Also, Trevor said he was going to start a business of his own, soon, once he got the funds together. He and his brother had come very near to starting a business selling bodybuilding supplements but his brother had ended up pulling, according to Trevor, “one dick move too many. So I decided basically fuck him.” Now he and his brother didn’t talk, but Trevor said he had learned much from the experience — enough to go it alone next time, he figured.

I sipped the beer he’d cracked open and handed me moments before. Every so often an alarmed yet muted part of my brain would sort of sit up, look around at what was going on, and demand an explanation. But then I’d just stare at Trevor’s blond forearms with their tendons hypnotically flexing and contracting beneath the freckled skin and after a while that part of my brain would lie back down again.

Dinner was three identical plates containing nothing but a massive steak and a massive baked potato, steaming in its tinfoil. Kelli was stymied by this and afraid of burning herself so I peeled the foil back on hers and discovered that Trevor had at some point dug into them and added mounds of cheddar cheese. I discreetly scraped out as much as I could and made a mental note to have Kelli drink a full glass of Metamucil before bed, which would add a good twenty minutes of cajoling to the bedtime ritual. Next came the job of cutting her steak up into tiny, choke-proof morsels, as Kelli’s teeth were not the best and she had always shown a lot more enthusiasm for swallowing than for chewing, which in the past had led to the occasional purple-faced panic. I meditated on the infinitesimal bites of meat as Kelli huffed with impatience beside me.

If I’d been capable of being amazed — that is, if my emotional spectrum wasn’t at that point a pendulum that swung only between the states of numb versus weepy — it would have been amazing to me how easily I’d fallen back into all these routines I’d once disavowed with such vigour. Kelli’s bad teeth. Kelli’s obstructed windpipe. Kelli’s blocked colon. I was not going to spend my life obsessing on these things day in and goddamn fucking day out, is what I said to my mother that angry summer when I was twenty years old.

To which, I recall, she had replied, the tips of her ears bright pink: You are the one who is obsessing on these things. I am not obsessing on these things. I am dealing with these things. This is called life. This is called everyday life.

There was not much else she could have said to get me out the door any faster.

When I looked up from Kelli’s decimated steak, Trevor had already cleaned his plate and brought it to the sink, which he was now filling with lemon-scented suds.

“Don’t do that,” I admonished him.