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“Sorry.” He adjusted the towel. “You know, you’re the only person I’ve told about this. It’s a confidence. You should pat me on the shoulder and say, There, there.”

“Sorry.” She patted him on the shoulder. “There, there. So why would you want to go to law school anyway? Law school people are the dullest of the dull.”

“I was thinking of becoming governor.”

“Of Wisconsin?”

“Illinois. I’m from Chicago.”

“Aren’t you Jewish?”

“There are currently three Jewish governors,” he said solemnly. “But yes.”

His tone, as he’d announced this lofty ambition, didn’t seem ironic. In fact, it didn’t seem to admit the possibility of the existence of irony. “Well,” she said, “there’s always next year.”

“Yeah.”

Pella couldn’t stop shivering—she hadn’t even brought any socks from San Francisco—but for some reason she didn’t want to leave. The sky was lightening beneath the clouds, and the snow had buried the muddled browns of early spring. Mike, his elbows planted on his knees, gazed down glumly at his clasped hands.

“So how do you like Westish?” she asked.

“I love it,” he said. “It’s my home.”

He was so ingenuous, so honest, so physically massive—somehow the combination was wildly endearing. She sat down again. She felt moved to make a counter-confession, to distract him from his sorrow. “My dad’s the school president,” she said.

“Affy? He’s your dad?”

“Yeah.”

“Then I guess you heard what happened at our game yesterday.”

Pella had not. Mike recounted the story. “Your dad even rode with Owen in the ambulance on the way to the hospital,” he said. “He really helped calm Henry down.”

Pella didn’t know who Owen and Henry were. “I guess that’s why my dad was so late to the airport last night.”

“He didn’t tell you why? Hm. Maybe he likes to perform his Good Samaritan duties on the sly.”

“I thought you were Jewish.”

“So are the Samaritans. More or less.”

The lumberjack governor was proving less stupid than Pella initially guessed. He was still staring out into the parking lot. “I can’t believe Affenlight’s your dad,” he mused. “That guy gives a hell of a speech.”

“I know.”

“He’s the reason I came to school here. Not that I had a lot of options. But I drove up here for prefrosh weekend, and he gave a speech I’ll never forget. About Emerson.”

Pella nodded. She knew the Emerson riff by heart, but Mike clearly wanted to tell it, and if that would cheer him up she was willing to listen.

“His first wife died young, of tuberculosis. Emerson was shattered. Months later, he went to the cemetery, alone, and dug up her grave. Opened the coffin and looked inside, at what was left of this woman he loved. Can you imagine? It must have been terrible. Just a terrible thing to do. But the thing is, Emerson had to do it. He needed to see for himself. To understand death. To make death real. Your dad said that the need to see for yourself, even in the most difficult circumstances, was what educa—”

“Ellen was nineteen,” Pella interrupted to say. She hated the namelessness of women in stories, as if they lived and died so that men could have metaphysical insights. “One of the cures the doctors prescribed for tuberculosis back then was ‘jolting.’ Which meant going for high-speed carriage rides on deeply rutted roads. Months, weeks before she died. Coughing up blood all the way.”

“Wow,” Mike said. “That’s awful.”

“Yeah, right?” Pella stood again, repeated the motion of brushing the snow from her thighs. “Well, I’d better go swim my lap.” She turned toward the door, more or less expecting Mike to follow, but he stayed put, staring out at the gathering snow. “Hey,” she called back. “Maybe you should put some pants on.”

He nodded absently, absorbed in some thought she couldn’t decipher, about law school, or her father’s speeches, or his injured teammate. “I might do that.”

15

Pella wasn’t in the guest room when Affenlight, post-espresso, peeked in. Perhaps this should have seemed worrisome—he expected her to vanish for good at any moment—but mainly he felt relieved not to have to explain or lie