something besides money, I consider myself lucky.”
“How’s your health?”
He drummed on his sternum. “Like a bull,” he said.
“You’re taking your medicine?”
“I take my walk by the lake every day,” Affenlight said. “That’s better than medicine.”
Pella gave him a distressed maternal look.
“I take them,” he said. “I take them and take them. Though you know how I feel about pills.”
“Take them,” Pella said. “Are you seeing anyone?”
“Oh. Well . . .” Seeing, actually, was just the word for it. “Let’s just say there aren’t many enthralling women in this part of the world.”
“If there are any, I’m sure you’ll hunt them down.”
“Thanks,” Affenlight said dryly. “And you? How’s David?”
“David’s fine. Although he’ll be less so when he finds out I’m gone.”
“He doesn’t know you’re here?” This revelation trumped the lack of luggage; Affenlight resisted the urge to stand and pump his fist.
“He’s in Seattle. On business.”
“I see.”
Lately it seemed to Affenlight that the students were growing younger; maybe he was just getting old, or maybe adolescence was stretching out longer and longer, in proportion with the growing life span. Colleges had become high schools; grad schools, colleges. But Pella, as always, seemed intent on shooting ahead of her peers. She looked older than he remembered, of course — her cheeks less round, her features more pronounced — but she also looked older than twenty-three. She looked like she’d been through a lot.
“Are you tired?” he asked, remembering not to say You look tired.
She shrugged. “I haven’t been sleeping much.”
“Well, the bed in the guest room is great.” Mistake: he should have said your room. Or would that have seemed too eager? Anyway, onward: “And the darkness out here is something to behold. Totally different from Boston. Or San Francisco.”
“Great.”
“You can stay as long as you like. Of course.”
“Thanks.” Pella finished her whiskey, peered into the bottom of her glass. “Can I ask one more favor?”
“Shoot.”
“I’d like to start taking classes.”
“You would?” Affenlight stroked his chin and considered this happy news. “That should work out fine,” he said, trying to keep his tone as neutral as possible; to betray too much enthusiasm might backfire. “The deadlines for the fall have passed, of course, but you can register for the summer session as a visitor, and if we sign you up for the next SAT date, I’m sure I could convince Admissions —”
“No no,” Pella said quietly. “Right away.”
“What’s that?”
“I . . . I was hoping I could start right away.”
“But, Pella, the summer is right away. It’s already April.”
Pella chuckled nervously. “I was thinking about tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?” Every nerve in Affenlight’s spine quivered, half with love of his daughter, half with indignation at her presumption. “But, Pella, we’re halfway through the semester. Surely you can’t expect to hop right in.”
“I could catch up.”
Affenlight set down his drink, drummed his fingers on the arm of the chair. “I don’t doubt that you could. You’re an excellent student when you choose to be. But it’s not simply a matter of catching up. It’s a matter of courtesy. As a professor, I can tell you I wouldn’t be pleased to be suddenly told —”
“Please,” Pella said. “I could just audit. I know it’s not ideal.”
Those first two years after Pella’s mother died: call them an adjustment period. He tried day care — expensive day care — but as soon as Affenlight grew accustomed to the fact that Pella was his, the sons and daughters of his fellow professors seemed like wan, elitist company. Better to throw her in with hoi polloi, to let her lift them up — but no, that would be even worse. He’d wanted to take her to another country, Italy, or Uganda, or somewhere, where it might be possible to raise her properly; he wanted to buy a tract of land in Idaho or Australia, with hills and streams and trees and rocks and birds and mammals, where Pella could roam and explore and he could trail behind, watching her grow; alternately he wanted to drop her at an orphanage and get back his life.
But something happened, to her and to him, when Pella learned to read. He would struggle out of bed after a late night’s work to find her already awake and dressed, in the breakfast nook of their townhouse on Shepard Street, reading from some or another novel — Judy Blume, Trixie Belden, her abridged Moby-Dick — or else some picture-laden science book culled from the stacks of Widener. She read with colored pencil in hand, copying the best sentences and sketching members of her favorite phyla onto sheets of construction paper. A few last Cheerios, floating in a bowl beside her elbow, impressed Affenlight as symbols of utter independence.
When interrupted by a polite paternal throat-clearing, Pella would look up from her book and wipe a coppery curl from her eyes, her expression oddly reminiscent of the one Affenlight’s dissertation adviser would assume when Affenlight appeared unannounced at his office door, and that Affenlight always thought of as studius interruptus. Still groggy and somewhat cowed by his daughter’s industry, he would tousle her hair, start the coffee, and head back to bed. If the school authorities wanted her that badly, he reasoned, they could come a-knocking.
The next half dozen years were halcyon ones for Affenlights père et fille. The Sperm-Squeezers went through several reprints. Pella became a perpetual truant from the Cambridge public schools, and a kind of Harvard celebrity. She wandered the Yard with her backpack, handing out sketches and poems to the students who stopped to chat. The members of each new freshman class, neurotically eager to compete with one another in any and all endeavors, fought mightily for Pella’s affection, and within the Freshman Union it became a mark of status to have her at your lunch table. She sat quietly through Affenlight’s packed lectures on the American 1840s, as well as his graduate seminar on Melville and Nietzsche, and she seemed to draw few distinctions between herself and the graduate students, except that the graduate students were forever eager to please Affenlight, whereas she did so without effort, and so could afford to think for herself.
When Affenlight took the job at Westish, he and Pella decided that she would not come with. Instead she enrolled at Tellman Rose, an unconscionably expensive boarding school in Vermont. Academically, this made sense; Pella was finishing eighth grade at the time — around age eleven she’d started attending Graham & Parks every day — and Tellman Rose was far superior to any high school in northern Wisconsin. But beneath that rationale lay the obvious, unspoken truth that the two of them, by that point, could barely coexist in Boston, and Affenlight shuddered to think what would happen in a foreign, isolated place like Westish. Most of Pella’s friends were older, and she claimed their freedoms for herself. She came home later and later at night, sometimes so late that Affenlight couldn’t stay awake to see what was on her breath.
One day during that eighth-grade spring, Pella mentioned that she was thinking about getting a tattoo.
“Of what?” Mistake: it didn’t matter.
“The Chinese character for nothingness. Right here.” She pointed to one of her coltish hip bones.
“No tattoos until you’re eighteen.”
“You have one.”
“I’ve been eighteen for