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room. He was gone so long that she stopped brushing her hair and went to look for him. He was seated in the wingback armchair, staring into space. The skates were at his feet. He glanced briefly in her direction. “They’re Jon’s, right?”
She nodded, but moved no closer.
He shook his head slowly, a thin smile on his face. “Jesus God,” he said quietly. He brushed a piece of imaginary lint off the arm of the chair. “Is Michael doing O.K.?” he asked.
“O.K.,” she replied.
Brian cast his eyes down at the skates. “He thinks of everything, doesn’t he?”
“Uh-huh.” She moved to the chair and sat on the floor between his knees. He stroked her hair methodically, saying nothing for almost a minute.
Finally, he said: “I almost lost my job today.”
“What?”
“It’s O.K. I didn’t. I smoothed things out.”
“What happened?”
“Oh … I punched out this guy.”
“Brian.” She tried not to sound too judgmental, but this had happened before.
“It’s O.K.,” he said. “It wasn’t a customer or anything. It was just that new waiter. Jerry.”
“I don’t know him.”
“Yeah, you do. The one with the Jordache Look.”
“Oh, yeah.”
“He shot off his mouth all day about one goddamn thing or another. Then he saw me eat a french fry off a plate that had just been bused and he said, ‘Shit, man, you’ve played hell now.’ I asked him what the fuck he meant by that and he said, ‘That was a faggot’s plate, dumbass—your days are numbered.’ ”
“Great.”
“So I pasted him.”
She wrenched her head around and stared at him. “Do you really think that was necessary?”
He answered with a shrug. “I got a big kick out of it.”
“Brian … they told you if it happened again …”
“I know, I know.”
She kept quiet. These half-assed little John Wayne scenes were simply a reflection of his frustration with an unchallenging job. If she didn’t tread carefully, he would use her disapproval as an excuse to remind her that fatherhood was the only job that really mattered to him.
“Did you ever read Nineteen Eighty-Four?” he asked.
The question made her wary. “Years ago. Why?”
“Remember the guy in it?”
“Vaguely.”
“Do you know what I remember about him the most?” She shifted uncomfortably. “I don’t know. They put rats on his face. What?”
“He was forty,” he answered.
“And?”
“I was sixteen when I read it, and I remember thinking how old the guy was, and I realized that I would be forty in nineteen eighty-four, and I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be that far gone. Well … nineteen eighty-four is almost here.”
She studied his expression for a moment, then took the hand lying on his knee and kissed it. “I thought we agreed that one menopause in the family was enough.”
He hesitated, then laughed. “O.K., all right … fair enough.”
She sensed that the crisis had passed. He seemed to know that this wasn’t the time to broach the subject, and she was more than grateful for the reprieve.

Anna’s Family
W HEN MICHAEL WENT DOWN TO BREAKFAST, MRS. Madrigal’s kitchen smelled of coffee brewing and bacon frying. The rain that streaked the long casement windows above her sink only served to heighten the conspiracy of coziness that ensnared even the most casual of visitors. He sat down at the landlady’s little white enamel table and sniffed the air.
“That coffee is heaven,’’ he said.
“It’s Arabian Mocha,” she replied. “It’s the sinsemilla of coffees.” She tore off a length of paper towel and began laying the bacon out to drain.
He chuckled, but only because he understood exactly what she meant. If he was a true pothead—and sometimes he thought that he was—this fey sixty-year-old with the flyaway hair and the old kimonos was the fiend who had led him down the garden path. He could have done a lot worse.
She joined him at the table, bringing two mugs of coffee with her. “Mary Ann was up awfully early.”
“She’s in