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the question, young man," said Dad. "You will not be drinking beer."
    I already had sampled alcohol in my time, of course, but I simply nodded.
    "I don't miss him," said Natalie. "He was a creep."
    Mom slapped Natalie, and said, "Silence, young lady. I can't help but feel responsible. What if it was me? My cooking? I should have considered his dietary preferences more carefully. He was just being polite. That fried chicken was too rough for him."
    "Don't you dare blame yourself, Alice," said Dad. "That chicken's been passed down through your family for generations. It's delicious, and that's the last word on it. No, it was simply Earth life in general. It doesn't suit everyone."
    "That's true," I said. "But don't worry, Mom. We still love your food."
    Mom forged a smile on her lips. We ate in silence. Mom still looked kind of sad.

LET'S STAY TOGETHER

    I'd been calling for days. She finally picked up the phone.
    "What?" she said.
    "Hi, good to hear your voice. It's so good. It's been so long. It's been. It's –"
    "You need to stop calling me. It's over."
    "You say it is, but I don't know. Can we ever be sure? As long as we're still here. It's still possible. Anything's possible. We're still here."
    "I'm gonna change my number."
    "Don't do that, babe. Come on. Don't say that. Just see me. We can talk this out. It'll be like old times."
    "It's never going to be. Don't you get it? It's over. Over!"
    "Don't yell like that. That's unnecessary. Can we just meet? I'm a different man now."
    She didn't say anything for a while and I thought she'd hung up.
    "Where you living these days? Can I come over?"
    "No."
    "Then let's meet at Frank's. I haven't seen you there since you left."
    "Because I know you go there."
    "But I know you love their coffee. Don't let me keep you away. Just come by and have a cup –"
    "I'm seeing somebody."
    "No you're not. I know you. You're not. You can't be. It hasn't been a week. No."
    "I am. I'm not gonna meet you."
    "Just one cup of coffee and we can talk. Come on. Saturday. Ten a.m., all right? All right?"
    "I'll think about it."
    "Do that. But don't just think about it. Be there. It'll be so good. Like old times."
    "I'm seeing someone."
    "No, just be there."
    She hung up and I breathed a sigh of relief. She'd be by my side again. Soon.

    I got to Frank's early that Saturday and set up camp. Frank's always got crowded on Saturday mornings for brunch, and I thought somebody might pester me with a request for the empty chair, so I draped my sweater on it presumptively, buried my face in my Nabokov, and used my peripherals to keep an eye out for her. I ordered a rooibos tea and croissant, but left enough room for breakfast should she so desire. I was equally ready to depart to another establishment, ready in fact to spend the whole day with her visiting our favorite haunts if we hit it off again.
    As I waited, pretending to read (I could not read with so much energy boiling inside me, with my attention fixated on keeping an eye out for her), I saw across the street a girl and her uncaring mother sitting behind a bake sale table piled high with Girl Scout cookies, the girl similarly adorned with insignia like the boxes of sugary goodness. The girl had the defeated expression of a spinster who nobody wanted. This was the wrong location for such cookies. There was a Whole Foods around the corner. That crowd didn't want fat and sugar pounded in their face. And wasn't there an article about the money raised by those cookies? Doesn't it go to fund lobbyists? Something like that.
    I'm sure the girl knew none of this – though perhaps she did, and this abetted her sense of defeat, this masochistic choice for selling – but the look on her face said she would never sell a box of cookies for the rest of her life, that cookies were no longer wanted here, that cookies and the dietary plan of citizens hereabouts would no longer be integrated, by order of the governor. And yet she held on to the dream, the idea of