“How do you feel about dancing?” she asked him.
“My grandmother taught me when I was in high school,” Aldo said. “I know how.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
She caught the motion of him smiling.
“Ask me later,” he suggested.
“Okay,” she agreed.
Six conversations, she thought with another rush of palpable disbelief, and still, she couldn’t wait to know.
part three, keys.
ONE OF ALDO’S CONSIDERATIONS when it came to time was how long it took, conceptually, before things became ordinary, unspecial. People were so easily desensitized, so helplessly numbed when it came to the repetitive nature of existence. He wondered, first, how long it had taken for Regan to lose her sense of wonder with her own life, but then secondly, whether she’d ever had any to begin with.
Aldo had never experienced an anniversary party, given that his own parents were never married and his nonno had died long before he was born, but he had been under the impression that such parties were generally reasonably-sized affairs. Not so for the Regan family, which consisted of the parents, John and Helen, and the two children, Madeline and Charlotte, along with Madeline’s husband, Carter Easton, and their daughter Carissa. Aldo understood, logistically, why Regan had warned him to call her by her first name, and upon seeing her in context he proceeded to grasp it intuitively. Regan was her usual name for herself, but when she was here she was Charlotte, whom Aldo had begun to see as an entirely separate identity.
Charlotte, for example, was a dimmer Regan upon entering the house she’d grown up in; almost as if the effort of trying to fill this space, easily accomplished in every other place, had sapped her of the energy required for certain facets of her personality. Where Regan was typically poised in a languid way, Charlotte was tensed and strained, all her muscles tight, the pads of her fingers pressed white around her glass. It was all Aldo could do not to stare at her hands, repeatedly drawn back to them like something out of place. Her discomfort was, for him, an insurmountable distraction.
“—you do, Aldo?”
Aldo blinked, tearing his gaze from Regan as he registered that her mother had been speaking to him. She was a smaller woman （Regan’s height was clearly inherited from her father—John, like his second daughter, was lean and almost reedy, while the other two women were petite and, for lack of a better word, woman-shaped） and Aldo was forced to look down, uncomfortably too-large by comparison.
“Sorry?” he said, grudgingly. He’d have preferred to speak to Regan, who in turn seemed to prefer to speak to Carissa, her niece. This, Aldo reminded himself, was something he probably should have anticipated. He hadn’t formally modeled the party’s events, but it was progressing as he could have （conceivably） predicted.
“What do you do?” Helen repeated, speaking with pained deliberation that time.
“Math,” he said, and stopped for a moment, thinking there was something in his throat. There wasn’t.
“Like a programmer?” Helen pressed.
“No. Theoretical math.”
“Mom, I told you,” Regan said, picking up Carissa and joining their conversation with the little girl’s legs slung around her hips. “Aldo’s a professor at U Chicago.”
“Adjunct,” Aldo corrected. “Not tenured. I’m a doctoral student.”
“Ah,” said Helen. “Are you hoping to become tenured?”
“I don’t especially love teaching,” Aldo said.
“He’s good though,” Regan contributed. “Well, he’s a genius, anyway.”
She flashed him a smile and a wink as Carissa grabbed hold of her hair.
“Is there much of a job market for ‘theoretical math’？” asked Helen.
“Mom,” said Regan.
“I’m not sure,” said Aldo, who had never really bothered to find out.
“Charlotte, I’m just asking questions. Are you from Chicago?”
It took him a moment to realize Helen was addressing him again.
“No. California,” Aldo clarified. “Pasadena.”
Regan, he noted, was glancing towards him with increasing frequency, so he guessed he was saying something wrong. Whether it was what he was saying or how he was saying it, he wasn’t entirely sure.
“My father lives there still,” he added. Perhaps he was permitting too much silence between words. “He owns a restaurant.”
“Oh?” said Helen.
“Yes.”