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the engine and engaged the parking brake. He knows she’s right. There is not a single injury that has befallen him—his broken wrist when they were nine, the fiery case of chicken pox that confined him to his bedroom for ten days the following year, every disfiguring sunburn, bubbling runny nose, and strawberry-skinned knee—that she has not suffered with him, either in actuality or in her heart. “Nicky wants to take me to another doctor.”
    â€œBut you’re fine now.”
    â€œI’m fine
for
now,” he corrects her.
    Althea chews a piece of her hair, a nervous habit that replaced the illicit thumb-sucking of her childhood but abated, mostly, when she joined the track team freshman year. It flares up when she’s sleep-deprived, overcaffeinated, or stuck in traffic. Watching her absently work the lock between her molars, he thinks—and not for the first time—that it’s a small miracle she hasn’t started smoking yet, and also a foregone conclusion that she will. She pulls her sketchbook back onto her lap.
    â€œWhat are you working on now?”
    She turns back to the present. “It’s a dead frog,” she says. “It’s good, right?”
    Her illustration of an ill-fated dissection frog is only half-finished, but rendered thus far in the eerie, Victorian style of old-fashioned anatomical drawings and vintage medical textbooks. She’s even drawn the thin silver pins stuck through the webbed feet to keep the creature stretched out and firmly in place. The skin of the belly has been sliced down the middle and peeled back to reveal the internal organs, which she’s labeled with Roman numerals. He studies the illustration for a long time.
    Oliver doesn’t see it coming, and the first thrown piece of popcorn catches him in the eye. Althea instigates as always, apparently too giddy with his return to allow his attention to stray from her for a moment. Things progress quickly until the contents of the bowl have been mashed equally into the carpet and her hair. From there they progress quicker still, until Oliver is facedown on the couch with a mouthful of damp upholstery, Althea’s knee digging into his kidneys, his arm twisted and yanked up so that his hand waves like a pale flag over his head. Her weight bears down on him ruthlessly, and when he tries to move, bottle rockets of pain whistle and pop inside his shoulder. They are yelling so loudly—
“Say Uncle!”
—
“Fuck you!”
—neither hears the door open at the top of the stairs.
    â€œAlthea, let him go,” her father says.
    Panting and reluctant, Althea stands up, picking popcorn out of her hair. She blows her bangs out of her face but says nothing, glaring in her father’s direction. Oliver knows this is one staring contest she isn’t going to win. As Garth comes down the stairs, a tumbler of scotch in his hand, he stoops to avoid cracking his head on the beams.
    Oliver’s impression of his best friend’s father was fully formed one summer night when Oliver and Althea were eight years old and Garth Carter taught them how to pitch a tent in the backyard. As they unrolled their sleeping bags, a skunk waddled out of the bushes and glanced absently in their direction. Petrified, the children collapsed to the ground, clutching each other, as if beset by a pack of feral dogs. Garth emerged from behind the tent, where he had been nailing the final stake into the ground, and restored himself to his full and considerable height. He clapped his hands together three times. The skunk turned and ran off into the night.
    â€œSkunks hate noise,” he had said. “You kids need to know things like that.”
    â€œSorry about the yelling,” Oliver says now, peeling his cheek from the sofa.
    Garth waves his glasses, shrugging to indicate how little he actually cares. “I can hardly hear anything from my study. I just wanted to visit. Say