“Oh good. I was afraid he didn’t like it.” He sat down at the table with a bowl of leftover salad and started to pick at the saturated leaves with his fingers.

“He claimed he didn’t like it, but at some point, he sneaked down here and practically licked the bowl.”

Thomas chuckled amiably as he sucked a limp lettuce leaf off his chin and into his mouth. “Healthy appetite,” he said.

Healthy appetite, growing boy—haul out the usual clichés and lay the entire burden of concern about Gerald on her. Maybe if he took a bit more responsibility for his son’s problems, she’d have time to enjoy his strengths. But she wasn’t going to bring that up now. This unqualified approval of Gerald and refusal to look at any of his eccentricities and potential trouble spots was one of the many things about Thomas she’d come to expect and had learned to ignore. Hopefully, with a little more emotional growth, she’d stop seeing them altogether. Sometimes she worried that having a successful marriage to Thomas meant erasing him, trait by trait, feature by feature, until finally she’d find herself married to a completely invisible man.

“What did you do today, Jody?” Jody was an amalgam of her first and last names, a nickname she found inexplicably embarrassing.

She’d gone to work for a few hours, had an unproductive day, gone to see Dr. Berman, hauled Gerald to his shrink, then to his piano lesson. In the late afternoon, she’d met Dale at a coffee shop a few blocks from the house, ostensibly to discuss his ridiculous infatuation with his friend’s wife, although most of it had been restaurant talk. Unfortunately, the conversation had taken place in a booth in a back corner that provided much too much intimacy for her taste, although not, obviously, for Dale’s.

She nodded at Desmond Sullivan’s biography of Lewis Westerly, propped up in the middle of the kitchen table. “Among other things,” she said, “I took more notes on this book. I had an idea for using it in a proposal for a series, and I’m getting very excited about it. I’m indebted to you for insisting I read it. You’ll have to invite the author for dinner when he gets here.”

Thomas gave her one of his doe-eyed looks of sympathy. “You’re always working,” he said. “I wish you’d take a little more time for yourself.”

She had another shrimp in her hand, but she felt her appetite dissipate and let it plop back in the Tupperware container. “This is for me,” she said. “I wish you could see that.”

“Don’t take it that way, Jody. You know what I meant.”