He feels like he has to double-check. Hospitals all have satellite campuses these days.

“Are you talking about the Cleveland Clinic in…Cleveland?” he asks.

Louisa’s head bobs and he notices her grip on Anna’s hand tighten. “Yes, Baker,” she says. It’s probably not her intent to speak to him like he’s a moron but that’s pretty much what she’s doing. “We’re relocating to Cleveland.”

“Not with Floyd,” Baker says. “You aren’t taking my son to Cleveland.”

“That’s what we wanted to talk to you about,” Anna says. “There’s more than one way to look at this.”

“Oh, really,” Baker says. He runs his eyes along the horseshoe to the opposite side, hoping that he will see his four friends eating amphibians. He needs them now because it’s becoming clear that this is an ambush. Anna and Louisa have accepted positions at the Cleveland Clinic. They’re moving to Cleveland, Ohio!

“Yes, really,” Anna says. The server arrives with Anna’s and Louisa’s Descendants (yams) and Baker’s Turtlenecks and Do-Rags, which appears to be a crab dish (not actual turtles’ necks). Louisa and Anna dig in, but Baker can’t even remember how to use his cutlery. “Our first choice would be for you and Floyd to come to Cleveland.”

“What?” Baker says.

“You can do your job from anywhere,” Anna says. “You don’t have to be in Houston.”

“But…we have a house, Floyd has school, we have friends in Houston. A community. A life.”

Anna scrapes yams out of the bowl. “The deepest roots we have in Houston are mine, at the hospital. And I’m willing to pull those up for this opportunity.”

Baker stares at his crab, fervently wishing that Wendy, Becky, Debbie, and Ellen were here so he could inform them that his friendship with them is, according to Anna, shallow—or at least, not as deep as Anna’s career. The woman is so cold, so dispassionate, Baker can’t believe he ever decided to marry her. Good luck to Louisa!

“You and Louisa go to Cleveland,” Baker says. “Floyd and I will stay here. I’ll send him up to you on his vacations.”

“That’s our third choice,” Louisa says. “A distant third, because we’d obviously like to remain a cohesive family unit.” Baker very much resents her chiming in at all. She stole Baker’s wife and now she’s dragging her to Ohio. It’s clear that Louisa is maintaining some kind of utopian vision of the three of them as the parents in this “cohesive family unit,” with Anna and Louisa as the breadwinners and Baker as Floyd’s primary caregiver. “But we want to keep the transition as harmonious as possible, for Floyd’s sake. So we can try that option for the first year if you insist upon it. You and Floyd stay here and we’ll set up a realistic visitation schedule—holidays and summers.”