The hedgehog is in a cage on top of the piano, next to college photos of me and my brother. Mother leads me to it first thing—past the dogs bowing and cowing by the door, past the cat on the dining room table, past Father asleep on the sofa next to a box of empty chocolate wrappers.

You walk past, with an air of purpose you don't feel; what you feel is eyes boring into your back. You haul yourself upstairs to the airless room where the library ladies come for lunch. Tahini dressing, bean sprouts, carrot soup with bits of dill, seven-grain bread. The library ladies like that sort of thing. You're not one of the library ladies, though.

Some of the dismay she felt must have shown in her expression, for the salon-tanned man turned to her. "I know," he said. "It's a bit embarrassing to be here, isn't it?"

You see, just as water births bubbles which rise to the surface only to disappear, so the earth has bubbles, and Kornblatt was undoubtedly one of them.