The house felt more festive when he was there; he compensated for his lackluster culinary abilities by cooking with copious amounts of garlic, so the kitchen always smelled good, and was warm, and he’d play music for them, the Velvet Underground and the Talking Heads—bands that would later inure Julia to the too-cool men she dated after college, men who viewed a woman with good musical taste as a statistical anomaly—until
