I suppose that some of our differences stem from our respective upbringings. While Jane was raised in a small town with three siblings and parents who adored her, I was raised in a town house in Washington, D.C., as the only child of government lawyers, and my parents were seldom home before seven o’clock in the evening. As a result, I spent much of my free time alone, and to this day, I’m most comfortable in the privacy of my den.

As I’ve already mentioned, we have three children, and though I love them dearly, they are for the most part the products of my wife. She bore them and raised them, and they are most comfortable with her. While I sometimes regret that I didn’t spend as much time with them as I should have, I’m comforted by the thought that Jane more than made up for my absences. Our children, it seems, have turned out well despite me. They’re grown now and living on their own, but we consider ourselves fortunate that only one has moved out of state. Our two daughters still visit us frequently, and my wife is careful to have their favorite foods in the refrigerator in case they’re hungry, which they never seem to be. When they come, they talk with Jane for hours.

At twenty-seven, Anna is the oldest. With black hair and dark eyes, her looks reflected her saturnine personality growing up. She was a brooder who spent her teenage years locked in her room, listening to gloomy music and writing in a diary. She was a stranger to me back then; days might pass before she would say a single word in my presence, and I was at a loss to understand what I might have done to provoke this. Everything I said seemed to elicit only sighs or shakes of her head, and if I asked if anything was bothering her, she would stare at me as if the question were incomprehensible. My wife seemed to find nothing unusual in this, dismissing it as a phase typical of young girls, but then again, Anna still talked to her. Sometimes I’d pass by Anna’s room and hear Anna and Jane whispering to each other; but if they heard me outside the door, the whispering would stop. Later, when I would ask Jane what they’d been discussing, she’d shrug and wave a hand mysteriously, as if their only goal were to keep me in the dark.

Yet because she was my firstborn, Anna has always been my favorite. This isn’t an admission I would make to anyone, but I think she knows it as well, and lately I’ve come to believe that even in her silent years, she was fonder of me than I realized. I can still remember times when I’d be perusing trusts or wills in my den, and she’d slip through the door. She’d pace around the room, scanning the bookshelves and reaching for various items, but if I addressed her, she’d slip back out as quietly as she’d come in. Over time, I learned not to say anything, and she’d sometimes linger in the office for an hour, watching me as I scribbled on yellow legal tablets. If I glanced toward her, she’d smile complicitly, enjoying this game of ours. I have no more understanding of it now than I did back then, but it’s ingrained in my memory as few images are.

Currently, Anna is working for the Raleigh News and Observer, but I think she has dreams of becoming a novelist. In college she majored in creative writing, and the stories she wrote were as dark as her personality. I recall reading one in which a young girl becomes a prostitute to care for her sick father, a man who’d once molested her. When I set the pages down, I wondered what I was supposed to make of such a thing.

She is also madly in love. Anna, always careful and deliberate in her choices, was highly selective when it came to men, and thankfully Keith has always struck me as someone who treats her well. He intends to be an orthopedist and carries himself with a confidence that comes only to those who’ve faced few setbacks in life. I learned through Jane that for their first date Keith took Anna kite flying on the beach near Fort Macon. Later that week, when Anna brought him by the house, Keith came dressed in a sports coat, freshly showered and smelling faintly of cologne. As we shook hands, he held my gaze and impressed me by saying, “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Lewis.”

Joseph, our second-born, is a year younger than Anna. He’s always called me “Pop,” though no one else in our family has ever used that term, and again, we have little in common. He’s taller and thinner than I, wears jeans to most social functions, and when he visits at Thanksgiving or Christmas, he eats only vegetables. While he was growing up, I thought him quiet, yet his reticence, like Anna’s, seemed directed at me in particular. Others often remarked on his sense of humor, though to be honest, I seldom saw it. Whenever we spent time together, I often felt as if he were trying to form an impression of me.

Like Jane, he was empathetic even as a child. He chewed his fingernails worrying about others, and they’ve been nothing but nubs since he was five years old. Needless to say, when I suggested that he consider majoring in business or economics, he ignored my advice and chose sociology. He now works for a battered women’s shelter in New York City, though he tells us nothing more about his job. I know he wonders about the choices I’ve made in my life, just as I wonder about his, yet despite our differences, it’s with Joseph that I have the conversations that I always wished to have with my children when I held them as infants. He is highly intelligent; he received a near perfect score on his SATs, and his interests span the spectrum from the history of Middle Eastern dhimmitude to theoretical applications of fractal geometry. He is also honest—sometimes painfully so—and it goes without saying that these aspects of his personality leave me at a disadvantage when it comes to debating him. Though I sometimes grow frustrated at his stubbornness, it’s during such moments that I’m especially proud to call him my son.

Leslie, the baby of our family, is currently studying biology and physiology at Wake Forest with the intention of becoming a veterinarian. Instead of coming home during the summers like most students, she takes additional classes with the intention of graduating early and spends her afternoons working at a place called Animal Farm. Of all our children, she is the most gregarious, and her laughter sounds the same as Jane’s. Like Anna, she liked to visit me in my den, though she was happiest when I gave her my full attention. As a youngster, she liked to sit in my lap and pull on my ears; as she grew older, she liked to wander in and share funny jokes. My shelves are covered with the gifts she made me growing up: plaster casts of her handprints, drawings in crayon, a necklace made from macaroni. She was the easiest to love, the first in line for hugs or kisses from the grandparents, and she took great pleasure in curling up on the couch and watching romantic movies. I was not surprised when she was named the homecoming queen at her high school three years ago.