The Leftovers

cherry-picked the best players for his own teams and almost always won the championship—but this wasn’t the time or place for honesty about the dead.
    “All right,” he said, after they’d taken their seats. “Our first order of business is approval of the minutes from the December meeting. Is there a motion to approve?”
    Councilman Reynaud made the motion. Councilwoman Chen seconded.
    “All in favor?” Kevin asked. The ayes were unanimous. “The motion carries.”
    *   *   *
    IN HER younger days, during the all-too-brief window of freedom between her first kiss and her engagement to Doug, Nora had come to think of herself as a top-notch girlfriend. At her current remove—half a lifetime and another world away—she found it difficult to reconstruct the origins of this belief. It was possible that she’d read an article in Glamour on “Ten Essential Girlfriend Skills” and realized that she’d mastered eight of them. Or maybe she’d taken “The Ultimate Good Girlfriend Quiz” in Elle and scored in the top category: You’re a Keeper! But it was just as likely that the habit of self-esteem was so deeply ingrained in her psyche that it simply hadn’t occurred to her to think otherwise. After all, Nora was pretty, she was smart, her jeans fit well, her hair was straight and shiny. Of course she was a better girlfriend than most. She was a better everything than most.
    This conviction was such an integral part of her self-image that she’d actually spoken it out loud during a mortifying breakup argument with her favorite college boyfriend. Brian was a charismatic philosophy major whose library pallor and pudgy waistline—he cultivated a European disdain for exercise—didn’t detract in the least from his brainy appeal. He and Nora had been a serious couple for most of sophomore year—they referred to themselves as “best friends and soul mates”—until Brian decided, upon his return from Spring Break, that they should start seeing other people.
    “I don’t want to see anyone else,” she told him.
    “That’s fine,” he said. “But what if I do?”
    “Then it’s over between us. I’m not gonna share you.”
    “I’m sorry to hear that. Because I’m already seeing someone.”
    “What?” Nora was genuinely baffled. “Why would you do that?”
    “What do you mean? Why does anyone see anyone?”
    “I mean, why would you need to?”
    “I don’t understand the question.”
    “I’m a really good girlfriend,” she told him. “You know that, don’t you?”
    He studied her for a few seconds, almost as if he were seeing her for the first time. There was something disconcertingly impersonal in his gaze, a kind of scientific detachment.
    “You’re okay,” he conceded, a bit grudgingly. “Definitely above average.”
    After she graduated, this story became one of her favorite college anecdotes. She told it so much that it eventually became a running gag in her marriage. Whenever she did something thoughtful—picked up Doug’s shirts at the cleaners, cooked him an elaborate dinner for no apparent reason, gave him a back rub when he came home from work—he would scrutinize her for a moment or two, stroking his chin like a philosophy major.
    “It’s true,” he’d say, with an air of mild astonishment. “You really are a better-than-average girlfriend.”
    “Damn right,” she’d reply. “I’m in the fifty-third percentile.”
    The joke seemed a little less funny these days, or maybe just funny in a different way, now that she was trying to be Kevin Garvey’s girlfriend and doing such a crappy job of it. Not because she didn’t like him—that wasn’t the problem at all—but because she couldn’t remember how to play a role that had once been second nature. What did a girlfriend say? What did she do? It felt a lot like her honeymoon in Paris, when she suddenly realized that she couldn’t speak a word of French, even though she’d studied the language for all four years of high school.
    It’s so frustrating, she told Doug. I used to know this stuff.
    She wanted to say the same thing to Kevin, to let him know that she was just a little rusty, that one of these days it would all come back to her.
    Je m’appelle Nora. Comment vous appellez-vous?
    I’m a really good girlfriend.
    *   *   *
    COUNCIL MEETINGS were a bit like church, Kevin thought, a familiar sequence of rituals—Appointments, Resignations and Retirements, Announcements (“Congratulations