“The flip-flops?” Sam guessed.
“I want to burn them,” Sarah said darkly. “Except then the house would smell like burning plastic and he’d probably just buy new ones.”
“Could it be related to money?” asked Sam.
Sarah shook her head. “I checked. Everything’s where it’s supposed to be. He hasn’t taken anything out of our savings, or our retirement funds.” She raised her shoulders in a helpless-looking shrug. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s online gambling. Or porn.”
“Watching it or making it?” Sam asked.
Sarah gave a startled bark of laughter. “Good God. Because people are lining up to watch middle-aged periodontists have sex. That would be a very niche market, am I right?”
“You’d be surprised,” mumbled Sam.
Sarah gave him an imploring look. “I thought—I don’t know—maybe he’d talk to you.”
“I’ll try,” Sam said. “It’s, what, five weeks until the wedding? I’ll see him in person and ask what’s going on.”
“Thank you,” Sarah said, her voice pitched low. “It’s been…” She bent her head. Sam saw her swipe her eyes, and could barely hear her when she said, “I’ve been trying to decide if I should just ask him to move out.”
Sam felt his face sag in surprise. Sarah and Eli’s marriage had always felt as reliable as anything he could imagine; as solid as their own parents’ union had been. “It’s that bad?”
Sarah nodded sadly. “Something’s got to change. Eli knows he’s been awful, and he won’t tell me why. He told me he won’t even talk about it until after the wedding, and I agreed. I thought maybe he was asking me for time because he wanted to fix whatever’s going on. Or end it. Whatever ‘it’ is.” She raised her hands, then let them fall into her lap. “The whole time we were dating, he made me feel like I was the most important person in the world. And now it’s like he can’t even see me. If I walk into a room, he walks out of it. If I cook dinner, he chews it like it’s cardboard. I can’t remember the last time he gave me a compliment, or looked at me like I mattered to him.”
“Ouch,” Sam murmured. He knew, maybe better than anyone, that Sarah needed to be seen. She was like their mother that way, comfortable at the head of a classroom, or onstage, performing, drawing from the energy of an audience or the admiration of a partner.
“He barely talks to me. He looks right through me, and he won’t tell me what’s going on, or why he’s acting this way, and I have no idea how to help him, and…” Sarah closed her mouth and raised her chin. “I don’t want the boys thinking that this is what marriage is supposed to be. Or Ruby, either, for that matter. I don’t want any of them believing that a husband, or a wife, can just check out emotionally, and the other person just endures it.”
Sam nodded. “I’m sorry,” he said.
Sarah sniffled. “I wish you were still here.”
“I’ll see you soon,” he promised. He told her to call him if she needed him, and that he’d do his best to talk to Eli, and ended the call feeling sorry for his sister, puzzled about his brother-in-law and glad, again, that she hadn’t asked him about his plans, or how he was doing, or if there was anything new in his life.
* * *
After Saul Barringer delivered his ultimatum, and Sam had cleared it with Connor’s father. （“Yeah, sure, man, whatever works,” Jason said, after Sam made his pitch. “I mean, I’d take him, but they say that the road ain’t no place to start a family, right?”） Sam had packed them up and brought Connor to New York for the summer.
Sarah and Eli had welcomed Sam, and their sons had been thrilled to have Connor staying in their house. Dexter was almost seven, and Miles was five, and Connor fit neatly into the boy-pack, a loyal （and extremely tractable） car in what his sister sometimes called the Testosterone Train. “I am going to pretend they’re my big brothers,” Connor told Sam, with a delighted expression on his usually somber face, and Sam felt his own heart lifting. He might have screwed up any number of things in his life, but at least he didn’t need to second-guess his choice to get Connor away from his grandfather.
Sam rented a desk in one of the neighborhood’s many shared workspaces and tried to re-gather the strands of his professional life. Every morning, he and his sister would drop the boys off at the day camp they attended. Then Sarah would take the subway to the music school, and Sam would head to his temporary office, ending his day in time to pick up the boys and escort them all back to Sarah’s for a snack. The boys would play or read until dinner. Sam would help with the cooking, and Connor and his cousins would set the table （“Dexter only gets to do the silverware because he always drops the plates,” Sam overheard Miles telling Connor）， and they’d go around the table with Sarah and Eli asking each of the boys about the best and worst part of their day.