“ ‘Piss down your throat if your guts were on fire’?”

“It’s a colloquialism. Jesus, Tom, it’s not supposed to be funny!”

“Barbara would have loved it.”

Barbara would have repeated it for weeks. Once, during a phone call, Tony had described the weather as “cold as the tits on a brass monkey.” Barbara laughed so hard she had to pass Tom the receiver. Tom explained patiently that she’d swallowed her gum.

But Tony wasn’t amused. He wiped his mouth and slapped the napkin down on the table. “If you want this job you’d better think a little more about your future and a little less about your hippy-dippy ex-wife, all right?”

Tom flushed. “She wasn’t—”

“No! Spare me the impassioned defense. She’s the one who ran off with her twenty-year-old boyfriend. She doesn’t deserve your loyalty and you sure as shit don’t owe it to her.”

“Tony,” Loreen said. Her tone was pleading. Please, not here.

Barry, the five-year-old, had wandered in from the back yard; he stood with one peanut butter-encrusted hand on the armoire and gazed at the adults with rapt, solemn interest.

Tom desperately wanted to be able to deliver an answer— something fierce and final-—and was shocked to discover he couldn’t produce one.

“It’s a new world,” Tony said. “Get used to it.”

“I’ll serve the dessert,” Loreen said.

After dinner Tony went off to tuck in Barry and read him a story. Tricia was already asleep in her crib, and Tom sat with Loreen in the cooling kitchen. He offered to help with the dishes but his sister-in-law shooed him away: “I’m just rinsing them for later.” So he sat at the big butcher-block table and peered through the window toward the dark water of the bay, where pleasure-boat lights bobbed in the swell.