Three Days in June

by Anne Tyler

a cat. I didn’t even want a houseplant; I had reached the stage of

Rupert,”

preferring her to me. When Debbie was a little girl,

after the cake was served, but how immediately? Did that mean even before people had picked up their forks? But how would they know to wait? So maybe it meant while they were actually eating. No, that seemed just plain wrong, to have the scraping of plates and the munching sounds drowning out the toasts. Surely it

according to Sophie’s index card, but a lot of people didn’t know that and so several of them stood

recliner, tipped as far back as he could go. He took a long swallow

“You have the matrilineal advantage, though,” he told me. “The what?”

at least in the on-again-off-again, maybe/maybe-not, semi-happy way of just about any married woman—broken apart my whole world for a man I never really knew? But maybe that was just it: I hadn’t known him. There are times when that can be the strongest draw of all.

with smaller houses, and then the houses turned into podiatry offices or one-man insurance agencies, and then we took a right onto Ashton Street and I saw Mayella’s Produce and the lake trout joint and beyond that, my school. Which reminded me: “I was thinking,” I said (a bit breathlessly, on