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gather his thoughts. The house was ransacked by 9:30, the emails read by 10:15, reread by 10:35, re-reread by 10:50. He’d called in sick (because you couldn’t call in shit on ) to work and there was a whole day ahead of him, brimming with endless possibility. He could pack his bags and leave, yes. He could be three states away—in any direction! he could go wherever he wanted!—by the time she pulled into the driveway. This was the first day of the rest of his life. He was not so old—only twenty-nine. He could begin again, reinvent himself. “I’ll understand,” she had said. But she had conspicuously not said “I’m leaving,” not said “the marriage is over.” She had left the choice to him. She had probably thought he would leave her, probably wanted him to leave her, probably was sitting at her desk pricing flights to Phoenix (this is where the man lived, he’d learned from the emails), preparing for the big, romantic reunion with Michael the tax accountant who had rocked her world in Boston. In the letters there had been phrases like “When we’re finally together” and “I can’t wait until we  . . . ” as if it were only a matter of time. But Carrie had not left him this morning, had not said she was leaving him, had instead, importantly, crucially, said, “I know you’ll want to leave me.” And now she was at work, fully expecting him to be here packing his things, using this bay window of time to get his affairs in order, to box up the marriage in her absence so she could be free (she used this word in one of the letters: “free”) to go to Phoenix and join Michael the tax accountant who had rocked her world in Boston. She was leaving the ball in his court, lobbing up a big fat fattie across the net, like she used to do when they’d played in college, so he could have his overhead slam and feel like a big man, but guess what? Fuck her! He said this aloud, at 11:13, standing among their lives dumped out on the floor. Fuck her! He’d show her, all right. No way was he going to leave her! He hated her, so he wasn’t going to leave her. And he loved her, so he wasn’t going to leave her. She wanted him to do the dirty work, make it easy for her, open the door to her new life? Ha!
    He cleaned the house. He didn’t only clean up the house, he cleaned the house, first tidying his own frenzied mess and then vacuuming and dusting and scrubbing until his fingers ached so much that he couldn’t make his hands into fists. He defrosted the freezer, tightened the rickety porch railing, changed the lightbulb in the garage that had been dark for two years. He showered and shaved and went to the grocery store and bought two slabs of tenderloin and baked potatoes and fresh corn on the cob. He made dinner and set the table and lit the candles and when she walked in the front door he put his arms around her and said, “We’re going to be okay.”
    â€œWe are?” she asked.
    Now, six years later, Dan stood in his daughter’s room, watching her sleep. She had saved them, softened his rage, centered Carrie’s world. And it wasn’t just that they loved her—of course they loved her, madly—but rather that their love for each other was altered, irrevocably, by her squirming body, lifted from Carrie’s belly (he’d seen inside his wife, seen the startled eyes of his daughter looking up from her mother’s womb) and set stickily and miraculously into his trembling hands.
    Chloe was clutching the armadillo, but she slept soundly so it was easy to slide it from her arms and insert, in its place, a red rabbit with a star for a nose. He knew that Chloe had little attachment to individual animals. She had never had the best-loved-bear, no tattered dog she mourned if it were left behind—he’d heard such stories from other dads. They were mostly interchangeable