When the car crunches the gravel outside the house Douglas starts barking, as he always does. Linda cannot blame him, for if her physiology were wired any differently, she might start barking, too, instead of only growing slightly flushed as she hastily checks the soup bubbling on the stove before glancing out the window at the drive.

The glance out the window is, at this point, only a reflex to the dog barking. Linda knows perfectly well who it is; it is her son Steven, her middle son, and his new girlfriend Natasha. It is 2 P.M. on a Saturday, the doldrum hour of clinking plates, murmured conversation, shouts of neighborhood kids, the occasional drone of a mower. Sunday stretches like infinity between today and Monday.

Natasha has brought her dog, Luna, with her. Thanks to previous visits, Luna and Douglas have already become well acquainted. When their wriggling, sinewy bodies are let into the yard through the back porch, they launch themselves, tongues-flying, onto the grass. As if possessed by diabolically cheerful demons, they complete their mad, joyous penance of dashing in circles, tracing over and over the path that Douglas tears into the ground every spring.

Natasha and Steven are taking off their shoes and jackets, they are saying hello and exchanging hugs with Linda, they are sitting at the kitchen table while Linda rushes back to the soup on the stove.

Steven looks well-rested, if a little scraggly, Linda thinks.

By the looks of it, he hasn’t shaved or even trimmed his beard in weeks.Though only twenty-nine, his dark hair is already receding far back from his forehead, leaving the arcs of two shining circles on the top of either side of his skull.

Linda tries not to linger on the resemblances between Natasha and Steven’s previous girlfriend of five years, Liz—the long dark hair, the large eyes, large breasts, slender waists. But she can’t help thinking of all the meals they shared, all the vacations, the family events, the lulls in conversation. Five years are not nothing.

She thinks, too, of the habits, preferences, and stories of Liz she had memorized and would now have to relearn—the relations of family and friends, the siblings, the trips abroad, the pets. Five years are not nothing. Her heart sends out one sonorous ring for Liz, a collective echo of the small griefs she has felt since first learning of the break-up a few months ago—but she knows she must let Liz go, because he has.

And there is, after all of this, still soup to be served to hungry guests, still Saturday afternoon lunches to be had.

Steven and Natasha remark on the pretty, though unusual, pale pink color of the soup that Linda ladles into ceramic dishes. A few gleeful barks are heard, muffled, from the yard.

“Guess what it’s made of,” Linda says, a small smile puckering her lips.

Natasha furrows her brow politely, while Steven tries the obvious possibility—“beets?”

“Close, but not quite,” Linda answers, sitting down now at the edge of her seat, hands poised on her lap. “Guess again.”

Natasha clears her throat, smiles. “Some type of potato, perhaps?”

A small shake of the head, and Linda raises her brows in triumphant explanation: “radishes!”

Steven and Natasha nod and make _ahhhh mhhhhhm_ noises. If not beets, of course it had to be radishes.

The main course is nothing special, a roast beef, green beans, a salad and rolls with butter. For Natasha, who is a vegetarian, she has made a small casserole of gnocchi with gorgonzola cheese. The gnocchi look like creamy slugs, nestling up in blue and white slime.

Conversation, like the forks clinking on their plates, pitter-patters across the various spheres of life—work, family friends, the news—without resting long on any of them. A vacation, a weekend, a political scandal are picked up, put back down again like a saltshaker traveling from one hand to another.

Linda remembers to give them an update about some family friends whose house burned down a few weeks back—he works for a bank, they’ll be able to take out a loan and rebuild—and shows them a small green sweater she just finished crocheting for the couple’s ten-year-old son.

“I can’t imagine it, losing everything like that,” she says and shakes her head.

“Would it really be so bad?” Steven asks. A hunk of roast beef hovers, stabbed by his fork. “I mean, as long as you have the money to start up again, it’s like a fresh start.”

“But just imagine, all the photos of the children, the things you inherit from parents and grandparents, all of it just gone. Things that can’t be bought again.”

Steven snorts. “Oh c’mon, Mom. Do you really ever look at old photos of us?”

“I absolutely do. Photographs mean a lot to me.”

Linda can’t believe how callous he is sometimes. It isn’t a matter of being hurt—she couldn’t be hurt by the child for whom she knew the origin behind every scar; knew the name of each one of his grade school teachers and his best friends in high school. For her, Steven would always be the sum of the stories she knew about him. What he said now would not change who he was for her—her son.

So she would let him believe in fresh starts: she brings a bite of salad to her mouth.

Natasha shifts in her seat and smiles. The part of her forearms that were visible from the rolled-up cheetah print sweater she wore were covered in small, colorful tattoos. She was probably a very nice girl.

“I think the sweater you made is lovely,” Natasha says. “I wish I knew how to crochet. I learned as a kid, back when I stayed with my grandma on the weekends; but since then, I’ve forgotten.”

“Well, it’s certainly not too late to start again,” Linda says, smoothing a fold in the tablecloth and patting the loose, auburn curls of her hair at the same time. “When the boys were young, I didn’t make anything of that kind for years, but when they got older, I picked it back up again. I could lend you some yarn if you wanted to try.”

“Yes, I do, that would be great,” Natasha responds. As Steven half drapes his arm around her, she glances at him at him from the side and smiles.

For desert, chocolate-cherry ice cream. Linda serves it in small glass dishes with the fresh strawberries Natasha had brought along but not washed or cut up. So Linda had done that instead. She didn’t mind at all. It made her smile and think of being young.

With panting and the click-clack of nails on tile floor, Douglas and Luna announce their entrance into the house and, exhausted, flop onto their bellies into opposite corners of the dining room. In his corner, Douglas snaps at the flies that gather and buzz near the glass door, lured by the warmth of sunlight half-trapped in glass.

From her own corner, Luna watches lazily, her tongue a wagging pink saucer.

“Hunting flies is one of Douglas’s favorite hobbies,” Steven explains to Natasha. “We chalk it up to the hunting dog in him. He can’t leave anything that moves alone.”

Natasha laughs and starts to say something about Luna and squirrels.

As it sometimes does during Saturday afternoon lunch, Linda’s mind drifts from the conversation. She thinks how this detail, about Douglas catching flies, will be one of the many small things that enters into their story together, the story of Steven and Natasha. Who could say how long it would last?

Linda is glad, very glad, that she no longer has to make a fresh start with anyone. She thinks of the lives of her three sons, of her husband, of herself: each of them is like a well-worn path in a backyard, trod over and over every spring by the warmth and terrific effort of animal bodies. Were the paths to be laid one on top of the other, intersecting at places and diverging at others, she couldn’t picture what shape they would make.

Without warning, the two dogs spring up and dash into the yard. Steven and Natasha, having finished their ice cream, excuse themselves to follow. At the threshold between the porch and yard, they pause, watching the dogs run in circles and squinting into the honey light. When Steven places a hand on Natasha’s shoulder, her skin flickers lightly, not yet sure when to expect his touch. She reaches up to meet his fingers with hers. Somewhere far away a mower buzzes like a huge black fly.

As quiet settles over the house, Linda is overcome by a sense of exhaustion that is relieving at the same time—as though something heavy, heavy is draining from her bones, heavy but fluid. Like the carton of cream she added to the soup.

At first, she tries to resist—there are so many things to plan—the next Saturday lunch, the yarn she promised Natasha, the childhood stories and family relations to learn, the—how many siblings did she have again? What was that she had said about her mother’s surgery last year, her father’s transfer to another branch of—I must—ahh, but there will time later, Linda thinks. Today is Saturday. I won’t think about those things now. There would be time.