“Now, I’ve made a nice tuna salad for our lunch. I chose that specifically for you, Alice, because fish is brain food. Roger and I have been taking fish oil every day, haven’t we, darl?”

Darl. Her mother just called Roger “darl.”

Roger didn’t seem to have changed at all in the last ten years. He was still tanned and polished and pleased with himself. Had he had plastic surgery? Alice wouldn’t put it past him. He was wearing a pink polo-necked shirt, with a gold chain nestled in graying chest hair. His shorts were just a little too tight, revealing muscular brown legs.

As Barb turned to go back toward the kitchen, Roger gave her a playful, not-at-all-discreet slap on the bottom. Appalled, Alice averted her eyes. (Roger, she remembered, owned a waterbed. “The ladies love it,” he’d told Alice once.)

Frannie gave a low chuckle and laid her hand over Alice’s in sympathy. Alice distracted herself by examining the long pine table in front of her. She’d dreamed about this table at the hospital. Nick was sitting at it, while she was cleaning the kitchen. He’d said something that made no sense. What was it?

Elisabeth came into the room, lifting her handbag over her shoulder. “I’ve got to go.”

“Where are you going?” asked Alice desperately. She needed support to help her cope with Roger and her mother. “Are you coming back?”

Elisabeth gave her an odd look. “I’m meeting some people for lunch. I’ll come back if you like.”

“Who?” asked Alice, trying to keep her there for longer. “Who are you meeting?”

“Just some friends,” said Elisabeth evasively. “Anyway, make sure you listen out for the phone because I’ve left three messages for that Kate Harper about tonight’s party but she still hasn’t called back.” She looked at Alice. “You still seem very pale. I think you should go back to bed after lunch.”

“Oh, I agree!” said their mother as she walked in from the kitchen, carrying a glass salad bowl. “I’m packing her straight off to bed after lunch, don’t worry. We need to get her completely recovered before those little terrors are back.”

Alice looked at the big glass salad bowl her mother was holding and for no particular reason the name “Gina” came into her head.

It’s always about Gina. Gina, Gina, Gina. That’s right. That’s what she’d remembered, or dreamed, Nick saying as he sat at this table.

“Who is Gina?” asked Alice.

The room became extremely still and silent.

Finally Frannie cleared her throat. Roger looked at the floor and fiddled with the chain around his neck. Barb froze at the entrance from the kitchen and hugged the salad bowl to her stomach. Elisabeth chewed hard at her lip.

“Well, who is she?” said Alice.

Elisabeth’s Homework for Dr. Hodges One thing I’ve been thinking about a lot is how I would feel if I lost ten years of my memory, and what things would surprise me, or please me, or upset me about how my life had turned out.

I hadn’t even met Ben ten years ago. So he would be a stranger. A big scary hairy stranger sharing my bed. How could I explain to my old self that I had accidentally fallen in love with a silent mountain of a man who designs neon signs for a living and whose most passionate interest is cars? Before I met Ben, I was one of those girls who was deliberately, prettily ignorant about cars. I described them by size and color. A big white car. A small blue car. Now I know makes and models. I watch the Grand Prix. Sometimes I even flick through his car magazines.

Do you like cars, Dr. Hodges? You seem more like an art galleries and opera sort of guy. I see you have a photo of your wife and two small children on your desk. I secretly look at this photo every session when you’re writing out my receipt. I bet your wife had no trouble getting pregnant at all, did she? Do you ever thank your lucky stars you didn’t end up with a reproductively challenged wife like me? Do you give that photo an affectionate look as I walk out of the room and think, Thank God my wife is a good breeder? Don’t worry if you do. I’m sure it’s innate, it’s just biology, for a man to want a woman who can give him children. I raised this with Ben once. I said he must secretly resent me and I understood that. He got so angry. The angriest I’ve seen him. “Never say that again,” he said. But I bet that’s why he got so angry, because he knew it was true.

Before I met Ben, I used to go for witty successful types. I’d never been out with a man before who owned a toolbox. A proper big dirty well-used toolbox full of, you know, screwdrivers and stuff. It’s embarrassing how aroused I became when I first saw Ben selecting a chunky oily wrench from that toolbox. My dad had a toolbox. So maybe I’d been subconsciously waiting for a man with a toolbox. I bet you don’t have a toolbox, do you, Dr. Hodges? No. I didn’t think so.

I used to think that one of my main prerequisites for a man was that he be good at dinner parties. Like Alice’s Nick. But Ben is hopeless at dinner parties. He always seems too big for his chair. He gets this trapped expression. It’s like I’ve brought along a big tame chimp. Sometimes he’s OK if he happens to find another man (or woman—he’s no chauvinist) who can talk about cars, but mostly he’s miserable, and he breathes out gustily when we get in the car, as if he’s been let out of jail.

It’s funny. I had all those years of being driven mad by Mum and Alice and their fear of social events. “Oh, no!” they’d say tragically, and I would think someone had died, and it would turn out they’d been invited to some party or lunch where they’d only know one person, and then there would be all the strategizing about how to get out of it, and the drama of it all and the sympathy they’d pour on each other. “Oh, you poor thing! That would be awful! You absolutely must not go.” I couldn’t stand it, and yet I ended up marrying a man who also thinks socializing is something that’s meant to be endured. Not that he’s shy like they were. He doesn’t get butterflies in his stomach or agonize over what people think of him. Actually I don’t think he has any self-consciousness whatsoever. He is a man without vanity. He’s just not a talker. He has no small talk ability whatsoever. (Whereas Mum and Alice, of course, were talkers, and they were actually interested in meeting other people. In reality they were more social than me. But their shyness stopped them from being the outgoing people they actually were. They were like athletes trapped in wheelchairs.)