Whistler: A Novel by Ann Patchett - 5

L eda was lying in the bed beside me, staring at the ceiling, tears soaking the pillow beneath her head. “You thought I knew that story?”

“I don’t know. I thought you knew some of it? When I was nine, I thought you knew everything I knew. I thought we transferred information telepathically.”

“I didn’t get that one.”

“I’m not even sure how accurate my memory is. I mean, it’s been a long time, and it was fairly traumatic. And there’s no way Eddie was just giving me a recap of a book proposal he’d read. He must have made parts of it up when he told it to me. Recovered childhood memories, don’t you deal with this in your business all the time?”

Leda nodded. “Absolutely. So what part are you sure about?”

I rolled over on my side to face her. “The horse. I’m positive about the horse.”

“Tell me.”

“Did the dead people show up? Did the dog show up? There’s no evidence. Mary Carter had a broken ankle and broken wrist, two broken ribs and a collapsed lung. There could have been an infection setting in, she probably had a fever, dehydration. She went through a terrible fall out there, and no doubt things got worse as the days went on. Did she see things she didn’t really see? The further away she got from the actual event, the less she wanted to write about it, so maybe she wasn’t sure, or maybe she didn’t want to deal with a bunch of readers questioning her memories.”

“This was pre-internet.”

“I’m sure they still had imaginative ways of destroying people back then.”

“Or maybe Mary was sure about what happened,” Leda said, “but as time went on, she came to think of it as private.”

I nodded. “I like that answer better, but either way, we’ll never know. The only thing anyone can be sure of was that the horse came back to get her, then brought her back to the ranch. Whistler was real.”

After breakfast and a long shower, after the walk to the train station and the train ride to Bronxville and the walk back to the house, I convinced myself that I should have called my mother by now, but there simply hadn’t been time. This was Sunday, and Jonathan and I had only gone to the Met last Thursday. But of course there had been free hours here and there, and in those hours I did not reach for the phone. I hadn’t even turned my phone on. When I did, I saw I had four missed calls from my husband, who never left messages. I had a tendency to turn off my phone, and Jonathan never left messages: two habits that were a source of irritation for both of us.

“Where have you been?” he said in lieu of hello.

If I was out of touch for longer than the length of a movie, then the answer to any question regarding my whereabouts was always going to be: At Leda’s. Jonathan knew that, no matter how many times he acted like he didn’t. “At Leda’s,” I said. “Are you okay?”

“We’ve been going through papers,” Jonathan said, “which include love letters, camp letters, insurance policies, electric bill stubs, report cards, dress patterns. Would you have thought of dress patterns?”

“They didn’t immediately spring to mind, but I guess it makes sense. They’re paper.” I waited for him to ask me how I was.

“These are unopened, uncut Vogue patterns from the fifties and sixties. My mother apparently meant to sew her own clothes, but she never got around to it. Dress patterns are like baseball cards. They’re worth money. Sydney’s been Googling.”

Sydney. Why did I keep forgetting that his daughter was part of the great clean-out?

“Are you losing your mind?” I asked, half hoping he would ask me if I was losing mine.

“Not really. We found the baseball cards, too. My father’s, mine.”

“Did you call the service that takes everything away?”

“No, the patterns kind of killed that idea. There’s a lot of nuance to the sorting process.”

“But won’t that take the rest of your life?”

“Not the rest of it.” He sounded more cheerful than he had the last time we’d talked, which felt like a month ago but had only been yesterday.

“I called Eddie,” I said.

“Did you? I’m glad. You should get together. He seemed like a nice guy.”

I waited for a minute. Jonathan had started talking to Bea.

“Go,” I said. “You’re busy.”

“Let me call you later,” he said. “Keep your phone on for a change.”

I told him I loved him because I did. I did love him.

There was always a period of adjustment after school let out, a sudden realization that once again my time was my own. Every year the ghost memory of obligations followed me well into June (I have to grade papers! I have to look at Persuasion before class!) until finally I shook them off, though the dreams in which I was late, unprepared, or in the wrong room speaking the wrong language never left me.

It was strange to have so much to think about and so little to do. I thought about weeding the raised beds in back and then going into town to buy tomato plants. I thought about cleaning the refrigerator. I thought about finding a book I would never dream of teaching or recommending to a teenage girl. Old Philip Roth novels! Our house was full of them. I could spend the day on the couch reading.

But I called my mother instead. This story had gone on too long without giving her an entrance.

“Daphne?” she said.

“It’s me,” I said. “How are you?”

“Fine, thank you.” Why did my mother always make me feel like a telemarketer calling to rope her into a time-share?

“Good,” I said. “Good. Listen, Mom, I was thinking I might come see you.”

“Are you in town?” I caught the edge of nervousness in her voice, as if I were on my way over to discuss the time-share now.

“No, I’m home, but school is out and Jonathan’s gone to Wisconsin to help his sister clean out their mother’s house.”

“Where is his mother?”

“She died,” I said. “You know Jonathan’s mother died.”

“I did not know Jonathan’s mother died! That’s terrible. I would have called him. I would have sent him a note.”

Was it possible I hadn’t told her, maybe to keep her from calling him or sending a note? No, I must have told her. “I was thinking maybe I could come to see you,” I said, letting the other thread of conversation lapse.

“When?” I could almost hear her stepping back.

“I don’t know. Soon? Tomorrow maybe?”

“Christopher and his family are coming over tonight.”

“Which is great,” I said, “but they live two miles away. They’ll go home after dinner.” That my half-brother and his family chose to live in such close proximity to his parents, one of whom was also my parent, was the great and abiding joy of those parents’ lives. It also removed the burden from my sister and me. Matthew, the younger one, lived with Lyle in Swampscott, a scant hour away, and near the beach! Christopher and his family provided regular attentiveness while Matthew and Lyle provided vacations.

“Let me talk to Lucas,” my mother said. “Let me see what the plans are.” As if Lucas might have plans of which she was unaware.

“Sure.”

“It might be better to wait,” she said.

“Sure,” I said, “of course, but Mom?”

There was a dead space on the line and so I went ahead. “I wanted to tell you that Jonathan and I ran into Eddie Triplett at the Met on Thursday.”

I knew my mother when I was young. I knew her through her marriage to my father, though I was four when that one ended, and I knew her through her friendship and marriage to Eddie, though, given the recent facts, I hadn’t known much. But in her marriage to Lucas, I had barely known her at all. I had never made a place for myself in that relationship, and no place was made for me. Then the boys were born and that was that. I called to tell her about Eddie because, I supposed, I still believed the primary relationship was between the two of them. Wasn’t it? They had been married. They had been divorced.

“Eddie?” she asked brightly. “Oh my god, how is Eddie Triplett?” It was more the voice I’d expect her to use if I’d run into her best friend from high school.

“He’s good,” I said hesitantly. “He seemed good.”

“You ran into him at the opera?”

“At the museum.”

“At the museum, that makes sense. Eddie had a great eye for art. We used to go to the museum in Boston, the big one?”

“The MFA,” I said. We were talking about museums?

“That’s right. He took me to the Gardner, too, and the one at Harvard. Anything I know about art today is something Eddie taught me. I can only imagine how thrilled he must have been to see you. He loved you, Daphne, you know that. He adored you. After that car accident? He was so torn up about having hurt you.”

“He didn’t hurt me.”

“Well, he was upset about the scar on your face. He was. All those stitches. You looked like someone had hit you with an axe. He’s not still at Random House, is he? He must have retired by now.”

As much as I would have liked to separate out each of those sentences and address them individually, I could not. I had to pick. “You knew he was at Random House?”

“I read Publishers Weekly . Even after I stopped working, I kept up with things.”

Someone started talking in the background and my mother stopped to listen. “I’m talking to Daphne,” she said. “Two more minutes.”

Lucas walked away.

“He didn’t retire,” I said. “He’s still working.”

“Oh, bravo, Eddie!” she said. “Good for him. Publishing is short on wisdom these days. All the mentors took the buyout. Of course I’ve been gone for decades , but I have to tell you, part of me still wishes I hadn’t retired. I stay so busy around the house, and at the end of the day I have no idea what I’ve accomplished.”

I took the phone away from my ear. I stared at it.

My mother was still talking. “It’s been such a long time since I’ve seen him, but—”

“Forty-four years,” I said, mystified.

“Is that even possible? It can’t be that long. Eddie was so good at his job. I can remember being at publishing functions over the years when his name would come up, someone saying they had worked with Eddie Triplett and what a good editor he was. Of course none of those people knew that we’d been married, and I wasn’t going to say anything. I don’t think they would have believed me anyway. Eddie Triplett. Do you think you’ll see him again?”

“I do,” I said.

“Will you tell him hello for me?”

I sat down on the couch. All this time I’d been standing, looking out the window into my backyard in Bronxville, and now I felt such a need to sit down. “Mom,” I said. “What the hell?”

My mother was quiet, and over in Winchester, I had a feeling that she had sat down on her couch as well. “What?” she said.

“You’re not mad at him?”

“Well,” she said, “forty-four years is a long time.”

And then I said something to my mother that I had never said to her before, at least not since the car accident. I told her she needed to help me understand.

She thought about it for a minute and then told me to come up tomorrow. “Tomorrow would be good,” she said.

“I hate having a job,” Leda said when I told her I was going.

“You love your job.”

“I love my job, but I’d like to be in the room for this one. I want to hear what she has to say firsthand.”

“Henry could see your patients, couldn’t he?” I had a great deal of confidence in my nephew.

“He’s wise,” my sister said of her son. “New York isn’t full of seventeen-year-old boys who could cover your therapy practice for you. Still, I think the licensing would be an issue. Call me the minute you leave the house.”

“Why did we never ask her before?” I couldn’t remember anymore.

“Because we weren’t thinking about Eddie. We forgot about him,” Leda said.

Maybe that was the question I should ask our mother: How had we forgotten about Eddie?

I called Jonathan next.

“Why are you going to your mother’s?” he asked. “Why not go to Leda’s if you’re lonely?”

“I’m not lonely. I need to talk to her, that’s all. Anyway, if I go while you’re in Wisconsin, she won’t get her feelings hurt.” Jonathan was always the one my mother wanted to see. I believed it had to do with the misalignments in our ages: her husband was now too old for her, and my husband was quite a bit older than me, which meant that my husband could have reasonably been my mother’s younger man. Jonathan would have fainted dead had I told him this theory.

“Well,” he said, “if that’s the case, I hope you go and see your mother. Have a wonderful time.”

“How’s the clean-out coming along?”

“We found an entire second house’s worth of crap in the attic: boxes, toys, furniture. I’m amazed the ceiling on the second floor never caved in. We’ve been so proud of the progress we’ve made, cleaning out closets and kitchen drawers, but we haven’t done anything. The attic, the basement, the garage—that’s where the problems are.”

“Are you ever coming home?”

“Someday,” he said. “After you visit your mother, you might want to think about taking a bus to Wisconsin.”

Jonathan had gotten the job in Manhattan six months after we started dating, but it took me another year to decide that I should be with him, which was stupid. I loved him, and he wanted me there, and Buddy was dead and nothing was keeping me in Boston. In the year of our commuting relationship, I lived in Newton and taught at Newton South, a good public high school, but I had no seniority, so there was nothing to give up. On weekends I took the bus to New York because the bus was cheaper, and I lived on a schoolteacher’s salary with the load of credit card debt I’d acquired while taking care of my father. Every week I brought a tote bag full of student papers with me on the bus and marked them up over the length of Connecticut. Round trip, I had nearly eight uninterrupted hours of grading and class-preparation time, which meant that during the week I was never behind. Jonathan hated the thought of me on a bus, mostly because it meant I started and ended my trips in bus stations. He was forever offering to buy me a train ticket, but in those days my feminist standards were such that the idea of letting the man I was sleeping with pay for my train ticket so I could go and sleep with him in a different state seemed tantamount to signing away my freedom. (Jonathan might have ridden a school bus when he was a child, and once or twice the 72nd Street crosstown bus, but he had never taken an interstate bus in his life. He never came back to Boston to see me after he left, which had to do with his busy new job and my depressing efficiency apartment.) Every time I waited in line to board the bus, some young woman, usually a college student, would attach herself to me. “Okay if I sit with you?” she’d say, and I’d tell her yes. If my seatmate got off in New Haven, some other girl who was already on the bus would dart over to take her place. I never understood it, until one Sunday night going home, a girl told me her mother had instructed her to identify the safest-looking person on the bus and ask if she could sit with her. “That’s you,” the girl said to me.

“How can you tell?”

She laughed. “Look around.”

And when I did, I could see that she was right. I was a little older. I was grading papers. I was always going to be the safest-looking person on the bus.

I used to daydream about the train in those days. I thought of how, in some mythical future where there was nothing but money, I would buy a ticket on the Acela, which was the fast train. Then I would pay extra to sit in the quiet car. Those luxuries meant so much when you couldn’t afford them. Two days after the Hotallings’ fiftieth wedding anniversary, I took the Acela to Boston, booking my ticket for the quiet car, and while I meant to read, I spent most of the time staring out the window, thinking the whole thing through.

Lucas and Abigail Ekker had stayed in Winchester, a suburb that offered both the small rental house we had lived in when I was a child, as well as the stately spreads where they had raised their sons. My mother had been enthralled with the grander side of town back when she was broke, so once she had money, she knew exactly what she wanted. She wanted to be able to walk to the Boat Club for lunch. In this way we were not dissimilar: she set her sights on the five-bedroom foursquare, and I wanted a train ticket on the express.

They had moved through Winchester strategically over the years—my mother quietly improving their circumstances through knowing when to sell and when to buy. She had worked for a real estate company back when she and Buddy were married, typing up the offers and the contracts, then writing the offers and the contracts because she was better at it than the agents. This was before she landed her job in publishing. I had never lived in the house she and Lucas lived in now, nor had I lived in the two houses before it. This one was the apex of her real estate dreams.

“We have to think about downsizing,” my mother said when she picked me up at the station. “We’re rattling around in there, and we need a main-floor bedroom suite. Lucas going up and down the stairs scares me to death.” At seventy-six, my mother was still taking Pilates twice a week.

“I’m all in favor of a simpler life,” I said, thinking of my husband and his sister going through the attic in Wisconsin. Sydney, his daughter, had given up on the project and gone home.

“You need to be thinking about downsizing yourself,” my mother informed me.

I shrugged. “We have the rare Bronxville ranch, all on one floor.”

“Is it?” she asked.

“It was this morning.” Surely she wasn’t doubting my memory on this one.

“I told Lucas we were going to the market,” she said. “Is there anyplace you want to go?”

“I’m happy to go to the market.”

She shook her head. “I’ve been already. I just don’t want to walk in the door having some big conversation about Eddie. Nobody wants to hear their wife talking about her ex-husband.”

“Lucas knows about Eddie, doesn’t he?” Anything was possible.

“I was briefly married to an editor who took a good job in New York City when I didn’t want to live in New York City. I wanted to raise my girls in the suburbs. Just one of those things.”

“You could have raised us in Bronxville or Maplewood.”

“Eddie was adamant about living in the city,” she said.

“That’s what you told Lucas?”

“He knew about your father, of course, I had the two of you girls to show for that one, but we never talked much about Eddie. If you don’t have children with someone, the marriage doesn’t count.”

“Jonathan and I don’t have children.”

“I’m not talking about you and Jonathan,” she said. “I’m talking about Eddie and me.”

“The raspberry farm,” I said.

“What about it?”

“I want to go to the raspberry farm.” It had come on me like divine inspiration.

My mother turned her big sunglasses in my direction. “You’re kidding me.”

“It’s a quiet place to talk,” I said. “And anyway, I’ve never seen it in good weather.”

“I’ve never seen it at all,” my mother said.

“You never went up there?”

“Why would I?”

“I don’t know. Eddie and I could have died there. We didn’t die there. Leda loves raspberries. That makes it a seminal location in our family history.”

My mother shook her head. “You didn’t almost die. You got a cut.”

I leaned back into the Audi’s comfortable leather seat, regretting everything. “Raspberry farm, please.”

My mother did not agree, but at the next light she turned the silver sports sedan and started in the direction of High Street.

A raspberry farm saw no more business in May than it did in January, but in May there were preparations going on, mostly of the digging and planting variety. Ours was not the only car on the road.

“Will there be a reenactment?” my mother asked. “Shall I crash the car into the woods?”

“Here’s the thing,” I said. “I hadn’t thought about any of this in a long time, and now I am. I’m thinking about the accident, I’m thinking about Eddie, I’m thinking about your divorce.”

My mother nodded. She was a cautious driver, both hands on the wheel. “What did Eddie tell you?”

“He took me to Skip and Polly’s fiftieth wedding anniversary party at the Century Club.”

Now her eyes did leave the road. “Those awful people are still married?”

“Fifty years.”

“How did that happen?” How had she had three husbands while Polly Hotalling had gotten by with one?

“They sit on the opposite sides of the table. I’m guessing that’s part of it.”

“So Eddie just runs into you, just happens to run into you in a museum, and the first thing he thinks to do is drag you off to see the Hotallings?”

I found the fact that my mother was mad infinitely preferable to her being bored or buoyant or sarcastic. Mad I could deal with. Mad made sense. “Eddie didn’t drag me anywhere. He was going to the party and his date got sick. He needed someone to go with him.”

“So now you’re his default date?”

“Not his date,” I said. “His stepdaughter. Actually, he introduced me as his daughter.”

My mother looked at me once more. “Had I had a child with Eddie, I would have remembered it, or maybe not. I’m getting old.” She stopped the car and turned on the hazard lights, tick-tick-tick like a metronome. She opened the door.

“Mom?” I leaned in the direction of her open door.

“You’re driving.” She walked around to my side and opened the passenger door. “I’m serious, get out of the car. This isn’t safe.”

I undid my seat belt and walked around. I had never driven my mother’s Audi. A navy blue Camry came up behind us, slowed, then stopped. That we were two women in distress was a self-evident truth. I nodded and waved him on.

“It would have been kind of you to suggest that we go for a late lunch, order a bottle of wine,” she said.

“We can do that later.” I clicked the hazards off and put the car in drive.

“What did Eddie tell you?”

“He told me about Skip. He told me that you knew.” I scrolled through the information he had given me, which now seemed like less than it had at the time. “Honestly, he said nothing but nice things about you.”

She ignored this last part. “Are he and Skip still …” She paused. She had no idea what word to use.

“I think it’s still going on, and I don’t know what ‘going on’ entails for the two of them.” The heavy leaves trimmed the light in the forest, letting less and less of it onto the floor. The turns in the road came without warning. I could see how easy it would have been to sail right off the edge of the world.

“Skip Hotalling was a waste of time,” my mother said. “Eddie’s friend, Eddie’s lover, either way, Skip wasn’t good enough for him. As for my knowing that Eddie was gay, can we take a minute to think about how stupid I was in 1978? I was divorced with two children. I had found the one man who wanted to be my friend, who didn’t try to jump me from behind when I took my coat off. There were the girls who were waiting until they were married, and then there were the girls who were already married, and then there were the divorcées .” My mother gave every syllable its due. She made the word swing. “Divorcées were the cows who gave the milk for free, or so went the wisdom of the day. Into that equation came handsome Eddie Triplett, funny, well-read Eddie Triplett, who knew how to listen and kept his hands to himself and loved my kids and had my back at work. Eddie Triplett, who made me laugh so hard I once spit my coffee all over my desk. Go to the offices of Houghton Mifflin in 1978 and show me a woman who wasn’t in love with Eddie. Probably a woman or a man.”

The steering wheel of my mother’s car was made of actual wood, polished to satin. Jonathan and I had a nice life, but the steering wheel on our car was not wood. “So what happened?”

“We went around together, that’s all. We kept company. We were friends. Nothing ever happened and we never talked about it. I’m sure we were both grateful for the break. That’s the sad thing about Eddie and me. We liked each other so much. I’ll even say we loved each other, not with all the bells and whistles, but in our way we did.”

The road to the raspberry farm was longer than I remembered, and I wasn’t exactly sure where we had gone off the road. On this side of the hill? The other side? “So how did you go from there to being married?”

“It was those awful Hotallings. We had gotten together with them a few times. Polly was from Boston, you know, big money. I expect she was always anxious to get out of their roach-infested walk-up and go home to her parents’ house, sleep in her childhood bed for the weekend. They lived on Marlborough Street. I’d never been in such a fancy house in all my life. She had a brass canopy bed. Do you remember that? We took you girls over once, and she showed you the bed and all her dolls. You and your sister about lost your minds.”

And then I did remember, though not until this exact moment. My stomach twisted to think of it now, the same woman who had put the fear of God in me two nights before, a young bride coming back to sleep in her parents’ house with her cohort of dolls.

“Even I knew there was something fishy going on. The charming part was I thought it had to do with Polly. Was Eddie meeting up with his best friend’s child-sized wife on the sly? I’ll tell you, there was enough electricity between the three of them to power up the Citgo sign. Eddie was always holding my hand when they were around. He would whisper to me, try to make me laugh, order one piece of cake with two forks, one more glass of wine for us to split. He may as well have been trying out for the lead in a Broadway show called This Is My Girlfriend . Then one night you and Leda were on a rare sleepover at your father’s and the Hotallings were in town again, so the four of us went out to dinner. Skip, god, but I hated that smug son of a bitch, Skip was bending over backwards to grind Eddie into the ground, asking Eddie to remind him why didn’t he go to law school, not that he could have gotten into law school. Why would he spend his life fiddling with the commas in some book that no one was ever going to read? What kind of a job was that? And I sat there thinking, Oh, Eddie must be sleeping with your wife. This is the moment it’s all going to come out and Skip is going to beat him to death in a restaurant. Then Skip says, ‘If you were going to waste your life like that, you should have gone to Vietnam, gotten it over with.’”

Now I looked at her. “What?”

“It was a bad night,” my mother said. “I was holding Eddie’s hand under the table. We were drinking too much, and Skip was drinking more than the rest of us. Polly kept putting her hand on his wrist and saying, ‘Skippy,’ real quiet. I’ll tell you, even thinking about it all these years later makes me want to go and find them.”

I had missed it, the place where the accident happened. Not that I thought I’d be able to find it. Suddenly the road had ended and we had arrived at the gravel parking lot of the raspberry farm. I put the windows down and turned off the car.

My mother looked around. “You didn’t find it,” she said. She seemed disappointed.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Tell me what happened.”

“Well, the miserable evening ended miserably and Eddie and I went for a walk. Did he tell you about the walk?”

“He mentioned it,” I said.

My mother took off her dark glasses and closed her eyes. “So many things I didn’t know. I blame the time, that was part of it, but part of it was me in that time. Eddie shouldn’t have taken that horseshit off of anyone, and especially not pompous Skip Hotalling. He deserved so much better than that.”

“So what did you do?”

My mother looked at me then and gave a tired smile. “I offered him something better. All of my love, and the love of my beautiful girls, and all he had to do was promise to never speak to Skip again. And not be gay.”

“Oh,” I said. Seventy-six, and still my mother was a beautiful woman. The other children used to stare at her when she came to pick us up at school.

She waved her hand, as if to wave away my thoughts. “It wasn’t purely mercenary on my part. I saw a good life for all of us, you and Leda and me and Eddie, all of us. I thought Eddie would change his stripes. He would change who he was so that I could have what I wanted.”

I had no idea what to say, and after a while she went on.

“I don’t much believe in God,” my mother said. “But someone sent me your brother so that I could redeem myself. Matthew told us he was gay the summer after his freshman year of college, told us what I’d pretty much known since he was born. And while Lucas crashed around the house rending his garments, I said to my son, ‘Let’s you and me go take a walk.’”

“So Matthew knows about Eddie?”

“Matthew is the only person I ever told.”

I might have reminded my mother that she had blamed me for her second divorce. Eddie had driven off this very hill and I had cut my face, so she could no longer be married to him. She couldn’t trust him. But my mother had suffered enough. And if my brother had in any way benefitted from her suffering, well, I was happy for them both.

“How did you find out about Eddie and Skip?”

“Did he tell you this part?”

I shook my head.

“That’s too bad. I would have liked to know how he remembered it. As far as I was concerned, we had a good thing going. We were tender with one another, thoughtful. I had loved your father, but that was madness, screaming, moving out, making up, making up in every room of the house.”

I held up my hand.

“I’m just saying, Eddie and I did a better job, especially where you and Leda were concerned. We did a good job with the two of you.” She stopped. She might have been resting.

“So?”

“So Leda was still in the hospital. She couldn’t get her bowels going, there was a lot of worry about infection. Then Eddie comes in and his foot and ankle are smashed to bits, his shoulder’s cracked. You were good, though. Just a cut. You were such a solid, reliable child. The car was gone. I was running up and down the stairs between Eddie and Leda, back and forth, back and forth. Eddie had surgery, he was doped to the gills, his ankle was in a rig to keep it elevated and he was still working on some book he was editing. He had asked one of the firemen to fish it out of the backseat before they brought him in. All of it was crazy, but we were okay. No one died. We made it through.”

“Eddie told me that’s what you’d say.”

“When you saw him?”

I shook my head. “When we were in the car after the accident. I said you’d be upset about us wrecking the car, and he said no, you’d be too happy that we were alive.”

My mother’s chin dropped to her chest, but she smiled. “That’s Eddie,” she said. “Bright side.”

“I interrupted you.”

“They’d put a sign up on the door whenever the doctor was there to do an exam or the nurse came to give him a bath: ‘Privacy, Please.’ I’d been in the room ten minutes before and I came back. There was something I was bringing to him or something I’d forgotten to say, I don’t remember. I saw those two words on the door and didn’t give them a second’s thought. ‘Privacy, Please’ did not apply to me, but I should have been respectful. He gave me everything. I could have given him that much.”

“Skip?”

“He was sitting in the chair beside Eddie’s bed and he had his head on Eddie’s chest and Eddie had his hand on Skip’s head. That’s all it was. Skip was crying. He must have been waiting down the hall for me to go. Eddie must have called him and told him what happened. He would have told Skip not to come. Eddie was no dummy. But Skip came anyway, and he sat in the chair I’d been sitting in ten minutes before, and he put his head on my husband’s chest. And everything was over because Eddie was still gay and he was still in love with Skip. And so I wanted Eddie gone. I never wanted to see him again for the rest of my life, but that isn’t true. I wanted him to be in love with me. That’s what I wanted.”

I reached over the gearshift and took my mother’s hand.

“It’s an awful business,” she said. “Loving another person.”

“It is,” I said, and for the first time in a long time, I remembered that I loved her, or more precisely, I remembered she was a person who had lived her own autonomous life full of mistakes and disappointments and judgments and thwarted love.

My mother and I got out of the car to look at the rows of promising raspberry canes. “It’s nice here,” she said. “Who would have thought?”

“You should see it at night,” I said, and she laughed. She hadn’t ever asked me what had happened in the car, probably because she thought she knew. And maybe she did know, maybe Eddie had told her, before everything between them was ruined.

When we had returned from the raspberry farm, my mother announced her need to lie down, and I found myself sitting in the den, flipping through the Positivity books. Lucas had never regained his footing after the demise of Positivity, a franchise dead in the water by 1985. It would have died long before then had it not been for my mother’s publicist tenacity. Once the series was scrubbed, Lucas spent the rest of his life pacing around the yard, or pacing up and down the halls when the weather was bad. He never could stop grumbling, to my mother or my brothers, about the unfairness of it all. To be unable to find something else to write about was one thing, surely that happened all the time, but his inability to take his own advice was a real mark against him. A stack of his books sat on some table or another in every room of the house. I hadn’t picked one up since a night in high school when Leda and I did a dramatic reading for our much younger half-brothers when Lucas and our mother were out for dinner. “Bounce on your toes while brushing your teeth!” I said in my most positive voice.

“Feel the positivity radiating up from your ankles!” Leda cried.

It wasn’t that we got busted. Lucas wasn’t there to hear us and the sweet boys didn’t tell. But when bedtime came around that night, and Christopher and Matthew stood at the sink, bouncing, bouncing, Leda and I felt like toads. Who were we to say their father was a fool? Our own father was out on a boat somewhere, pulling lobsters out of the ocean. At least their father came home.

Looking at those books now, the person I most wanted to read them to was Lucas himself:

While a positive attitude yields positive outcomes, life’s deepest joys come not from those outcomes but from the practice of a positive lifestyle. Gratitude is the garden in which the flowers of positivity bloom. Look around right this minute. What are you grateful for? Make a list, starting with your health. If you’re not in good health, focus on what is working, because something in you is thriving: your eyes, your heart, your hands. Pick one thing and spend an entire minute feeling a sense of wonder for what you’ve been given.

Next, think of a person you’re grateful for. Maybe it’s a child, a parent, a spouse. Maybe it’s not. Maybe it was your third grade teacher. Mine was Mrs. Smithson, who picked up leaves on her way to school. Every day she found new leaves, even if it meant taking a longer route, and the wonder she felt at the sight of those leaves spread to every student in the class.

I went out into the yard and found Lucas staring at a flower bed. “Hey,” I said, holding up his book. “Have you looked at this in the last forty years? This is good.” Sentimental and simplistic, but gently nudging the reader towards the obvious: Here you are, lucky thing. You’re alive.

“Weeds,” he said. “Look at them. I pay that gardener a fortune and everywhere I look I see weeds.”

Positivity meant solving the problems. Solving them and letting them go. Or it meant not solving the problems but coexisting with them peacefully. “So you talk to the gardener, or you find a new gardener, or you pull the weeds yourself, or you look at the flowers. What about those lilacs, Lucas?” I sniffed the breeze. “I swear, I just read a chapter about this exact thing.”

Lucas looked at the book in my hand, Positively Grateful! “That was a good one,” he said.

“It is!” I said. He was eighty-eight and I had never liked the man, but in that moment I was open to the idea that I had been wrong about everything.

“Then tell me why it hasn’t been reissued? Old books get reissued all the time. Some big shot needs to slap their brand on it. You tell me Oprah can’t get behind Positivity? What about Anderson Cooper? He’s Mr. Compassion.”

“You’re missing your own point: it’s not about getting the thing you don’t have, it’s about recognizing what you do have. You’re still in good health, you’ve got this beautiful house, your wife loves you, your sons are nearby.”

Lucas looked at me as if he wasn’t entirely sure we’d met before. The late-afternoon sun shone bright against his heavy spectacles. “Are you still teaching school?”

“I am.”

He chewed on this for a minute, nodding slowly, and I began to think that once again I was wrong about everything. Lucas had dementia. Lucas had no idea who I was. “Maybe you could get the books adopted as textbooks for your class,” he said. “Kids these days are no better than rats. They’re lawless. All they care about is what pops up on their phones, then they repost the most loathsome things they can find so that they can bring down democracy. They’re the ones who need Positivity.”

Scratch that. Not demented. “The books we read in my classes are novels.”

“So what? Think outside the box,” he barked. “Think positive for a change. A book gets onto the curriculum in one school and the other schools get competitive and order it, too. That’s what we need to get going, some real competition. Siblings, neighbors, friends. If I can get it started in one school, it will spread, especially if the kids start posting about it.” The thought of this seemed to cheer him, then he shuffled off in the direction of the garage.

Was my mother looking out the window? Was this her life every day?

The life they lived in Winchester might have begun with Positivity, but it had been sustained through my mother’s cleverness and self-taught financial acuity. She had spent their married life buying and selling and shifting things around. She took what Positivity had given her and she worked it. She’d made a brilliant deal on some beachfront property on the Cape, as well as a large, early buy in Apple.

And wouldn’t she give it all back to be married to Eddie Triplett now? He could be as gay as he wanted. He could spend every weekend with Skip Hotalling. They could laugh about it all over dinner. They could laugh after a book club at the Center for Fiction, after a black-tie fundraiser for PEN. After all, Abigail and Eddie had been friends, and in the end a friend was the better person to have.

I slept poorly among the proliferation of fringed throw pillows and the high-thread-count sheets in the house of abundant guest rooms. In the morning I stripped the bed and took my sheets to the washer. My mother, who had been equally exhausted by our time together, drove me back to catch the commuter rail to South Station. I thought she might object to my leaving so early, but she didn’t. She didn’t at all. “It’s impossible to park,” she said, looking around the lot.

I told her not to worry. I kissed her and let her go. My connections were tight, but I made them.

I couldn’t call Leda from the train. Not having to listen to other people’s telephone conversations was the privilege of the quiet car, and anyway, it was Tuesday, and she would be seeing patients. I sent a text to tell her I’d survived. Proof of life.

I should have taken Jonathan up on his offer of train tickets when I was young because he was right, the train was better. When would I have the chance to see all those marinas, the water and the boats? The marshy grasslands and tidal lakes, the little shingled houses and the vast stretches of scenic nothingness were unimaginable to those confined to a bus. How was it that a weekday trip to a museum with my husband had plunged me back into childhood at the age of fifty-three? I knew what Leda would say. She would say it was because childhood never leaves us. We seal the room up and cover it in sheetrock. We dry and sand and paint, but the pocket of history remains, and sooner or later someone always winds up tapping on the wall, commenting on the way it sounds strangely hollow in there, and then the whole thing comes tumbling down.

All the way back to New York, my mind went to Buddy. Isn’t that strange? The one father I didn’t have to deal with. Buddy had managed to be true to himself. My mother had always talked about Buddy in terms of his selfishness, which was not incorrect—he had largely abandoned our family to do what he wanted to do—but in a way his story was not so dissimilar to Eddie’s. He was supposed to give up the ocean for my mother, and Eddie would give up men. Looking back, it was easy to see that neither one of those things was ever going to happen.

My father went to Boston College from Gloucester on a football scholarship—a win for everyone. The school got a big Catholic boy who was fast and good with his hands, and my father could still go home on the weekends to work on his family’s boat. This was years before Doug Flutie’s Hail Mary pass put BC on the map as a force in football, which in turn brought in the high tide of alumni donations. When my parents went there, it was still mostly a school for local kids who came to class on the T, then went home to sleep in their childhood beds. That’s what my mother did. My father had a room in the dorm as part of his scholarship, and soon enough Abigail was in that room more often than not.

“We were really something back in the day,” Buddy told me, years after the fact. “She’d be waiting in the stands after the games, and I’d go and pick her up. A big tall girl like that thinks no one’s ever going to pick her up and swing her around again.”

When Buddy lost his scholarship, it had nothing to do with football. He was good, and they were more than happy with him. Then he wrapped a line around his hand while pulling up a lobster trap, and the middle part of that line got caught in the boat’s propellor. Five little bones were snapped, which meant surgery and the rest of the season in a cast. They might have forgiven that, Buddy was popular, but the strength never fully came back, and he couldn’t catch the ball with one hand anymore, and half of the time he couldn’t catch it with two, but it made Abigail love him more, the sweet injured bird, and it made him love her more because she didn’t seem to care that he was no longer at football practice or playing in football games or on a bus going to play in football games. She talked him into staying in school, where his scholarship was reconfigured into a loan, though not the kind of life-crushing loans students get today. He gave up his room on campus and moved home. Everything was manageable, and Buddy read his history books while his father drove the boat and his brothers made fun of him, though not much. Buddy Zabriskie wasn’t a guy to be made fun of. When my mother turned up pregnant at graduation, she didn’t want him working on the boat anymore. She kept saying he was going to drown and then what was she supposed to do with a baby by herself? So he got a job as an assistant-assistant coach at Boston College, and my mother went to work in a realty office. Buddy was still allowed to go out on the boat on the weekends because they needed the extra money, and who ever drowned on a Saturday?

What would life have been like had my parents stayed married to each other and my father kept working on the boat? What if they rented a place in Gloucester together and my mother still landed her publicity job at Houghton Mifflin? What about the life in which they were good to one another and therefore good to us, all of us good together? I would have liked to have seen that.

Next fall I would be more attentive to the sad girls who washed up in my classroom after their parents broke the news of their divorce. There were things I remembered now, including the particular longing that life could stay as it had been. How strange that such a pointless wish could resurface after all these years.

For a while I slept on the train, my head against the glass, the bridges and coastal towns rushing by. The train was still an hour out when my phone pinged.

Lunch? It was Eddie. I can come to Bronxville.

I laughed. No one from the city had ever come to Bronxville for lunch. I pushed myself upright in my seat and told him I was on my way into the city. Send me the address. I would meet him at his office. Send.

Then, for the briefest moment, I regretted my quick reply. Wasn’t it too soon to see him again? I shouldn’t present my life as a vast expanse of open time into which he was welcome to drop in at will.

But wait, no, he could! He could come anytime! I wasn’t dating Eddie Triplett. We were not at the start of some disastrous affair. The ping from the phone had woken me from a dead sleep, that was all. I was confused. I wanted to see him. I wanted to see him more than I wanted to see anyone. I would gladly run all the way to Random House to throw my arms around his neck because somewhere deep inside myself, in a place inaccessible to me since I was nine, I had missed him every day of my life.

The guard checked the name on my driver’s license against a list of welcomed visitors and found me there. He took my picture, gave me a badge, and sent me up. I was sorry to be wearing sneakers and jeans, sorry that I hadn’t taken a shower this morning before leaving early, but not sorry enough to decline the invitation. Upstairs, the lobby was big and bright and full of walls of brand-new face-out books, each one lit like a star. I told the receptionist I was there to see Mr. Triplett. The words were hardly out of my mouth, and there he was, coming around the corner.

“Daphne Fuller for Mr. Triplett,” he said, holding out his arms.

“You’re sure you want to go to lunch with him?” the receptionist asked. It was her job to be the straight man. I imagined she waited all day for an opening.

“Look who’s jealous,” he said to her. “Miss Bilardello, I want to introduce you to my daughter, Daphne Fuller.”

“Your what ?” she said.

“My daughter . Of the long-lost variety.”

I held out my hand. “Pleased to meet you.”

Miss Bilardello shook my hand, then turned back to Eddie. “She doesn’t look like you.”

“Well, she did. She used to. You should have seen her when she was a baby. We could have been twins.” Eddie hugged me. “Should you come and see my office?”

“Yes, please,” I said, then waved goodbye to Miss Bilardello at the desk.

We went through the corridors of books, books beautifully displayed as well as books in boxes and in naked stacks on the floor. Books up and down the walls. Eddie stuck his head into every open door, introducing me. “This is Daphne,” he sang. “I want you to meet Daphne.”

All of them stood up and smiled and shook my hand. They loved him, that was clear. Everyone was glad to see Eddie and meet his friend.

His office was buried in books and I wanted to read all of them. I wanted to sit in a chair with every book he’d ever sat with, think about him thinking through all those sentences and pages and chapters. Here was his heart: in these books. He had loved them and so I would love them. I had the feeling that all the books in the hallway were inching their way in for their terminal stop. Eddie had a good window. I remembered going to his office at the old Houghton Mifflin on Park Street, the one that had once been a closet. “This is where they store the Eddies,” he had said to me then.

“It used to be impossible to get anything done here,” he said, picking up a stack of manuscripts from the second chair so I could sit. He sat down at his desk. “There were always meetings and new interns and somebody wanting to come in and shut the door so they could share the latest palace intrigue. I would go home at night and do my editing at the breakfast table, which meant I was either at work or working at home or sleeping. But now everyone prefers to work at home, except for me, because I’m the opposite: I’m tired of working at home. Now I can work in my office and no one bothers me. Some days I go to the cooler and fill up my little cup with water and bring it back to my desk and I don’t pass another living soul. Excellent for my productivity but sad , of course. Young people learn by osmosis, and now they don’t get to knock on my door and ask me what a semicolon is supposed to do. I guess someone else will tell them. I wasn’t going to be around forever anyway.”

“So you do think you’ll retire?”

Eddie laughed. “I think I’ll die, which I suppose is a form of retiring. That Ed, they’ll say. He was very retiring.”

“Stop it,” I said, and I meant it. Stop.

“Are you hungry?”

“Starving. I left before breakfast.”

“Left where?” he asked.

I had forgotten to tell him. “My mother’s. I’ve just come back from Winchester.”

“Oh, my,” Eddie said. “I suppose that’s why I’ve been thinking about you all day.”

As we got up to leave, I saw the small framed picture of a horse. “Whistler?” I said, though who else could it be?

He picked it up off his desk and handed it to me. “I was going to wrap it up,” he said, “but here you are.”

“What?”

“It’s your present. Leda got my mother’s vase and you get the horse.”

“I can’t take this.” The photograph was faded, four by six. All these years later you could still see what a beautiful horse she was.

“Put it in your bag and we’ll argue about it later.” He took the frame back from me and slipped it into the top of my overnight bag. “There. Done. We have to leave immediately. There’s so much to say.”

Café Luxembourg was a twenty-minute walk but we flew there. All the crossing lights lit in our favor, all the tourists, walking three abreast, arms linked, caught sight of something in a store window that intrigued them and stepped aside. Eddie and I, determined not to start any real conversation until we were properly seated, talked about books. “Tell me what you’re working on now,” I asked. “Tell me what you’re reading,” he replied, though neither of us listened to the answers. We existed in a state of mutual distraction.

The lunch rush had ended before we arrived, and Eddie knew the hostess, so we got an excellent table alone in the corner. “This is where the soprano sits after the opera,” he said to me. “They have to have a quiet table to avoid vocal strain. After a full night of Bellini, their voices are tender.”

I nodded. Those sensible sopranos.

“I’m going to have a glass of wine,” Eddie said. “You can tally them all up in your head if you want, but I’m nervous now.”

“I’m not keeping count,” I said, though maybe I was.

The waitress came to the table, and Eddie ordered two glasses of Chardonnay.

I shook my head. “Only one,” I said. I was too tired for drinking.

“Two,” Eddie said. “Her glass will keep my glass company.”

Then we each ordered an omelet, and the waitress nodded and left us to our lives.

“So,” he said, beginning the conversation for me.

How thrilled my mother would have been to join us for a late lunch, to sit at the soprano’s table with a glass of wine, telling Eddie the story herself. “She was perfectly lovely,” I said. “I was surprised. I would have thought she’d be angry, but she wasn’t at all. If anything, she took responsibility. She knew she’d asked you to do something impossible.”

“Giving up Skip? Well, she was probably right about Skip. Life would have been easier for all of us if I’d kept my word on that one.”

“Do you still—” I stopped there, remembering that I didn’t care what they did. My mother cared.

“Skip Hotalling does my taxes,” Eddie said flatly. “The former senior partner of Mergers and Acquisitions does my taxes. And in return I shave the two small corns he has on his left foot because he doesn’t trust the podiatrist not to go down to the bone. Sometimes we watch a movie—we share a strong preference for movies with tap dancing—or we work the crossword puzzle together. That’s pleasant. I bring him presidential biographies and World War II spy novels. Getting the advance reader’s copies still makes him feel special. Sometimes it’s nice to be with someone you’ve known for a long time, and other times, not so much.”

“And what does he tell Polly?”

“He tells Polly he’s going to see good old Ed Triplett. Best friend from Yale, best man at the wedding. She cuts a piece of last night’s cake and wraps it up, sticks it in his pocket for him to bring me.”

“Which means she doesn’t know or doesn’t care?”

At that moment the wine made a perfect entrance, and while I left my glass on the table, Eddie raised his drink to me all the same. “Polly Hotalling is not your mother.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning Polly was never one to ask a lot of questions. She has her children, her grandchildren. She’s got the house in Darien, the place in Sag Harbor. She and Skip take the grandchildren on trips now, one at a time, anyplace they want to go. One of them wanted to go to Mongolia last year, so that’s where they went.”

I looked at him steadily. “Meaning what?”

Eddie sighed and put down his glass. “Meaning I don’t know what she knows and neither does Skip and neither one of us asks. Sometimes I think yes, sometimes I think no. Mostly I’ve stopped thinking about it, because I have found that when you start to wonder about who you’ve hurt in this life, you can easily lose your mind. Did I damage Polly’s happiness? Did I damage your mother’s happiness? What about Skip’s? What about yours?”

“Not mine,” I said.

“Well, that’s a comfort.”

“And not my mother’s. She made her choice. She knew what she was getting into.”

“No, she didn’t.” Eddie finished the wine in his glass and then set the glass aside. “I promised her I’d stop seeing Skip, that I’d stop seeing men. For the record, I lied on both counts. I meant to keep my promises and I did not. I’d love to present myself as a sympathetic character, but I’m not entirely sure that I am. Continuing to meet up with your college boyfriend for the rest of your adult life is a ludicrously bad idea, but somehow we made it into our mid-seventies without stopping. That makes us sound like we were star-crossed, like Romeo and Tybalt, when really we were more like a habit. Every point at which we should have drifted, we clung. First the extension granted by Skip moving to Cambridge, then our marriages, then there was AIDS. In the eighties, Skip was adamant that we only sleep with one another, though I guess for him that meant sleep with me and with Polly. I didn’t exactly do a yeoman’s job keeping that promise either. There were always too many other yeomen around.”

“Were you in love with any of them?”

Eddie looked at me. “By which you mean, did I give my heart to anyone other than Skip Hotalling?”

“Let me know when I cross the line.”

“There are no lines,” he said. “You and I reside on the same side of the line.”

“We do,” I said.

“Love,” he said. “Yes. Skip aside, I was in love twice, once for a long time and once for a short time. Wait, I take that back. I’m going to say three times. One long, two short. And honestly, we could count your mother. It was an entirely different sort of love, but still, I loved her. But through all of that, Skip persevered. That’s just the way it was, the way we were.”

I nodded.

“Were you in love with anyone in college?”

The abrupt change of direction caught me by surprise. “Fred Bowen.”

“Oh, I wish I’d known you then. Tell me about Fred Bowen.”

I didn’t even think he asked to spare himself more questions about the intricacies of his own past. He wanted to know, and so I told him. “Fred majored in biology, played outfield, and once wrote me a sestina.”

“And you loved him?”

I covered my heart with my hand to commemorate the place where Fred Bowen had once resided. “With my whole heart.”

“You went around together? People knew about the two of you?”

He had bought a bottle of red nail polish and written “Fred loves Daphne” in clear block letters on the white enamel underside of the sink in the men’s locker room. He brought me there in the dead of night for my birthday, had me lie down on the floor. “Close your eyes,” Fred said, working us under the sink. “Now open them.”

“Everyone knew,” I said.

Eddie nodded. “Good,” he said. “Good for you. But now imagine that no one knew, and everything that happened between you and Fred was a secret with potentially damaging consequences, and over time you got very good at keeping everything to yourself.”

“I get the point.”

Eddie reached over and took my glass of wine. “I’m not entirely sure that I get the point. It was a long time ago,” he said. “That’s what I want to tell you. It all happened in another lifetime, to different people. We should never speak of it again. So, what happened with Fred?”

Fred, so sunny and tall, always walking around with a baseball glove in his hand. “He left me for a girl named Breelyn. I became unreasonably fixated on her name, Bree -lyn. I hated that.”

“And did Fred and Breelyn have a long and happy life together after they ran off and left you?”

I shook my head, eating my omelet with satisfaction. Breelyn had a semester abroad in Spain. The relationship, from what I was told, did not survive the distance. “They did not.”

“Everyone shuffled through relationships with several other people, perhaps many other people?”

“To the best of my knowledge,” I said. “But my knowledge only extends to the end of college. I never got into this business of looking people up. It seems like such a depressing habit.”

“I’m sure it is,” he said. “It’s a luxury not to know what happened to the people you were once in love with. Unfortunately, it was not a luxury I was afforded. Which leads me to an unpleasant question.”

“Shoot.”

“The Hotallings have invited us to brunch on Saturday, in Darien.”

“Both of us?”

Eddie nodded. “Polly said if I had a daughter, then I needed to bring her to the house.”

It was the first time I saw a possible downside to this door that had opened, because while I was happy to dig around in the past with Eddie or Leda or my mother, I had no interest in digging around with the Hotallings. None at all. “Is there a tactful way around this?”

“For you, of course. For me, alas, no.”

“Let me think about it,” I said, even though I had already thought about it. The question wasn’t whether or not I might enjoy it, but if I’d be able to stand it in the name of familial duty. “I’ll let you know.”

“May I ask you another question then, something that’s absolutely none of my business?”

“May I have a banner made that says ‘Absolutely None of My Business’?” I asked. “We could sit beneath it all day, catching up.”

“Why didn’t you have children?”

That was a question my father had asked me before he died, and my mother had asked me until I told her to stop. Random people asked until I reached the age when no one bothered anymore. It had been a while since another person had shown interest in my reproductive choices, but Eddie had been gone a long time. “Jonathan has two daughters,” I said. “His first wife died. Being a stepmother was plenty.”

Eddie had another sip of my wine, then tipped the glass in my direction. “And the other answer?”

I took the glass from his hand. The wine was warm but still good, still capable of doing the job. “I didn’t have a happy childhood. There was one part that I liked very much—” I handed back the glass. “The rest of it, not so much.”

“I see,” he said.

“I didn’t want to do that to someone else.”

“Do what?”

“Childhood,” I said.

In 1992, while I was having sex with Fred Bowen under neath the sink of the men’s locker room at Amherst, Candy Fuller was in treatment for metastatic melanoma. Of course I never met Candy, though I have lived with her memory, her photographs, her china, her sofa, her husband, her paintings of rabbits. Candy Fuller collected paintings of rabbits, and while I know that sounds terrible, it wasn’t. In her short life she curated a truly remarkable group of rabbit paintings, most all of them small, rabbit-sized. She had a genius eye. Jonathan said that he was never allowed to give them to her. With one exception, all the paintings she had she’d found herself. A rabbit hung in nearly every room of our house in Bronxville—rabbits in a meadow, in a hutch, in several cases a single rabbit looking straight at the viewer. There was one tiny pencil sketch done by Beatrix Potter herself. While people noticed them individually, complimenting one painting or another, no one had ever caught onto the theme because there weren’t too many of them. I believed, as Candy must have, that on some subliminal level the rabbits held the house together. We’d asked the girls a hundred times if they wanted the paintings, and they always said later, eventually, not now, which was fine with me. I was attached to them.

Candy had been dead five years when I met her husband in the hospital where my father was dying. The two Fuller daughters, Sydney and Rachel, were both in college then. I didn’t meet the girls for some time. Jonathan said he didn’t want me to meet them until we knew if we were serious, and I agreed with that. No daughter ever born needed to meet her father’s casual girlfriend.

Sydney had been sixteen when her mother died, her sister, Rachel, fourteen. I had a particular sympathy for those ages, though children, siblings, and all manner of loss inflicted on children were matters close to my heart. The death of the mother upended the daughters’ lives, and what they had left was each other and a father who loved them. The fact that they were older when I came along, in college, didn’t matter. I didn’t want them to feel threatened.

I was a good stepmother before I’d even met them, respecting these young women I didn’t know by not disrupting their lives. When Jonathan moved to New York, I would come to see him (via bus) on the weekends, unless it turned out to be a weekend when one of the girls decided to come home. Home! Jonathan had bought a house in Bronxville instead of an apartment in the city so that they would both have their own bedrooms, so their boxes of childhood memories could be safely stored in the attic, so there would be plenty of closet space for old prom dresses and winter coats, so there would be a yard the way there had always been a yard at home. I lined the kitchen cabinets of the new house, stacked up their mother’s plates. I helped their father hang the rabbit paintings before taking the bus back to Boston. My invisibility was the proof of my deference as I lurked past the edge of their peripheral vision. I was so good that they didn’t see me at all.

It had always been my plan to do right by Jonathan’s girls, to be a helpful and supportive person in the family who did not try to take the place of their mother and did not take their father away, but I didn’t foresee the doom in my enterprise. First and first and first, I was too young. When finally the four of us sat down at a restaurant, I appeared to have been seated on the wrong side of the table. I should have been on the daughter side. They would not forgive me my age. Nor were they pleased to find out we’d already been seeing each other for a year. “Not seriously,” Jonathan said, trying to roll back his announcement. I looked at him, the three of us did. “I mean, we’re serious now,” he said. Damned if he did or if he did not.

We were not a catastrophe, Sydney and Rachel and I. We were all decent people, smart people. They loved their father and wanted his happiness. They only wished that happiness had been found with someone his own age, and that maybe it could have come a little later, when they felt more securely launched. Sydney was starting medical school in the fall. Rachel was working on her undergraduate degree in environmental science. Rachel had specific ideas about wind turbines. These were STEM girls, girls of the future. I was never going to win them over with talk of Thomas Hardy.

Many times I wanted to tell them they should love me for not having children of my own. They should love me for not wanting to have children with their father. I was still young in those days—I could have pushed for it, thus throwing a permanent wrench into the family happiness. But I didn’t ask for a closet or a desk, much less a child. When finally I came to Bronxville, I brought less than a graduate student moving into a furnished apartment: no furniture, no rugs, no paintings to compete with the rabbits. I had my clothes, some bedding, a cast-iron Dutch oven that had been my father’s—Buddy made many a glorious cioppino back in the day. When Rachel eventually found that heavy pot on the back shelf of the pantry, she sat down on the floor and quietly wept over the disruption to her memories, even though this was not the house she’d grown up in.

“I’m sorry,” she said, covering her face with her hands. “I know it’s stupid, but everything makes me sad.”

You make me sad, was what she was saying. You who aren’t supposed to be here.

“The pot was my father’s.” I stood beside her in the pantry.

“Doesn’t he want it back?” she asked. Couldn’t it still be made to go away?

My stepdaughters did not know my father was dead. They didn’t know my parents had divorced, making me, like everyone else on the planet, a person with my own sad past. I’d been so careful to not impose myself on them, and as a result I had told them nothing at all.

And so Rachel and I began a conversation in the kitchen pantry, well over a year after we first met. Talking to Sydney was easier the next time she was home because Rachel had already filled her in.

Our best times came later, when both girls were home and Leda came up on the train, leaving Steve in charge of making dinner for their three small children and getting everyone to bed. On those nights I sent Jonathan away, and the two sets of sisters made popcorn and drank beers and watched a movie. Rachel put nutritional yeast on the popcorn, which Sydney regarded as old news and Leda and I embraced as a revelation. That was when the tide began to turn. I believed we had Leda to thank for that. Even when she didn’t appear to be using her therapeutic toolbox to move us forward, I knew she was.

Might I have liked a child of my own? It would be so easy to blame my stepdaughters now, to say yes, I would have been a mother if not for them, but it wasn’t true. If anything, the lesson of Candy Fuller confirmed what I already knew: there was no protecting anyone, no matter how much you loved them.

As for love, I loved their father, and as the years passed and the girls found partners of their own, this came to count for more. They took in our quiet and accepting brand of happiness and possibly admired it. Sydney and Rachel were never like my own daughters, but they were my husband’s daughters. That alone would have been reason enough to love them.

That night I called Eddie after dinner to tell him I’d go to the Hotallings’ for brunch on Saturday. He called me heroic. Maybe I was heroic, but I had done these things for my stepdaughters over the years, gone to my share of inconvenient brunches with difficult in-laws. I did it because they were my family, and Eddie was my family. Besides, I had found the photograph of Whistler in my bag. I put it on the dresser.

Jonathan continued to call me from Wisconsin, sometimes first thing in the morning and always at night, lying in the twin bed of his youth after dark. His sister went back to her own house every day after their work was finished, to her own husband and dog five miles away, and every day she renewed her invitation to bring him home with her, but he always declined. “Once this is over, I’ll never be in this house again,” he told me over the phone. “I won’t walk through the door, much less sleep here.”

“That’s the way it works when you sell a house,” I said.

“Believe me, I want to sell this place. I don’t know, maybe I’m trying to absorb the past while it’s still available to me.”

Jonathan’s father, an only child, had inherited the house in Fond du Lac from his bachelor uncle when he was twenty-two. When he married Jonathan’s mother, he brought her home and there they stayed, first the two of them, then with Jonathan and then Bea. Jonathan went to college and didn’t come back, and Bea went to college and came back to marry her high school boyfriend. Thirty years later, their father died—emphysema—and their mother stayed on by herself. The exterior walls of the house were a double thickness of brick—who does that now? There were deep-set windows, a wide porch. “I’m sorry one of Bea’s kids doesn’t want it,” he said, but they didn’t. Bea had talked to all three of them. No, no, and no. Rachel and Sydney just laughed.

It turned out one of the lamps in the living room was valuable. Sydney had found a dealer in Los Angeles who, based on the pictures she’d sent, would pay $8,000. For a lamp. “I’ve been walking past that thing my entire life,” Jonathan said. “I’m pretty sure it came with the house.” Though of course there was no one left who would know.

“The past is soul-crushing,” he said lightly.

“Tell me about it,” I said.

“Maybe we should sell the house,” he said.

“I thought that was the plan,” I said, slightly alarmed.

“ Our house,” he corrected. “Maybe we should get rid of everything and move into the city, get a loft in Tribeca, a big open room with triple-height ceilings and a wall of windows.”

What about the rabbits? “You’re having real estate hallucinations,” I said. I liked our house. I liked getting on the train after work. I liked getting off the train and walking up the hill beneath a canopy of trees and sitting in the backyard at dusk, listening to the insects sawing away. I had lived in that house longer than I’d ever lived anywhere else. I liked that.

Jonathan yawned. “Something to think about,” he said. “I’m not making any plans.”

“Good. Don’t make plans. I love you. Go to sleep. You’ve had a long day.”

And Jonathan said that he would, that I was right, that he loved me, too.

Little from the rest of the week was worth reporting. I talked to my husband, my sister. I cleaned out the freezer. My mother called me more than usual because she kept remembering things she wanted to say regarding Eddie, chief among them that she still had the red leather dictionary his parents bought him as a high school graduation present, “To our son Edward Triplett, with love from Mom and Dad, May 1957” written on the upper right-hand corner of the first blank page. “It’s awful that I have it,” my mother said. “I felt so guilty that I put it away, and then I forgot about it completely. I should have given it to you when you were here. Can I send it to you? Would you give it to him?”

“I can give you his address,” I said. “It might be nice if you sent it yourself.”

“I couldn’t do that. He wouldn’t want to hear from me.”

I told her I would ask him, and that seemed to placate her.

“His parents were sweet people,” she said. “I wonder how long ago they died.”

“You knew Eddie’s parents?”

“Of course I knew his parents. I was married to their son. They came to see us a couple of times. They came to our wedding.”

But as much as I tried, I could not find them in my memory. It felt like such a failure on my part. “Where were they from?”

“Altoona,” my mother said. Of course they were from the same place Eddie was from.

We said goodbye, but an hour later she called me back. “You don’t think it was only Skip, do you?” she asked.

“What are you talking about?” I was cutting up some watermelon to eat for dinner in the backyard. My hands were sticky.

“You know what I’m talking about,” she said, tired of having to spell everything out for me. “You don’t think Skip Hotalling was his only boyfriend? I mean, he must have seen other people over the years. Otherwise it would be sad.”

“I’ll ask him,” I said, even though I already knew the answer, even though I had no intention of telling her the answer. “Once he has the dictionary.”

When Jonathan called me on Friday morning, there was so much noise in the background I could hardly hear him. “You sound like you’re in a bus terminal,” I said.

“Airport terminal,” he said. “I’m coming home.”

“Today?”

“Four hours, give or take,” he said. “I wanted to surprise you, but Bea said people don’t like surprises. She said you might need time to get your lovers out of the house.”

“Bea said that?”

A gate announcement blared through, a final boarding call to Minneapolis. I had to ask him to repeat himself. “No, she didn’t. That was me being funny.”

“Ha, ha,” I said.

“I’ve missed you,” he said.

The sincerity in his voice landed with a weight, and suddenly I missed him, too. I missed him very much. I wrote down the flight number and arrival time. I told him I would be there.

“Don’t drive to the airport,” he said, but I could tell he was happy.

When we got home, Jonathan and I had sandwiches and watermelon for dinner. He emptied his suitcase straight into the washer and took a shower, and after that we got into bed while it was still light outside. This was the definition of a long marriage: the same things happened but in a different order.

“So does this mean you’re done with Fond du Lac?” I asked, my head on his chest. “Can Bea finish up the rest of it?”

He cupped the back of my head with his hand. “Oh, no. Nothing like that. But a couple of days ago, we were doing something, I don’t even know what it was, maybe going through Dad’s tools, and we both decided we needed to stop for a while. The house isn’t going anywhere, the canning jars aren’t going anywhere, but we could go somewhere.”

“That makes sense.”

“The further along we get, the more it feels like some sort of immersive therapy project. I wonder what Leda would think about that—put two siblings in their childhood home and let them go through every single object in the house, see what comes up.”

“So what came up?”

“Memory, loss, love, anger, all the usual suspects. Sometimes I’d have to go in the other room and stand there with my eyes closed for a minute because I couldn’t look at anything else. Every teacup comes with a short documentary film: I remember Mom’s friend Marie had taken a china-painting class, and she’d painted this cup and saucer for our mother, peonies or roses, we couldn’t tell which it was, but it was nice, she did a good job. The thing was, though, every time Marie came over, our mother would have to drink her coffee out of this particular cup or Marie would get her feelings hurt. And then I have to think it all through: Marie is dead. I have no idea what became of her children. I’m going to wrap up this cup and saucer and put it in the box for Goodwill, but is anyone going to want it? It’s pretty, you know. Then I’m hoping that someone will want it because I don’t want to bring it home with me.”

“About a hundred thousand times.”

“About that. Maybe more. That’s why I wouldn’t go home with Bea at night. We’d be vibrating by the end of the day. Wait.” He got out of bed, my dear naked husband, and went into his closet. He came back with his hand in a fist. “I brought you something. Hold out your hand.”

I held out my hand, and he covered my hand with his hand, then took it away.

There sat a metal horse. As small as it was, it had some weight. It had been painted a chestnut color, with a saddle and bridle a darker brown. No rider. The horse must once have been part of a regiment of toy soldiers.

“I painted them when I was a kid,” he said. “Hundreds of them, soldiers, I mean. I didn’t paint that many horses. I thought that one was especially good. I don’t know why it made me think of you.”

I stood the horse upright on my palm and felt my throat tighten. “I love it,” I said.

He was so pleased. “Do you? There were so many things I could have brought you.”

I shook my head. “You picked perfectly. This is the only thing I would have wanted.”

When we lay back into the pillows, Jonathan told me about the set of lead soldiers and how he had painted them after school and on weekends when he should have been doing his homework. Rachel agreed to take the set for her son, though no twelve-year-old boy with his own iPhone wanted a regiment of British soldiers. Rachel was taking them because she was kind and I loved her for it.

“When do you think you’ll go back?”

“Soon enough. There is a sense of the ending now, and we both want to get things finished.” He stretched and then resettled himself. “It’s awfully nice to be home, though.”

“I think we’re living parallel lives,” I said, and from there I told him everything, about talking to Eddie, and about Henry telling me Eddie was gay, going to the Century Club and then the wedding, about talking to my mother, and talking to Leda about our mother and Eddie. “I mean, it’s fascinating and I also want it to stop. I’m too old to be nine again.”

That was when I remembered that tomorrow was Saturday, and on Saturday I had agreed to go to brunch at the Hotallings’.

“Who are the Hotallings?” Jonathan asked.

We were comfortable in bed, and so I explained who the Hotallings were as well. Skip and Polly were easier to unpack than one might imagine.

“And there’s a brunch in Darien?”

“At their house.”

“Are you picking Eddie up?”

I shook my head. I would drive and he would take the train. He would get there before me. We had worked it all out. Jonathan told me he was going to come. “Call Eddie and tell him to call the Hotallings. They’ll understand. The husband just got back from a lengthy trip. He refuses to be separated from you.”

“You don’t want to come to the Hotallings’ for brunch,” I said. “Trust me on this.”

“I want to be with you,” he said. “I came back from Wisconsin to be with you.”

Like all long-married couples, Jonathan and I were capable of sitting across from one another at the breakfast table without a single sentence to exchange, which made this closeness a luxury—bed, horse, brunch. That he offered to go with me to Connecticut was an act of generosity I could hardly fathom.

I lived in a school full of girls, most of them smart from wealthy families, a few of them very smart from working-class families or occasionally poor families. Girls who loved literature above all else—ask me any question about these girls, and I would be able to answer. I imagined Eddie’s life to be limited in similar ways, buffeted as he was by readers on every side. We were especially qualified to talk to people coming out of libraries, bookstores, or certain classrooms. The rest of humanity? Less so.

But Jonathan could talk to anyone, illness and death being the guaranteed common denominator. He wasn’t worried about the Hotallings at all. I texted Eddie to tell him Jonathan was coming, and Eddie promised to pass the happy news along to our hosts.

The next day we took the Hutch north, past the exits for Rye and Port Chester and Scarsdale, the parkway living up to its name as a park to be driven through, the trees that lined either side of the road a rich and heavy green. Jonathan seemed to be nothing but happy driving to Connecticut on his first full day at home, giving my knee an occasional affectionate pat. Moreover, there was nothing in the story of Eddie Triplett and Skip and Polly Hotalling that surprised him. “Everyone goes their own way,” he said when I laid it all out.

“I once fired a doctor who lived in Darien,” he said as we passed the state line into Connecticut and the beautiful Hutch became the much more beautiful Merritt and the tax rates lowered considerably. “It must have been my first month or two on the job. I know it was before you got here. The guy who had the job before me left the mess behind. Didn’t want to deal with it. Not that I could blame him. I didn’t want to deal with it either.”

“What was he doing?” I asked, grateful not to be driving. Grateful for pretty much everything.

“Back surgery. There is a fortune to be made in back surgery.”

“He was doing back surgery on people who didn’t need back surgery?”

“He was doing back surgery on people who should have had their tonsils out. Anyway, the guy was impossible to pin down. He was always busy doing back surgery. For whatever reason, I ended up going out to his house to talk to him. I’d never been to Darien before. Maybe that was why he wanted to get me out there, so he could show me what his overhead looked like.”

“So what happened?”

“I fired him,” Jonathan said. “Then I dealt with the lawsuits. He sued the hospital, the patients sued the hospital. He tried to sue me personally. As we say in the business, it was a dumpster fire. That’s what I think of whenever I think of Darien.”

“What was his house like?”

Jonathan thought for a minute. “Like stacks of money shaped into a building.”

I laughed, and when, fifteen minutes later, we arrived at the Hotallings’ address on Pear Tree Point Road, I asked him if the surgeon’s house had been anything like this. Jonathan shook his head. “Oh, no. This is tasteful,” he said. “This is modest.”

We continued to sit in the car, contemplating. “I guess if all their children came home at the same time and brought all their children and no one was willing to double up in a room—”

Then the heavy wooden door of a type most often found on cathedrals swung open and Eddie came out. “Fullers!” he shouted.

It was the second time they had met, but there went Jonathan, arms open, as I was getting out of the car.

“Am I ruining your entire weekend?” Eddie asked.

“Brunch in Connecticut?” Jonathan said. “Are you crazy?”

“Polly wants very much to make a good impression,” Eddie said to me. “If I had wanted to make a good impression, I would have let you stay home.” In another minute she was there behind him, standing in the open door.

“Come in, come in,” she said with radiant good cheer. “You’re so nice to drive out here on a Saturday.”

Then Skip came out and shook our hands, showing us his formidable teeth. His insistence that he was glad we were there was so convincing that I wondered if he remembered keeping his back to me for the entirety of the evening at the Century Club. All three men had on khaki pants and navy sports coats, as if there had been a memo.

“I haven’t met your husband,” Skip said, looking straight at Jonathan, shaking his hand. Topflight polite.

“Your firm handled our merger,” Jonathan said, playing his ace while we were still in the driveway.

“You’re a lawyer?”

Jonathan said the name of his hospital. “We worked with your team during the RFP.”

That would be Request For Proposals.

Skip willed himself to his full and former height. “Did you stay?” he asked.

Jonathan shook his head. “Took the buyout.”

Jonathan had taken the buyout. Skip had taken the buyout. In the span of two minutes, Jonathan had established the conversational triangle: I know your law firm, you know my hospital, we are both retired. We all went in the house together, but Skip and Jonathan immediately peeled away, heading to the sunroom at the back of the house. Skip said he wanted Jonathan to see the water, to see the restored Chris-Craft that bobbed at the end of the dock.

“Well, I need to see about the drinks,” Polly said, and then she was gone as well.

Eddie looked around. Only the two of us remained. “That was a neat trick,” he said.

“Give me a minute,” I said, walking through the entry hall as if through a strange dream.

“Pace yourself,” Eddie said. “It’s a lot to take in.”

Every item in the house appeared to have been chosen for texture. The living room walls were covered in what might have been raw silk, lightly padded from beneath. The extravagantly floral carpets, the sofas, the floral pillows arranged on the sofas, the arrangements of flowers on side tables and coffee tables both resplendent and familiar because, of course, Polly loved flowers. She had ordered the arrangements for the anniversary party—peonies, ranunculus, anemones, dahlias—and here they were again, both different and the same. They stood in contrast to the heavy swagger of the drapes restrained by multicolored silk ropes, the palest flash of lining showing at the edge like a slip beneath a dress. Even the glass in the windowpanes seemed different from other glass in other windowpanes, so freshly washed as to appear watery. The art hung from satin cords attached to the crown molding. I had the strangest desire to run my fingers over all of it.

Polly reappeared. “Mimosas or Bloody Marys?” She looked at Eddie. “I know what you want.”

“Jonathan and I will have to pass,” I said. “He’s driving, and I’ve never been able to drink during the day.”

“So you’ll just have one,” she said. “One apiece. Which do you want?”

I shook my head. “Not unless you want to put me in the guest room.”

Polly clapped her hands. “Bloody Marys then. That’s what Eddie and Skip always have, and I don’t care. We’ll all have Bloody Marys. That will be fun.”

When she turned and left for the kitchen, I widened my eyes in Eddie’s direction and he held up one finger. “I’ll cover for you,” he whispered.

I took his sleeve, and together we crossed the flowered field of carpet to the far corner of the living room. “How often do you do this?”

“Come out here?”

I nodded.

“Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter. Engagements and weddings, of course. We do birthdays in the city, the café at Le Bernardin, a play. When you put it all together, it averages out to something every fifteen minutes.”

“But you don’t usually do brunch.”

“No, no,” Eddie said. “Brunch is for you.”

“Eddie!” Polly called from somewhere offstage. “Come help me, please.”

Eddie looked back at me. “Come help me, please,” he said.

I followed him down the hall.

“Oh, Eddie,” Polly said, standing in the kitchen and looking only at me. “Now she’ll see the mess.”

“Daphne’s seen mess,” he said.

But there was no mess, only exuberant wallpaper and glass cupboards, wide marble countertops displaying platters of grilled chicken and shrimp, a sliced tenderloin, three different kinds of salad in bowls that must have been shipped over from Capri. “Who’s coming to lunch?”

“You’re coming!” Polly said. “This is a big day. Daphne Zabriskie returned to the fold. We’ll put out a spread for that.”

But that made it sound like I had left, marched off in a nine-year-old huff, only to return at fifty-three. Why hadn’t I asked if I could bring Leda to brunch? Surely they wanted to see both of the Zabriskie girls. And Leda could have brought Steve and Henry since I’d brought Jonathan. Fair is fair, and there was plenty of food. Instead I asked what I could carry.

“Eddie can take his drink,” she said, handing him a glass, a bright stalk of celery playing the role of swizzle stick, then she handed me two glasses and picked up two more herself. “It’s one for each of us and one for each of the husbands.”

Polly walked in front of us, a hostess in miniature, the proportions of her clothes precisely correct, ballet flats, narrow white pants, a boxy top in a dark pink, the color of certain carnations. Framed photographs of her children and grandchildren lined the hall, beautiful people holding skis, holding tennis racquets, holding the bridles of horses. I imagined they had all been invited to brunch. I imagined they declined.

“The thing about Augusta that no one factors is the heat,” Skip was saying when we came into the glass-fronted room with the staggering view of the bay. “There was a time I could take it, but not now. Now I’d just as soon play Blind Brook. Excellent course and I can finish off the day in my own shower.”

Jonathan looked up at me. If he was in hell, his face did not betray him. “We’ve found the overlap,” he said, taking the drink from my hand.

“Watch out for that,” I said, but it didn’t matter. I could drive us home.

“Don’t be a killjoy,” Polly said, then raised her glass to me. “To lost lambs.”

“ Baa, baa, baa ,” Skip and Eddie sang together, and everyone laughed.

I took it back: the person I wished for in this moment wasn’t Leda, it was my mother. My mother would down her Bloody Mary, then drag me to the kitchen to tell me she was appalled— appalled! —and not only by the wallpaper and the square footage but by Polly’s obliviousness and Skip’s soul-dead acceptance, Eddie’s agreeableness. It’s clearly some form of Stockholm syndrome, my mother would contend. He’s so used to them that he can’t even see it anymore. Then she would go back out to the sunporch and sit next to Eddie, holding his hand beneath the tablecloth. My mother was a great one for giving voice to rage, something I would not get from Jonathan on the drive home.

The spread of hors d’oeuvres had been laid out on a low table in advance of our arrival—olives and cheese and onion dip and some sort of bright green dip, seeded breadsticks, homemade potato chips, some carrots and celery sticks that no one wanted.

Jonathan was asking Skip how he was managing his retirement.

“Why don’t you ask me?” Polly said. “Ask me how I’m managing Skip’s retirement.”

“I couldn’t have stayed another minute,” Skip said, crossing one long leg over the other, ankle to knee. “The golden age is already twenty or thirty years behind us. Now the summer interns come to their interviews wanting to know what company policies are in place to support their work-life balance. Interns! Two years in they start asking questions about paternity leave and lactation suites. These are lawyers.” He shook his head. “It’s a different species.”

“Work-life balance,” Polly said, “means that he worked all those years and now he’s come home. That was work and this is life.”

Skip didn’t seem to hear her. “Not to get all nostalgic about hard work, but gone are the days of putting your head down on the desk for an hour if you happened to find yourself at the office come two a.m. on a Saturday night. That’s how it was done. Plenty of people got upset about the money we made, but I’m here to tell you, we worked for it. Same as the doctors.” He gestured to Jonathan, who was not a doctor. “Am I right? Did you ever hear a surgeon in the eighties talk about his work-life balance? It didn’t exist, and the practice of medicine was better for it. You’re here to save a human life, goddamn it. That’s what men signed on for. What about you? Getting out of hospital administration must have felt like running out of a burning building. Health care’s gone straight to hell.”

Jonathan gave his most affable shrug. “Oh, I don’t know. We were still doing good work.”

“Maybe so, but you’ve got the insurance companies, and then the uninsured on top of that. Together they’ll beat the incentive out of any living thing. You must have been glad to leave it behind.”

Was he glad? I looked at my husband. Are you glad?

Jonathan worked his celery stick around the inside of his half-empty glass. “I liked the work. But no one gets to do the job forever.”

Skip pointed at Eddie. “Except this one.”

Eddie had just put a potato chip with onion dip in his mouth, and so we waited while he chewed, then dabbed his lips with a napkin. “I’ll have you know I was offered a buyout, and I declined to take it. As our host has said on more than one occasion, my vocation doesn’t matter, so it stands to reason that it also doesn’t matter if I decide to keep doing it.”

“Have you been to his apartment?” Skip asked me. “He lives like a graduate student. A whole lifetime of work for a one-bedroom.”

“There’s only one of me in there,” Eddie said.

“I gave him the money for the down payment. Had I known he was never going to leave, I would have found him a better place.”

“I paaaid you baaackk ,” Eddie sang.

“Aren’t you sick of it by now?” Polly asked. She had eaten nothing, and her Bloody Mary, like my own, sweated on the glass table, untouched.

Eddie remained sanguine. “There are plenty of things I’m sick of that I continue to do,” he said cheerfully. “But I happen to like editing books. Anyway, I need the structure. Structure gives life meaning.”

Polly shook her head. “What about you?” she asked me. “You’re still working, aren’t you?”

I had no idea if Polly had ever had a job outside the home, but taking care of Skip and their children had no doubt been plenty. I nodded.

“Look at her,” Skip said, pointing his breadstick in my direction. “Of course she’s working. She’s a child. She should be working.”

I spent my days working with the fourteen-to-eighteen-year-old set, girls who thought of me as time’s own crone, so Skip’s perspective pleased me. Age was a matter of comparison, and in this room I was young. “No one’s offering buyouts for private school teachers. And anyway, I love teaching literature.”

“Books, books, books.” Skip laughed. “The family obsession. Like father, like daughter.”

Every person in the room knew that Eddie was not my father, and we knew his calling me his daughter was nothing more than kindness, but Polly couldn’t let it stand. “How is your father?” she asked.

I told her my father was dead.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said, and said it genuinely. If she was trying to change the subject, she hadn’t meant to change it in that direction.

“It was a long time ago.”

“That’s how Daphne and I met,” Jonathan said, jumping in. “Her father was a patient at my hospital outside of Boston.”

Eddie took a sip of his drink. “What a nice man he was.”

A slight rearrangement of understanding took place among the people around the table. I felt the shift. “You knew Buddy Zabriskie?” Jonathan asked.

“I was married to his wife,” Eddie said. “I was the stepfather of his children.”

Jonathan nodded. “I’d just never thought about it.”

“Abigail had many feelings where Buddy was concerned, many large feelings, so when there were things that needed to be dealt with, they tended to go through me. Buddy and I got along fine. In fact, he came to see me a couple of times when I was in the hospital after Daphne and I were in our famous car accident. He would go to see Leda and then he would come upstairs to check on me.” Eddie looked at me then. “Your father was such a decent man.”

“I didn’t know her first husband came to see you,” Polly said. I wondered why it bothered me so much to hear Polly refer to my mother only as her .

“He did. He’d bring me a copy of the Globe , a couple of magazines. I remember he brought me a Peter Matthiessen book called Men’s Lives , about fishing off the coast of Long Island. I’m sure it had to do with the time in which I read it, but the book made a huge impression on me. All about impermanence.”

I could see my own hardback copy of that book on the living room shelf at home. I knew exactly where it was. “He gave it to me when I graduated from high school,” I said to Eddie. “He loved that book.” Buddy was full of surprises.

“He gave you a book about fishing for your high school graduation?” Polly asked, no doubt thinking of the gifts she’d assembled for her own children when they graduated from Choate.

“I was so close to calling him when it came time for me to leave the hospital,” Eddie said, though now he was speaking to himself.

“You were going to call Buddy?” I asked.

Eddie nodded. “I was thinking of who I could go to. I didn’t want to go back to Altoona, to my family. I didn’t think I should ask anyone from Houghton since I’d be leaving the job.”

“You called us,” Polly said. “Of course you came to us.”

“I wanted to be near the girls,” Eddie said. “I didn’t know that I wouldn’t be able to see you anymore. I thought if I went to Buddy’s—”

“He would have said yes,” I said, speaking for my father, a man who might have dropped the ball on many fronts but spent his life in the service of generosity and hospitality, no questions asked.

“I know that,” Eddie said. “It’s quite an exercise, thinking about who would take you in when your ankle’s been crushed.”

“How is your ankle?” Jonathan asked, as if it had recently mended. We were all tumbling into the past.

Eddie raised his left leg and made a couple circles with his foot. “Never bothers me at all. Time is the great healer.”

“We took you in,” Polly repeated, adamant that her service be acknowledged.

Eddie leaned across the open space between their chairs, picked up her hand and kissed it. “And I am forever grateful.”

We ate our lunch in the sunroom, moving to a table that was already set. Eddie and I helped Polly bring out the food that we no longer wanted while Jonathan held down the fort with Skip. The conversation moved to real estate prices and the long arc of human migration between Manhattan and the suburbs of Connecticut: first the exodus from the city, then the exodus from the suburbs back to the city, then back out to Connecticut at the start of the pandemic, and finally to Ibiza and Bergen and wherever else people wanted to live because they could get their work done anywhere.

“People should be made to come to the office,” Skip said, stabbing his fork against his plate for emphasis. “There’s a culture to office life, and that culture holds the company together. If you don’t show up, you aren’t part of the culture.”

We understood the futility of correcting him and so we didn’t, and anyway, it made him happy to have the last word.

Later there were tender strawberries that had reached their full potential earlier that same day, and a cold lemon pie to accompany them. Then Skip announced they were going out on the boat. He dropped his crumpled napkin on the table. “Come on, men.”

“Daphne’s going to help me clean up,” Polly said, handing me Jonathan’s dessert plate.

I was happy to clean up, I would even say I was born to clean up, but I couldn’t remember my services ever having been commandeered by someone who was not my mother. I didn’t want to be alone with Polly. “I’d love to see the boat,” I said.

“You go,” Jonathan said, taking his plate back from my hand. “Polly and I will knock this out in a minute.”

“No, no,” Polly said. “Skip wants to show off his boat. Humor him.”

“I’ve seen the boat,” Eddie said. “I think I’ve seen the boat a thousand times. I can clean up by myself and then everyone can go.”

I realized then my glass was empty. So deft! I’d never seen it happen.

Skip gave a single clap. “Here’s the edict, sailors: you’re coming and you’re coming.” He pointed to Eddie and then my husband. “So says the captain. Let’s go.”

But in this complex entanglement, Jonathan remained his own man. He put his arm around my waist and pulled me to him. “I am not leaving my wife, sir. I have been in Wisconsin for more than a week. I came here today to be with Daphne. We’re a package deal.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Polly said, annoyed. “Skip, you and Ed take the boat out. The Fullers and I will clean up. Is everyone happy with that?” She was not happy with that.

“I could not be happier,” Jonathan said, and kissed the side of my head, which seemed to annoy Polly further.

“Happy,” I said.

“Happy enough,” Eddie said.

“Well, that’s what I get,” Skip said. “One mate and one mutineer. Let’s go.”

Eddie and Skip went through the glass French doors and crossed the flagstone patio, following a wide set of stone stairs down to the water. Maybe it was my imagination, but it seemed to me, looking at the two of them as they receded into the afternoon light, that they moved more easily as they reached the Long Island Sound.

Jonathan and Polly were stacking plates while I picked up the glasses. Only Polly’s glass was full. “A lovely, lovely lunch,” Jonathan said. “Couldn’t have been nicer.”

But Polly wouldn’t look at him, and she didn’t say a word. She picked up her stack of plates and left for the kitchen.

I looked at my dear husband, mouthed the words thank you .

“I will never leave you behind,” he said quietly, and the two of us went to the kitchen.

Polly’s boxy carnation-colored top had belled sleeves, and one of those sleeves had dragged through a plate or possibly into one of the bowls of salads. When we came in, she was standing at the sink, scrubbing.

I asked her if I could help.

“With the stain ?” she said. “No, thank you, I know how to do this.”

I put the glasses down. Jonathan put down the plates.

“I planned the whole thing,” Polly said. “I worked it out with Skip. After brunch he would take the men down to the boat so you and I could talk.” She was crying now, holding her sleeve beneath the running stream of tap water.

“You can talk to me.” I took two steps towards her and stopped. I was supposed to comfort her.

“It’s the leukemia, isn’t it?” she said. “My god, when he told us, we thought it was the end of the world, but then you go along year after year and nothing changes and you start to think that maybe it’s okay, maybe we can just forget about it, and then you do forget about it, you really do. But it’s not okay, is it? That’s why you’ve come back. I said to Skip, the only reason she’s come back is his leukemia’s gotten worse. Maybe you’ve got some score to settle or maybe you think there’s money, which there isn’t, but if there’s something going on, you have to tell me. We’re his family. We deserve to know.”

A large wooden table took up the center of the kitchen, the place where Skip and Polly no doubt ate when the two of them were home alone, the place we had set the dishes down. Now my fingers curled around the edge to keep me standing. Given the chance, I would have said I had no idea what she was talking about, because I didn’t. I didn’t know anything. But before any of that, Jonathan went to Polly, reaching over to turn off the faucet. He took her wet hand from the sink. I could see her shaking.

“Ed is fine,” Jonathan said. “Nothing’s changed. We’ve got the best people keeping up with it. If anything, the numbers look better than they did last month.”

Polly Hotalling looked at my husband the way you look at the person who is telling you what you wanted to hear, the thing you weren’t expecting to hear. “He’s okay?”

“Well, he has chronic lymphocytic leukemia, it’s nothing you’d want, but he’s managing it. For the most part, it doesn’t affect his life. Someday it will, but that’s not what’s happening now.”

Polly took a small step towards him and Jonathan put his arms around her. “Are you sure?” she asked. Her voice came out as a small croak from the front of his shirt.

He patted her back like a baby. “As sure as anyone can be under the circumstances. This is emotional stuff. We all love Eddie, we all want what’s best for him.”

“I just thought …” she began, but she didn’t feel the need to finish. She had already said what she thought.

“Go put yourself together and let Daphne and me handle the kitchen.” Jonathan took off his blazer. “They’ll be back before you know it. No boat ride lasts forever.”

She looked up at him and smiled, wiping her eyes on a dish towel. “You won’t tell him I said anything?”

Jonathan held her eye. “Not a word.”

She left the room relieved, the dish towel still in her hand. I don’t think she remembered I was there, though she walked right past me. When she was gone, Jonathan and I stood there, trying and failing to make sense of it all.

“How did you know it was chronic lymphocytic leukemia?” I asked him, when what I wanted to say was, Eddie? Leukemia?

“Because if it were some other kind, he’d be dead.” Then Jonathan rolled up his shirtsleeves and started on the dishes.

In other circumstances, seeing my husband lie with such fluency might have alarmed me, but in these circumstances, I felt nothing but grateful. How do we talk about death but to lie about it? I had asked Eddie if we were going to die in the car up at the raspberry farm. “I don’t think so,” he had said to me that night. “I mean, of course we will eventually, everything does, but I don’t think you and I are going to die in this car.”

I wondered if this would turn out to be the eventuality of which he spoke.

I carried the glasses and plates to the sink, then hunted around until I’d found containers for all the leftover food, then I put the food away.

Nearly an hour passed and still the boat did not return. We had no idea what had become of Polly. We had cleaned up and put away every trace of lunch and then gone back to the sunroom and out those same glass French doors to sit on a wicker love seat that looked out over the water. Jonathan and I agreed to say nothing about Skip or Polly or Eddie for as long as we were in the house, or, better still, for as long as we were in Connecticut. To pass the time, we looked at the housing prices in Darien on Jonathan’s phone, and when we got tired of that, we looked at the water.

“We could go home,” Jonathan said. “Leave them a note.”

I was just saying I’d give the whole thing another half hour when, in the distance, the Chris-Craft swung into view. They were going fast, a tall arc of spray above their wake. When the boat came closer in, we could see that both men were standing, and when they saw us, they waved and we waved back.

“You never know what the day will bring,” Jonathan said.

We watched the boat slow, then make its way to the dock. Eddie and Skip tied the lines and then got off like two old men, Skip helping Eddie up and then Eddie, safely on the dock, turning around to give Skip his hand. A few times they stopped to laugh about something we were too far away to hear. They were both wearing sunglasses and baseball caps.

Polly came outside as they were climbing the stairs and sat down in the wicker chair beside us. She wore a different blouse now, still in the family of dark pink. She must have been watching for the boat from a window somewhere. “Look at them,” she said to us. “Every time they get together, they’re kids again. Can you imagine having a friend like that for your entire life?”

“No,” Jonathan said.

“My sister,” I said.

Polly shook her head. “Doesn’t count.”

Eddie, coming up the stairs, waved his hand over his head. “Ahoy!”

“Was it glorious?” Polly called.

Skip, a few steps behind Eddie, stopped to catch his breath. “There’s still water in the bilge. The boat’s spent so much time in the yard getting fixed that I might as well not have a boat and the goddamn thing is still leaking.”

“I’ll call on Monday,” Polly said.

“A boat sits in the water all day long,” Eddie said. “Logic dictates that it’s going to get a little water in it.”

Skip shook his head, still on the same step. “That’s like saying logic dictates the house will have a few termites because it’s sitting on dirt.”

Eddie laughed and turned around. He held out his hand and Skip declined to take it, so Eddie went up without him. After a minute or two Skip caught his breath and came up.

“Where did you go?” Polly asked.

“Westport!” Eddie said. “A pretty town to see from the sea.”

“Made all the better for not needing to find a parking space,” Skip said.

Polly agreed. “There is no parking in Westport.”

It was clear, at least to us, that brunch at the Hotallings’ had at last reached its conclusion. “Well,” Jonathan said, looking at his watch, “it’s time my bride and I headed back to Bronxville.”

“Drop me at the train station, will you?” Eddie asked.

I said we’d be happy to.

“You can’t go now,” Polly said to Eddie, her franticness resurfacing for the moment. “Spend the night! Or at least stay for dinner. We can watch a movie. Did you see all the food we have?”

Eddie shook his head. “There’s work to be done, manuscripts waiting in line for the red pencil.”

“But it’s Saturday ,” Polly said, a fact she’d no doubt called out to the men in her life for as long as she’d had men in her life. Later she would say it to her children, and then to their children: It’s Saturday. Stay with me.

I was still undecided as to whether I disliked her intensely or felt terribly sorry for her.

“No one’s going to die if you don’t get chapter fifteen straightened up this weekend,” Skip said.

“Did I ever once, in all the years you were working, tell you to put either the merger or the acquisition aside so that we could go out on the boat?”

But Eddie had missed what Skip was saying: Skip wanted him to stay. If belittling Eddie’s job was the only way he knew to ask, still, he was asking. One imagined time passed slowly in Darien.

Skip waved Eddie away with his hand. “Let them go,” he said to Polly. He still had his sunglasses on.

Polly declared that in order to leave we would have to take a portion of the leftovers with us: leftovers as exit tax. Then she disappeared to the kitchen, returning ten minutes later with plastic containers full of food arranged in two giant bags from Palmer’s Market. “Eat it,” she said sharply. “I don’t want everything going to waste.”

We said our goodbyes. I put the bags in the backseat beside me and told Eddie to get in the front. We looked like we had robbed a specialty food store and were making our getaway.

Eddie clipped his sunglasses back onto his glasses. “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” he said as we pulled down the driveway, his head falling back against the headrest. He continued to wave and Polly continued to wave even though Skip had gone inside. “I never would have gotten out on my own. Her will is too strong. Take a left down here.”

“We’re not going to the station,” Jonathan said. “We’ll drive you home.”

Eddie shook his head. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

I told him we were ridiculous people.

The Yankees were playing, and so we set out on 95 South towards 287 West to avoid the traffic. Jonathan, who had promised Polly he would say nothing, recounted our afternoon down to the stain on her sleeve.

“Skip took me out on the Chris-Craft so she could ask you about my health?” He stared out the window, taking in the passing mansions for a while before pushing ahead. “ That’s why we had to go to Connecticut?”

“That was our impression,” I said. “I don’t think she meant to welcome me back into the family.”

“I don’t even remember how long I’ve had leukemia. Eight years maybe? It’s not exactly breaking news. My doctor stumbled onto it doing the annual blood work. ‘Your cholesterol looks good, Mr. Triplett, but we need to run some more tests to see if you have leukemia.’ Which I did. It sounded so terrible at first. When I got back to the office, I called Skip—that was poor judgment on my part. Skip told Polly, Skip and Polly looped in every expert they could think of, and all the experts said I was fine, given the circumstances. I’m fine. I can’t imagine they’re still thinking about it.”

“They’re very attached to you,” I offered from the backseat. We hold these truths to be self-evident.

“Anyone would think that Polly’s the one you’ve been seeing on the side all these years,” Jonathan said.

“That’s what my mother thought!” I said.

Eddie turned to look at me. “Your mother thought I was seeing Polly?”

“Back in the earliest days, when you and my mother were friends at Houghton Mifflin. She thought Skip was so angry at you because you were sleeping with his wife.”

“Skip was so angry at me because I was sleeping with Skip.” Eddie turned back in his seat. “I don’t know why people bother to guess at things. They’re always wrong.”

“Skip still seems angry.”

We could see the water from the car now, blue sky, blue water, the bobbing boats, the occasional storybook cloud. “I wish you’d come out with us on the boat,” Eddie said. “There’s no explaining how lovely he can be. Which is not to say he isn’t perfectly capable of being a complete ass. Both things are true. Both things are true for most of us, I suppose.”

“So you’re telling me I don’t have to worry about your leukemia?”

“I am telling you,” Eddie said, “that given the state of the world, worrying about my leukemia, or my relationship with the Hotallings, should be far down on your list.”

Jonathan asked some more questions about Eddie’s numbers and the details of his medical care. Jonathan, who had spent much of his adult life in a hospital, was full of knowledge he no longer knew what to do with. Listening to him ask about leukemia was like listening to him recite the lines from a play he had once been the star of. He sounded good.

“I’ve had two flare-ups, if that’s the term,” Eddie said. “One last year and another one maybe three years before that. One dose of chemo and a little rest and I was back on track.”

“That’s reasonable,” Jonathan said.

Eddie turned to me and smiled. “See? Your husband says I’m reasonable.”

I smiled back. I wasn’t entirely sure we weren’t being snowed, but I would wait and ask Jonathan later. He would know.

“We’re on the Cross County?” Eddie asked, looking at the signs overhead. “Don’t you live in Bronxville?”

“We’re about six minutes away from our house. That way.” I motioned in the general direction.

“Take me to the train station in Bronxville then,” Eddie said. “You’ll lose the rest of the day if you drive into the city and back.”

“We have the rest of the day to lose,” Jonathan said.

“No, I can’t stand this. Or I have a better idea: Take me to your house. Show me your house and let me use the bathroom. I didn’t go before we left Skip and Polly’s because I didn’t want to impede the departure and that was a mistake.”

After a little more tugging back and forth, we finally agreed to take Eddie home with us, and then later we would drive him to the station.

Bronxville was not unlike Winchester, the town where I grew up. Bronxville denizens lined the platform every morning to take the train to New York City, while Winchester denizens took the commuter rail to Boston. In certain sections of both towns the houses ran towards mansions, and, in Bronxville’s case, foreign embassies, but there were also plenty of houses I thought of as regular. We lived in one of those houses. Our life had never seemed as delightfully regular as it did on that day coming home from Darien.

“It’s wonderful to be home,” Eddie said, even though he’d never been to our home before. And I thought to myself, Yes, it is.

I showed Eddie straight to the bathroom while Jonathan brought in the bags of food. We were set for the next three days’ worth of lunches and dinners. Not having to cook made me think for a minute that going to brunch had been worth it. It had been worth it because now I knew what was going on with Eddie.

“There’s a drawing of a rabbit in the hallway that looks like a Dürer,” Eddie said when he came back.

“It’s not,” I said.

“Well, still, it’s quite good.” He stopped and looked around, then went to a painting of two rabbits eating the edge of a cabbage leaf. That one might have been my favorite. There was something both industrious and romantic about it. After a while, he went and stood in front of the Beatrix Potter in the front hall. “Will you give me the rabbit tour?”

I didn’t ask him how he knew, and I didn’t tell him that no one had asked before. I called to Jonathan, who was still in the kitchen. “He wants to see the rabbits,” I said.

I didn’t think about Candy much anymore. For years I did. I thought about how Rachel and Sydney still missed her, but I didn’t wonder if Jonathan missed her. In that moment I saw it cross his face, the loss of her, the pride he felt in this small, lingering accomplishment: she had put together a first-rate collection of rabbits. “This was the first one she bought,” he said, starting with the cabbage leaf. “She found it in a junk shop in Anchorage.”

“When were you in Anchorage?” I asked.

“Never,” he said. “One of her friends got a job there after college, fell in love. Candy was in the wedding. I didn’t know her then.” He led us down the hallway to speak of the rabbit that was not a Dürer. “It’s good, though, right? It’s French, late 1800s. She paid some real money for this one.” The most expensive one, of course, was the tiny Beatrix Potter in the heavy frame, a rabbit in a calico dress holding a spoon. “This broke two of Candy’s rules, the first being no one was allowed to buy a rabbit painting for her, and the second being no rabbit anthropomorphizing. She didn’t believe in rabbits wearing dresses. But she forgave me. That’s the kind of collector she was.”

“She had the most extraordinary eye,” Eddie said, pulling his glasses down the bridge of his nose when he got close.

“She was disciplined, I’ll say that. She never wanted the house to be overrun. She sold several off over the years because she’d find a new painting she liked better. The fact that she picked them all out herself turned out to be the real gift. They make me think of her, of what she liked, which is much better than paintings that remind me of going shopping.”

We showed him every rabbit in the house, including the one that none of us could stand, a thin dead hare hanging upside down, its back legs bound together with twine, its ears limp. We kept it in the laundry room. “She was already sick when she bought it,” Jonathan said. “She hung it in the kitchen back when we lived in Beverly. The girls couldn’t stand it. They were so young then. I don’t know what Candy was thinking. I mean, I do know, and the girls knew, too. They used to take it off the wall and hide it under the couch or in the coat closet. Finally she gave up. They still hate the painting. If one of them is home for a while, they stick it between the dryer and the wall.”

“Still,” Eddie said, “you can see it from Candy’s perspective.”

The way the fur was painted was extraordinary, brown and gray and white, every single hair defined. The hair of the hare. I wanted to touch my fingers to its flank every time I put in a load of wash.

“That’s why I keep it up,” Jonathan said.

There were eight pieces in all, and the last one on the tour was in our bedroom, which made me grateful that we were people who always made the bed. “This is my favorite,” Jonathan said.

By the standards of the others, the rabbit in our bedroom was more abstract: white and leaping, the grass beneath it tipped in blue. It hung on the wall by Jonathan’s closet.

Eddie nodded. “I agree with you,” he said. “This is my favorite.”

“Candy liked to paint,” he said, nodding. “But she never thought anything she did was good enough. She never would have let me put this up when she was alive.”

“Did she paint other rabbits?” Eddie asked.

“Well, sure, some. Candy painted everything.”

Then Eddie went over and sat down on my side of the bed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I need to sit here for one minute.”

“No,” I said, “it’s perfectly fine. Are you okay? Can I get you anything?”

He shook his head, then changed his mind. “If I could have a glass of water.”

Jonathan was gone in an instant. He was a great believer in the power of a glass of water.

“Stay,” I said quietly, not wanting to sound like Polly.

Eddie closed his eyes. “One minute. I’ll be fine.”

“Does this happen to you?”

“Do I get tired after listening to Polly and Skip talk over one another and two Bloody Marys in the middle of the day along with too much to eat and then going for a boat ride? Yes, I suppose every time I do that, I feel tired.”

Jonathan reappeared with the water. He sat down beside Eddie on the bed. “Here,” he said.

Eddie drank, then opened his eyes. “That fixed it,” he said, but he didn’t stand up.

I was thinking that I didn’t know what to do when Jonathan said, “This is what we’re going to do: We’re going to walk down the hall to the guest room and you’re going to take your shoes off and lie down. And if you want to leave in an hour, that’s fine. And if you want to leave tomorrow, that’s fine.”

He drank some more water. “This is quite a detour to make on the way to the train station.”

“Do you want to stand up?” Jonathan asked.

“I do,” Eddie said. “I will in one more minute.”

“Take your time,” Jonathan said.

Eddie finished the water and handed me the glass. “Okay,” he said. “I’m going to listen to your husband. That’s what I’m going to do.” He looked like he was about to stand when he saw the little horse on the nightstand and changed his mind. “Look at that,” he said, reaching over to pick it up. “Whistler.”