Songs Without Words by Ann Packer

side of the chair, turned around, and fell straight back into it, his legs swinging way up and then folding over the padded arm. “Sweet,” he said.
    He sat quietly, stuffing crackers into his mouth, his bare feet moving a little.
    “Is your homework done?” Liz said.
    Joe glanced at Brody, then looked at his watch and said, “I think it needs a little longer.”
    “Wise guy,” Brody said.
    They all sat there: Joe chewing, Liz shifting to the end of the couch and resting her feet against Brody’s thigh, Brody holding the remote loosely in his hand. Above them Lauren’s floor creaked, and he heard the sound of her desk chair scraping across the floor. At dinner she’d said she had a lot of chemistry homework tonight.
    “Dad,” Joe said suddenly, mouth full, “guess who’s going to the Yankees.”
    Brody tried not to smile. “Not this again.”
    “No, he is,” Joe said. “Trent told me. He is.”
    “Barry Bonds is not going to the Yankees. It’ll never happen.”
    “I don’t know,” Joe said. “I think you’re in denial.”
    “Better da Nile dan da Hudson.”
    “Errrr,” Joe protested, but he smiled and stretched, then got up and tossed the cracker box onto the coffee table. He went back to the kitchen, filled a glass with milk, drank it down and filled it again. When it was empty, he burped loudly.
    “Honey,” Brody said to Liz, happier than he had any reason to be. “We forgot to teach the kids manners.”
    In a little while the house shifted into its penultimate nighttime form: both kids in their rooms, the dishwasher running, Liz upstairs scouting for small tasks and saying goodnight. Brody remained on the couch, in no hurry to move because once he did he’d have to set his alarm for 4:30 a.m. He had a 6:50 flight to Seattle.
    He thought again of the apartment he and Liz had shared in San Francisco: the two small rooms, the tiny kitchen, the balcony with its narrow view of the bay. He remembered how strangely thrilled he was by his first sight of Liz’s makeup in their shared medicine cabinet, how it seemed to prove something important.
    When he proposed they were on the living room couch eating takeout Chinese. He’d been thinking about it for weeks but hadn’t had a plan; what got him to speak was a conversation he’d had at the office that afternoon. One of his coworkers had said, more or less in passing, that people chose their spouses for the flimsiest of reasons, and when he asked what she meant, she insisted that she’d married her husband because he had a nice blue shirt. And that her friends had reasons like: because he gives a great back rub, because his sister’s really nice, because he can order wine in a restaurant. Right then and there Brody thought: because she has a great laugh. She did—a wide, unencumbered laugh that was tantalizingly at odds with her calm demeanor. And that was her reaction, over the Chinese food. She said yes and cried a little, and then she laughed and laughed.

6
    S arabeth’s house was set behind another, larger house, on a flag lot without its own driveway. This meant she had to park on the street, which should have been easy—it was a tiny, quiet street—but the parking situation was completely out of hand. Berkeley being Berkeley, there had been petitions to limit the number of cars per house that could park on this block, petitions to formally disallow rules about how many cars per house could park on this block, flyers left in mailboxes urging more considerate parking (“Dear Neighbors: Please, if you park in a space next to a driveway, take a moment to think of the rest of us and park within a foot of the curb cut”), and even, rumor had it, an enraged letter from one party to another about the immorality of a single family’s owning two SUVs.
    All of this was on her mind as she made her morning tea, because last night, coming home from dinner with Nina, she’d had to park way down the block, and she couldn’t quite decide if she was