I wondered if he was simply a product of my imagination.

Jenny was prattling on and on about lunch with her Nana and then shopping with her Mom and sisters. I feigned interest and pretended to listen. At one point monologues like these were a refreshing break. In grad school, Jenny had been intense and focused to say the least. But since we had married and moved back to Philadelphia, these banal excursions and her insipid descriptions of them in tedious detail were becoming far more frequent. She had stopped looking for a job. She was assuredly becoming her idiot mother.

So I sat there. I couldn’t begrudge her the shopping, it was her Mom’s money that was being spent. Actually, her grandfather’s. It was just kind of disappointing. And then as she was describing why her sister had to return shoes she had just bought because the necklace she had just bought didn’t match the dress that the shoes were for, or something like that, a little man’s head peeped out from behind the door to the bedroom.