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if it doesn’t work out?” she said. “It’s not going to hurt less if you pretend you don’t care.”
    Although I finally did let myself fall, ours would have been a very proper courtship even by eighteenth-century standards. Joe was awkward and I, nearly twenty-two by then, was still an exasperated virgin, although determined to correct that oversight. The lovemaking didn’t happen for two years. And when it happened, it was never our best thing, although our bodies were built for sex—me a dancer, him a gym rat. Our intimacy never approached the total abandon of self you were supposed to feel. But it was good enough. It was one C in a garden of A-pluses. We were pals. We had history and hopes. Joey sheltered me. Joey set me free. When I was with him, I forgot that I was supposed to be an untouchable. With Joey at my side, I was at least as good as.
    So if Marie was the sun and Kit the ground on which I stood, Joey became my north star.
    I knew tonight he’d want to take me out, to distract me with bad jokes and good wine. I knew I should go. Tomorrow at 7:00 a.m., Joey would start his forty-eight-hour shift. But it would be even harder on me to be sociable than it would to eat pasta politely. Despite my inability to smell, I’d trained my brain to let my tongue do what little tasting I could do. But I couldn’t train my mouth to act like a lady. And so I ate sparingly, and only when I needed to, a fact that drove my aunt Marie crazy, as she drank thimblesful of wine and worked out like a prizefighter to stay TV-lady skinny. Joey took an almost erotic pleasure in food, hence my working more hours and taking on new clients to help pay for the house with the fancy gourmet kitchen that we would buy one day. For Joey, I would even learn to cook. When I described the kneading and the thumbprint required for my grandma’s homemade gnocchi, Joey said, “I love it when you talk dirty.”
    But even for sweet Joey, I wouldn’t go out tonight.

    For one thing, my beloved seemed to have a genetic inability to be comfortable in public without his lifelong friends. When we were alone, we didn’t lack for things to say. In public, Joe liked people around, and I assumed it was to cover his own shyness. So Neal Polachek, Joey’s best friend, would most likely tag along or meet up with us at some point. If it wasn’t Neal, it would be Andy English or Adam Sawicki or Joey’s brother, Paul. I tried to like Paulie, who’d dated Kit for a few months, prompting my best friend, who always took new romance far, far too seriously, to rapturous speculation about our being sisters-in-law. Now Paul was dating Jane, a high school teacher and tennis coach who was exuberant and fun to be with. But since the engagement, Paulie and Jane seemed almost to avoid us—I never knew why—while Neal, a loner, for whom three weeks with a woman was an enduring relationship, was always available.
    So when I called Joey back and his phone went over directly to voice mail, I did a quick little fouetté en tournant of victory.
    Honey, I’m pooped , I thought, but what I said, since it was even harder to understand me on the telephone, was, “Honey, I’m worn out tonight. I’m going to sleep. I’ll come to the station tomorrow.” It wasn’t that I took Joe for granted: Having him was like being given a birthday present every day. I worried that I would let him down—that I was too self-centered for the patience and daily-ness of a married life. But there was nothing I wouldn’t master for Joe, for the life we would have, the house we would buy, the children—rowdy little girls, tender little boys.

    I would bring something nice to the station tomorrow. Cannolis, maybe. I liked Joey’s fellow firefighters and felt almost more comfortable in a firehouse than anywhere else, since the days Kit and I used to ride bikes to my father’s station after school and eat Schmitty’s chili and corn bread. Joey’s crew knew who I was and who my father