“You should simply enjoy the fact that he has a friend,” Roberta told him.

A few minutes later, when she turned out her light, Pete vaguely considered rolling over toward Roberta, who remained very attractive for a woman of forty-seven — pretty, slim, the gray in her hair sexy in a Disney villainess kind of way — but he didn’t know if he exactly wanted to have sex. The last three or four — yes, it was exactly four — times he’d made advances, Roberta had rejected him, and he didn’t know if he was up for the emotional trauma of five in a row. He might be awake half the night, pondering this rejection, wondering what it meant for their eighteen-year-old marriage. Alternatively, she might be interested, and he wasn’t entirely sure that would be a good thing either. In theory sex seemed like an excellent idea, but even at its most rushed it was a time-consuming business, and it was already after midnight. He had work to finish in the morning. Did he want to have sex, or did he want to have had sex already so not having sex could be something he didn’t have to ponder? As he turned over these ideas, Roberta began to snore in a low, grumbling rhythm and the decision was made for him.

It turned out that Roberta could not take Neil over to my house on Friday night. She was the program director of an oldies radio station, and a crisis had exploded across station management with shocking urgency. The station’s popular morning DJ announced he’d received a lucrative offer from a station in Baltimore, and Roberta had to attend an emergency meeting about how to confront this offer. Pete, who telecom-muted as a software engineer for the database company he’d been with in San Diego, had the flexible schedule, and he was the one who picked up all the parenting slack. On the way to my house, Neil slouched in the front seat, playing with the satellite radio, settling on some kind of shrill dirge-like music that left Pete feeling both anxious and depressed.