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Dinah

“You think it’s logical for a terminal patient to be suicidal?” I dip a crispy noodle into a small dish of sweet-and-sour sauce.

Joe considers the question as he chews on a mouthful of noodles. The Chinese takeout is stacked across our coffee table like mushrooms along a rotten piece of wood. There’s shrimp fried rice, sweet-and-sour chicken, mu shu pork, and egg rolls, along with small bowls of Hunan, honey, and soy sauce.

We’re sitting cross-legged on the floor beside the table, eating with chopsticks and our fingers, an old episode of Cash Cab running in the background.

In between our conversation, we spit out answers to the contestants’ queries.

We rarely lose a question, and are united in our opinion that, if given the choice to double-or-nothing our prize money on a bonus question, we’d risk it all in a heartbeat.

Joe takes a sip of tea, then wipes his mouth with a monogrammed paper napkin.

It has J she’s going to be in the mindset of thinking about her children.

That’s all she’s going to be thinking of.

Preparing them for what is to come. Sharing all of her wisdom with them.

Telling them everything she thinks they might ever need to know.

Of course, I’m referring to young children.

Someone, say, your mom’s age ... with mature children?

” He shrugs. “The connection and concern weaken with age. I’ve talked to you in the past about how dynamic system approaches organize behavior around coherent patterns of interaction .

..” He pauses, waiting for confirmation.

“Yeah.” I nod as if I know what he’s talking about and hope he doesn’t reopen the lecture.

The connection weakens with age. Jessica Bishop is twenty years old.

How strong would her desire be for a connection with her mother?

What kind of bond did she have with Reese?

Maybe Reese started spilling secrets in her final days.

Joe is rambling about how adaptive relationships can flexibly reorganize as adolescents enter adulthood, and I interrupt him to point out a Cash Cab question about Formula 1, a topic he loves just as much as behavioral theory.

You aren’t a mother.

There had been something there. An edge. A bite. And that is ridiculous, because just like our tastes in music and films and food and love, we’re in sync with our opinions on children. Have been from the start.

Our relationship is a two-person union. Any addition to that will only detract from our life.