The silver doors dinged closed.
“Congratulations,” he said, “we created a sociopath.”
“A burgeoning sociopath. But with hard work, who knows?” Jen tugged her tote bag onto her shoulder. “Do you agree with her?”
“The thing is.” Paul stared up at the tiles on the ceiling. “She seemed to really get Abe.”
“I know.”
On the tenth floor, the elevator lurched to a stop and a short blond woman with a green handbag stepped inside. She looked remarkably unburdened.
“Do you still want to stop at the farmers market before home?” Paul said formally.
“I do.” Jen matched his stiff tone. “We need bread.”
Paul sighed and once again regarded the ceiling tiles. “When I was six,” he said, “I used to deliberately step on ants.”
The blond woman stopped rummaging in her green bag and looked up with alarm. When the doors opened at the garage level and the woman was safely out of earshot, Jen said, “The ants aren’t the same thing.”
“We have to remember that even if this is right, even if he has this disorder, Abe is the same kid he was earlier this morning. He’s still Abe.”
“True.”
“It doesn’t even sound that bad. Conduct disorder. It sounds like—”
“Like you misbehave in class.”
“Like borderline personality disorder.” Paul pressed the key fob and their car beeped open.
“What?”
“It’s just always sounded so gentle to me, like it’s on the border of not being a problem. But apparently people with that diagnosis can suffer tremendously. I’ll drive?”
They opened the car doors and got in.
“Have you been researching mental illnesses on Abe’s behalf?”
Paul buckled his belt, looked at her bashfully. “It’s silly.”
“Not at all.”
Apparently, this was how to romance Jen, because she’d never felt more like hugging him.
Jen tried to forgive Paul’s distractedness: he was gone most of the week, traveling and working hard. Sometimes, though, when she’d report in on Abe, she felt like she was explaining a movie to someone who’d wandered in in the middle. Keep up, she wanted to scold.
Which was unfair. Paul’s job was work, and Jen’s was Abe, and this was the way it would be because Jen made approximately ten percent of what Paul did.
Even now, she wouldn’t have wanted to trade. If someone was going to focus on the puzzle that was Abe, it had to be Jen. （She’d feel like a caged tiger, otherwise, probably call home fifty times a day and bark at Paul that he was doing it wrong.）
But it did feel sometimes—and this wasn’t Paul’s fault—imbalanced. They’d started out on such equal footing, after their first date. Both of their careers had been theirs alone to manage.
Paul was very taken with you, Jen’s friend Candace had told her after one of her crowded house parties.
“Me?” Jen said.
To be singled out like this was a new experience for her. There had been partygoers spilling out of Candace’s house to the backyard, and Jen hadn’t been able to remember which one was Paul.
“You know,” Candace answered, bringing her hand to about three feet above the ground, “short, slight, really prominent eyebrows, looks kind of like a Muppet—but in a good way. I’m giving him your number.”
It didn’t sound promising.
When Paul called, he had a nice warm tenor and they made a date to meet at a restaurant in Chinatown. Jen hadn’t expected much, but when she saw him there, in front of the king crab tank, she smiled. （Which was really saying something: those poor crabs, trapped in that murky crowded water, legs pressed helplessly against the glass, always made her temporarily resolve to become a vegetarian.） Paul was short and slight, with the promised eyebrows—two thick caterpillars slanted downward, which gave him a stern, intense air.
Candace hadn’t mentioned Paul Pagano’s neatly bearded, even-featured face. Or those giant hazel eyes underneath the brows: the kindest eyes Jen had ever seen.
It was funny now to think that Candace, who later disavowed the Muppet comment—but come on, how could Jen have made that up?—was a social media friend who seemingly spent twelve hours a day filming and posting videos of her daughter’s dance team, and Paul had become everything that mattered.
Jen often wondered if she was the butt of some higher power’s practical joke. The part of life that she had expected to be difficult—finding a life partner—had landed in her lap, while the part she might have assumed easy—sending your school-aged child off to school—required Herculean effort.