The dog came in and sniffed her smooth golden legs while she stared up at the ceiling through greenish-pinkish makeup I’d never seen before.
She was fifteen, and tanned, because she swam on a team that practiced outdoors all winter in a heated pool. And even though it was cold and rainy and the middle of December, Rachel was wearing a tank top, a pink-and-white miniskirt, yellow platform sneakers, and a little furry gray jacket. They’d ridden their bikes home from school. We referred to this flopping-down-anywhere thing she sometimes did as “floor time.” Like our Labor Day block party, which featured beer pong and a spoon race, the cookie party made the world feel smaller and saner, and I was happy to have Rachel safely at home, and Brendan in the doorway, looking down at her with a stupid expression. I felt protected by the holiday, and by this baking and the neighborly union to come. I was examining the test cookie in the light, by a window that overlooked a row of back yards, while listening to Christmas music and wondering when to start dinner.
In the spring, we got vaccinated, and, in the fall, they went back to school and the office. My wife was either the customer or the boss: she and our daughter came first, and everything hinged on nobody being mad at me. I was like a housekeeper who folded underpants and got laid. I lived in a little cage now, which I’d built for myself, and I was comfortable in it. Before the TV show, I’d been a serious writer with big ambitions, but supporting a family was a whole other thing. My wife, Monica, moved her practice online, and I’d hear her down in the basement, not the words or even the tone so much as the endlessness of it, with her patients onscreen, in states of dislocation and despair, as she put in more hours than she had in her entire life. I figured out how to vacuum inside the radiator, and at night I’d close my eyes and see the top rack of the dishwasher. I did the shopping and the driving and the cleaning. When he fired me, I came home, and a few months later the pandemic hit.
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