“Well, some trees bear and some don’t.

You can water them all you like.”

There was about a second and a half of silence.

I want to describe what happened in that second and a half, because it is the center of my whole life.

Everybody at that table understood the sentence.

That is not in dispute; my cousin Dara has confirmed it to me since, unprompted, eight years later, without my asking.

Carmen did not look at my mother.

She looked at me.

She looked at me for the length of that second and a half, across a table, and what she was doing was the most ordinary thing a wife has ever done, which was waiting to see whether her husband was going to say anything at all.

He was not.