I don’t know how the tradition started, but that whole year Fred and I never cooked dinner on Tuesdays. Word must have gone around that we treated our bach- elors well because there was never any difficulty securing one. One year, fifty-two Tuesdays, fifty-two men we convinced to cook dinner for us.

He walked in slowly and he was stooping, not too much but just a bit, and he said abruptly and in his monotonous tone, don’t worry if I’m not walking straight I’m just a whiff tired, no, not too much but I have something to tell you, to ask you, it’s maybe not an important thing, but in fact it does matter to me that we discuss this thing together because you know Alissia, and she knows you, you may convince her, I have already told her but she didn’t listen, she never does, I never figured out in what kind of a world she lives, now suddenly she’s bizarre, not the Mom I always had, or that I thought I had, and it doesn’t matter, we’re going through a crisis, a serious crisis, the first huge happening between the two of us since my father died and God bless his soul.