The Husband

bring out its beauty. In fact it was dinosaur dung, which time and pressure had petrified into stone.
    "Mineral analysis confirms that it came from a carnivore," said Mitch's father.
    "Tyrannosaurus?"
    "The size of the entire stool deposit suggests something smaller than a T. rex."
    "Gorgosaurus?"
    "If it had been found in Canada, dating to the Upper Cretaceous, then perhaps a gorgosaurus. But the deposit was found in Colorado."
    "Upper Jurassic?" Mitch asked.
    "Yes. So it's probably a ceratosaurus dropping."
    As his father picked up a glass of Scotch and soda from the desk, Mitch went to the display shelves.
    He said, "I gave Connie a call a few nights ago."
    Connie was his oldest sister, thirty-one. She lived in Chicago.
    "Is she still drudging away in that bakery?" his father asked.
    "Yes, but she owns it now."
    "Are you serious? Yes, of course. It's typical. If she puts one foot in a tar pit, she'll never back up, just flail forward."
    "She says she's having a good time."
    "That's what she would say, no matter what."
    Connie had earned a master's degree in political science before she had jumped off the plank into an ocean of entrepreneurship. Some were mystified by this sea change in her, but Mitch understood it.
    The collection of polished dinosaur-dung spheres had grown since he had last seen it. "How many do you have now, Daniel?"
    "Seventy-three. I've got leads on four brilliant specimens."
    Some spheres were only two inches in diameter. The largest were as big as bowling balls.
    The colors tended toward browns, golds, and coppers, for the obvious reason; however, every hue, even blue, lustered under the display lights. Most exhibited speckled patterns; actual veining was rare.
    "I talked to Megan the same evening," Mitch said.
    Megan, twenty-nine, had the highest IQ in a family of high IQs. Each of the Rafferty kids had been tested three times: the week of their ninth, thirteenth, and seventeenth birthdays.
    After her sophomore year, Megan had dropped out of college. She lived in Atlanta and operated a thriving dog-grooming business, both a shop and a mobile service.
    "She called at Easter, asked how many eggs we dyed," Mitch's father said. "I assume she thought that was funny. Katherine and I were just relieved that she didn't announce she was pregnant."
    Megan had married Carmine Maffuci, a mason with hands the size of dinner plates. Daniel and Kathy felt that she had settled for a husband beneath her station, intellectually. They expected that she would realize her error and divorce him—if children didn't arrive first to complicate the situation.
    Mitch liked Carmine. The guy had a sweet nature, an infectious laugh, and a tattoo of Tweety Bird on his right biceps.
    "This one looks like porphyry," he said, pointing to a dung specimen with a purple-red groundmass and flecks of something that resembled feldspar.
    He had also recently spoken to his youngest sister, Portia, but he did not mention her because he didn't want to start an argument.
    Freshening his Scotch and soda at the corner wet bar, Daniel said, "Anson had us to dinner two nights ago."
    Anson, Mitch's only brother, at thirty-three the oldest of the siblings, was the most dutiful to Daniel and Kathy.
    In fairness to Mitch and his sisters, Anson had long been his parents' favorite, and he had never been rebuffed. It was easier to be a dutiful child when your enthusiasms were not analyzed for signs of psychological maladjustment and whenyour invitations were not met with either gimlet-eyed suspicion or impatience.
    In fairness to Anson, he had earned his status by fulfilling his parents' expectations. He had proved, as had none of the others, that Daniel's child-rearing theories could bear fruit.
    Top of his class in high school, star quarterback, he declined football scholarships. Instead he accepted those offered only in respect of the excellence of his mind.
    The academic world was a chicken yard and Anson a fox. He did not merely absorb learning but devoured it with the appetite of an insatiable carnivore. He earned his bachelor's degree in two years, a master's in one, and had a Ph.D. at the age of twenty-three.
    Anson was neither resented by his siblings nor in any slightest way alienated from them. On the contrary, if Mitch and his sisters had taken a secret vote for their favorite in the family, all four of their ballots would have been marked for their older brother.
    His good heart and natural grace had allowed Anson to please his