There’s a picture of Jane and Charlie at ages eighteen and fifteen. It was taken on a family vacation and they are in swimsuits on a dock by a lake. Their father is a blurred shadow in the background, which everyone in the family agrees is perfectly symbolic. Jane and Charlie look like an attractive young couple, dark-eyed, dark-haired, healthy. In typical fashion Jane is standing with one foot crossed over the other while Charlie is flat-footed confident. She looks directly into the camera, a little curious and impatient. He gazes sideways like he’s searching for fun.

That’s how they grew up: Jane awkward/angry/impatient and Charlie easygoing and eager to be happy. Both of them got rather large feet, but only Jane was bothered about it.

Large feet, dark hair, well-shaped. They looked like each other to Martha but no one else saw it; everyone focused on the gender differences, and Jane’s curly hair, and Charlie’s glasses. Their father died…first he faded away as a personality in the family, growing quieter as he aged, shorter and paler…then he got lung cancer from his incessant Marlboros, and the cancer and the doctors chipped away at his body until he finally gasped his last one morning, at home in a hospital bed, ninety-two pounds light and colorless as his laundered sheets. Their mother was by then well-connected enough to get a job at the oncology center. Jane and Charlie were in college.

They shared a two-bedroom apartment near the north side of campus. They’d tried different roommates but they liked living together better. Each had an active independent social life, anyway. Charlie was as easygoing as ever: never without a beer, a joint, a cigarette, and a woman. Jane was practical and less carefree, but even she engaged in more than one romance. She had a sexual relationship with her boyfriend Alan. But she also had a flirtation going with Gary in her Greek class. He was a brilliant linguist with a tall firm body, and he confessed to Jane that he had a major thing about feet. Gary didn’t think his attraction rose to the level of a fetish, but he was fascinated with a shapely foot, and he found Jane’s foot shapely. He told her she drove him a bit crazy when she wore the flats with the cutouts that showed toe cleavage. He confided in her that he had a girlfriend named Sandra, whom he loved and admired, but he thought Sandra’s feet were ugly, and that was a big problem for him.

Gary’s confession had a dual effect on Jane. It made her consider her feet as something someone could consider lovely, which was strange and wonderful. And it creeped her out. She felt self-conscious, inhibited to the point where she just didn’t wear those flats. She loved to study Greek with Gary, but she tended to hide her feet from him.

Jane and Charlie got married within weeks of each other. Martha stood up for both of her children during the summer of 1975. She thought Jane and Alan had a good chance; they divorced four years later. Martha was less optimistic about Charlie, but he stayed with LeAnn (unfaithfully) for the rest of his life. It was Gary and Sandra she should have put her money on: they remained married and relatively happy, once Gary learned how to put his fantasies on a shelf and ignore his wife’s feet.

Jane missed living with Charlie when she got married. Alan was a nice man but he wasn’t her brother; no one could get her to lighten up like Charlie. Alan bored her.

Charlie found LeAnn boring too, but she was a good wife. She kept a home for them, ran all the errands, provided a warm atmosphere. She didn’t ask questions when Charlie stayed out weeknights till nine or ten. So Charlie went from work to drinks with friends, told jokes and laughed and sometimes spent a little time with people he shouldn’t have spent time with, but he never made plans and he always came home. He never wore shoes in his house. He strode barefoot through the place in drawstring pants, beer in hand.