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nodded at one shelf.
    “The one at the end, I assume?” Evan asked her.
“Living with ALS
?” She nodded, and Evan reached past us and tapped the spine of a thick blue book. I didn’t know if they meant for me to borrow it or only to note the author, so I studied the spine intently, repeating the title. “I’ll put a hold on it at the library,” I said. I was embarrassed to have asked. I’d been sincere but now seemed disingenuous. “Thanks again.”
    I walked out to my car, still thinking about the notion of fit. It was a nicety of interviewing I never failed to appreciate. It comforted me to think that any job I wasn’t offered was not because I was totally unqualified but simply due to a vague notion of attraction. Fit, that’s what it was: fit, not failure, like a date you kiss good-bye without feeling a thing, except an unfocused sense of goodwill and the knowledge that you won’t ever see each other again.
     
    MAKEUP APPLIED AND HAIR dressed, Kate led the way into the kitchen. She pulled up next to the table but not facing it while Evan poured himself a cup of coffee. He held up another mug to me.
    “Thanks,” I said.
    “Milk’s in the fridge,” he said, nudging a sugar bowl toward me. I found the milk, sloshed a bit in, and dropped a spoonful of sugar into my mug.
    Evan opened a pantry door and gestured to me to follow, which I did, sipping contentedly at my coffee. It was a big walk-in, stocked with blue and yellow tin gallons of French olive oil, jars of tomatoes and peaches and pears. Beneath that was a neat shelf of bottles. They had spices I knew but had rarely seen people really use: jars filled withpiles of crimson threads of saffron or bright gold powdered turmeric; tiny reddish pellets that looked like the centers of flowers; little curls of cinnamon like stubby brown cigarettes; something I first thought was a jar of almonds but that turned out to be whole nutmeg.
    “This is really something,” I said. I looked over my shoulder at Kate, who was sitting just outside the pantry door. “Did you cook?”
    She nodded and said something. “ ‘I used to love to cook,’ ” Evan’s voice translated near my ear, startling me. I’d forgotten he was in the pantry too.
    I touched a plastic bag filled with desiccated burgundy peppers, like long, shriveled hearts. “What did you like to make?”
    She tipped her head, with a look on her face that was half-wistful and half-proud. “All kinds of stuff.”
    I turned back to the pantry, eyeing a jar stacked with coins of sliced cucumbers and starbursts of some green herb and wondering who had put these up last summer. Could it have been Kate? Evan was still standing where he’d been when he first motioned for me to come over to the pantry: next to a whole wall stacked with the same brown boxes on each shelf. He reached into one of the open boxes and held up a can a little smaller than a soda. A nutrition shake. He handed it to me and then grabbed another.
    “Breakfast,” he said.
    He took a white plastic funnel and a long clear tube from where they were sitting by the sink and held them up for me to see. “I’m going to do this today, but tomorrow I’ll let you do it.” He and Kate exchanged a look. “Unless you want to do it now.”
    “You’d let me do this before makeup?” I asked, eyeing the tube. Where exactly was that supposed to go?
    Kate said something and Evan translated: “ ‘Well, the makeup. That’s important. This is just sticking a tube into my digestive tract.’ ”
    I laughed, but I had no intention of getting ahead of myself on the first day of training. If they offered me the option, I was watching.
    Evan showed me how to attach the tube and funnel to each other.
    “If you lift her shirt on the right side, you’ll see a little valve.” He did this, gesturing with the funnel for me to come closer. I went to the other side of her chair and bent at the waist, bracing myself on herwheelchair. I saw Kate give my hand on