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thing to me nine years ago when he’d interviewed me, a senior at the university. The lab hadn’t even been in existence then, Will himself having been at the university only a year. He’d had more hair then, but wore the same oxford button-down and gray corduroys.
    â€œCan you handle rabbits?” he had asked, and I remember I had looked past him to the window behind him, the shade up, heat shimmering in waves from the radiator beneath the window so thatthe snowflakes outside seemed to dance even more, hang an instant longer before falling to the ground. I remember thinking that rabbits were nothing to handle. Timid, stupid creatures.
    â€œHandle rabbits,” he had said again. “That’s not as easy as it sounds, sweetheart. You don’t go in every morning and sweep little rabbit turds out from beneath a cage. That’s not what I mean. We’ve got flunky grad students to do that kind of shit. Hah.” He had laughed, and then I had laughed, too, just to be polite, all this time ready for him to ask a single question of my training, my course work, my psych background, any one question that might undo me and expose me to be what I knew I was: only a girl with no real training other than her psych courses. A girl who knew nothing about neuroscience and behavior, but who needed a job. I waited for him to ask one single question that might make me fall apart, show me to know, really, nothing.
    But no such question came. Instead Will had leaned forward in his chair, that same squeak in my ears. He had put his hands on the table, reached into the mass of papers, and pulled out a memo pad. He wrote on it, then handed it across to me. I held it in my hands, my hands trembling, and read it.
    1. Running rabbits
    2. Stereotaxic surgery and atlas
    3. Perfusion
    4. Staining, mounting
    I could still remember that list now. It had been foreign to me then, merely procedures read about in textbooks. Now they were routine.
    â€œWhen you’re looking for a house,” Will started in, and I looked at Sandra.
    â€œHere we go,” I said.
    She said, “I asked for it.”
    Will ignored us. “You want to make sure you get a dry basement. Check out the basement first. That’s the most important thing you can find in a house, a dry basement.” I could tell by his eyes, and how they were beginning to crease closed, that soon he would be lapsing into the next state beyond words of wisdom, when he wouldbegin to tell stories of either his first or second marriage. “It was our first house,” he went on, leaning even farther back in his chair, his eyes closed to near slits, “that we lost hundreds of dollars in water damage. Books. Books, I remember.”
    â€œWill,” I said. Someone had to stop him. “For one thing, I don’t even know if the place has a basement. More than likely just a crawl space down below. But if it does have a basement, you can be sure we’ll check to make sure it’s dry.”
    Sandra said, “I’ll vouch for her. She’s responsible. Dry basements have always been tops on her list. I know it.”
    He opened his eyes, leaned forward in the chair, and brought his hands from behind his head without looking at us. He tore the sheet from the pad and handed it to me.
    I took it from him, and he said, “I don’t know why I put up with this. I don’t.”
    â€œBecause,” Sandra said, and sat up in her chair, “we do good work. We do damn fine work, and that’s why we’re working for you.”
    The list in my hand, I looked across at her and could see she was serious. Because, I knew, she was right.
    But Will only did what we expected him to do: he shrugged, still not looking at us, and simply waved us off. Slowly Sandra and I stood, still holding our coffee mugs. His mug sat On the middle of his table, there on a stack of papers, and I said on my way out, “You be careful with that coffee,