“My parents were essentially speechless,” she said and exhaled wearily. “They were raised so poor in southern Ohio—where nobody really had anything to say, anyway—that they didn’t know there were all these things you needed to be able to say to make the world work.” She nodded, agreeing with herself. “My mother for instance. She wouldn’t just walk up to you and just say, ‘Hello, I’m Mary Burns.’ She’d just start talking, just blurt out what she needed to get said. Then she’d stare at you. And if you acted surprised, she’d dislike you for it.”

Jena seemed to fix her gaze on the molten flow of cars below. This was her story, Wales thought; the one she couldn’t get over from her past, the completely insignificant story that she believed cooperated in all her major failures: why she married who she’d married. Why she didn’t go to a better college. Why she wasn’t more successful as an artist. He’d had his own, years ago: 1958, an overcast day on Narragansett Bay with his father, in a dory. A fishing trip. His father had confessed to him about a half-Portuguese woman he loved down in Westerly—someone his mother and sister never heard about. The story stayed fixed in his mind for years, though he’d forgotten it until just now.

Still, these things were unimportant. You imagined the past, you didn’t remember it. You could just imagine it differently. He would tell her that, tell her she was a wonderful woman. That’s all that mattered.

“Is this okay?” Jena said, pulling her sweater sleeves up above her slender elbows. Her dark hair shone with the candle’s flicker. The room was reflected out of kilter in the tall window. “I can’t stand it if I bore you.”

“No,” Wales said. “Not at all.”

“Okay, so my father,” she went right on. “He couldn’t go inside a restaurant and ask for a table. He’d just stand. Then he’d inch forward, expecting his wishes would be understood by whoever was in charge—as if his being there could only mean what he needed it to mean.” Jena shook her head, breathed against the glass and mused at the fog her breath left. “So odd,” she said. “They were like immigrants. Except they weren’t. I guess it’s a form of arrogance.”

“Is that all?” Wales said.

“Yes.” She looked at him and blinked.

“It doesn’t seem very important,” he said.

“It’s just why they were unsuccessful human beings,” Jena said calmly. “That’s all.”

“But does it mean very much to you?” It surprised him that this was what she wanted to talk about. It seemed so intimate and so irrelevant.

“They’re my parents,” she said.

“Do they like you?”

“Of course.