HE SUN WAS STILL BRIGHT IN THE SKY WHEN I GOT HOME. It was one of the very few benefits of summer in Miami: The temperature may be ninety-seven, and the humidity well over a hundred percent, but at least when you got home at six o’clock, there was still plenty of daylight left, so you could sit outside with your family and sweat for another hour and a half.

But, of course, my little family did no such thing. We were natives; tans are for tourists, and we preferred the comfort of central air-conditioning. Besides, since my brother, Brian, had given Cody and Astor a Wii, they hadn’t left the house at all except by force. They both seemed unwilling to leave the room where the thing sat, for any reason. We’d had to make some very strict rules about using the Wii: They had to ask first, and they had to finish their homework before they turned it on, and they could play with it no more than an hour a day.

So when I came into the house and saw Cody and Astor already standing in front of the TV with their Wii controllers clutched tightly in their hands, my first question was automatic. “Homework all done?” I said.

They didn’t even look up; Cody just nodded, and Astor frowned. “We finished it at after-school,” she said.

“All right,” I said. “Where’s Lily Anne?”

“With Mom,” Astor said, frowning deeper at my continuing interruption.

“And where’s Mom?”

“Dunno,” she said, waving her controller and jerking spasmodically with whatever was happening on the screen. Cody glanced at me—it was Astor’s play—and he shrugged slightly. He almost never said more than three words at a time, one small side effect of the abuse he’d received from his biological father, and Astor did most of the talking for both of them. But at the moment she seemed uncharacteristically unwilling to talk—probably a continuing miff over impending braces. So I took a breath and tried to shake off my growing irritation at both of them.

“Fine,” I said. “Thank you for asking, yes, I did have a hard day at work. But I already feel a lot better, now that I’m here nestled in the warm bosom of my family. I’ve enjoyed our little chat very much.”

Cody gave a funny little half smirk and said, very softly, “Bosom.” Astor said nothing; she just gritted her teeth and attacked a large monster on the screen. I sighed; as comforting as it may be to some of us, sarcasm, like youth, is wasted on the young. I gave up on the kids and went to look for Rita.

She wasn’t in the kitchen, which was a very large disappointment, since it meant she was not busily whipping up something wonderful for my dinner. There was nothing burbling on the stove, either. And it wasn’t leftover night; this was very puzzling and a little bit troublesome. I hoped this didn’t mean we were going to have to order pizza—although it made the kids happy, it simply could not compete with even the most casual of Rita’s efforts.

I went back through the living room and down the hall. Rita was not in the bathroom, and not in the bedroom, either. I began to wonder whether Freddy Krueger had grabbed her, too. I went to the bedroom window and looked out into the backyard.

Rita sat at the picnic table we’d put up under a large banyan tree that spread its branches over nearly half our backyard. She was holding Lily Anne on her lap with her left hand and sipping from a large glass of wine with the right. Other than that, she seemed to be doing absolutely nothing except staring back at the house and slowly shaking her head. As I watched she took a gulp of wine, hugged Lily Anne a little tighter for a moment, and then appeared to sigh heavily.

This was very strange behavior, and I had no idea what to make of it. I had never seen Rita act like this before—sitting alone and unhappy and drinking wine—and it was disturbing to see her doing it now, whatever the reason might be. It seemed to me, however, that the most important point was that, whatever Rita was doing, she was not cooking dinner, and that was just the sort of dangerous inaction that calls for prompt and vigorous intervention. So I wound my way back through the house, past Cody and Astor—still happily killing things on the TV screen—and on out the back door into the yard.

Rita looked up at me as I came outside and she seemed to freeze for a moment. Then she hurriedly turned away, put her wineglass down on the picnic table’s bench, and turned back around to face me. “I’m home,” I said, with cautious good cheer.

She sniffled loudly. “Yes, I know,” she said. “And now you’ll go get all sweaty again.”

I sat next to her; Lily Anne had begun to bounce as I approached, and I held out my hands for her. She launched herself toward me and Rita passed her over to me with a tired smile. “Oh,” Rita said, “you’re such a good daddy. Why can’t I just …” And she shook her head and snuffled again.

I looked away from Lily Anne’s bright and cheerful face and into Rita’s tired and unhappy one. Aside from a runny nose, she also seemed to have been crying; her cheeks were wet and her eyes looked red and a little swollen. “Um,” I said. “Is something wrong?”

Rita blotted at her eyes with the sleeve of her blouse and then turned around and took a large sip of wine. She put the glass back down again, behind her, and faced me once more. She opened her mouth to say something, bit her lip, and looked away, shaking her head.

Even Lily Anne seemed puzzled by Rita’s behavior, and she bounced vigorously for a moment, calling out, “Abbab bab bab!”

Rita looked at her with a small, tired smile. “She needs a fresh diaper,” Rita said, and before I could respond to that, Rita sobbed: just one small sob, and she strangled it off for the most part so that it might almost have been a hiccup, but I was very sure it was a sob. It seemed like overreacting to a dirty diaper.

I am not comfortable with emotions, partly because I do not have them and so I generally don’t understand where they come from and what they mean. But after years of careful study and a great deal of practice I had learned to cope when others displayed them, and I usually knew the correct response when a human being was in the grip of strong feelings.

In this case, however, I admit I was helpless. Going by the book, a woman’s tears generally called for comfort and reassurance, no matter how phony—but how could I apply either of those things if I didn’t know what was causing Rita’s crying fit? I looked at her carefully, searching her face for some clue, and found nothing; red-rimmed eyes and wet cheeks, yes, but unfortunately no one had scrawled a message on her face outlining a cause and a course of treatment. And so, sounding almost as awkward as I was beginning to feel, I stuttered out, “Uh, are you … I mean, is something wrong?”

Rita sniffled again and wiped her nose on her sleeve. Once more she seemed about to say something truly momentous. Instead, she just shook her head and touched the baby’s face with a finger. “It’s Lily Anne,” she said. “We have to move. And then you.”

I heard those terrifying words, “It’s Lily Anne,” and for just a moment the world got very bright and spun around me as my brain was filled with an endless list of terrible maladies that might be attacking my little girl. I clutched my baby tightly and tried to breathe until things steadied down again. Lily Anne helped out by swatting at the side of my head and saying, “Abah-a-bah!” The clout to my ear brought me back to my senses and I looked back at Rita, who apparently had no idea that her words had sent me into a full-scale tizzy. “What’s wrong with Lily Anne?” I demanded.

“What?” Rita said. “What do you mean? There’s nothing— Oh, Dexter, you’re being so— I just meant, we have to move. Because of Lily Anne.”

I looked at the happy little face of the child bouncing on my lap. Rita was not making sense, at least not to me. How could this perfect little person force us to move? Of course, she was my child, which raised a few terrifying possibilities. Perhaps some vagrant strand of wicked DNA had surfaced in her and the outraged neighborhood was demanding her exile. It was a horrible thought, but it was at least possible. “What did she do?” I said.

“What did she— Dexter, she’s only a year old,” Rita said. “What could she possibly do?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But you said we have to move because of Lily Anne.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” she said. “You’re being completely …” She fluttered a hand in the air, and then she turned around again and took another gulp of wine, bending over the glass and shielding it from me, as if she didn’t want me to know what she was doing over there.

“Rita,” I said, and she slapped the glass down onto the bench and turned back toward me, swallowing convulsively. “If nothing is wrong with Lily Anne, and she didn’t do anything wrong, why do we have to move?”

She blinked, and then wiped the corners of her eyes with her sleeve. “That’s just …” she said. “I mean, because look at her.” Rita gestured at the baby, and it seemed to me that her motor skills were not quite what they should have been, because her hand bumped clumsily against my arm. She jerked the hand back and waved at the house. “Such a little house,” she said. “And Lily Anne is getting so big.”

I looked at her and waited for more, but I waited in vain. Her words did not add up to anything I could understand, but they were apparently all I was going to get. Did Rita really think that Lily Anne was growing into some kind of gigantic creature, like in Alice in Wonderland, and soon the house would be too small to contain her? Or was there some hidden message here, possibly in Aramaic, that would take me years of study to decipher? I have heard and read many suggestions about what it takes to make a marriage work, but at the moment what mine seemed to need most was a translator. “Rita, you’re not making any sense,” I said, with all the gentle patience I could fake.

She shook her head, just a little bit sloppily, and scowled at me. “I’m not drunk,” she said.

One of the few eternal truths about humans is that if someone says they aren’t sleeping, they’re not rich, or they’re not drunk, they almost certainly are. But telling them so when they deny it is thankless, unpleasant, and sometimes dangerous. So I just smiled understandingly at Rita. “Of course you’re not,” I said. “So why do we have to move because Lily Anne is getting so big?”

“Dexter,” Rita said. “Our little family is all getting so big. We need a bigger house.”

A small light flickered in my mighty brain and then came on. “You mean we need a house with more room? Because the kids are growing up?”

“Yes,” she said, slapping her hand on the picnic table for emphasis. “That’s exactly right.” She frowned. “What jid you think I meaned?”

“I had no idea what you meaned,” I said. “But you’re sitting out here—and you’re crying.”

“Oh,” she said, and she looked away, and once more she blotted clumsily at her face with her sleeve. “It doesn’t seem like right now.” She looked at me and quickly looked away again. “I mean, you know, I’m not soopit. Stooper.” She frowned, and then said very carefully,

“I’m. Not. Stupid.”

“I never thought you were,” I said, which was actually true: amazingly scatterbrained, yes, but not stupid. “Is that why you’re crying?”

She looked at me very hard, and I was just beginning to get uncomfortable when her eyes glazed over a little, and she looked away.

“It’s just hormones,” she said. “I didn’t want anyone to see.”

I skipped over the image of anyone seeing her hormones and tried to focus on the heart of the matter. “So there’s nothing wrong with Lily Anne?” I said, still not quite sure that everything was exactly what it should be.

“No, no, of course not,” Rita said. “It’s the house too small. Cody and Astor can’t share a room forever, because you know,” she said. “Astor is getting to that age.”

Even without really knowing what specific age she meant, I thought I understood. Astor was growing up, and she couldn’t share a room with her brother forever. But even so, aside from the fact that I was used to this house and didn’t really want to move away from it, I had a few practical objections. “We can’t afford a new house,” I said. “Especially not a bigger one.”

Rita waggled a finger at me and squinted playfully through one eye. “You have not been paying attention,” she said, working very hard to make each word distinct.

“I guess not.”

“There are lots of wonderful opportoonies,” she said. “Toon-a-nitties. Damn.” She shook her head, and then closed her eyes tightly. “Oh,” she said. “Oh, lord.” She breathed heavily for a moment and swayed so that I wondered if she was going to fall off the bench. But then she took an extra-deep breath, rolled her head in a half circle, and opened her eyes. “Foreclosures,” she said carefully. “Not a new house. A foreclosing houses.” She smiled loopily, and then jerked around and hunched over the wineglass again; this time she drained it.

I thought about what she said—or at any rate, I thought about what I thought she had said. It was true that South Florida was littered with bargain real estate right now. No matter how much the economy was officially improving everywhere else, Miami was still full of people who were in over their heads on a bad mortgage, and many of them were simply walking away, leaving the bank holding the worthless paper as well as the overpriced house. And quite often the banks, in turn, were anxiously unloading the houses for a fraction of the original price.

I knew all this very well from a general and somewhat disinterested standpoint. Lately the whole subject of foreclosure and bargain houses was on everybody’s lips, much like the weather. Everyone talked about it, and the media were full of stories and discussions and panels with dire warnings. And closer to home, even my own brother, Brian, was happily employed dealing with this same phenomenon.

But to go from this theoretical awareness of foreclosure into the very real idea of taking personal advantage of it took a moment of adjustment. I liked living where we were, and I had already given up my comfy little apartment to do so. Moving again would be difficult and uncomfortable and inconvenient, and there was no guarantee at all that we would end up someplace better, especially with a house that had been abandoned in despair and anger. There might be holes kicked in the roof, and wiring ripped out—and at the very least, wouldn’t there be bad karma to deal with?

But once again, Lily Anne proved that she saw things a little more clearly and shrewdly than her dunderheaded father. As I wrestled with all the concepts of foreclosure and moving and personal inconvenience, she cut right to the heart of the matter with an insight that was sharp and compelling. She bounced three times on her powerful little legs and said, “Da. Da da da.” And for emphasis, she reached out and pulled on my earlobe.

I looked at my little girl, and I came to a decision. “You’re right,” I told her. “You deserve your own room.” I turned to Rita to tell her what I had decided, but she had leaned back against the edge of the table and closed her eyes again, and her head was swaying gently, her mouth open and her hands clasped in her lap.

“Rita?” I said.

She jerked upright and her eyes popped open wide. “Oh!” she said. “Oh, my God, you scared me.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “About the house?”

“Yes,” she said, and she frowned. “Brian says— Oh, I hope you don’t mind,” she said, and she looked a little bit guilty. “I talked to him first? Because, you know, his job.” She fluttered a hand again and it bumped against the edge of the table. “Ouch,” she said.

“Yes,” I said, with soothing encouragement. “You talked to Brian. That’s good.”

“It is good,” she said. “He Is Good. He knows really what ups. Wha’s up. With houses. Right now, I mean.” “Yes, he does.”

“He’s going to help us,” she said. “Find, find …”

“Find a house,” I said.

Rita shook her head slowly and then closed her eyes. I waited, but nothing happened. “I’m sorry,” she said at last, very softly. “I think I need to go lie down.” She got up from the bench; the empty wineglass fell to the ground and the stem snapped off, but Rita didn’t notice. She stood there, swayed for a moment, and then meandered back into the house.

“Well, then,” I said to Lily Anne. “I guess we’re moving.”

Lily Anne bounced. “Da,” she said firmly.

I stood up and carried her into the house to make a telephone call; it looked like it was pizza night after all.