Rather, we couldn’t actually afford it. A bachelor uncle had died, and Millard’s mother, who had loathed me since I was seventeen and ensnared her only child, decided to use some of her inheritance to buy Millard—not me—a house. It was a homey Tudor in a prewar development—a little small, a little dark, with a one-car garage—but with a Japanese maple on the front lawn I could hardly believe was mine. Every leaf, every crooked bough, mine. I’d never owned a tree before, just as I’d never owned a kitchen or a fireplace, but after all those years in apartments, the treeness of that Japanese maple spoke to me of eight-year-old Barden playing in the backyard, of bikes in the garage, of Halloween, of neighborhood. And that’s probably why, in overwhelming and buoyant suburban joy, I decided that it was time for our son to own a dog. The all-American dream, right? A boy, a house, a dog? Our family’s moment to see Spot run? Besides, now that Millard and Barden and I were starting our Real Life.
