The Leftovers

really close family.”
    “She’s not kidding,” Eggy informed them. “They phoned last night while we were fucking and she took the call.”
    “Hello?” asked Kermit. “Ever hear of voice mail?”
    “That’s our agreement,” Ouch explained. “I can do whatever I want as long as I answer the phone. They just want to know I’m alive. I feel like I owe them that much.”
    “It goes way beyond that.” Eggy sounded genuinely exasperated. “They talked for like a half hour, this big convoluted discussion about morality and responsibility and self-respect.”
    Kermit looked intrigued. “While you were fucking?”
    “Yeah,” Eggy grumbled. “It was a real turn-on.”
    “They made me so mad.” Ouch was blushing again. “They wouldn’t even concede that casual sex is healthier than hurting myself. They kept trying to draw a moral equivalence between the two, which is so ridiculous.”
    “Then—get this—she put me on the phone.” Eggy pretended to shoot himself in the head. “She made me talk to her parents. I’m naked with a fucking hard-on. Unbelievable.”
    “They wanted to talk to you.”
    “Yeah, but I didn’t want to talk to them. How do you think I felt, getting interrogated by these people I never met—what’s my real name, how old am I, am I practicing safe sex with their little girl? Finally I just said, Look, your little girl’s a consenting adult, and they’re like, We know that, but she’s still our child, and she means more to us than anything in the world. What the fuck am I supposed to say to that?”
    “It’s just because of my sister,” Ouch told him. “They still haven’t gotten over that. None of us have.”
    “Anyway,” Eggy said wearily, “by the time she got off the phone, I didn’t even feel like fucking anymore. And it takes a lot to make me not feel like fucking.”
    Ouch gave him a look. “You got over it pretty fast.”
    “You were very persuasive.”
    “Ah,” said Kermit. “So there was a happy ending after all.”
    “Two, as a matter of fact.” Eggy’s expression was smug. “She’s quite the scholar-athlete.”
    Tom wasn’t surprised by this—Barefoot dudes bragged about their sexual exploits all the time—but he couldn’t help feeling offended on Ouch’s behalf. In a world that made any sense, she wouldn’t even be talking to Eggy, let alone going to bed with him. She must have sensed his sympathy, because she turned to him with a curious expression.
    “What about you?” she asked. “Are you in touch with your family?”
    “Not really. Not for a while.”
    “Did you have a fight?”
    “We just kinda drifted apart.”
    “Do your parents know you’re alive and well?”
    Tom wasn’t sure how to answer that.
    “I probably owe them an e-mail,” he muttered.
    “Whose turn is it?” Eggy asked Kermit.
    Ouch took out her phone and slid it across the table.
    “You should call,” she said. “I bet they’d like to hear from you.”
     

AT THE GRAPEFRUIT
    NORA BOUGHT A NEW DRESS for Valentine’s Day and immediately regretted it. Not because it didn’t look good; that wasn’t the problem at all. The dress was lovely—a blue-gray silk/rayon mix, sleeveless, with a V-neck and empire waist—and it fit her perfectly right off the rack. Even in the dispiriting light of the changing room, she could see how flattering it was, the way it emphasized the elegance of her shoulders and the length of her legs, the pale matte fabric calling attention to the darkness of her hair and eyes, her enviable cheekbones, her finely formed chin.
    My mouth, she told herself. I have a very pretty mouth. (Her daughter had had the exact same mouth, but she preferred not to think about that.)
    It was easy to imagine the looks she’d get in that dress, the heads that would turn when she walked into the restaurant, the pleasure in Kevin’s eyes as he admired her across the table. That was the problem, the ease with which she’d allowed herself to get swept up in the excitement of the holiday. Because she already understood that it wasn’t really working out, that she’d made a mistake getting involved with him, and that their days together were numbered—not because of anything he had or hadn’t done, but because of her, because of who she was and everything she was no longer capable of. So what was the point of looking this good—better than she had any right to, really—of eating a nice meal in a fancy restaurant, drinking expensive wine and