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heirloom chairs and told far too many ethnic jokes in the company of someone of that same ethnicity, and after each of these unconscious, unpremeditated bumblings, Anne Marie accused me of doing it intentionally. “This wasn’t an accident,” she’d say. “You did it on purpose.” And I always told her, “I didn’t! I don’t!” And she’d say, “There is no such thing as an accident.” And I’d say, “There is, there is!” But maybe there wasn’t. I could see what she was talking about, and Thomas, too.
    “I miss my parents so much,” Thomas said. “It’s been twenty years since you killed them, and I still miss them so fucking much.”
    “Oh, I know you do,” I told him. I was feeling empathy for him deep down in my gut, and his missing his parents made me miss mine, too, and in a way we were both orphans and in the same boat. “Hey, listen,” I said, “are you sure you don’t want a drink or something?” Because I was still thirsty from the lawn mowing, and besides, I was really starting to feel close to him and in his debt for doing what I’d done to his parents and his life, and would have gotten him anything he wanted.
    “No,” he said. And then: “Do you know what they did to me in school?”
    “Wait a minute,” I said. “Who? When did this happen? What school?” Because I need to know the specifics of a story if I’m going to care, I mean really care, about it. As a child I could never feel much for the three little pigs and their houses because I didn’t know whether the houses — straw, brick, or otherwise — were in a town or a city or a village, or whether that municipality had a name, and without one I just couldn’t bring myself to care.
    “This was at Williston Country Day,” Thomas said, “right after you killed my parents.” He said this slowly, as if I were somewhat slow myself and so I would get it all down and understand, which I appreciated. “The other kids, students, friends even, they made fun of my parents.”
    “You’re kidding me,” I said. “That’s awful, Thomas. Those were no friends.”
    “They were. They made fun of the way my parents died, you know, in bed.” He stumbled over these last words and was obviously still in a lot of pain and haunted by it, the poor guy.
    “For a long time,” he went on, “I was ashamed of them, hated them because of what they were doing when you killed them.”
    “That’s understandable.”
    “There was a girl in my class whose parents died in a car wreck,” he said. “They were both decapitated. I was jealous of her. For a long time, I wished my parents had died like that.”
    “Totally understandable,” I said.
    “For a long time,” he said, sucking in a big, wet breath, “I wanted to kill myself.”
    “Don’t say that, Thomas, don’t even think it,” I said. Again, I would have done anything for the guy. If he’d brought out the razor blades to slit his wrists, I would have ripped my shirt into bandages; if he’d had pills and swallowed them, I would have pumped his stomach, even without the proper know-how or medical equipment. I wanted to save him just like I wanted to save myself, I suppose. In this way I was like the mirror who wanted to save the guy looking into it and thus save the mirror image, too. It was a complicated emotional response, all right, and I’m not sure I understood it myself, which was how I knew it was complicated.
    “And when I didn’t want to kill myself,” Thomas said, looking at me from underneath his eyebrows, which were blond and thin, like his hair, “I wanted to kill you.”
    “Well,” I said, because I didn’t have a response to this except to say that I was glad he hadn’t. Killed me, that is.
    “Don’t worry,” he said, although he said this in a deep, dark tone of voice that belied his skinniness and suggested that maybe I should worry. “My shrink talked me out of killing you.”
    “You have a shrink?”
    “I’ve had a bunch.” Thomas said