Casebook by Mona Simpson

lunch to study the Indian clerk’s letter; they thought he was either crazy or brilliant. They decided he was a genius and brought him to England. But the isolation from his family plus the work killed him within seven years. He was dead in his thirties. But for Hardy, the collaboration was the one truly romantic incident in his life.
    Eli offered to buy it for me. I shrugged. I didn’t want a book.
    Eli debated between the two hardbacks for Boop Two, but in the end settled on a used paperback called Letters to a Young Mathematician . I was surprised he didn’t buy her all three. In our family, neither parent stinted on books or music. Eli found a green hardback for the Mims called A House for Mr. Biswas .
    He paid for it all, packing the twenty-six Nancy Drews in a box. After a trip to the car to put the books in the trunk, they found another store of old things. There, Eli plucked a set of German binoculars in a leather case from a jumbled shelf, and as I was wishing I’d spotted them first, he looped them over my head, saying, “You need a pair.” Later, I wondered about the fact that Eli had sent me Sherlock Holmes and bought me binoculars. Does everyonefinally want to be caught? The Boops hated the smell of this store; they asked if they could go across the street to Patagonia. The Mims sent me along, and in a good mood from the binoculars, I said they could each pick out something from me. Boop One found a black fleece hoodie. Boop Two chose a birdcall. In line for the cash register, we started petting the fleece. I told Boop One to go get another for her sister. But the Santa Claus feeling froze when I saw the total. How much would you think two miniature sweatshirts plus a birdcall could cost? A fucking fortune was what. But, with my sisters watching, I handed over the last of my money.
    Boop One skipped outside the thrift store. I didn’t see the Mims at first, and then I heard something near the back. “Are you the personal shopper?” someone asked. The Mims stood in front of a mirror in a dress like a dress in the old movie we’d seen. The store lady was kneeling on the linoleum with pins in her mouth. I lingered behind a rack of musty clothes. Eli draped his arms around our mom from the back. They looked at themselves in the mirror. I wasn’t used to seeing my mom look at herself.
    She had never been beautiful before. But she was—there, then, in that mirror. And what my father had once called Eli—a less-good-looking version of himself—that seemed a little off now, too. My dad was best in profile, still. He was a great-looking man. You saw Eli’s handsomeness only in movement. “Wow,” he whispered, eyes stretching, looking at her in the mirror. “We’ll take it,” he said to the woman with pins in her mouth. “Merry Christmas.”
    At the counter, the woman showed us a label in the dress’s collar. HATTIE CARNEGIE . “This was a thousand-dollar dress, once,” she said. Our great-grandmother Hart had worn thousand-dollar dresses during the Depression, we’d been told. The woman wrapped the dress in a long plastic bag, tying the end in a knot.
    My mom’s phone finally worked, and I called my dad. My sisters huddled together, ready to leave, while I paced the brick street, gossiping about the weekend’s releases and how they’d opened. Somethings I said made my dad speed up. Questions about his work, about the studio executives who drove him crazy, unrumpled his voice and slowed him. I had him pausing now, for emphasis. My sisters kept staring at me. But this was a good talk, the first time I’d really figured out how to be with him on the phone. It was okay to make them wait. Then, as an afterthought, I called Hector. He turned out to be a mile away, where his mom was supervising the cleanup after a party for the Southern California Realtors Association. They invited us to come over.
    We parked in front of a huge old wooden house. The night had turned colder. Both Boops wore their