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during the PMS argument about Mrs. Sparrow’s mother Marge who lived in Wauwatosa and called her daughter twice a day and with Christmas coming on she was good and weepy and remembering her late husband Mutt and how he loved his outdoor Christmas lights. He put them up around Halloween. Zipper lights, Santa dancing a hula with Frosty, Rudolph leading the Wise Men. A sign on the roof flashing Hal and then le and lu and yeah . Marge sat in her kitchen in the dark, the lights flashing outside, and drank a little Bailey’s Irish Cream and wept for the old days.
    Fine. James liked Marge okay.
    He assumed it was PMS. It had a PMSsy feel to it. PMS hit Joyce harder than it did most women. She lay in the dark weeping and listening to music and in the throes of hormone poisoning, she worked herself up into a state and thought (or thought she thought) that James thought her mother’s Christmas lights were stupid and garish. He had no such opinion! He had been careful not to form an opinion. The lights simply were what they were. He knew that in times of deep toxic PMS, he should show endless patience and kindness, and that particular night she emerged red-eyed from her office and said, “I’ve decided that we don’t need to invite my mother here for the holidays. She’s weird and depressing and you get depressed enough by Christmas without my mother adding to the problem.” He knew he should have said: I love your mother and I enjoy seeing her—at Christmas or any other time. She is a dear and good woman. Let’s not talk about it now, darling. Let’s go to bed and I’ll hold you in my arms and kiss your neck.
    What he actually said was, “If that’s what you’d like, fine. Maybe she has other plans.”
    She said, “Well, that’s what you’d like, isn’t it?”
    “If that’s what you want, darling,” he said.
    She said, “I remember how irritated you got with her last year when she talked about how she couldn’t understand people objecting to Christmas trees in schools. You sat there, grinding your teeth.”
    “I didn’t grind my teeth, I simply disagreed with her on constitutional grounds.”
    “She has gone through so much and now she has her gluten problem . . .”
    “I know—”
    “To live your life knowing that if you should sit down next to someone who baked that morning, your throat will swell up and you have to find the emergency kit and before you can find it, maybe you’re on the floor, clutching at your throat and making strangled animal sounds and people are stepping around you and averting their eyes—”
    “Darling, invite your mother here if you want her to come.”
    And she broke down sobbing that she didn’t want her mother to come where she wasn’t wanted. He tried to reason with her. She said that she was not about to throw away her flesh and blood as if they were garbage. “My mother is seventy-eight, and I’m supposed to—what? throw her in the ditch? Because she’s an inconvenience? She’s my mom. And someday she’s not going to be there anymore and I’m gonna miss her so much. And I’m going to feel terrible that I never gave her a grandchild.” She blew her nose, Breaughhhh. “Oh James, is that why you refuse to give me a baby? The fear of heredity? That a baby would look like my mother?”
    And she ran sobbing into the bedroom and locked herself in the bathroom and when he tapped on the door and begged her to come out, she said she needed to be alone right now. And she emerged an hour later in her white bathrobe and apologized in a chill tone of voice and took a sleeping pill and went to sleep at 9 o’clock. It sort of put a damper on the week. But now that was over and they’d moved on, he thought, to post-PMS, and he was ready to go. The plane was ready. The bags were packed and lined up by the service elevator. The staff at Kuhikuhikapapa’u’maumau was awaiting their arrival. The sun was shining there. The mangoes and pineapple were picked. They should have