"In the kitchen, decades ago, you drop an egg. You lean over, with a quiet “Fuck!,” to clean it up, and from behind comes “hyuh-hyuh-hyuh-hyuh-hyuh” from his highchair, Will’s first laugh — at five months and your expense, but you laugh, too, and wonder how he — how we — know how to start to laugh. In fourth grade, the teacher asks if someone knows the names of Columbus’s three ships. Up goes Roberta’s hand. “The Atchison, Topeka, and the Santa Fe.” We laugh, those of us who understand not only what went wrong but on some instinctive level how it’s right: the threeness, the scansion, the overlapping Santas, and the land-and-sea conveyances"