Sally gave me that sideways look she never gave anyone else. She said, “Jenny. Have you been—you know—smoking that stuff?” She never would call boom or any drugs by their right names, it was always that stuff, and it used to drive me mad. I said, “No, I haven’t,” which happened to be true that afternoon. I said, “I was making a joke, for God’s sake. I don’t have to be booted to make jokes. Give me a break, all right?”

On any other day, we’d probably have gotten into a whole big fight over it, a dumb thing like that, and wound up with both of us hiding out in our rooms, too pissed and upset to eat dinner. We used to have a joke about the Gluckstein Diet—stay on it for two months and lose twenty pounds and your family. But this time Sally just put her head on one side and smiled at me, and then suddenly her eyes got huge and filled up, and she said, “Jenny, Jenny, Evan’s asked me to marry him.”

Well, it wasn’t as if I hadn’t been practicing for it. I can still close my eyes and see myself, lying in bed every night that whole year, holding Mister Cat and visualizing how she’d be when she told me, and how she’d expect me to be. Sometimes I’d see myself being so sweet and so happy for her, I’d never have gotten through it without puking; other times I thought I’d probably cry a little, and hug her, and ask if I could still call Norris “Daddy,” which I haven’t called him since I was three. And on the bad nights I’d plan to say something like, well, that’s cool, only it doesn’t matter to me one way or the other, because I’m off to Los Angeles to be a homeless person. Or a movie director, or a really famous call girl. I varied that one a lot.

But when it actually happened, I just looked at her and said, “Oh.” I didn’t even say it, exactly, it just came out—it wasn’t a word, it wasn’t anything, but it was what came out, after all that imagining. “Oh.” The story of my life.