Author: Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan

In State College, Pennsylvania, five miles north of the airport, in a stately house on a street that hasn’t quite grown into itself—the trees are like shrubs, which is striking given the wooded expanse one hundred yards away—Jim lives with his wife, Shannon, and three children and one grandchild. The oldest is twenty-one and a problem. The two younger children, nine and eleven, are being homeschooled the “classical” way; they’ve just started learning Latin. At 2:30p.m. when school lets out, they race to the bus stop at the end of the street to find friends to bring home to play. Jim works for a San Francisco-based affiliate of Hewlett Packard and has a 415 number. Jim also has a side gig: buying and repurposing computer parts and reselling them on Amazon. He has just returned from a work trip to New Zealand and is jet-lagged. His wife has been alone with their four children for the past two weeks. If Chanelle, their foster daughter, hadn’t emancipated herself earlier in the year, after placing her own baby up for adoption, it would have been five at home with Shannon, a former schoolteacher with a graduate degree in education, pale skin, and blue eyes. When Shannon is pulled over for speeding, she cries. She is generally let off. *** I meet Jim in Chicago’s O’Hare. He’s standing with a guy named...