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dining room table, we’d had to add extra leaves. Rob and me struggling to fit the sections together. Our hands brushing. Maybe it’s harder to relate to a brother-in-law if you’ve never had a brother.
    At dinner, the table seemed too crowded. You’d have thought it was Thanksgiving or Christmas and that we were all family, talking and laughing loudly. Trying to sound festive. My eyes smarted with tears, though I was laughing. I kept looking for Dad amid all these faces and was baffled to see Rob Chisholm in Dad’s place, across the long table from Mom.
    More annoying, the exalted Gilbert Wexley was seated to Mom’s right, speaking pompously to the table—“The president will be reelected by a landslide in November, the patriotic American people will never be soft on terrorism”—while Mom looked on smiling and anxious. I couldn’t bear to think that my mother might care about this man who so reveled in his own self-importance.
    Fifty-six was too old to “date.” If Mom didn’t know this, Clare or I would have to clue her in.
    Beside me sat Sonny Danto, as I’d feared. Before dinner I’d tried to switch name cards, placing myself between Mom and Lilja, Mom had caught me and slapped playfully at my hand. Nikki no!
    One good thing about Danto, he vied with Wexley for dominance at the table. Though he knew virtually no one here, he wasn’t shy in the slightest. Talking, gesticulating, eating and drinking with the zest of a swarm of cockroaches. Even his attempt to speak with me was bustling, aggressive: “‘Nicole Eaton’—your name? In the little local paper?”—smiling with his large stained teeth, leaning toward me so that I wasn’t spared seeing each hair, each follicle of the Presley pompadour with unnerving intimacy—“my favorite of all the local writers, I always look for your columns.”
    “Do you.”
    Mom must have talked me up shamelessly to Sonny Danto, he seemed to have come prepared. In the local library quickly scanning back issues of the Beacon .
    Danto confided in me, in a lowered voice, he intended to write his memoir someday—“ The Scourge of the Bugs: A No-Holds-Barred Account of a Real-Life Terminator . Terrific title, eh?” Or maybe, if he could find the right collaborator, it would be one of those “as told to” memoirs.
    He’d been inspired by his grandfather in Tonawanda, who’d been the original “Scourge of the Bugs.” Except Danto’s grandfather’s specialty had been termites, his were carpenter ants. “It reveals a lot about a person, which is his specialty. In the field of pest extermination.”
    I said, “I think my specialty would be moths. Those little fluttery paper-looking things? That are kind of pretty? Though I guess, I’d have to kill them, wouldn’t I. I don’t think I would like that.”
    Danto laughed extravagantly. He must have thought that I was flirting with him. Like an infomercial he began to lecture on the subject of moths, drawing the interest of most of the table away from Wexley: “Now your so-called paper moth can infest a household worse than ants! One day you see there’s a few of them, next day you see there’s a dozen of ’em, suddenly they’re all over the house and know why?—it isn’t just woollens they eat. No, they lay their eggs in cereal, crackers, pasta, dry pet food, birdseed, even in tea, anything in your cupboard that isn’t canned or packaged airtight. People just don’t know! Like poor Mrs. Eaton yesterday who despite a pretty clean household was about overrun with red ants and had no clue how to deal with ’em, which is where the Scourge of the Bugs comes in. You don’t ever want to underestimate the power of bugs to take over your house, you need professionals to exterminate ’em.” I saw Mom force a smile at pretty clean household and exchanged a look of sisterly irony with Clare across the table. How could our mother have plucked “Sonny” Danto out of the yellow pages and foisted him upon us, at