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simply been provided more opportunities to view him at a distance.
    “It’s so weird,” she said. “I don’t understand how I’ve been coming back all these years without the memories jumping out at me. Djuna and I used to play Monopoly, right here in the middle of this carpet. One time—this is embarrassing, okay?—we got in a terrible fight over ‘title deed.’ ”
    “Monopoly was practically a blood sport when I was a kid,” Huck said. “Those hotels were red for a reason.”
    Celia closed her eyes and pictured the slightly asymmetrical nose, the cowlick over the left temple, the eyes that shifted from brown to green depending on their mood—though, these days, Huck’s face came to Celia most often in profile, bathed in the blue glow of the television, or sunk into a recalcitrant sleep beyond reach of the morning sun.
    “Sure,” she continued, “but this fight wasn’t even about paying rent. Djuna was convinced it was pronounced
tittle
deed, and I knew it wasn’t. We screamed about it until she finally went home. I remember I blocked the front door because I didn’t want her to leave. I wanted to keep playing—I must have been winning—and finally Mommy came to the door and actually moved me aside so that Djuna could go. Later, after dinner, Djuna called to tell me that her mom said I was right. That it was
title
deed after all. I got the feeling Mrs. Pearson was on the phone along with her, making sure Djuna said it.”
    For a moment, they listened to each other breathe. Were she at home, they’d already be past the opening credits of a movie, Huck beside her on the couch but long gone.
    “Now it’s your turn to talk,” she said.
    “Everybody misses you,” Huck replied. “At dinner, Sylvie kept sniffing at your empty chair.”
    “What did you eat?”
    “Chili,” Huck said. “Not the crappy take-out kind from Ortega’s. I actually cooked.”
    She pictured him at the stove wielding the ancient wooden cooking spoon he wouldn’t let her throw away, the dogs waiting patiently behind him.
    “You’re not going to let them into bed with you, are you?” she asked.
    “Why, you jealous?”
    She laughed. “Just guarding your welfare. They’re going to be farting like crazy after all the cheese and beans I bet you fed them.”
    “Shit, I didn’t think of that.”
    “You might want to keep them away during your nightly ritual. The flame might set off an explosion.”
    “They must still be digesting,” Huck said, “because we all survived intact.”
    She heard it now, the slightly muted tone to his voice, like there was a bubble caught in his throat. She’d tried getting stoned with Huck, but even his connoisseurship hadn’t saved her from feeling stupid and slightly paranoid. Sativa or indica, white widow or skunk, it all required her to loosen her grip on something she preferred to hold tight. Her acceptance of Huck’s habit had belonged to the earliest phases of her falling in love. It felt nonnegotiable, part of the unwritten contract of their coupling, but it was impossible not to notice that whatshe used to liken to her mother’s nightly glass of wine had lately become more like a cocktail before and after dinner.
    “Did you set your alarm?” Celia asked. The first morning Huck overslept, he’d been late to school. She’d found him still buried beneath the covers, slack-mouthed and softly snoring over the clock radio when he should have been dressed, half-breakfasted, and heading out the door. The next morning, she’d intervened early enough that by eating in the car he had made it to school before the first bell. After the third day, she replaced her wake-up kiss with his name pronounced as if it were part of a larger language lesson: bed, pillow, blanket, Huck. Neither sympathetic nor accusatory, it seemed to pierce the veil of his sleep more effectively than an alarm ever could. On the fourteenth day Huck overslept, Celia decided to stop counting.
    “I did,” he said.