I loved having him home, and I loved that all the things that had been bothering me for months were finally being taken care of, but it wasn’t paying the bills. Finally, after an unpleasant conversation with our credit-card company, Frank and I decided that I should take a job at the new Target that had opened up in Plymouth Meeting, not too far away.

I made sure Spencer, who was four months old, would drink from a bottle, then squeezed myself into a skirt and went to fill out an application. I got hired the same day I went in, and I liked Target fine. The work itself was nothing special — stocking shelves and sweeping floors, cleaning the bathrooms and telling shoppers where to find things — but I liked the people, the jokes we had, how we got to know one another’s stories, sharing soda and microwave popcorn in a breakroom with red-and-white tiled floors and scuffed-up walls and metal lockers for our things. Most of the other employees were women like me, helping out while our men were home, laid off or furloughed or looking for work, but a few of them were college kids home for the summer, and one of them was this guy — really, a boy — named Gabriel. Gabriel was working his way through Penn State. He was tall and pale and lanky, with a narrow face and glasses and long, thick brown hair that he was always flipping off his forehead or shoving behind his ears.

I figured the college kids would keep to themselves and act like the job was beneath them, rolling their eyes at the mothers asking where to find the toilet paper or the mousetraps or the wrapping paper, and it was true that most of them were like that. Cliquey. They’d sit at their own table in the breakroom, just as if we were all still in high school, and bring things like sushi from Whole Foods for dinner, with chopsticks and little packets of soy sauce, but Gabe was always polite. That was the second thing I noticed about him. The first thing was his food. Most of us had regular stuff, sandwiches or leftover casserole or lasagna, but Gabe had interesting things: a tin of oily sardines that he’d pop into his mouth one by one, a chunk of crusty bread, wedges of cheese so stinky that they made everyone wince and crack jokes about smelly feet, sticky dates in a plastic tub, a square of black-flecked brown goo that he told me was truffled pâté and that he ate on a heel of bread, with fig jam smeared on top. “My grandma’s French,” he said. “We always had weird stuff around the house. I’d bring friends home from school, and instead of having, you know, Oreos and milk or whatever, she’d give us herring.”

“Herring’s French?” I’d never had French food, except for the one time Frank and I had gone to a fondue restaurant, where for your main course you dipped bread and vegetables into bubbling melted cheese, and then dipped fruit into chocolate for dessert.

He’d shrugged. “Not especially, but my grandma loved herring. I do, too.” He’d smiled then, offering me a bite of chicken marinated, he told me, in lemon peel and crushed garlic, which tasted like no chicken I’d ever had before.

Sometimes Gabe sat with the college kids and sometimes he sat with us. He carried lollipops in his pockets and would give them to kids fussing in the shopping carts after asking the moms if it was okay. “That’s nice,” I said, the first time I saw him do it, and he shrugged, looking a little embarrassed with his hair flopping into his eyes. “I’ve got two little brothers,” he said. “I understand the value of candy.”

Gabe always had a book in his pocket and I usually had one tucked into my purse, and at break time we’d slip into the corners to read. After I’d been there for a week, he wandered over, casually, and asked me about my book — a Nora Roberts — and told me about what he was reading, the story of a Russian rapper in New York. “But really,” he said, sitting down in the molded plastic chair beside me, “it’s about what it means to be an American.”

“Huh.” I wondered what my book was “really” about — about love, I thought, but I could have been wrong. Maybe if I’d been to college the real story of the book would reveal itself to me, like one of those Magic Eye puzzles where if you stare at it long enough a hidden picture appears. I’d never liked school: all those things like the square of the hypotenuse and the principal exports of Uruguay would, I correctly suspected, have nothing to do with my life after graduation, my life as a wife and a mother. I did all right in my English classes, and I’d always liked to read, but just for the story’s sake, for the chance books gave me to visit another world, where everyone was beautiful, where the sex was always amazing, and where, when the telephone rang, it was sometimes a handsome stranger and not the heroine’s mortgage company inquiring as to when they could expect that month’s check.

“You can read it when I’m done,” he said, offering me the book. I shook my head, smiling. “I think I’ll stick with Nora.” But two days later I found the book in my locker, next to the snapshots of my family that I’d taped to the inside of the door. When I tried to thank him Gabe just shrugged. “You don’t have to read it,” he said. “No pressure.” He held up his hands like a gunfighter showing they were empty, then tucked into his lunch, which was a salad with rice and raw tuna and a dressing he’d made of soy sauce and sesame seeds. Poké salad, he’d told me, and I’d looked it up later online.

I made my way slowly through his book, which was funny in places and slow in others, with long, twisting sentences and sex scenes that were funny and gross at the same time, and I started talking more with Gabe during our breaks. He told me he’d worked at Target ever since he was sixteen. He told me about college, how he planned on taking six years to graduate, then going for a master’s degree in hospitality and maybe, someday, opening a restaurant of his own. I told him about my boys, about Frank Junior in particular, how he was smart but a handful, and how his teacher had said, at the parent-teacher conference, that he was an exhausting child. “She wants us to ask his doctor about medication before he starts kindergarten,” I said. Gabe’s narrow face darkened.

“Don’t do that,” he told me, raking his fingers through his thick hair, then hitching up his pants. He was so skinny I wasn’t quite sure how his jeans managed to stay up at all, and his Target pinny, the one he’d had since he was in high school, was starting to come unraveled. Threads hung all along its seams. I wondered if anyone in his house sewed, if he had a mother or sister who could fix it for him.

“Why not?” I’d already decided on my own that I didn’t want Frank Junior taking pills. I’d read some articles online, on websites where mothers debated the pros and cons, and I thought that there was nothing wrong with my son except that he was a little boy with a lot of energy who hadn’t learned that he didn’t need to say, or shout, every thought that came into his head — but I wanted to hear Gabe’s opinion.

Gabe rocked back on the heels of his high-tops and gave me a speech about the dangers of doping little kids, how the purpose of the American educational system wasn’t learning but conformity.

“What do you mean?”

He paused, flipping his hair around. “Well, ‘conformity’ is making everyone act and think like everyone else.”

I nodded, even though I knew what the word meant. He went on, talking about how the drugs were designed to make it easier for teachers, not better for the children. Then he stopped, midsentence, looking embarrassed. “But what do I know?” he asked. “Like I’ve got kids.”

“No,” I told him. “This is good.” I imagined what he must have looked like when he was Frank Junior’s age. Probably his mother had kept his hair cut short, but I suspected that he’d dressed about the same way he did now, in jeans and sneakers and a T-shirt, only without the Target pinny on top.

Gabe had been surprised to learn that I was only twenty-two. “I thought you were older,” he said, then quickly added, “Not that you look old.”

“Don’t worry,” I told him. The truth was I felt older than my years, like I’d been a wife and a mother forever.

Most days I drove to work, but one night Frank dropped me off, keeping the car so he could take the boys to the free concert downtown that night. At the end of my shift I went outside to wait for the bus, and Gabe, driving by in his car, spotted me.

“You need a ride?”

“Oh, no. I’m going to take the bus.”

“I’ll wait with you.”

He parked the car and jogged through the lot, back to me.

“You don’t have to do this. I’m fine.”

“Don’t worry about it,” he told me. “I could use the fresh air.” We looked at each other, both of us knowing that the air in the parking lot wasn’t particularly fresh. It had been in the nineties for three days straight. The bus stop smelled like baking tar and car exhaust, and the cigarettes the workers at Target and Marshalls and the Pancake Barn around the corner would sneak out the back doors to smoke. A humid breeze lifted my hair off my neck. Thunder rumbled in the distance; heat lightning crackled in the sky. I hoped it wouldn’t rain — the last time there was a storm, Frank and I had woken up to puddles in the basement and blistered paint on the ceilings, and I’d spent all morning running around the house with empty plastic containers, putting them under the leaks so the floors wouldn’t be ruined, too.

“Did you ever think about going to college?” Gabe asked.

I shook my head, glad that he couldn’t see me blushing in the dark. It was like asking “Did you ever think about going to the moon?” I hadn’t been a great student, and, by the time high school was over, I’d been so in love that the only thing I’d wanted to be was Frank’s wife. That was what the women I knew did — they got married and got jobs you didn’t need a degree to have, and they worked in between children, or when their husbands couldn’t, or didn’t. The only reason my sister had been any different was that she’d been too fat and too unpleasant for any boy to want her.