Jack looked at her samples of countertop materials—a kitchen renovation was next—and watched her chop a pepper for an eggless omelette.

“There are appliances that do that for you.”

“But I hate to move into the twentieth or twenty-first century, whichever this is,” Vicki said, and reached to turn up a song of busted romance that was on the kitchen radio. Jack listened until an ad for some lame kind of career came on. He had a small graphics business that ran itself; every ad he saw or heard made him think: Is this what I’m supposed to do next?

Vicki worked three days a week at the hospital as a physical therapist, sometimes carrying out her husband’s instructions. She taught people how to walk again, helped them recover a grip. She gave a surpassing deep-heat massage, the doctor told Jack, and Vicki herself had several times offered this to him. Jack had been afraid he might respond and embarrass them both, so had always begged off. But this morning, when she saw him straining to look over his shoulder at the dogs, he let her work on the back of his neck.

When she finished, he said, “I’ve got something for you.”

He opened his gym bag and took a tiny box out of a zippered nylon pocket. Inside, under a layer of cotton, were gold earrings that each framed a piece of round onyx in the center.

“You have pierced ears, right?” he said.

“I love them,” Vicki said, putting them on. She moved to a hallway mirror and pulled her tangled hair away from her face.

“They came with blue stones or red ones, too,” Jack said. “The salesgirl kept pushing me to get a color, but I’m a big black man.” He snorted and said, “Yeah, I’m Denzel Washington.”

Vicki touched her ears and turned from side to side for Jack to see. “Trina’s coming at two,” she told him. “I’ll be out of the way.”

“What do I do with her?” Jack said.

“She’ll tell you,” Vicki said, and left for the hospital.

Jack was wearing a T-shirt Alex had brought him from last year’s sales conference. It said across the front: THE DANTEL GROUP COMMITMENT TO EXCELLENCE 1993. His gym bag said: the DANTEL GROUP THE LEADERSHIP ADVANTAGE 1992, and—no telling why since they didn’t have a child—there was a baby’s bib in the glove compartment with another go-getter slogan. (Nineteen-eighty-nine—BUILDING ON THE BEST—was the only year in their years together that Alex hadn’t brought Jack back a souvenir. That was the year the company had tried to cut corners. Alex’s budget for the conference had been reduced, and the motivational speaker she’d been able to afford was the backup quarterback for a losing team. He had, it turned out, one speech for all occasions and had earnestly urged the management team of The DanTel Group to “stay in school.”)

Jack hoped he had one clean T-shirt left. He had packed up a box of his clothes to take along, but instead of loading it into the car, he had left it beside a Dumpster, saying, “This’ll show me! This shirt I wore last summer?—I won’t be wearing it again.”