“What was Sasha like as a teacher?” Karen asked.
“We called it ‘The Sasha Senderovsky Show.’ I nearly peed in my pants every time.”
“She said ‘peed’！” Nat shouted, spitting out little pieces of ham.
“Cover your mouth,” her mother said.
“That is funny, sweet pea,” Dee said to her. And to Masha: “Are we allowed to use that word?” The mother nodded unconvincingly.
“My daughter’s very spirited,” Senderovsky said. “But she’s actually pretty well behaved tonight, because it’s fun to have guests, right?”
Nat didn’t say anything, just giggled to herself, mouth full of ham. Precocity notwithstanding, she loved the bathroom humor her parents found unserious. Peed.
Vinod noticed Karen looking at the little girl, ignoring the rest of the table. Karen was thinking that Masha had put her in the larger two-room family bungalow as a way to highlight the fact that she had no children and now most likely never would. （As Leon had put it ever so dramatically during their penultimate fight on a private jet headed from nowhere to nowhere: “Thank God for small mercies. You as a mother…”） Or perhaps Senderovsky had put her there because she was now more important and deserved more space. The last time, she had been placed in a small strange room with a bunch of creepy lullabies scribbled over the walls. Now, six feet away from her, Nat was whispering the word “peed” over and over in a concentrated monotone as she built a poor man’s A-frame house out of chunks of baguette. Karen wanted the girl to sit on her lap, wanted to run her hands through the bobbed black hair of memory. She had been estranged from her younger sister even before Tr?? Emotions had “scaled,” and did not even know where Evelyn was at this time or whether she was safe.
She remembered now that Masha had lost her younger sister. To cancer, was it? She looked across the porch meaningfully but without modulation, a look Masha misinterpreted as anger instead of sorrow. What does she have to be angry about, Masha thought.
“How’s it going with that fire?” Masha shouted to Ed.
“No luck yet. The kindling’s gotten wet.” Ed glanced at Dee, who was sucking on an oblong Greek olive.
“A bad dancer is bothered by his balls,” Senderovsky shouted to Ed.
“Let’s go help him,” Vinod said to Senderovsky.
“You, sit!” Karen said, but Vinod rebelled.
All the men fussed over the woodstove now, Ed and Sasha ignoring the distancing rules, but none of them really knew how to light it, not even the landowner himself.
Finally, Masha sighed and got up. “Please move over,” she said, taking the poker from her husband. When the fire had been lit （a draft had to be opened to ensure success）， Senderovsky realized Masha had given Vinod his exact place at the table so he could be closer to the warmth of the fire, his sallow face lit by a biblical glow.
“Masha’s awesome,” Ed said to Dee after he had retaken his place behind his Gibson.
“You probably laid the groundwork,” Dee said.
There was a term Ed and Senderovsky came up with a long time ago in the city, after a drunken May Day spent on a Fifth Avenue rooftop: sundress weather. The air was still brutally cold, but, to Ed, tall, slender Dee was the essence of sundress weather. He wondered how many inches she had on him, even in flats.
“This is not jamón serrano,” Senderovsky was saying after his second glass of wine at the other end of the table, “this is jamón Monta?o.”
“What makes it different, Proffy?” Dee asked. She was hardly one for diminutives, but Russians seemed to appreciate them.
“For one thing, it’s a thicker cut,” Ed explained. He had failed to notice his right hand cupping his right ear as he spoke to her, but the rest of his friends did.
“Do you travel a lot?” Dee asked him, speaking louder, because his ear cupping seemed to indicate he had trouble hearing her.
“Oh, here and there.”
“Once this is over, I’m going to hit the road myself.”
Ed pictured something very specific: a cheap, rumpled room in Chania, on Crete, the sole window filled by a large many-domed mosque jutting out of the harbor, its optical white peeled clean by the sea, placed like a squid egg alongside a colorful devil-may-care row of Christian tavernas. And at the desk （because the single room of their minimal lodgings would still have a desk）， this woman, Dee, was putting on a silver necklace he had bought her back in Athens, at the airport’s satellite terminal, it must be confessed, because even though he tried to talk her out of it—“If you don’t find anything better on the island, which, I swear, you will, we’ll get it on the way back”—her mind was made up, and now the silver of the pendant glowed against the sunburn of her skin. “I’m going to put some aloe on you,” the phantom Ed said to make-believe Dee. He had thought of every eventuality.