“Don’t get me wrong, I know Larry is great, but in the future column he’s a little lacking. Does he even have a job? Last time we talked, you said something about him not even having a checking account.”

“That’s just temporary. He needs to use my account because the bank messed up his account so he can’t write checks anymore. That’s why I put everything into my account now.”

“I’m just saying that he’s not exactly a candidate for the ideal husband. He’s living with you and isn’t going to get back with her, right?”

“Right,” she replied, but she was gazing down at her place setting and not looking me in the eye.

“They’re not in communication at all, are they? I mean, after everything that happened two months ago?”

“No! They’re not in communication. I’ve actually contacted a lawyer about getting the divorce paperwork drawn up.”

I froze with my fork halfway to my mouth. “Why are you contacting the lawyer, and not Larry?”

“Larry is really busy with class and auditions right now, so I’ve been doing the research. And also, it’s going to cost almost three thousand dollars, and that’s a lot of money to us these days.”

“You mean, he’s not even making an attempt to pay for his own divorce—you’re supposed to scrape this together?”

Ina scowled. I knew she would rather be the one asking the questions. She was never in the mood to be interrogated about Larry. “You know,” she said, measuring her words, “I would think you, of all people, would be a little more understanding.”

I exhaled. Now I felt bad. “Okay, I’ll lay off Larry. We’ll just beat up on Dave for now. Deal?”

Ina smiled. “Deal.”

Driving home from lunch, I wondered if I was predisposed to being slightly whacked when it came to trust issues and men. I had my mom’s roomy hips; maybe I’d inherited other unpleasantness from her. I remembered my mom sitting me down in our family room when I was eleven, clenching and unclenching her hands while she carefully tried to explain to me that she and my father were getting divorced.

I had been away at camp for a week, and the two of them, as well as the rest of the family, knew this was happening, but they’d kept it from me because they thought I was too young to handle the news while away from home. My first awkward weekend of visitation with my dad, I sat silently in the car, hoping he would explain what had happened. But Dad could never go that deep. “You know, it’s been hard with your mother and me,” he began. “We were married just out of high school.”