“It’s just one of those rules.”

“One of what rules?”

“Like, nobody can make fun of your father but you. Don’t eat a giant cake before running. And always buy the shoes that the bride wants you to buy.”

Juice looks impressed. “What other rules do you know?”

“Too many,” Phoebe says.

PHOEBE HELPS JUICE pick out gold shoes that she doesn’t completely hate more than life itself, and Phoebe gets a black pair for herself. She tries them on and they look so good, she feels proud of her feet.

“What do you think?” Phoebe asks, stretching out her leg.

“It looks like a foot,” Juice says. “With a shoe on it.”

“But do you like it?”

“You sound like Lila,” Juice says. “Lila’s obsessed with her feet.”

“What do you mean, she’s obsessed with her feet?”

“During the pandemic she spent hours watching TV and soaking her feet in this pedicure machine she bought. And it was my pedicure machine. I mean, she gave it to me for my birthday. And she was like, Yeah, but you never use it. And I was like, Well yeah, why would I use that? I mean, who cares what someone’s feet look like? It’s like she has no idea that we’re all just going to die someday.”

Juice leans over to unbuckle her shoe.

“Is that what you said?” Phoebe asks.

“Once,” Juice says.

“Harsh.”

“Well, it’s not normal. She’s obsessed with the way she looks. It literally takes her hours to figure out what to wear … to the bathroom. It’s such a waste of time.”

It’s a similar kind of thing Phoebe used to tell herself in graduate school when everybody showed up to class looking like they had spent all morning turning themselves into a postmodern painting. It made her feel better about just wearing jeans. But Phoebe no longer believes this is the whole truth.

“A woman is asked out as much for her clothes as for herself,” Phoebe says. “It’s a line from an Edith Wharton novel.”

A line that struck Phoebe as very true, even though her students always thought it sounded shallow. So does Juice.

“Well, that’s just sad,” Juice says. “You shouldn’t ask someone out because of their clothes.”

“I think Wharton meant something more than that,” Phoebe says. “I think she wants us to think about the secret things people reveal through their clothing choices. Like when we admire someone’s dress or jacket, we’re really admiring something else.”

“Like their body?” Juice asks. “Like how much money they have?”

And yes, yes. But no.

“Clearly you’ve never fallen in love with a man because he wore the same leather belt every day,” Phoebe says.

Juice laughs. “Wait, you fell in love with a man because of his belt?”

“My ex-husband wore it on our first date,” Phoebe says. “I remember admiring how the leather was smooth and tan, and then I kept noticing him wear it again and again.”

It was a good belt, Matt told her when she finally asked about it, said he bought it when he was eighteen, and that he hoped to keep it until he died. And she could see it all, how this man would care for this one belt his whole life, how he would walk the perimeter of their house each night, making sure the doors were locked and the cups were in perfect order in the cabinet.

“Did he?” Juice asks.

“Yes,” Phoebe says.

“Then why aren’t you still married?”

“He had an affair.”

“Oh. Like Albert Schuyler?”

“Like Albert Schuyler.”

“Did he build his mistress a building, too?”

Phoebe chuckles. It feels good to finally laugh about it for real.

“Not quite,” she says.

“So you were wrong about the belt,” Juice says. “He didn’t take care of you forever.”

“No,” Phoebe says. “But I was not wrong about the belt.”

Phoebe remembers the last night she spent with her husband, watching him undress for bed, rolling up the belt into a little ball. Here was a man who took care of everything, she thought. A man who folded his laundry with the precision of a dressmaker. So why couldn’t he take care of this, too? Why did she believe that somehow he could always save her, like her womb was a cupboard with cups in all the wrong places? A place her husband would rearrange, if only he could get to it.

“The belt revealed what we both wanted him to be,” Phoebe says. “But we can’t always be what we want every second. And that’s okay. That’s just life, you know?”

Juice picks up her boots and stares at them like they look different to her now.

“What do you want your boots to say about you?” Phoebe asks.

When Juice doesn’t say anything, Phoebe worries she’s lost her, that this might be too much for the kid, the way she used to worry about losing her students when they fell silent in class. Because their silence during the pandemic was excruciating. Their silence sounded like proof that they hated her, proof that they couldn’t wait to leave, too.

But Phoebe had not always felt that way about teaching. When she first started, she loved it so much, she often felt bad for the parents of her students who didn’t get to know their children in the way Phoebe sometimes did. Because a professor was in a unique position to open students up. They seemed inclined to trust that when Phoebe asked a question, it was leading somewhere worthwhile. It was nice, Phoebe thought, how often they went with her. How they trusted her to be a good professor, and she trusted them to be good students who sat in silence not because they hated her but because they were thinking.

So she decides to trust in Juice’s silence. She does not retract her question or apologize for it. She just waits, until finally, Juice speaks.

“I guess I want people to know that I don’t care what my feet look like,” Juice says. “That I’m not like Lila at all.”

“What are you like?”

“Like my mom.”

“What was she like?”