She was trying to be good, though. Her notebooks were locked in the attic, up there together with her mother’s failures—her enthusiasms, her dad had called them. Her mother would suddenly get the idea that she was going to be a poet, a painter, a weaver of exquisite tapestries. She would spend hundreds of dollars on materials, including the kind of clothes, hairstyles, and jewelry such a person might wear. Sitting with Ruth, energized and happy, she would extrapolate the kind of life she would have when she had learned those seven languages and was translating all over the world for diplomats. She developed extended fantasies that Ruth lost herself to equally: World leaders were on the verge of war, but her mother would step in and make a magnificent speech for peace, slipping effortlessly from one language to another, her passion and resolve itself becoming a kind of universal argot. When she decided to be a painter, she and Ruth had talked for weeks about what she would paint, and how Ruth would have to keep her sane, since artists tended to go mad and cut off their extremities. Together they relished her glorious insanity, the one paint-spattered dress made from curtain material that her mother would never take off, how her mother’s eyes would become a world of color and light in which they could both find refuge as they traded inconsolable grief, briefly, for visionary beauty. And it never struck Ruth as strange—she was too young, perhaps—that there was always a particular man in these fantasies, one of the diplomats, an aficionado of art, who would have a name like Matteus or Demetrius, her mother touching the back of her hand gently to her cheek. Then the materials her mom had ordered would arrive and Ruth would help her set everything up. A month later her father would carry it all, unused, into the attic. The attic groaned with them, straining like a brain. The windows of the house, with her defeated mother looking out of them, became the eyes of a senile genius, searching the fields for what was sealed and moldering in her skull. Over the years her father, who had fashioned himself into a drag anchor for her mother’s flighty craft, would slowly smother these enthusiasms, his condescension and contempt never overt, but as subtle and deadly as a gas that robs the blood of oxygen. Finally she ceased even to fantasize, became a failed cruel agoraphobe endlessly cleaning her immaculate house. I am hell. Which way I fly is hell.

Ruth had educated herself in that attic, reading the books her mother had bought.

Now that girl was a woman in her mid-forties, alone, back in this same Missouri farmhouse after a dozen failed relationships, right up to Oliver the Ever Approaching.

“What does aphrodisiac mean?” Raj glanced up from the book.

“An aphrodisiacal is something that provokes desire.”

“Like what?”

“Like oysters.”