A man goes to meet his girlfriend’s mother. When his girlfriend pushes the doorbell, he asks, “You can’t go in?” to which she replies, “It’s her house.” When he meets the mother, she does not look him in the eye. He tries to be polite and enthusiastic, but the woman focuses mostly on her daughter, leaving him in the peripheral. He realizes that his girlfriend’s mother “love[s] her unnervingly. Not in the way that meant she’d love him, too. The opposite. Their love was a piece of furniture designed for two people only. Their love was an institution that barred men.” He sits down and takes some almonds from a bowl on the coffee table. The mother “lunched and slapped his forearm, really slapped it, and said, in the voice of a shocked dog owner, ‘No.’” The almonds are for her daughter. He opens his fist, gives them to her.

The mother moves many times, and the boyfriend is invited to none of her new homes. He still tries to win her favor. He learns he should not approach her as if he is her child, husband, friend. He spends time with her because her daughter works a lot. He goes with her to “baseball games, museums, movies,” “allow[s] himself to be lectured…offer[s] himself up as the brunt of jokes.”

After he’s dated the woman’s daughter for twelve years, he gets a phone call. The woman’s friend asks if the man can help because she “took a tumble.” The friend says the woman doesn’t want to bother her daughter, asks that he doesn’t tell her. The friend gives the man the address, and when he arrives, he finds that the woman lives in a building that used to be a school. There are the smells of school: “gym class,” “smoke from the teachers’ lounge,” “square pizza.” He finds the woman, with her friend, presumably a lover. Her temple is bleeding from her fall. The friend thinks maybe the woman’s shoulder is dislocated. The man says he’s going to call the ambulance and then he’s going to call her daughter. The woman says her daughter is “terrible in situations like this.” She tells him not to call her. At the hospital, they fix the woman’s shoulder. The woman tells the man that her daughter saw her father die, and perhaps, because he died when she was nine, a part of her has stayed nine. He says he’ll look after her, and the woman says not to look after her daughter, but to look after her, as because of her trauma, her daughter is unreliable. He says he will. The daughter arrives. Later, the man asks her about seeing her father die. She says he had an aneurysm, and yes, she saw it. She reflects on what happened: he was showing her a card trick, and then, “he fell to his knees, as though surrendering to the imaginary playing-card police force, he sat, he had a dopey expression on his face, he leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes, and his hands made funny giving up gestures.” “[S]he had thought it was a joke.” She thinks about how she’s never told anyone that, how it seemed like a joke. The realization that it wasn’t filled her with an emotion that was hard to describe. She figures that’s why she hasn’t told anyone because “[s]he couldn’t bear another’s interpretation. Couldn’t imagine converting any of it into words.” She wants to sustain the mystery of it. “String [her secret] on a chain. Wear it close to [her] heart. [Not] submit to anyone else’s unraveling.”