The Smart One

Chapter 9





The people at Proof Perfect (or “PP,” as they affectionately called themselves) took themselves very seriously. They wrote each other e-mails that said things like, “As we discussed,” and “FYI,” and “Per our earlier conversation,” and “Loop me in.” It was as if they’d all just read a book on office jargon and were in a competition to see who could use the most terms in one day.

People walked quickly, as if they couldn’t waste a second (not one second!) by walking at a regular speed, and so they raced from their offices to the restroom, and back again, presumably to continue their proofreading. As they passed each other in the halls, they often called out to each other, “Shoot me an e-mail,” because wasting time to stop and talk was clearly not an option.

Sometimes it was funny and sometimes it made Claire a little sad to watch them. They all seemed to have just discovered Microsoft Outlook meeting invitations and they sent them to each other for everything—weekly meetings, morning coffee breaks, birthday celebrations in the break room. It was the cause of many a scuffle when someone chose not to respond to an invite.

One of the women that Claire assisted, Leslie, called her anywhere from seven to ten times a day. She mostly called her Amanda, even though Claire was certain that she knew her name and remembered that Amanda was on maternity leave. Claire answered to it, figuring it was Leslie’s way of trying to tell her that she was very important and couldn’t be bothered to remember everyone’s name.

The job was easier than Claire had imagined. It was also a lot more boring. She mostly just sat around and waited for someone to ask her to Xerox something or for the phone to ring. If Claire had had any desire to write a book or a screenplay, this would have been the perfect opportunity. She could have sat all day and typed, mostly uninterrupted. But she had no such desire, and so instead she played solitaire, and perused cooking sites for recipes. Sometimes, she added up how much she was earning each day, and how much closer she was to paying down her credit cards. That was usually the most exciting part of her day.

AT HOME, MARTHA KEPT SAYING, “It’s good timing that you moved home now, since I’ll probably be buying a place soon.” Martha had been talking about buying a place for years now, so Claire didn’t pay much attention to her.

Each morning, Claire got up and was in the shower by seven, in order to beat Martha, who took forever in the bathroom. The two of them still often ended up in there at the same time, brushing their teeth or putting on their makeup, which made it feel like they were in high school again. Claire left the house around eight thirty and then was home by six, where she immediately changed into pajamas, or headed over to Lainie’s to drink wine. It was one or the other.

The first time that she came back late from Lainie’s, Weezy started to say something about coming home at a regular hour, and wanting to know where Claire was. While she talked, Claire just stood and stared at her and finally said, “Mom, I’m almost thirty. This isn’t going to work.”

Weezy let out a little laugh then, and looked just a touch embarrassed, as if she’d actually forgotten how old Claire was. “I guess it’s hard to get used to you living here as an adult,” she said. But then she made Claire promise that she would still just leave a message so that they knew where she was. Claire was too tired to protest, so she agreed. “Just Twitter me,” Weezy said, by which she meant send a text.

They ate dinner together every night, and Martha talked about her new job, Will talked about his students, Weezy asked Martha about nursing, and Claire tried to figure out how she’d ended up there. After a week of the same routine, Claire felt like she was right back in high school. Or jail.

The other thing about living at home (which Claire had forgotten) was that all of a sudden, she was expected to be so many places, to attend so many random things—Lainie’s niece’s baptism, lunch with Weezy’s cousins, dinner with Will’s professor friends. When she tried to back out of anything, they would all just shake their heads. “You’re here,” they’d say, as if that explained it. As if her presence back in the state of Pennsylvania required her to participate in everything.

She even got roped into going to a wake for the father of an old high school friend. “I haven’t seen Kelly in, like, six years,” she said, but Lainie wouldn’t hear of it.

“You have to go,” she said. “It’s Kelly’s dad.”

And just like that, Claire was in the car with Lainie and Martha (who’d taken a math class with Kelly in high school) and they all stood in line at the wake, which was incredibly crowded, and then talked to Kelly’s mom, who looked really drugged up, hugged Kelly, and then stood and looked at the dead body at the front of the room.

“Doesn’t he look great?” Kelly’s mom said.

No, he didn’t look great. He looked dead. Kelly’s mom grabbed Claire’s hand, although Claire was pretty sure that she didn’t know who she was. Lainie, meanwhile, was nodding and telling stories and saying gracious things, like she was an expert at wakes now.

Claire hated wakes. It was a bizarre tradition to stand around and look at a corpse. And so, as soon as she could, Claire excused herself and walked outside and around the corner of the building, where she almost ran right into Fran Angelo, leaning against the wall, his head tilted back and his eyes closed as he smoked a cigarette.

For a second, Claire wondered what he was doing there. Was everyone in town required to go to this thing? Then she remembered that he was related to Kelly somehow, a cousin or a second cousin or something like that.

“Hey,” Claire said. He opened his eyes, but didn’t look all that surprised to see her, like he’d been waiting for someone to come find him. He smiled at her and she looked at the ground.

“Hey,” he said. “What’s going on?”

“Not much. Just, you know.” Claire motioned toward the wall of the funeral home, like that explained everything. She shifted from one leg to the other, hating that he made her feel like she was fifteen again.

“I haven’t gone in yet,” Fran said. “I hate wakes.”

“Me too. I was just thinking the exact same thing.”

“Do you want a cigarette?” He shook the pack and held it out to her.

“I don’t really smoke anymore,” she said. “But sure.” She didn’t bother to explain that she’d never really smoked in the first place, except when she was drunk and sometimes in college if she was bored. But now seemed like an appropriate time to smoke, and so she took one out of the pack and leaned forward to let Fran light it. She remembered parties in high school, clumps of teenagers standing around a backyard, smoking and looking bored. She inhaled and felt dizzy almost immediately. Fran smoked Reds, which seemed like a serious, old-man cigarette. He would probably smoke for the rest of his life.

“I was going to call you to hang out,” Fran said, “but then I realized I never got your number the other day.”

“Oh really?” Claire said. She sounded like an idiot. A teenage idiot.

“Yeah, we should get together.” He reached into his pocket, pulled his phone out and handed it to Claire.

“So, should I put my number in?” she asked. He nodded and she typed herself into Fran Angelo’s phone.

“I should probably go in, I guess.” He closed his eyes and leaned his head back, aiming his face at the sky. Claire remembered him in high school, how he was always tilting his face up like that to drop Visine into his eyes, like he was stoned or wanted people to think he was.

“Okay,” Claire said. “I’ll see you.”

Fran opened his eyes and looked at her. “I’ll call you,” he said. He walked back toward the front door of the funeral home, and left Claire standing there, holding her still-burning cigarette.

Lainie came out of the funeral home as Fran was going in. Claire walked around the corner of the building and called out to Lainie.

“Hey,” Lainie said. “I wasn’t sure where you went. Are you smoking?”

“Not really,” Claire said. She dropped the cigarette on the ground. “Are you ready?”

“Yeah. We just have to wait for Martha.”

“What’s she doing in there? Making plans to go to the burial with the family?”

“She’s just saying good-bye to a couple people. What were you doing out here anyway?”

“Nothing. I just didn’t want to be in there anymore. I hate wakes.”

“I don’t think anyone really likes them,” Lainie said.

“Martha,” Claire said. “I think Martha likes them.”

FRAN CALLED CLAIRE TWO DAYS LATER and invited her over. She’d lost her breath for a second when she heard his voice on the phone, and it was hard to recover and answer him when he said simply, “Want to hang out?”

“Sure,” Claire said. And then, “Sorry, I’m out of breath. I just got back from a run.”

“Cool,” Fran said.

Fran was living in the basement of his parents’ house. It looked just as she’d imagined it would. There were two old red-plaid couches that were scratchy when you sat on them, a banged-up coffee table, wall-to-wall brown carpeting, and a queen-sized bed in the corner. There was a small bathroom down there with a stand-up shower, a tiny refrigerator (the kind that kids keep in their dorm room), and a flimsy-looking desk with the oldest computer Claire had ever seen on it. In an adjoining room were the washer and dryer, and every so often, a whiff of dryer-sheet–smelling air would come drifting out, which was always surprising and pleasant.

“Here it is,” Fran said when she walked down there. “My new place.”

“It’s nice,” Claire said. She knew that since she was living in her parents’ house at the moment, she didn’t have a lot of room to judge, but it seemed worse that Fran was in the basement. Like it was more permanent or something.

Claire’s friend Natalie had a brother who had lived in the basement for as long as she could remember. He was eight years older than they were, and by the time they were in high school, he was a permanent fixture in the basement of the Martin house. He smoked pot down there, and he and his parents seemed to have an agreement—as long as he sprayed air freshener and pretended that he wasn’t smoking, his parents would pretend that they didn’t notice the smell of weed drifting up to the kitchen.

When they were freshmen in high school, they were all in love with Dan Martin. They’d giggle when he came upstairs and talked to them, kept their makeup on when they slept over, just in case he was around. As they got older, they sometimes went down to the basement with him to hang out, and by the end of high school, they sometimes drank beers down there or even smoked a joint.

But by the time they graduated from college, Dan no longer seemed cute or even a little bit appealing. He was thirty then, and even though he was thin everywhere else, he had a gut that hung over his pants. They never went down to the basement to see him anymore, and when he came upstairs they didn’t giggle. He transformed into Natalie’s creepy older brother, who was sort of a perv, and everyone seemed to forget that they used to worship him. Even Natalie started rolling her eyes at him, calling him a loser, blaming her parents for letting him live there. “What a waste of life,” she used to say. “What a complete waste of a person.”

Claire sincerely hoped that Fran would not live in the basement forever, but as she looked around she heard Weezy saying, “It’s a trend, an epidemic.”

Fran told Claire that he’d let Liz keep their apartment, which was a loft on the edge of a trendy new neighborhood. “I didn’t want to stay there anyway,” he said. “She picked out all the furniture and decorated it. I didn’t want that place. It was full of fake posters and dream catchers.”

He got them both beers and they sat on the couch with the TV on, but they didn’t watch anything. Instead, he told her about Liz, who was a waitress and an artist who made jewelry that she sold at street fairs and some small boutiques.

“She thinks she’s going to make it,” Fran said. “She stays up half the night baking beads in a kiln that’s in the middle of the f*cking apartment, thinking that she’s really going to make it.” He took a sip of beer and sniffed. “I mean, her stuff’s good, don’t get me wrong. But how many people actually make it big designing jewelry, you know?”

“Probably not a lot,” Claire said.

“Yeah, exactly. I used to tell her I wanted the kiln out of there, and she’d freak, like me saying that I didn’t want a huge fire pit in the middle of our apartment was single-handedly killing her career. Like, because I didn’t want to live in a fire death trap, I wasn’t supporting her.”

Claire laughed, and he smiled at her. He got them each another beer, and they set the empty ones right on the coffee table in front of them.

“Doug used to sleep with his BlackBerry. And I don’t mean he had it by the side of the bed. He had it in the bed, right next to him, sometimes on the pillow like it was a little pet. No matter what time it went off, he’d read it and respond. Like he was so important that he couldn’t even wait a second, like someone would die if he didn’t answer them right away.”

Fran nodded like he understood. He was just as confident as he’d been in high school, which surprised her. She thought maybe time or the breakup would have taken something off of him, but it hadn’t. After their second beer, he got them each another, and when he sat back down, he put his hand on her upper thigh, just letting it rest there right next to the crotch of her jeans.

He didn’t move his hand, just started moving his fingers, drumming them. Then he started moving his thumb in circles on the top part of her thigh, and rubbed his fingers on her inner thigh, his pinky just sometimes brushing against her, lightly, until she couldn’t sit still.

He kept talking while he did this—about his job, his old apartment, what he missed about the neighborhood—just kept circling his fingers, as though he had no idea what he was doing, until she couldn’t listen to him anymore, and when he leaned over to kiss her, she turned to face him, straddling one of his thighs, moving back and forth, grinding against him, both of them making appreciative noises as they moved.

Later, as they lay in bed and sniffed the dryer-sheet air, Fran laughed. “What?” Claire asked.

“I’m just surprised, that’s all,” he said.

“Surprised at what?” She rolled away from him and sat up, holding the sheets in front of her and feeling very, very naked.

“At this. You were always so quiet in high school.”

“I wasn’t quiet,” Claire said.

“Well, you didn’t talk to me.” He stretched his arms above him.

“I talked to you. We hooked up, remember?” She felt like digging her nails into his arm until it hurt.

“I remember,” he said. “Don’t get so worked up.”

“I’m not worked up.”

“Okay,” he said. He put his face next to her and started to kiss her, then pulled her on top of him. He still tasted like tobacco and cinnamon gum, but his face felt different now. He had stubble that seemed harder, more grown up. As they kissed, she was aware of all of this, and still had time to think, This is a dumb move.

LAINIE AND BRIAN HAD SEX freshman year of high school, and when Lainie told her about it, Claire tried to listen, but she was so far away from it, so far from that actually happening to her, that it didn’t make much sense. It was like somebody telling you about a safari that they went on; you understood why they were excited, but you couldn’t actually imagine a giraffe coming up and licking your hand, and so you just nodded and smiled.

After that happened, Lainie joined the Group of Girls Who Have Sex With Their Boyfriends. It was like a club. Claire never totally understood how they all identified one another, but somehow girls from all different groups of friends would smile knowingly at each other during the health portion of gym class, nod at each other in the hallways. Sometimes, Claire would walk into the bathroom at school and find Lainie whispering with Margie Schuller and Tracy King, two girls they weren’t even friends with, and she knew without asking what the three of them were talking about.

When Claire finally had sex, her junior year in college, she didn’t tell Lainie right away. She didn’t want Lainie to welcome her into the club, like she was the president, like she owned sex because she’d done it first.

And even now, as she told Lainie about Fran, it was strangely uncomfortable. Claire just blurted it out, knowing that Lainie would be hurt if she didn’t tell her.

“You’re sleeping with Fran?” Lainie asked her.

“Not sleeping,” Claire explained. “Slept. Once.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I’m telling you right now. What did you want me to do? Call you from his bed?”

“I can’t believe this.”

“I sort of can’t either.”

“I do not see you guys together,” Lainie said.

“Yeah, I know, right?” Claire was offended, but tried not to show it.

“So, do you think you’ll see him again?”

“Who knows? Probably not,” Claire said.

But Fran called her the next day, as she thought he would, and they saw each other that night. And then the next night and the one after that.

“It’s fun,” she said to Lainie, as if that explained it all.

The truth was that most of the time when they were together, they talked about Doug and Liz, telling stories and trading information with a sense of urgency, like the faster they could get it all out of their heads, the sooner they’d be back to normal. They talked about them when they were still in bed together, often when they were still naked. Claire wondered what Doug and Liz were doing at that moment, and she thought that it would have been nice if they could have been together, doing the same thing.

They were a good balance; Fran was angrier than she was, and Claire suspected he was a little more heartbroken too. Claire was mostly confused and embarrassed, and Fran was neither of these things, so it seemed to work out well. Claire never minded when Fran talked about Liz, even when she didn’t have clothes on. She understood what was happening here, that they were trying to get rid of their memories, trying to figure out new bodies to forget the old ones.

Claire waited to come to her senses, waited for her grown-up self to show up and tell her to cut it out, to tell her that Fran Angelo was not who she should be spending time with. But every time he called, she happily went over there, ran down the steps to the basement as quickly as she could, to get to Fran Angelo and his dryer-sheet–scented room.

CLAIRE HAD BEEN DREADING THIS weekend for a long time. All of her high school friends were getting together, “for a reunion,” they kept saying, like they didn’t all see each other a few times a year at least.

Their friend Jackie was the one that demanded this reunion happen. “I miss you girls,” she kept saying. “Come to my house and I’ll send the kids to my mom’s and we’ll have a GNI.”

“A GNI?” Claire asked.

“Girls’ Night In,” Lainie said.

“It sounds like an STD,” Claire said.

They suspected Jackie just wanted to show off her new house, but for some reason they all still agreed to go to Red Bank, New Jersey, for the weekend. Claire, Lainie, and their friend Paula drove from Philly, and their friends Katherine, Clancy, and Erin came from New York.

Paula was recently engaged, and on the drive down there, every time she talked about the wedding, she turned to Claire and said, “Sorry.”

“I’m fine,” Claire said. “Really, you can talk about your wedding.” She was already planning to drink as much wine as she could.

“I can’t believe we’re going to Jackie’s,” Claire said. “We could have at least gone somewhere fun. Why did we agree to go there again?”

Lainie just shrugged. They’d all been friends with Jackie in junior high, mostly because they were scared of her. Jackie was the queen of three-way calling, orchestrating one girl to stay silent, while she encouraged another unsuspecting girl to rip the listener to shreds, and then she’d announce the secret guest like she was a talk show host. She was like an evil preteen Oprah.

In seventh grade, Jackie left fake notes in Claire’s locker, signed from Luke, the boy in the class that they all loved. It still made Claire’s face burn to remember the excitement she felt when she found those notes, how she hoped they were real, as if any seventh-grade boy would ever declare his love for a girl on a piece of notebook paper and stuff it in her locker.

Jackie confronted Claire at a sleepover, announcing to everyone that the notes were fake. “You believed it, though,” she said to Claire. “I saw your face and I know you believed it.”

“I did not,” Claire said. It still remained one of the worst nights of her life, as she found out that every one of her friends had known that Jackie was leaving the notes, including Lainie, who cried later and apologized.

“I wanted to tell you,” she said. “But she told me that she’d get me if I did.”

To distract Jackie from Luke and the fake notes, Claire suggested that they TP Molly Morrisey’s house. “You know,” she told Jackie, “she said you were the fifteenth-prettiest girl in our class. The only one lower than you was Lacey. And she said it was because she thought you were fat.”

Claire was still ashamed that she’d thrown Molly under the bus like that. But looking back, she realized it was normal to crack under a regime of terror. She was just trying to survive.

In high school, Jackie had gone through a klepto phase. She had piles of bras and underwear in her room with the tags still on them that she’d stolen from Victoria’s Secret. “It’s so easy,” she told them. “You just bring a bunch of stuff to try on in the dressing room, and then you wear it out underneath your clothes.”

Sometimes if she grabbed the wrong size or was simply feeling generous, she’d dole the stuff out to the girls. Claire never wanted to take any of it, since it felt like stealing once removed, but Lainie didn’t seem to have a problem with it. “What?” she’d always say. “It’s not like we stole it.”

The fact that they’d lived with Jackie as their evil ruler for all of junior high was hard to believe. Harder to believe was that they stayed friends with her throughout high school, where her power was diminished a little bit when it became clear (as Molly Morrisey so accurately pointed out) that she wasn’t very pretty; but whatever power she lost, she made up for by always being the one to take beer to parties in her backpack, to be unafraid to talk to boys. She was not to be trusted.

Jackie had married a boy from high school, Mike Albert, who was a roundish guy with glasses and a fuzzy stare. He’d been friends with all the cool kids, even if he was a little on the periphery of the group, and Claire figured that this was very important to Jackie, that she had probably bullied him into dating and then marrying her.

As they pulled into the driveway at Jackie’s house, Claire said, “I can’t believe we agreed to this.”

“Of course you can,” Lainie said. She turned off the car and the three of them sat there for a moment. “Come on, we’ll get drunk and it won’t be so bad.”

“I CAN’T BELIEVE THAT I HAVE two under two,” Jackie said. It was probably the twentieth time she’d said it, but who was keeping track? She sounded so pleased with herself that she almost couldn’t stay seated.

“I’m so glad we’re doing this,” Jackie said. “And I’m so glad you guys get to see my house. Don’t you love it?”

The girls just nodded and looked around. Clancy was eight months pregnant and was sitting so far back on the couch that it looked like she’d never be able to sit up again. Claire didn’t envy her, having to stay sober this weekend. Clancy and her husband had just moved to Long Island. “It’s really boring,” she answered, when they asked her how it was. “I mean, I know we had to do it. We were running out of space and we would have had to put the baby in a drawer or something, but still. You can’t order any takeout past like eight thirty, and it’s just really boring.”

Erin and her boyfriend, James, had just bought a new place in Brooklyn. She showed them all pictures of the huge new loft, and when she left the room, Jackie leaned forward. “What does James do?” she asked. “I mean, I know it’s just an apartment, but still it’s really nice.” Jackie was easily threatened. “I mean, I’d sooner die than live in Brooklyn. There’s a lot of immigrants there, you know. And gangs. It’s really dangerous.” Claire was almost positive that Jackie had never been to Brooklyn.

Jackie poured them all some more of the deep yellow Chardonnay from the huge bottle, unaware that they were all looking at each other. They’d begun to notice in the past few years that Jackie was definitely racist. At first, they’d thought she was just a little clueless, maybe had some bad timing or judgment with her jokes. But her comments kept getting harsher and way more embarrassing. “Don’t be a Jew,” she’d say, when someone tried to itemize a restaurant bill.

“Even my grandmother wouldn’t say that,” Claire whispered.

“Bets would totally say that,” Lainie whispered back.

“Okay, fine, but she’s like a hundred years old.”

They all took large gulps of the wine, which was tangy and bordered on unpleasant, but thankfully seemed to go down easier the more you drank. When Jackie went into the kitchen to get another bottle, Katherine picked up the empty one and said, “I think my great-aunt Janice drinks this. And she’s, like, the world’s cheapest person.”

The weekend went slowly. The next day, as they walked around the neighborhood and down a bike path, Jackie made an announcement. “We’ve decided to teach Emma to sign,” she said, like they’d all been waiting for this news about her daughter. “We’ve all read the reports about its possibly delaying language. But Mike and I just really believe that it’s positive, you know. We really think it will help her.”

No one said anything, but Jackie didn’t seem to notice. She was so sure that everyone was dying to know the details of her life that it probably never occurred to her that she could possibly be boring them.

Later that night, they ordered pizza and drank more wine. Erin suggested going out for dinner, but that idea was quickly shot down by Jackie. “It’s so cozy in the house,” she’d said. “Let’s just stay here.”

They drank more wine that night than they had the night before. Katherine told them all how she had broken up with her latest boyfriend, Jed, a computer programmer of some sort that looked like he really wanted to be a hipster, but was just a little off.

“What happened?” Claire asked.

Katherine shrugged. “I read his e-mails and found out that he’d been posting online ads for meeting men,” she said. Lainie choked on her wine and started coughing. Erin leaned over and patted her on the back. “It happens sometimes, you know?”

Jackie nodded knowingly. “That’s why you should always read your boyfriend’s e-mails,” she said.

“Seriously?” Clancy asked. “That’s seriously what you just took from that story?”

Katherine sighed and drank her wine. She’d cut her hair short and dyed it blond. She looked tired, like she’d given up fighting. Even when she’d climbed out of Clancy’s car the day before, it had seemed like she didn’t want to be there but didn’t have the energy to resist.

“So,” Jackie said, turning to Claire. “I heard you and Fran Angelo have a little thing going on.”

Claire turned to Lainie, who shook her head just a little, meaning that she hadn’t said anything. “Who told you that?” Claire asked.

“I have my sources,” Jackie said.

“It’s nothing,” Claire said. “Really.”

Jackie let it drop, and Claire was relieved. But on the ride home, she was angry. “What are we doing still hanging out with her?” she’d yelled at Lainie and Paula in the car. “She’s disgusting. I’m done. I’m serious, I’m ashamed of myself that I even spent this much time with her. What does that say about us? What is wrong with us?”

Paula and Lainie had muttered in agreement, which made Claire even angrier. She was silent the rest of the way home, arms crossed, hating herself for not cutting off all contact with Jackie when they were twelve. What was wrong with her? Why was she still putting herself in situations where she was around this person? Jackie was nothing but bad energy. She was pure evil. And how on earth had she ended up married and living in a house with two kids? How had she tricked people into not seeing that she was horrible?

It seemed to Claire that Jackie was a symbol for everything that had ever gone wrong in her life since junior high. She couldn’t stand up for herself then and it had probably just spiraled from there.

FRAN WAS SITTING ON THE COUCH in the basement playing video games when Claire walked in. “How was your weekend?” he asked. He didn’t look away from the TV, or pause the game.

“It was fine,” she said. “Sort of boring. We just stayed at Jackie’s house mostly.”

“Oh yeah? Did you see Mike?”

“No. Jackie made him leave for the weekend.”

“Jackie was always sort of a beast,” he said. “I don’t know what he was thinking.” Claire felt better.

At least sitting in the basement with Fran, she didn’t feel like the messed-up one. Even around Katherine and her boyfriend that dabbled in men, Claire felt like she was the one that was a disaster. It was only here, on the red-plaid couch, that she felt like things weren’t totally falling apart. She sat and watched Fran play his game.

“Remember what video games looked like when we were little?” Claire asked. “The people were basically just little geometric shapes. You could barely see them. These look like real people.”

“I know,” Fran said. “It’s awesome.” He stood up and put his arms straight up in the air when the game was over, and Claire assumed that meant he’d won. “Want to watch a movie?” he asked her.

“Sure.” Claire sat with her arm resting against the back of the couch, her feet right at Fran’s thigh. She let him pick the movie. It was some story about gangsters or a fighter or something. It was mindless. She watched it without talking, just nodding whenever Fran said something.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Yeah, I’m fine.”

Fran picked up her foot in his hand and held it on his lap. He started running his fingers over her toes, pausing to hold each one for a second, before moving on to the next one.

“What are you doing?” Claire asked.

“I’m looking for the one that ate roast beef,” he said. He held on to her middle toe and squeezed it. “He’s my favorite.”

Claire leaned her head back and laughed, a big loud laugh that surprised her. She held her stomach and laughed until it hurt. Her whole body shook, and she laughed harder than she had in as long as she could remember.

“There we go,” Fran said. He patted her leg. “There we go.”