she were all the news he would ever need.