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Franny would never have been so cruel to her own mother, who had insisted on weekly dinners throughout her first year at Barnard, as if Brooklyn and Manhattan had anything to do with each other, as if she hadn’t just moved to another hemisphere. If she and Jim were really over, Sylvia would have it even worse. When she came home to visit, where would she go? To her mother in an otherwise empty house? To her father in a bachelor apartment, slick and sad with all new furniture? Franny stared into space, her hands still on the corkscrew.
    “Can I help with anything?” Carmen appeared just behind Franny’s right shoulder, startling her.
    “No, no, all done,” Franny said. “Well, you can carry this to the table.” She put down the bottle of wine and handed Carmen a bowl. “No, wait,” she said, and handed her a different one. Franny always wanted to carry in the most impressive-looking dish, no matter that everyone knew she’d cooked everything on the table.
    Carmen’s dark hair was wet, and her curls hung heavily over her shoulders. It was what Franny’s hair had looked like before she’d had the Brazilians zap it with lasers, or whatever they didat the salon. It was the first beauty treatment she felt was truly life-altering, after discovering mustache bleach when she was a teenager.
    “Thank you for having us here,” Carmen said. She had put on makeup, which Franny found distasteful. After all, it was only the family, and they were only having dinner. She would just have to wash it off in a few hours. Putting on makeup for this crowd, at this hour, smacked of deep-seated insecurity, which Franny had little patience for, both as a host and as Carmen’s boyfriend’s mother, on his behalf. Of course, Franny didn’t trust anyone whose life’s work was shaping other people’s altoids, anyway. No, Altoids were the mints. Deltoids. Still, it was nice that she was making an effort.
    “Of course,” Franny said. “We’re so glad you could join us. And how is everything going, at the gym?”
    “It’s good! It’s busy. Really good. Yeah.” Carmen nodded several times.
    “Well, shall we?” Franny asked, gesturing toward the dining room. She waited until Carmen had passed in front of her to roll her eyes. Life would be so much easier, Franny often thought, if one were permitted to select romantic partners for one’s children. There was nothing physically wrong with Carmen, save for the lack of egg production in her forty-year-old ovaries, but that wasn’t even the worst of it. She was a deadly bore, and that problem couldn’t be solved with in vitro. Still, she had shown up, and offered to help, which was more than Franny could say for either of her children.

Day Four
    BOBBY AND CARMEN’S ROOM WAS BETWEEN SYLVIA’S room and the bathroom and overlooked the pool, which meant that any noise louder than a whisper could potentially be heard by everyone in the entire house. Bobby was awake but hadn’t moved yet, not even wiggled his toes—Carmen was still snoring softly next to him, and he didn’t want to disturb her.
    At their apartment in Miami, Carmen was up before dawn. Her clients liked to get in a workout before heading to the office, and so she started seeing people at five-thirty a.m., straight through until ten a.m. Then there was a break until the lunchtime crowd, and then she was booked again from eleven a.m. until two p.m. She saw up to eight clients a day, sometimes more. Everyone at Total Body Power knew that Carmen got results, and that she worked you harder than the other trainers. She’d been seeing some of her clients for more than a decade,back from when she was fresh out of kinesiology school and working at the YMCA. Bobby’d come to the gym looking for some help with his lats and traps, and that was that. Of course, that was when Bobby had the money to spend on a personal trainer twice a week.
    His mother was up—Bobby could hear the pans banging onto and off the stove, the sound of