Free Everybody Has Everything by Katrina Onstad

which meant that when Ana came home from work the next afternoon, there were three men in her frozen, broken yard, and James, too, each of them drinking a beer out of the bottle. James had gloves on; the men did not. One was Romanian and two Italian, though they considered themselves Sicilian, really, James informed her later, in the bathroom, his mouth filled with toothpaste. The tinier the country, the more divided, James noted. (Ana thought:
What about Andorra?
But she didn’t say it out loud.) He prided himself on always knowing something significant about everyone within eleven minutes of introductions.
    The pipes had been replaced, but the yard remained ripped apart. James and Ana had decided to leave it until spring, and now it was spring and James stood in the very center of the frozen lawn like a spoon in a bowl of hardened pudding, with two rolls of sod at his feet. James knew a little about gardening—he had interviewed some organic farmers inCalifornia who discovered ammonium sulphate in their fertilizer—but not enough to save the lawn.
    Ana surveyed the kitchen. The risotto ingredients were lined up in small ceramic bowls as if waiting for a cooking show close-up. Ana wore an apron James had sewn years ago in his high school home economics class: WOK WITH JAMES , it said in black iron-on letters across the chest, a reference to a popular TV show Ana had never seen.
    James slammed the back door, letting in a gust of cool air.
    “How can you not be wearing a coat?” asked Ana.
    He leaned over her three-ring binder, reading the recipe in its plastic sleeve.
    “This looks great.” Then: “I’m not cold. That apron is still fucking hilarious.”
    He plugged his iPod into the dock in the next room and returned midsentence, speaking over the music, telling Ana about the band, which included a tuba player. This enthusiasm reminded Ana of a time during their courtship when James would arrive at her apartment in the middle of the night—3 or 4 a.m.—just as the black crust of the sky was breaking. He had a key by then, and wouldn’t wake her, but would stand for a moment at the side of Ana’s bed. She would press her eyelids closed, feigning sleep. After a few minutes of heavy breathing, if he was still there, she would open her eyes. James never went out at night in those days without the paramedic’s shirt he’d bought at a secondhand store in Kensington market. It had blue crosses on the shoulders and a polyester sheen made Day-Glo by James’s sweat.
    “How did it go?” Ana would ask, watching him vibrating with eagerness to tell her what had happened to him and whatshe had missed with her early-to-bed rhythm, her morning-person status.
    “Excellent,” he’d grin, his tongue broad with drink. “I got right to the front around midnight.”
    James would wear the shirt to cut through the crowd, calling: “Excuse me, excuse me! Paramedic coming through! Medical! Injured woman!” He did this when the lights were low, timing it perfectly so the music was just beginning, and the crowd was distracted but not drunk enough to be ugly. Oh, man, it was miraculous: The fans parted for this compassionate professional.
    Ana was charmed when she heard the story the first time, and laughed. But later, she came to identify the gag as a piece of a bigger problem. James got older, but his great sense of entitlement stayed around: the stacks of unpaid parking tickets; his clear conscience over buying a shirt, wearing it, and then returning it to the store a day later. He had many theories, rationalizations about Dada and culture jamming and upending a system that was inherently disadvantageous to … well, not him, maybe, but people who didn’t even recognize they were disadvantaged. Somehow, it was his duty to get the best of the world. After a while, Ana tuned out that particular strain of James, the yammering of the kid from the suburbs justifying why his hand was reaching for the last piece of cake.
    But back