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play on my chest until he fell asleep. And then I fell asleep. The last thing I saw was a bird trying to get in the window. Monika’s luggage was still sitting in the living room, unopened.
    Bob must have figured out that Karel did not have a skin condition because there was certainly a theme to the gifts he brought over. “He already had a baby shower in Belgrade,” Monika said, but that didn’t stop Bob. A children’s biography of Martin Luther King Jr., James Brown’s
Greatest Hits
, and a pretend leg of fried chicken made out of some rubberlike material. “He can actually teethe on it!” Bob said.
    When he was gone, Monika said, “My dream was of a new life here, but this may be impossible.”
    “I think Bob meant well,” I said.
    “Ah, make no mistake: that was not Bob speaking and bringing his symbolic gifts. That was America speaking through Bob.”
    Meanwhile, Karel teethed contentedly on his rubber drumstick, his little chin glistening as he hummed.
    As part of Monika’s first assignment on her return to architecture school she began to design some alterations for our house, a wing here, a wing there: I was terrified that she would actually want me to have these things built.
    “Why do we need a loggia?”
    “Why do I even talk to you?”
    Bob continued to visit some mornings for coffee. If he arrived before Monika left for school, she fled to her car. “Always in a hurry, that gal,” Bob said. “Someday she’ll be designing skyscrapers, and we’ll brag we knew her back when.” Whenever Bob drove Monika from the house, it fell to me to care for Karel until the babysitter arrived in her white tennis shoes and loose shorts that made the vanishing of her thighs into them a matter of urgent mystery. I loved to start the day by playing with Karel in bed. He’d sit on my stomach, and we’d play hand games that always ended with this merry little boy tipping over onto the pillows only to arise and crawl on top of me again to resume the battle with a shout. If Bob was still there, we did this on the living-room rug, scurrying around until I had rug burns on my knees. When Bob wasn’t launching into some complaint about his overindulgent mother, he was wonderful with Karel. I couldleave the two of them together while I dressed for work, and whatever Bob did always had Karel squealing with delight. The arrival of the babysitter, nubile Lydia, would put an end to all this: I went to work; Bob went home.
    I have lived in this town for a long time, but I was raised in Bakersfield, California, a town I was longing to flee by the age of ten. I coughed up out-of-state tuition, went to law school, then settled here, at first alone and then with Monika. I mention all this because my colleague, Jay Matthews, who has lived here all his life, told me that Bob’s mother could hardly be driving him crazy: she died when he was a boy. “Got to be fifty years ago.”
    “I must have misheard him.”
    “Yeah, Bob was an only child, and his mom was single. Ole Bob was a bubble and a half off plumb, even back then. That’s why he’s always fit right into this godforsaken town.”
    Life went on. Karel’s father, Olatunde, called every week, sometimes talking to me and sometimes to Monika. His attempts to talk to Karel came to nothing, as Karel drooled and stared at the receiver. Olatunde spoke in measured tones in a deep voice, which, combined with his cultivated, slightly fusty British accent, seemed to come from a tomb. Nonetheless, his melancholy over the absence of his little boy could be discerned. He wished me luck with Monika and said that I was going to need it. His, he said, had run out.
    Bob and Karel became so close—Karel singing in his presence and crying out in delight when he arrived—that Monika and I consulted about dispensing with the babysitter and using Bob instead. I wasn’t sure about this. The babysitter was gettingready to start college and needed the money, and, besides, I was sweet on her