My grandmother had been dead for thirty-one years when she told me I was burning the garlic. In my defense, she had arrived without calling.

“Turn it down.”

I was holding a wooden spoon. There was sauce on the handle and, from an earlier investigation, on my shirt. She stood beside the stove in her brown cardigan, the one with the button she had replaced with a slightly larger button and dared anyone to notice.

“Nonna?”

“Who else?”

I turned off the burner.

“Down. I said down.”

She reached past me and relit it.

For a moment I watched the blue flame. When I looked up, she was still there, examining the inside of the lid. Then she set it in the spoon rest, where it did not fit.

“You eat alone here?”

“Mostly.”

She looked at the table.

“What happened to the nice one?”

The nice one had gone with my former husband. We had divided the furniture amicably, which meant that neither of us had wanted to carry the discussion into another room. For almost four years I had eaten at the kitchen counter.

On Thursday, I bought a table.

The estate sale was in a split-level house on a street where I used to deliver newspapers. I recognized the steep driveway before I recognized the house. In winter the owner had expected the paper to arrive at his front door, although he himself went in and out through the garage.

Inside, everything had a price. A strip of masking tape ran along the spines of a set of encyclopedias, holding together subjects that had not spoken in years. Someone had put three dollars on a framed photograph of a girl with a flute. Upstairs, a man was testing a recliner by getting into it and closing his eyes.

I found the table in the kitchen.

It was walnut, rectangular, with rounded corners and a leaf someone had painted over while painting something else. One leg had a dark repair near the bottom. There were no matching chairs.

An old woman sat by the sliding door with a cash box on her lap. She wore sneakers with her stockings. A small electric heater pointed at her ankles, although it was May.

“Does it open?” I asked.

“Sometimes.”

“I mean for the leaf.”

“I know what you mean.”

I pulled at one end. The table held its position. I moved to the other end and tried again, this time with the expression of a man who had learned something.

“Take the catch off.”

I crouched beneath it. A brass hook joined the two halves. Around the underside of the edge, the wood was worn smooth in separate patches, one in front of each place a person would sit. I ran my thumb over the nearest patch. It was shallow and cool, almost polished.

The catch released. I stood up and pulled. The halves came apart with a sound that brought the man out of the recliner upstairs.

“Hundred and twenty,” the woman said.

“The label says eighty.”

“Then eighty.”

I looked at her.

“You should always read the label.”

There was a drawer beneath the end nearest her. Inside lay a single birthday candle, bent nearly double, and a little metal key. I held up the key.

“For the drawer?”

“The drawer doesn’t lock.”

“What’s it for?”

“China cabinet. The people who bought it forgot the key.”

I had come in to look for a lamp. I did not need another thing in my house. But Daniel was coming on Sunday, and I had already invited three other people, which was more than the counter could accommodate unless somebody ate from the sink.

“I’ll take it.”

The woman looked toward the table, then back at me.

“You have people to help you?”

“I’ll manage.”

“They always say that.”

I paid her. She counted the bills twice, not because she doubted me, I thought, but because counting gave her something to do before letting go of them.

At the door she said, “Don’t set six places unless you mean it.”

I waited for the rest.

She tucked the money into the box.

“Is that what it seats?”

“That’s what I said.”

The man from the recliner helped me carry it outside. On the front steps he stopped, leaving most of its weight in my hands.

“You want the candle?” he asked.

“It came with the table.”

We got it into my station wagon with the back seats down and the hatch tied shut. I drove home slowly, watching the nearest leg in the rearview mirror. At every light it looked as if it were about to climb over the seat.

I called my neighbor Frank. Together we carried it into the kitchen. He steadied it while I folded a piece of cardboard beneath the repaired leg.

“You having a party?”

“Lunch.”

“Good. About time.”

He said it while looking at the leg, giving me permission to pretend he meant the table.

Daniel had called the previous Monday. I let it go to voicemail because I was in the supermarket and because I had not answered his last message. By the time I got home, I had constructed a plausible account of how busy I had been.

His message was short.

“Hey, Uncle Pete. I’m moving next Saturday. Thought maybe we could get lunch before I go. Call me.”

I listened again. He had told me about the move. I remembered the general shape of it and that I had replied with something enthusiastic. I opened our messages.

Providence. A new job. An apartment he was going to look at with his girlfriend, whose name I knew when it was in front of me.

I called him.

“Sunday,” I said. “Come here. I’ll cook.”

“Really?”

“Don’t sound so alarmed.”

“I’m not. That would be good.”

He had been eighteen when Marco died. In the year afterward, Daniel came for dinner almost every week. He would bring his laundry and leave with the shirts warm from my dryer, wearing one because it had become his favorite while he waited. We watched terrible movies. Sometimes he slept on the sofa, long feet extending beyond the arm, and I turned down the television rather than wake him.

Then he had a girlfriend and classes and work. I had things too. We canceled, rescheduled, and eventually stopped giving the rescheduled dinner a date. I sent money on his birthday. He sent photographs from places I had not known he was going.

After our call, I stood in the kitchen wondering what we would talk about.

So I invited Frank and his wife, Joan. Then I invited my cousin Angela, who could keep a conversation alive after the people involved had lost interest in it. She tapped your wrist with her reading glasses when she wanted you to listen. Four guests. A Sunday lunch.

On Saturday I bought six chairs from a used office-furniture place. They were upholstered in a blue material designed to conceal whatever happened during a meeting. One had arms. I put that one at the far end for Joan, whose hip had been troubling her.

By eleven on Sunday, the sauce had been cooking for hours. The meatballs were in it, along with the sausage. I had grated the cheese and taken a loaf of bread from the freezer. There was a cake on the counter beneath a glass cover. I had bought that. My grandmother had distrusted purchased cakes on principle, although she could be persuaded to eat one while describing its defects.

I had forgotten how many bowls a lunch required. Everything was in something that would be needed for something else. The bread basket was holding mail. The large bowl contained onions. I transferred the onions to a saucepan and then needed the saucepan.

At ten, Frank knocked at the back door to return a measuring tape. He found me emptying the dishwasher onto the counter so I could locate a serving spoon.

“You want us to bring plates?”

“I have plates.”

“I can see that.”

“Sit down. Have coffee.”

He looked at the chairs around the table. I had put one of the blue ones aside after noticing a tear in the seat and replaced it with the wooden chair from my desk.

“You expecting trouble?”

“That one’s mine.”

He sat in it. “Comfortable.”

“Then I’ve made a mistake.”

He drank his coffee while I worked. When he left, he took a bag of recycling out with him and promised they would arrive hungry. I washed his cup by hand, dried it, and put it back in the cupboard.

The kitchen was ready sooner than I expected. I stood beside the table with nothing left to arrange until I noticed that one chair was closer to the wall than the others. I moved it two inches.

I laid the cloth, smoothed it around the corners, and set the places. A plate, a folded napkin, the knife on the right. I made a second trip for the forks.

Six.

I stood with the last fork in my hand.

When we were children, my grandmother always left a place for whoever showed up. Usually someone did. A neighbor with a bowl to return would find a chair pulled out before she finished saying she could not stay. My grandfather’s brother had once eaten an entire lunch with his hat on because he had stopped only to borrow a ladder.

I counted again. Frank, Joan, Angela, Daniel, me.

I could put the spare plate away. Instead I shifted it slightly so the pattern on its rim matched the one beside it, and set down the fork.

The seller’s warning came back to me then.

I opened the drawer. The little key and the candle lay where they had been.

I shut it.

At a quarter to twelve Daniel texted that he had to collect a bookcase from a woman who was moving. Could we eat a little later? I was beginning to think I’d picked the wrong Sunday to start having people over.

I wrote, Of course. Whenever.

Then I stood over the sauce worrying about the garlic.

“Give me a clean spoon,” Nonna said.

I opened the drawer beside the stove. She watched me select one, then took it from my hand. Her fingernail brushed my palm.

I reached for her wrist.

“What?”

I held it. The skin moved beneath my thumb. She had always worn her watch too loosely; it slid toward my hand, its little face turned inward.

“Pietro.”

I let go.

She tasted the sauce and considered it without sympathy.

“You put sugar?”

“A little.”

“Why?”

“The tomatoes were sharp.”

She returned to the pot. I sat in the chair nearest me. It made a small complaining sound beneath my weight.

“You don’t look well.”

“I’m having an unusual morning.”

She turned to face me properly. Her eyes moved over my hair, my face, the place where my shirt pulled across my stomach. Then she touched her own cheek, indicating mine.

“You shave like that now?”

“It’s a beard.”

“I can see what it is.”

She came over and put a hand against my face. I leaned into it before I thought to do so. Her palm smelled of the bar soap she kept in a chipped dish beside her sink.

“How old?” she asked.

“Fifty-eight.”

Her hand stayed where it was.

“Already?”

I nodded.

She looked down at her watch. I could see the hands now. They had stopped at twenty past seven.

“I have something to tell you,” I said.

“You can tell me while I work. Where’s the salt?”

“You died.”

She looked at me for a moment.

“Yes.”

The refrigerator began to hum. Outside, a lawn mower stopped and someone called for someone else to bring a bag.

“You know?”

“I know.”

“How did you get here?”

She glanced at the place at the table and then at me, as though I had asked how she got into a house whose door I had opened.

“I was here.”

“Before that.”

Her fingers tightened around the spoon. She looked toward the window.

“I don’t know how to tell you.”

I stood up again. I wanted to look at her from another angle, to find the edge of whatever was happening. There was a loose thread at the bottom of her cardigan. She had stockings on, and the flat shoes she wore in the house after her feet began to hurt.

“Would you like coffee?”

“After we eat.”

“I could show you the house.”

“Later.”

I went toward the hall. “It’s not very big.”

She took two steps after me and stopped at the kitchen doorway. Her hand rested on the frame. There was no sound, nothing visible preventing her from going farther. She looked past me toward the stairs.

“Nonna?”

She lifted her foot, then put it down in the same place.

I came back.

“Is it the step?”

There was no step.

“I’ll stay here.”

I held out my hand. She took it, but when I moved toward the hall, she released me.

“Stay with me,” she said.

We stood in the kitchen doorway. I had changed the floor since buying the house, and a narrow strip of the old flooring remained between the rooms. Her shoe rested against it.

“How long can you stay?”

She looked at her watch again, gave it one irritated shake, and turned back toward the stove.

“We’ll eat while it’s hot.”

My phone vibrated on the counter.

Joan had sent a message. Her hip was bad and she had taken something for it. She was sorry. Frank would still come over.

I was reading the message a second time when somebody in the pantry said, “Who owns the white car?”

My grandfather stood beneath the shelf where I kept the cereal. He wore a gray suit with a brown belt. He was carrying his hat.

“You can’t leave it like that,” he said. “Nobody can get out.”

“Hello, Vittorio,” my grandmother said.

“It’s across the driveway.”

“Have you said hello to the boy?”

My grandfather looked at me.

“What happened to your hair?”

He kissed me on both cheeks, then stepped back without removing his hands from my shoulders. His thumbs pressed into the seams of my shirt.

“You look like your father.”

“People keep telling me that.”

“Around here.” He touched his own jaw. “Your mouth is still your mother’s.”

Assunta took his hat and put it on the counter. He noticed the chair with arms and pulled it out. Before sitting, he pressed down on the table, first near one corner, then the other.

“What’s under the leg?”

“Cardboard.”

“You got a screwdriver?”

“Can we just sit down for a minute?”

“We’ll sit when it’s fixed.”

He lowered himself carefully onto one knee. I got the screwdriver from the drawer by the sink and gave it to him. For a few seconds, all I could see of him was his back and the hand he extended for me to put the tool into. I had spent entire afternoons in that position as a child, supplying things whose names I did not yet know.

“The other one.”

I gave him the flathead.

“Thank you.”

There was a little turning and a substantial amount of breathing. He took out the cardboard, folded it differently, and put it back.

“There.”

“You didn’t use the screwdriver.”

“I looked.”

I helped him up. He brushed the knees of his trousers and sat in the chair with arms. His fingers curled beneath the edge of the table.

Assunta brought him water. He tasted it.

“From the sink?”

“No, Vittorio. I went to the mountain.”

“I asked a question.”

“And now you have an answer.”

I laughed. They both looked at me, pleased but uncertain what they had done.

My phone was still in my hand. I set it face down beside the stove.

“Who’s coming?” my grandfather asked.

I named the guests. He remembered Angela after I explained whose daughter she was. Frank meant nothing to him. When I said Daniel, he looked to Assunta.

“Marco’s boy,” I said.

My grandmother stopped stirring.

“He has a boy?”

I nodded. Daniel had been born five years after she died. In the drawer in the living room I had a photograph of her holding Marco as a baby. There was a resemblance around the mouth that I had been meaning to show Daniel.

“Twenty-six now.”

She turned back to the stove slowly.

“What does he do?”

“He works with museums. Art. He’s moving to Providence.”

“A painter?” Vittorio asked.

“Something with the exhibitions.”

I reached for my phone, then left it where it was.

Assunta tasted the sauce again. “Does he eat meat?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

She took the large serving bowl from the counter, tested its weight, and put it beside the stove. I watched her arrange the things she would need within reach. There had been a time when every Sunday started with that movement of bowls.

The phone vibrated.

I did not pick it up immediately.

Vittorio looked toward it. “You got something boiling?”

“It’s a message.”

“From who?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“Then read it.”

Frank had decided to stay with Joan. He did not want to leave her alone after the medication. They were both sorry. Could he bring anything over later?

I looked at the pantry.

Nothing happened there.

From behind me came the sound of a handbag being placed on a chair.

“I had the worst time finding you.”

Lucia stood by the window in a yellow blouse and navy skirt, looking around as if she had already been shown the other rooms and found them wanting. My father’s younger sister had worn the same shade of lipstick for forty years. I recognized it before I quite recognized her face.

She took my chin between her fingers.

“You’re getting handsome again.”

“Again?”

“You went through a period.”

She kissed me, leaving lipstick just below my mouth, then went to kiss Assunta. They held each other’s arms longer than they needed to.

“You look good,” Lucia said.

“So do you.”

“This? I got it on sale.”

“Where?” Assunta asked.

“It was ages ago. I bought two, but the other one shrank.” Lucia held out a cuff for Assunta to feel.

She opened her handbag and took out a white paper package tied with string. Inside were six little pastries flattened slightly on one side.

“There was somebody sitting against me.”

“Where?” I asked.

She thought about it, then began separating the pastries with the edge of a knife.

“They’ll taste the same.”

I picked up the paper. On one corner, in faded red ink, was the name of a bakery that had become a bank before Daniel was born. I remembered waiting there with Lucia after school, looking at the rotating cake display while she discussed someone’s gallbladder with the woman behind the counter.

“You can put these on a plate,” she said.

I found one. My hands were shaking enough for her to notice.

“Did you eat breakfast?”

“Yes.”

“What?”

I could not remember.

She peeled a damaged corner from one of the pastries and held it out to me. I ate it from her fingers. The cream was cold.

“Now go wash. You have sauce on you.”

I went to the sink. Through the window above it, I could see Frank walking slowly with Joan from their car to their front door. He had her handbag over his shoulder. She stopped to point at something in their flower bed.

When I turned around, Lucia was moving Vittorio’s water glass away from his elbow. My grandmother was searching for a potholder. Three dead people were in my kitchen, and Frank was next door without the slightest idea that his wife’s hip had become involved.

I opened Angela’s message thread. The last thing she had written was, What should I bring? I had told her nothing.

I typed, Are you still coming?

Then I erased it.

Lucia had news. Her neighbor’s daughter had married a man who owned a shoe store, but apparently the store belonged to his mother. The distinction required several minutes. My grandfather disputed which shoe store it was and was told that nobody had asked him.

I stood at the counter listening. I had thought of Lucia often in the years since her death, but never once remembered the amount of time she could spend establishing who owned a business.

“You know who I mean,” she said to me.

“I do.”

“The girl with the eyes.”

“The older one?”

“No, her sister. I just told you.”

Assunta filled a pot with water. I reached to help her carry it, and she permitted me to take one handle, although the distance to the stove was two feet.

“What time?” she asked.

“Nearly one.”

“They said noon?”

“One. Daniel’s running late.”

“We should wait.”

“He said we should start.”

He had not said that. I looked toward the phone.

Lucia noticed the empty place at the other end of the table. “Who goes there?”

“Daniel.”

“Oh, good. He’s coming.”

She had known him. When he was little, she gave him coins for doing things she could have done herself. He would straighten the shoes in her hall, then wait by her chair for payment, having been raised to respect a contract.

“He must be tall now.”

“He is.”

“Show me.”

I found a photograph on my phone. Daniel stood beside a lake with a woman wearing his jacket. His hair was longer than I remembered. I passed the phone to Lucia.

She held it far away, then brought it close. “Who’s this?”

“His girlfriend.”

“I can see that. What’s her name?”

I enlarged the picture with my fingers, unnecessarily.

“Maya.”

The name arrived just in time.

Assunta left the stove and leaned over Lucia’s shoulder. She put a hand to her mouth. Then she took the phone from her.

“Look, Vittorio.”

He put on his glasses. He held the phone by the edges, carefully, as though the photograph might still be wet.

“Marco’s mouth.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Her too,” he said, indicating the young woman.

“No, she’s not related.”

“I mean she has a nice mouth.”

“Give it back,” Assunta said.

She held the phone for another few seconds before returning it. “You have a copy?”

“I could print one.”

“Good.”

She spoke as though there would be time to decide where to put it.

I sat down with the phone. I was looking for another photograph when Angela’s message arrived over the top of the screen. Her son had come home unexpectedly. They had already ordered lunch. She hoped I had not made too much.

I put the phone down.

“You have enough?” Assunta asked.

“Plenty.”

Someone opened the refrigerator behind me.

“You got any beer?”

Marco stood with one hand on the door, looking into the light.

He wore a faded green shirt I knew. Its collar had lost the argument with his neck years before he died. There was gray in his beard, less than in mine. He shut the refrigerator when he saw our grandmother.

“Nonna.”

She was already moving toward him. Lucia stood up so quickly she caught the strap of her handbag with her foot. Vittorio got to his feet using both arms of his chair.

I stayed where I was.

Marco bent to let Assunta hold his face. She kissed his forehead, then pushed him far enough away to look at him.

“You’re thin.”

“I’m exactly the same.”

“You were thin before.”

Lucia put her arms around him. He kissed her hair, shook our grandfather’s hand, and then looked across the kitchen at me.

“Hey, Pete.”

“Hello.”

He waited.

“Good table,” he said.

“I just bought it.”

“I like it.”

Assunta went to the counter. Marco followed her with his eyes.

“Can I do anything?”

She put the bread knife in his hand.

He cut the bread in thick slices. At the end of the loaf he stopped to remove a little paper label from the crust. His thumbnail worried at it. I remembered the same motion with price stickers, with the labels inside new shoes, with the bit of tape holding the wrapping on my birthday presents.

“You want the heel?” he asked me.

I shook my head.

“Since when?”

He set it aside anyway.

When I was sixteen, he left our parents’ house with two laundry baskets and a suitcase whose handle had been repaired with electrical tape. He was twenty-one. Our father had told him to get out, and Marco, who had been threatening to do exactly that for months, went upstairs to pack.

I helped him carry the baskets to his car. He had folded nothing. A sleeve hung over the side and dragged in the wet driveway until I tucked it in.

We stood beside his car while he checked his pockets for the keys he was holding.

“I’ll get a place,” he said. “Then I’ll come get you.”

I asked when.

“Soon as I can.”

He reached across the roof and squeezed the back of my neck.

That evening I put clothes in a blue gym bag. I added my little cassette player and the headphones with one side that worked. The bag went beneath my bed, turned so the handles would be easy to reach.

I kept it there for eleven months. Sometimes I needed something from it. I would take out a shirt, wear it, wash it, and put it back.

Eventually the weather changed twice, and the clothes were wrong for the season. I emptied the bag onto my bed one afternoon before our mother got home. I put the cassette player on the dresser and slid the folded bag into the closet with my school things.

Years later, Marco helped me move into my first apartment. He checked the windows and tightened a loose screw on the bathroom door. We ordered pizza and sat on the floor to eat it because my furniture had not arrived.

I could have asked him then.

At his funeral, Daniel wore one of his father’s watches. It was too large for his wrist. I watched him push it back beneath his cuff while people told him what a good man Marco had been.

Now Marco was in my kitchen with a knife in his hand and bread crumbs on his shirt.

“Where do these go?”

I pointed to the basket.

He lined it with a napkin and arranged the slices loosely, the way our grandmother liked them. Then he washed the knife and laid it on a towel.

The phone rang. Daniel’s name filled the screen.

I picked it up before Marco could see.

“Everything all right?” I asked.

“Yeah. The bookcase is bigger than she said. We have to take it apart.”

“Leave it.”

“What?”

“Come eat. You can go back.”

“I’ve got the van until four. Her building wants it out of the hall.”

Marco looked up at the sound of his son’s voice. He dried his hands on the towel without taking his eyes from the phone.

“Who’s there?” Daniel asked.

“Just family.”

“Angela?”

I moved toward the hall, stopped at the doorway, and stayed inside the kitchen.

“Don’t worry about being late.”

“I thought you just said...”

“I know. Take your time.”

“Two-thirty at the latest. I’m sorry.”

“You don’t have to be.”

“Save me something.”

“Of course.”

I put the phone down. Marco was still holding the towel.

“Danny?”

“Daniel now.”

He nodded.

“He’s coming here?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

He folded the towel and laid it beside the sink. Then he unfolded it and hung it over the handle of the oven.

Assunta dropped the pasta into the boiling water.

“I’ve got some photographs,” I told Marco.

He came to stand beside me while I found them. I had fewer recent ones than I expected. There was the picture by the lake, another from a Christmas gathering I had not attended, and an image Daniel had sent of a wooden structure in a workshop. I had replied with a thumbs-up.

Marco touched the edge of the screen.

“He made that?”

“I think so.”

“He send you pictures often?”

“Sometimes.”

“That’s good.”

He kept looking at the screen. I went backward through the messages and found a photograph of an apartment with bare floors. Daniel had taken it from the doorway. The previous tenants had left one plant on the windowsill.

“This is where he’s going.”

Marco studied it. “Decent light.”

“There’s another room, too.”

“Good.”

He pointed to a dark rectangle against the far wall. “Radiator?”

“I suppose.”

“Tell him not to put that bookcase in front of it.”

“You could tell him.”

Marco looked toward the empty chair. After a moment he turned back to the photograph.

“What’s her name?”

“Maya.”

“They been together long?”

“A couple of years. Maybe three.”

“You like her?”

“I’ve only met her once.”

He enlarged the picture of them by the lake. His fingertip obscured her face, and he lifted it quickly.

“She looks nice.”

“She is.”

“His mother met her?”

“I’m sure.”

He nodded. At the table, Lucia was opening a packet of tissues with her teeth. He watched her, then handed me the phone so he could open it for her.

When he came back, I brought up the photograph of the crate again.

“Look at the joints.”

I enlarged the photograph. The structure was a crate, built around the shape of something that was not yet inside it. In the background I could see a vise and a pair of work gloves.

“That’s good work.”

He looked at the picture of Daniel beside the lake for a long time. I could hear my grandmother testing the pasta with her teeth. Lucia was asking where I kept the serving spoons.

“Does he like it there?” Marco asked.

“He’s moving. For the new job.”

“You said. I mean does he like what he’s doing?”

“I think he does.”

Marco handed back the phone.

“He always wanted real tools. Remember that little plastic set you bought him?”

“He took your hammer instead.”

“Went straight through the lid of the toy box.”

I remembered getting down on my knees to look at the damage. Daniel had stood beside me, solemnly holding the hammer by the neck.

“He said he was putting in a window.”

Marco smiled. “That’s right.”

I put the phone away. We stood beside each other without looking up.

“Marco, there’s something...”

“Boys.”

Assunta was at the sink with the pot in both hands. I took it from her and poured the pasta into the colander. Steam filled the space between us. She reached through it with a spoon to prevent one piece from going down the drain.

“Hot,” I said.

“Yes, Pietro. It was boiling.”

She dressed the pasta in the serving bowl, turning it over carefully so the sauce reached the pieces underneath. Marco brought the meat to the table. Lucia made me move the bread because Vittorio would eat it before anything else arrived.

We sat down.

I had put Marco beside the empty place. I could not remember doing it. He held the back of that chair for a moment before taking his own.

Assunta crossed herself. We followed her, even Vittorio, who had already taken bread.

She said the prayer softly. I knew the words, but I was looking at the hands resting beside her plate, so I came in late and finished after everyone else.

For a few minutes there was only serving. Someone wanted a smaller portion and did not receive one. Vittorio needed the cheese. Lucia asked whether the sausage was hot, and Assunta told her to find out.

Marco passed me the bowl.

“You made all this?”

“Most of it.”

“It’s good.”

I took the bowl from him and put it down.

Across the table, Lucia was telling my grandmother about the time I had put dishwashing liquid in a fountain. According to her, the foam had reached the second floor of the municipal building.

“It didn’t,” I said.

“They had to close the street.”

“They closed one lane.”

“He remembers the lane,” Marco said.

“It was an important distinction.”

Vittorio frowned. “I thought that was your brother.”

“No,” Marco said. “I got blamed for other things.”

“You were there.”

“I came to get him.”

I had forgotten that. He had picked me up outside the police station in a car that smelled of damp upholstery. Our father was away. Marco told our mother we had been getting ice cream, an explanation she accepted until she noticed that my shoes were full of suds.

“You charged me ten dollars,” I said.

“For gas.”

“It was six blocks.”

“You should have walked.”

I laughed with a mouthful of pasta and had to put my napkin over my face. Marco smiled down at his plate. He always liked getting me when I was eating.

Lucia picked up her fork. “Your mother knew everything, anyway.”

“She didn’t know about the fountain until Tuesday.”

“She knew.”

“I was there when she found out.”

“Then she let you think you were there when she found out.”

There was no useful response to that. I ate another forkful and let her win.

Vittorio dropped sauce on his tie. Assunta reached across with her napkin. He leaned away.

“I can do it.”

“Then do it.”

He dabbed at the stain, spreading it into the pattern. She watched until he put down the napkin, then reached over and did it herself.

I began to collect an empty serving dish. My grandmother put her hand flat on the edge of it.

“Leave it.”

“I’m only making room.”

“There’s room.”

I left the dish. A few minutes later, she moved it herself onto the counter.

“I thought you said...”

“Not the plates.”

I looked at the five used plates around the table. Daniel’s was still clean, its napkin folded beside it.

“What happens with the plates?”

She held my eyes.

“When the last one comes off, we go.”

Marco set his fork down. Lucia looked into her water glass. Vittorio continued working at the stain with a damp corner of his napkin.

“Who told you that?”

“I know it now.”

“Then we leave them.”

She glanced at the food on mine.

“Eat. You’re letting it get cold.”

I picked up my fork.

There was enough food for another meal. I had bought too much bread. The cake beneath its cover was still whole. I began calculating how slowly we could eat it without making the afternoon ridiculous.

“We haven’t had salad,” I said.

“We’re eating,” Lucia said.

“I know. I mean afterward.”

“Is there something wrong with the salad?”

“No.”

“Then stop worrying about it.”

Marco reached for another piece of bread. His sleeve brushed the empty chair. I wanted to ask him while the others were busy, but they never remained busy at the same time. Vittorio would finish speaking just as Lucia began watching us, or my grandmother would stop me to ask whether the oven was off.

I turned to him.

“Do you remember when you moved out?”

“Which time?”

“The first time.”

He chewed and swallowed before answering.

“Sure.”

“You told me...”

“On Maple Street,” Lucia said. “I liked that apartment.”

Marco looked across at her.

“It was nice,” she said. “You had the window in the front. I brought you curtains.”

“It was in the back.”

“No, sweetheart. You looked over the street.”

“That was the second place.”

Vittorio put his napkin down. “I moved the sofa.”

“There wasn’t a sofa,” Marco said.

“I know what I carried.”

“Nonno, it was one room.”

“You can put a sofa in one room.”

“You couldn’t put one in that room.”

Lucia frowned, searching for the apartment she wanted him to have lived in.

“But there were curtains.”

“There were curtains.”

“Blue.”

“Yellow.”

She looked at Assunta for help. My grandmother was cutting a meatball into smaller pieces without eating it.

Vittorio lifted his water glass. “Might have been Raymond.”

Nobody corrected him.

“You had a kitchen,” Lucia said.

“There was a hot plate.”

“You cooked for me.”

“I made you coffee.”

“Well, you had your own place. You were doing well.”

Marco rubbed a crumb from the table with his thumb. It caught against a tiny rough spot in the finish.

“Not that well.”

“You had the job at the garage.”

“They cut my hours.”

“You never said.”

He shrugged.

I had pictured that first apartment so often that for a moment I could still see it: two rooms, his records on a shelf, a space for me somewhere beyond the door. I had not known which town it was in. I had given it a view of trees.

“The second one was better,” Lucia said.

“It was.”

“I remember that. You got yourself settled.”

Marco nodded. He left the crumb where it was.

“And you always looked after your little brother.”

He looked at me.

I put my fork down. Somewhere outside, the mower started again and traveled slowly past the kitchen window.

“I kept thinking I had to get everything right before I came for you,” he said.

“I would have slept on the floor.”

“I know that now.”

He moved his hand toward mine, then stopped beside his plate. I could see a pale mark on one knuckle where he had cut himself repairing my bicycle. The scar was still there.

“I’m sorry, Pete.”

I looked at him. His eyes were wet, but he did not look away or reach for something to do.

Vittorio set his glass down carefully. Lucia kept her hands in her lap. My grandmother waited.

Marco nodded toward the basket.

“Pass me the bread?”

I passed him the bread.

After a while, I got up to make coffee. I measured it into the pot and filled the reservoir. When I returned to the table, Vittorio was trying to remember the name of the man whose sofa he had moved. He had rejected Raymond and was now considering a person nobody else remembered.

“There was a dog,” he said.

“Everybody had a dog,” Lucia told him.

“Little brown one. Wouldn’t let me past the stairs.”

“I don’t remember a dog.” Lucia looked at Assunta.

Marco asked whether I still had my old speakers.

“One of them.”

“Where’s the other?”

“It stopped working. I threw it out.”

He winced.

“I know,” I said.

“Probably just the connection.”

“It was thirty years old.”

“So?”

I smiled. He reached for the water and filled my glass before his own.

The coffee machine clicked. My grandmother turned in her chair to look at it.

“That’s coffee?”

“It will be.”

She watched the first thin stream run into the pot.

“You have a little saucepan?”

“You’re not boiling it.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You don’t have to.”

I took the cups down. Five of them, then a sixth. I put the last one back on the shelf and took down Daniel’s old mug instead. It had come from a school fundraiser. His name appeared beneath an uneven picture of a dog that looked like a chair.

Marco took it from me.

“He made you one too?”

“You got a dog?”

“Supposedly a rocket.”

He turned the mug over and ran a thumb along the bottom. Then he put it at Daniel’s place.

I brought the cake to the table. Assunta lifted the glass cover, inspected what was underneath, and said she would have a small piece. Her piece became larger while I was cutting it. She ate it without comment until Lucia asked whether she liked it.

“It’s fine.”

“That means she likes it,” Marco told me.

“I know.”

There were no separate dessert plates. We ate the cake from the edges of our dinner plates, avoiding the sauce.

I looked up at the clock. Two-fifteen.

The afternoon light had moved across the kitchen and reached the repaired leg. Lucia loosened her watchband. My grandmother rubbed her ankle with the toe of her other shoe.

“You want to take those off?” I asked.

“I’m all right.”

“You always say that.”

“These stockings. They catch at the heel.”

She slipped off one shoe beneath the table.

I wanted him to stay until Daniel arrived. I kept looking at the empty chair, then at my phone. Marco noticed but said nothing.

“I can call him,” I said finally.

“He’s on his way.”

“I could tell him to hurry.”

He shook his head.

“Let him get here.”

Assunta reached for the pastries. There were six in the package. She put one on each used plate and left the last beside Daniel’s napkin. The cream had softened at the edges.

Lucia began telling Marco about someone she had seen in a supermarket. He listened as though he knew exactly which supermarket she meant. After a minute, I realized that the person was his third-grade teacher. I remembered her standing outside the church at his funeral, so small among the other mourners that I had nearly missed her.

“She asked about you,” Lucia said.

“That was nice.”

“I told her you were doing well.”

He looked down at his plate, then back at her.

“Thank you.”

She patted his hand and continued with the story. It concerned a jar of olives, but it took some time to get there.

I stayed in my chair. When Marco looked across at me, I tilted the coffee pot toward his cup. He shook his head, then changed his mind and held it out.

The doorbell rang while my grandmother was wrapping the remaining cake. She had insisted on doing it despite the glass cover standing beside her. The plastic film had attached itself to her sleeve.

“He’s here,” I said.

Marco turned toward the hall. He put one hand on the back of Daniel’s chair.

I stood there with my phone in my hand, though it had not rung. Nobody moved toward the doorway.

“Go answer,” Assunta said.

I set the phone down and went.

Daniel stood on the porch holding a paper bag. He wore a faded T-shirt, and there was sawdust along the outside seam of his jeans. A rental van sat at the curb with one rear door slightly open.

“I’m sorry. She had every book still in it.”

“Come in.”

He bent to hug me. I held him a little longer than he expected, and he shifted the bag out of the way so it would not be crushed between us.

“You okay?”

“Yes.”

He looked past me into the hall.

“I nearly didn’t recognize the place. You finally painted.”

“A while ago.”

“It looks good.”

I had painted three years earlier. He touched the wall lightly as he passed it, checking whether it was dry.

“Where is everybody?”

I followed him into the kitchen.

The chairs were pushed in. The cloth had been straightened. Our plates stood in a stack beside the sink, each scraped clean. At the far end of the table, Daniel’s place remained set.

The cake was covered. Vittorio’s hat was gone.

“Did I miss them?”

I looked at the doorway beside the pantry. It was empty. The refrigerator hummed, stopped, and left the room quiet.

“They had to go.”

Daniel put the paper bag on the counter.

“Am I too late?”

“No.”

I took two clean plates from the cupboard. I put one in front of my chair and replaced the plate at his place with the other, setting the unused one beside the sink.

“Let me warm this up.”

“You don’t have to. I can eat it cold.”

“Sit down.”

He saw his mug and picked it up.

“Christ. You still have this?”

“Of course.”

“It’s terrible.”

“I like it.”

He turned it around to look at the dog.

“That was supposed to be you.”

I took the serving bowl to the stove. Behind me he opened the bread bag and folded down its top.

“I got the one you like. They only had the big loaf.”

“Good.”

“I wasn’t sure if you still went there.”

“Sometimes.”

He looked at the pastry beside his napkin. “Who brought this?”

“Your aunt Lucia used to get them.”

“I remember.”

He broke off a corner and ate it while I warmed the pasta in a pan with a little water. The sauce loosened. I turned the heat down before the garlic could catch.

“How’s the museum job going to work?” I asked.

“It’s not actually with a museum.”

“Right.”

“The company moves art. Museums hire us.”

I brought the pan over and served him, then myself.

“The crates you showed me?”

“That’s part of it. Packing. Installation. We travel with some of the pieces.”

“Where?”

“Depends where they’re going.”

“I deserved that.”

He grinned and picked up his fork.

I almost asked whether the work paid enough. Instead I asked him how they moved a painting so it did not touch anything. He put down his fork and shifted the salt and pepper to make room. With his hands he showed me the frame they built around it, where the supports went, how the corners were held.

I moved my water glass out of his way.

“Show me that part again,” I said.

The men came up the stairs the way men always came up the stairs on the first night. One at a time, slow, like any step might be the one that changed its mind.

Walt had set out nine chairs in a circle. Eight for them, one for him. The clinic had people who could do that, but he liked doing it himself.

Downstairs, somebody was heating food in the staff microwave. The smell of onions came up through the stairwell. Walt opened a window.

By five past six, seven men were sitting in the circle. A kid in a gray hoodie with his phone face down on his leg. A big man in a work shirt with HANK stitched over the pocket. Two men who obviously knew each other and were working hard to look like they didn’t. Three others studying the paperwork as though there might be a way out on the second page.

The eighth man came in at ten past. He didn’t apologize. He looked at the circle once, the way you look at a parking lot for a space, and took the chair nearest the door. He kept his coat zipped to the collar. Brown canvas, frayed at one cuff. It was April, and the heat in that building was always too high.

Walt passed him the sign-in sheet. His intake form had come from probation. He’d served a prison term; this group was one of the conditions of his release.

The man leaned forward to write. There was a pale strip on his left wrist where a watch had been.

“Let’s go around,” Walt said. “Your first name, and one thing you want me to know. Just one.”

The kid went first.

“Tyler. And I barely blew over.”

A couple of men laughed.

“You want that to be the thing we know about you?” Walt asked.

Tyler looked at him. “I work on motorcycles.”

“All right.”

“Hank. Two kids. Can’t lose my license again.”

It went around. A man who worked nights. A man whose wife had driven him and was waiting downstairs. One of the friends gave his name as Carl; the other gave his as Kenneth and immediately said Ken. Then it came to the chair by the door.

“Denny.” He waited. “I’m here because I have to be.”

“That’s where most people start.”

“I’m not starting anything. I’m doing my twelve weeks.”

“Then we’ll start with that.”

Denny looked at the floor between his boots.

Walt explained the rules and what went into a report. He told them the certificate meant they had completed the program. It was not a letter saying they were good men now, or that nothing bad would happen again.

“What do we get for the money?” Tyler asked.

“Twelve weeks of my sparkling company.”

Hank laughed through his nose.

“And a chance to look at how you got here,” Walt said. “If you use it.”

On the board he wrote: What happens before you pick up the keys?

They gave him the things they thought he wanted. Someone said bad decisions. Walt wrote it down and asked what happened before that. Eventually Hank said he hated going home to an empty apartment on the nights his children weren’t there. Nobody laughed at that.

Denny said nothing. He sat with one hand inside the other, his elbows close to his body.

At seven-thirty Walt reminded them to sign out. Denny was first at the table and on the stairs before the pen stopped rolling.

The coat never came off.

Walt checked the room afterward. A water bottle under a chair. Tyler’s intake envelope with nothing in it. He put the bottle in recycling and stacked the chairs.

In the parking lot, Hank was trying to persuade his old truck to turn over. Walt waited beside his car until it caught. Hank gave him a small wave through the windshield.

On the drive home, he didn’t think about Denny at all.

The second week, Walt asked them to choose one point on the night of their arrest when something else could have happened.

“Not the part where the police show up,” he said. “Go back further.”

Tyler said he could have stayed at his cousin’s. Hank could have answered his daughter’s call instead of letting it go to voicemail. Ken said he should never have gone to the wedding, which led to ten minutes about whether you could attend a wedding without getting arrested afterward.

Denny listened with his coat on.

“I was coming back from Harwinton,” he said when it was his turn. “Stopped at a place on Route 6. I should’ve kept going.”

“What brought you to Harwinton?”

“Family thing.”

Walt waited, then nodded. “All right. You stopped.”

“Had a few. Went to leave. The bartender asked if I wanted her to call somebody.”

“Did you?”

“No.”

“What did you say?”

“Said I was fine.”

As he talked, Denny rubbed his right thumb across the knuckles of his left hand. Slowly, back and forth.

Walt knew that thumb.

The face had become thinner. There was gray at the temples, and the man Walt remembered had worn a blue shirt with a collar too tight for his neck. But Walt had watched that hand for twenty minutes one morning while a public defender talked and a clerk waited with her fingers resting on a keyboard.

Pelletier.

He had seen the name on the roster without making the connection. There had been thousands of names. Now he could see it on the folder in front of him, a paper clip pressed into the first letter.

It had been a Tuesday. Plea day. The courtroom was full, and the air conditioner made a noise like a truck reversing somewhere very far away. There had been two drunk-driving cases before Denny’s. One of the defendants had cried. Walt had found himself impatient with the crying.

Denny’s lawyer asked for the low end. The prosecutor asked for more. There was a prior conviction. There were reasons in the file, and Walt had read them. He could no longer remember all the reasons. He remembered being certain.

A month earlier, a drunk driver had killed a sixteen-year-old girl two towns over. It wasn’t Walt’s case. Her school photograph had been in the paper every day anyway. In the photograph, she had braces and a strand of hair caught on her lip.

Walt had rejected the request for less time.

Then he had leaned forward.

“People like you think the consequences are always going to belong to somebody else.”

He remembered the satisfaction of saying it. That was the part he usually left out when he remembered.

Denny had looked at him and said, quietly, “You don’t know me.”

The marshal moved closer. Walt raised one finger to tell him to leave it. Then he called the next case.

“Walt?”

Hank was looking at him. So was everybody else.

Denny’s hands were still.

“I’m sorry,” Walt said. “I lost the thread for a moment.”

“I said I hit a mailbox.”

Walt looked at him.

“This time. Getting out of the lot. I knew I hit it. Kept going anyway.”

“What happened next?”

“Light in Terryville. Cop pulled in behind me.”

The room returned to the story. Hank asked about the mailbox. Tyler said it was a good thing it hadn’t been a person, and for once there was no cleverness in his voice.

Walt listened. He made himself follow every word.

At the end, Denny signed out and left. Walt didn’t try to stop him.

He stood at the table with the roster in his hand.

Dennis Pelletier. Same careful handwriting as the week before. Every letter fit inside the line.

Walt went to see Mara the next morning before he could make a respectable argument for waiting.

She supervised the evening programs and ate breakfast at her desk. When he came into her office, she moved a container of oatmeal off the visitor’s chair.

“I think I sentenced one of my participants.”

“Think?”

“I did. Eight years ago.”

She put down her spoon.

He told her about the sentencing and what he had said from the bench. He gave her the version without the dead girl’s photograph. Halfway through, he went back and included it.

“Does he know?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Have you asked him?”

“No.”

“Then that’s the first problem.”

Walt looked at the oatmeal. There were blueberries in it, dark blue against the gray.

“I don’t want to make the group about my guilt.”

“Good. Don’t.”

“I also don’t want to put him in a position where he feels he has to reassure me.”

“Also good.”

He waited for her to recognize how difficult it was.

Mara turned to her computer and checked the other group schedules.

“He needs to know he has a choice about working with you. A real choice. Same credit for the sessions he’s attended. No extra cost. We’ll find something that works with his hours if that’s what he wants.”

“And if he stays?”

“Then we keep talking about whether this arrangement is serving him.”

Walt shifted in the chair.

“You make it sound simple.”

“I’m making this part simple. You’re trying to solve the other part first.”

On the drive to the clinic the following week, Walt thought about telling Denny why he had left the bench. At trainings, he told the story of the year he started counting how long people stood in front of him. Eleven minutes, on average, to deal with matters that followed them home for years.

It was true as far as it went. After fourteen years he had been exhausted. What frightened him was how easily he could go home after certain afternoons. He had not resigned in a burst of goodness. There had been a pension calculation. There had been several months of looking for work that would make sense of the work he had already done.

The training version ended when he found the rooms.

Six years of the rooms, and he still liked that ending.

Denny arrived twenty minutes early. Walt was in the hallway sorting the worksheets.

“Could we talk privately for a minute?” Walt asked. “Mara’s here. She supervises the program.”

Denny looked past him toward the office.

“About what?”

“I recognized you last week. From court.”

Denny’s face didn’t change.

“Took you a while.”

Walt lowered the papers.

“Yes.”

“I knew as soon as I heard your voice.”

In Mara’s office, Denny took the chair closest to the hall. Mara explained the options. He listened without interrupting, then asked whether his attendance so far would count. She said it would. He asked twice about the money.

“No additional fee,” she said. “I’ll put that in writing for you.”

“I work until five in Bristol. This is the one I can get to.”

“We can look at the schedule together.”

“I looked before I picked it.”

Walt set the worksheets on Mara’s cabinet.

“You don’t have to decide now,” he said.

“Do I have to leave?”

“No.”

“Then I’m not leaving.”

Mara gave Denny her card. If he changed his mind, or if there was anything about the arrangement he wanted to discuss without Walt, he could call her directly.

Denny put it in his coat pocket.

“Does everybody else know?”

“No,” Walt said.

“Keep it that way.”

“I will.”

After he left, Walt looked at Mara.

“He chose to stay.”

“He said this is the group he can get to.”

Walt picked up the worksheets.

“I heard him.”

Mara waited.

“All right,” he said. “I heard him now.”

Knowing that Denny knew did not make the room easier.

Walt became aware of where he put his hands. He stopped himself halfway through ordinary questions. Once, when Denny gave an answer so short it was almost useless, Walt thanked him and moved on. He would have asked anyone else to explain.

The following week he tried to correct it and went too far in the other direction.

“What were you telling yourself when the bartender offered to call somebody?”

“That I could drive.”

“But underneath that?”

“What?”

“What did accepting help mean to you?”

Denny looked at him for a long moment.

“It meant leaving my truck there.”

Tyler laughed. Denny didn’t.

Walt put down his pen.

“Fair enough. What would have been difficult about that?”

“Getting it the next day. Being late for work. Calling my sister and hearing the way she says my name when she’s had enough of me.”

“Which of those was the biggest?”

Denny rubbed his thumb once across his hand.

“The last one.”

In week five, Hank brought in a photograph of his daughter’s softball team. He passed his phone around, pointing her out each time as though she might move between chairs.

“Back row. Tall one. Don’t know where she got that.”

Hank was six foot four.

When the phone reached Denny, he enlarged the picture with two fingers.

“That’s the field off North Street?”

“Yeah.”

“They ever fix that right-field fence?”

“You know that fence?”

“I put it up.”

Hank leaned forward. “Well, you did a terrible job.”

Denny handed back the phone.

“Nineteen ninety-six. I’d like to see your work after thirty years.”

It was the first time Walt had seen him smile. One corner of his mouth, gone before anyone could make much of it.

He learned things by listening to Denny talk to the other men. He worked in a small machine shop now, doing assembly. He had a sister named Carol and an elderly neighbor who paid him in food to fix things she could have paid someone in money to fix. He hated the Yankees with a degree of attention Walt admired but couldn’t understand.

None of it explained the drinking. Walt noticed how often he wanted it to.

Denny kept arriving on time, still in the coat. When he didn’t want to answer, he said so.

The sixth week, Tyler came in holding a letter from the motor vehicle department. He flattened it against his thigh while Hank was talking. When Walt asked him to wait his turn, Tyler said he’d waited long enough for everybody involved in this bullshit.

“I’m working. I’m paying. I’m here. What else do they want?”

“What does the letter say?”

“It says I’m fucked.”

Walt held out his hand. Tyler didn’t give it to him.

“You’ve never been on this side,” Tyler said. “Some guy in a robe decides your whole life in five minutes, and then everybody else takes a turn.”

Walt felt Denny looking at him.

“Let’s slow down,” he said.

“Why? So you can do the thing where you ask a question and make it my fault?”

“Knock it off,” Denny said.

Tyler turned toward him.

“You don’t have to stick up for him.”

“I’m not. I was listening to Hank.”

The room went quiet.

Denny nodded toward the folded photograph in Hank’s hand.

“He was telling us about his kid. I wanted to hear the rest.”

Hank looked down at the picture, then put it in his shirt pocket.

“She asked if I was going to miss the tournament too,” he said.

Tyler let the letter curl back into its envelope. Later, when there was time, he passed it to Walt. They read it together.

After the men left, Walt stacked the chairs. He had already begun to remember the moment as Denny coming to his defense.

Walt put the last chair on the stack.

Week eight was consequences.

Walt wrote a question on the board. What did it cost you?

“You can start with money,” he said. “Most people do. But don’t stop there.”

Hank had lost overtime because he depended on another man for a ride. He put a number on that, then a number on the fees, then began talking about his daughter again.

“She doesn’t ask me first anymore. About getting places. She asks her mother, or her friend’s father. I used to be the first call.”

Carl had lost the job he and Ken had shared. Ken drove him to interviews and was tired of arriving to find him still in the shower.

Tyler said it had cost him his pride.

“In what way?” Walt asked.

“My mother’s picking me up from work. She pulls up and waves. Like I’m coming out of school.”

“Have you told her the waving bothers you?”

“I asked her to park down the street.”

“How’d that go?”

“She said I could walk the whole way if I was embarrassed.”

Even Denny laughed at that.

Then it was his turn.

He sat with both hands flat on his knees. Behind him, through the open window, someone was trying to unload a metal cart from a van. The cart hit the pavement hard.

“I did seven months,” he said. “Eight years back.”

Walt kept his marker against the board so he wouldn’t cap it too loudly.

“I drove for a lumber yard then. That was the job gone. You don’t drive, you don’t work. I understood that part.”

Denny moved his feet under the chair.

“My father had been having tests. Before I went in. He said it was his gallbladder, but he didn’t know that. He just picked something that sounded like you could get rid of it.”

Hank leaned back.

“It was his pancreas. They told us he might have a year. He had ten weeks.”

There was a blue ink spot on Denny’s thumbnail. Walt had noticed it when he signed in. Now he couldn’t look anywhere else.

“I talked to him on the phone. Not enough. First time, all he wanted to know was if I had enough money to buy things. Shampoo. Whatever they let you buy. I told him I was fine.”

Denny stopped.

“Second time, Carol held the phone by his ear. He couldn’t really talk. I could hear him breathing, but I didn’t know if he knew it was me.”

“What did you say?” Hank asked.

“Nothing useful.”

Walt waited.

“I asked about his truck. He had this old Ranger. The check-engine light had been on since Christmas. I told him not to let the guy on Main Street do the inspection because he’d find two thousand dollars’ worth of things it didn’t need.”

Denny pressed his palms against his knees.

“That was what I came up with. His truck.”

The van outside pulled away. Walt could hear a turn signal clicking until it reached the corner.

“He died Thursday. Funeral was Monday. I put in to go. There was paperwork. People had to sign it. They approved it Wednesday.”

“Jesus,” Ken said.

“Carol kept calling. She thought if she got the right person on the phone, somebody would fix it.”

“Could they have waited?” Tyler asked.

He asked it softly, but Hank turned toward him.

Denny answered before anybody else could.

“There was family coming. Things were paid for. She was doing all of it. I wasn’t going to ask her to keep him in a box another week because of me.”

Tyler nodded. His ears had turned red.

Denny began rubbing his knuckles.

“The guy who sentenced me didn’t know about my father. My lawyer didn’t bring it up. I didn’t bring it up. I thought the lawyer said what needed saying. The judge had a line of us waiting.”

He looked at the whiteboard.

“I’m not saying I didn’t do it. I drove drunk. I could have killed somebody. I knew it then too. But he talked to me like he’d been living in my house for twenty years and had finally had enough.”

Walt felt the marker slipping between his fingers. He set it in the tray.

“Then I got out and everybody wanted me to move on. I had a job to find. Carol had the house to sell. People were already saying he wouldn’t want us to be sad.”

Denny looked down.

“He wasn’t that considerate.”

Nobody was sure whether to laugh.

“He wasn’t,” Denny said. “He’d have wanted a decent period of mourning. Six months, minimum.”

Hank smiled. Then Denny did, and the room breathed again.

“What’s something else we should know about him?” Walt asked.

Denny looked at Walt directly.

For a moment Walt wished he hadn’t asked.

“He stole pens,” Denny said.

“Pens?”

“Everywhere. Bank. Insurance office. Restaurants. He’d take a pen with the name on it and then tell you it wasn’t stealing because why else would they put the name on there? Advertising. He was helping.”

Tyler laughed.

“When Carol cleaned out his kitchen drawer, she filled a grocery bag. I took three. Two didn’t work.”

He put his hands back on his knees.

“I go see him Sundays. Cemetery in Harwinton. It’s not on the way to anything.”

Walt nodded.

“That’s where you’d been,” he said. “The day of the arrest.”

“Yeah.”

“Do you still go?”

“Every week.”

Walt reached for the marker, then left it in the tray.

Walt wanted to ask what Denny did after the cemetery now. He could ask that later.

“What were you hoping to say on the phone?” he asked.

Denny’s thumb stopped.

“I thought I’d get another call.”

Walt nodded once.

“I understand.”

Denny looked at him.

“Do you?”

The clock made a small click above the door.

“No,” Walt said. “I don’t know what that was like.”

Denny sat back. For a moment he seemed to consider getting up. Then he reached for his water bottle and took a drink.

Walt let the room stay quiet.

When they went on, Hank spoke about his daughter. Walt listened without trying to improve what he’d said to Denny. He asked the questions that belonged to Hank. At the end he gave them their assignment and reminded them about the following week.

Denny left with the others.

Walt remained in his chair until the motion sensor switched off the lights.

He raised a hand and the lights came back on.

That night Walt opened a document on his computer and typed Dennis Pelletier at the top.

For years he had written about people by beginning with their names at the top of a page.

He wrote that he had thought about the courtroom exchange many times. He wrote that he had been carrying a particular fear that morning because of an unrelated case in the news. He wrote that this was not an excuse.

He read the paragraph.

It was an excuse with a sentence at the end saying it wasn’t.

He deleted it.

He tried describing what had changed in him since he left the bench. It sounded like a job application. He deleted that too.

In the kitchen he made toast because it was almost ten and he hadn’t eaten. He stood at the counter, getting crumbs on the keyboard, and tried to remember whether he had asked Denny anything before sentencing him.

There would have been an opportunity to speak. Walt knew his own courtroom. He would have turned toward the defendant and asked whether there was anything he wanted to say.

Would he have waited?

He could not remember.

He could remember the public defender putting a hand on Denny’s elbow. He could remember the loud air conditioner. The rest had become the story of a remark Walt wished he hadn’t made.

He had carried that remark for eight years. Until tonight, he had hardly wondered what Denny had carried out of the room with it.

At their next meeting Mara listened while he talked about the father.

“I don’t know whether a different sentence would have changed it,” Walt said. “The dates. Whether he would have been home.”

“Are you trying to find out?”

“I thought about looking up the file.”

“For what purpose?”

He opened his mouth and stopped.

“I want to know what I’m responsible for.”

“You know something you’re responsible for.”

“The words.”

“Start there.”

Walt took his glasses off. One of the arms had become loose, and he kept meaning to tighten it.

“I don’t want an apology to become another thing he has to sit through.”

“Then ask if he wants to hear it.”

“And if he doesn’t?”

Mara looked at him.

“You’ll have to manage that.”

The ninth week, Denny arrived early again. Walt met him in the hallway and asked whether he would be willing to talk for a few minutes. Denny glanced at Mara’s office.

“She’s here if you’d rather she joined us,” Walt said.

“About moving groups?”

“No. About what I said in court.”

Denny looked at the clock.

“I’ve got a cigarette to smoke.”

“All right.”

He went back downstairs. Walt could see him through the landing window, standing beside the low wall around the parking lot. He lit the cigarette and looked out at the traffic.

Walt moved away from the window.

He was setting out the worksheets when Denny came back.

“You can say it,” Denny said. “I’d rather get it over with.”

They sat in an empty office. Walt left the door ajar after asking Denny whether that was all right.

He had practiced standing. Sitting changed everything. Their knees were almost level. There was a basket of children’s toys under a desk, and a plastic dinosaur lay on its side between their shoes.

“When I sentenced you,” Walt said, “I said ‘people like you.’ I spoke as if the charge and your record told me everything I needed to know about you. They didn’t. What I said was contemptuous. It was wrong, and I’m sorry.”

Denny looked at him.

Walt waited. His chest felt too small for the amount of air he wanted to take in.

“You remember saying it?”

“Yes.”

“I wondered.”

“I remember you saying I didn’t know you.”

Denny picked up the dinosaur and turned it over in his hands before returning it to the basket.

“Carol was in the back,” he said.

Walt hadn’t known that.

“I heard her get up after you said it. I thought she was leaving. Turned out she was just standing because she didn’t know what else to do.”

Walt’s hands were resting on his thighs. He kept them there.

“I didn’t know she was there.”

“There were a lot of things you didn’t know.”

“Yes.”

Denny looked around the office. On the wall, a child had drawn a house with five chimneys.

“Would you have given me less time?”

Walt wanted the case file in front of him.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t honestly tell you I would have.”

“Even with my father.”

“I should have listened. I don’t know what I would have decided after that.”

Denny nodded, but not in agreement.

From the hallway came Hank’s voice, followed by the sound of something falling out of the vending machine.

“I need that certificate,” Denny said.

“I know.”

“This doesn’t change anything about that.”

“No.”

“And I’m not telling the group.”

“That’s your decision.”

Denny stood.

At the door, he looked back.

“I don’t know what you want me to say.”

“You don’t have to say anything.”

The next week Denny’s chair was empty at six.

Walt looked at the clock, then at the door. At three past he asked Ken to begin. At five past he lost track of what Ken was saying because someone was coming up the stairs.

It was a woman from the downstairs office carrying a box of printer paper.

Walt had a clear picture of what had happened. Denny had gone home, thought about the conversation, and decided he could not come back. Walt had taken a room that was becoming useful and spoiled it because he needed to be understood.

At seven past, Denny came in with a wet shoulder.

“Bus,” he said.

He signed in, sat down, and took out his workbook.

Walt felt so relieved he was angry with himself.

The subject that night was what happened when a plan failed. Tyler said his plan was to sell the motorcycle and buy a horse because apparently you could still ride one of those to work. Hank asked where he intended to park it.

When the laughter settled, Denny raised a hand.

He hadn’t done that before.

“I called Carol Sunday.”

Walt waited.

“From the cemetery. I was supposed to call before I left.”

They had worked out that plan at the end of the previous session. Walt had asked Denny what he wanted the call to accomplish. Denny said he wanted to hear a voice that wasn’t his own before he decided where to go next.

“How did it go?” Hank asked.

“She didn’t answer.”

“So what’d you do?”

“Called again.”

Tyler smiled. “That always works.”

“Left a message the second time.”

“What kind of message?” Walt asked.

Denny looked at his workbook.

“The kind where you’re being very reasonable but you want the other person to feel like shit.”

Hank nodded. He knew that message.

“I said I was doing what she’d asked. I was calling. I said apparently I was the only one taking this seriously.”

Walt let him finish.

“She was at the grocery store. Phone was in her purse.”

“When did you find that out?”

“After I called her a third time.”

Denny rubbed at the blue ink stain, now almost gone.

“She said she’s not working a shift. I said I never said she was. She said I didn’t have to say it.”

Ken leaned forward, his elbows on his knees.

“My wife told me that. Different words.”

“What did you say?” Denny asked.

“Something that made it worse.”

“Yeah.”

Walt asked what happened after the call. Denny had taken a cab to a diner. He ordered eggs and stayed until he had stopped wanting to do something that would make Carol sorry.

“Did you want a drink?”

“Yes.”

“Did you have one?”

“No.”

Tyler tapped the edge of his workbook against his knee.

“Then that’s pretty good.”

“The message wasn’t.”

“You can have a bad message and a good breakfast,” Hank said.

Denny laughed. “The eggs weren’t that good either.”

They spent the next ten minutes on what he could do if Carol didn’t answer again. Ken suggested calling somebody else. Denny said he didn’t have a long list. Hank offered his number, then said he worked Sundays sometimes, so he might not answer either.

“Don’t leave me one of those messages.”

“I won’t.”

“I’m serious.”

“I know.”

Walt watched them exchange numbers.

He asked, “What do you want to say to Carol about the message?”

Denny thought about it.

“That I was an asshole.”

“Will that tell her what you’re apologizing for?”

“She heard it. She knows.”

“Do you?”

Denny looked up sharply. For a moment Walt thought he had gone too far.

Then Denny looked back at the page.

“I made her responsible for what I did next.”

Walt nodded.

“And she wasn’t.”

“No,” Denny said. “She was buying groceries.”

After the session, Denny stayed to copy Hank’s number into his workbook in case he lost the scrap of paper. His handwriting was small and neat. He checked every digit.

Walt wiped the board.

“I told her you were here,” Denny said.

Walt turned.

“Carol.”

“What did she say?”

“Wanted to know if you knew.”

“And you told her.”

“Yeah.”

Denny closed the workbook.

“She asked why I stayed.”

Walt waited.

“I told her Hank’s kid has a tournament coming up.”

He put the book under his arm and went downstairs.

The last night, Tyler brought donuts. He set the box on the table and announced that anyone taking the Boston cream had to fight him for it.

Hank took the Boston cream.

“All right,” Tyler said. “Anybody else.”

The men came upstairs faster than they had in April. Carl had found work. Ken was going to miss the last bus if they went over, and said so three times. Hank’s daughter had made two catches at the tournament and dropped one. He had been there for all three.

Denny arrived at six on the dot. He wore the brown coat, though June had settled over the parking lot and the upstairs room was warm before anyone sat down.

He took his usual chair, unzipped the coat, and pulled one arm free, then the other. He folded it across his knees.

Underneath was a gray T-shirt with a tiny hole near the collar.

Walt noticed.

They talked about the weeks after the program. What would be difficult without the Tuesday appointment. Who would notice if they started disappearing. Tyler said his mother would notice everything until the day one of them died, and then probably afterward.

Walt asked what each man had changed that another person could actually see.

Denny spoke first. He looked at his folded coat.

“I called my sister back.”

“How did that go?”

“Better.”

He glanced at Walt, then continued without being asked.

“I told her I was sorry about the message. That she didn’t have to answer every time I called.”

“What’d she say?” Hank asked.

“She said she knew that.”

The men laughed.

“Then she asked if I wanted to come over Sunday. She’s got a storm door that doesn’t close right.”

“There it is,” Hank said. “Family.”

“I went. Fixed the door. Stayed for supper.”

“Did you go to the cemetery?” Walt asked.

“In the morning.”

He smoothed one sleeve of the coat.

“I don’t stay as long now.”

Denny shook his head a little and looked toward the next man.

Ken went next. He had told Carl which days he could help instead of saying yes and being furious in the car. Carl admitted he had stopped lying about job interviews. Hank had arranged his own rides to the tournament.

At the end, Walt handed out the certificates. He read each full name. Tyler took a picture of his and texted it to somebody before he sat down. Ken put his in a folder he had brought from home. Hank inspected his carefully, checking the spelling.

“Dennis Pelletier.”

Denny stood and came across the circle.

Walt handed him the certificate. Their hands met briefly at the corner of the paper.

“Thank you,” Denny said.

“You’re welcome.”

Walt left it there.

Then the chairs scraped and the men began saying the things men say when they don’t know if they’ll see one another again. Take care. Good luck. Don’t be an idiot. Hank hugged Walt with one arm because he was still holding half a donut in the other hand.

Ken hurried downstairs. Carl followed him, calling that he could give him a ride. Tyler checked the top of the refrigerator in case somebody had hidden the last Boston cream.

Denny remained by the table, sliding his certificate into the workbook. One corner kept catching on the cover.

Walt had put two chairs on the stack when Denny spoke.

“Can I ask you something?”

Walt set down the next chair.

“Of course.”

“You ever miss it?”

“Court?”

Denny nodded.

Through the open window they could hear Hank telling Tyler that his mother was waiting on the wrong side of the building.

“Sometimes,” Walt said.

“What part?”

“Knowing where I stood,” he said. “Having an answer people had to accept.”

Denny ran his finger along the bent corner of the certificate.

“Must’ve been something.”

“It was.”

Walt stayed beside the chair.

“It took me a long time to notice how much I liked that part.”

Denny managed to slide the certificate into the workbook. He closed it carefully.

He picked up his coat and put out his hand. Walt shook it.

At the door Denny turned.

“You didn’t know me then,” he said. “You do now.”

Walt heard his boots on the stairs. The downstairs door closed.

After a while, Walt started stacking the chairs again. He left the one by the door for last.

The woman wanted to know whether Ruth would hire Eddie again. Ruth asked her to hold.

She pressed the button and put the receiver down beside a check for three hundred and eighty dollars. The customer had written paid in full across the memo line. It was not paid in full. There were two invoices, and the check covered the smaller one.

Ruth picked up the receiver.

“I’m sorry. Can I call you back this afternoon?”

“Of course.”

“By four thirty?”

“That would be fine. I’m Dana Holt, with Northfield Facilities. I’ll give you my direct number.”

Ruth wrote it down. The woman was speaking from somewhere quiet. No other phones, no traffic, nobody calling to ask whether they had any more half-inch elbows.

“Did he give you my name?”

“Yes. Ruth Delaney, office manager. Have I got that right?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you. I’ll look forward to hearing from you.”

Ruth hung up. On the message pad she wrote EDDIE, although there was already enough information to identify the call. She tore off the sheet. His name had gone through to the one underneath.

On the calendar, at two o’clock, she had written E toolbox. He had texted on Monday. Could he come by Thursday? She had said after lunch. He had said two, and she had answered with a thumbs-up because it was quicker than typing anything else.

She had been meaning to tell him to come for the box. It occupied a shelf in the supply room that she needed for the case of shoe covers Vic had ordered twice. Each time she moved it, she felt obliged to consider where he was living now and whether he had room for it. It wasn’t large. Blue metal, one tray, a plastic handle repaired with tape. She had carried it herself when the shelf above it leaked.

She turned the calendar face down.

The office was at the front of a low building behind a tire warehouse. Three desks, only two in regular use. A counter separated Ruth from people who came in to dispute bills or ask if the business next door was open. Vic’s desk held a monitor, a lamp that didn’t work, and seventeen years of objects Ruth had been told not to throw away. He preferred working in the field. He called the office from houses where he couldn’t find the shutoff and expected her to know where it ought to be.

Her own desk was clear except for what she was doing. Behind her, on a hook, hung a cardigan she wore when the air conditioner became enthusiastic. It was October, and the unit still ran as if there were eight people in the room instead of one woman and a printer.

She opened the banking app on her phone. Their savings balance hadn’t changed since yesterday. She knew the number before it appeared.

The back entrance opened. One of the plumbers came through carrying a part in a paper bag.

“Wrong one,” he said.

Ruth closed the app.

“The one they sent or the one you ordered?”

He put the bag on the counter.

“Can we just say it’s wrong?”

She took out the part and checked the packing slip.

“They sent what you ordered.”

“Can you get the other one?”

“I can ask.”

“Please.”

She looked up the number. He remained at the counter, shifting his weight, until she pointed to a chair.

The supplier could exchange the part, but somebody had to bring the first one back. Ruth arranged for it to go on the afternoon run. Then she called the customer at the house where it was needed and moved the promised arrival to the next morning.

The woman was irritated. Ruth let her finish. She had been at home since eight, and nobody had told her that the job might take two visits. Ruth looked at the schedule. Vic had put ONE HOUR beside the address in his large square handwriting.

“I can put you first tomorrow,” Ruth said.

“Will that mean first?”

“Eight to eight thirty.”

“Because first today meant eleven.”

“I understand.”

The woman wanted the name of the person who would come. Ruth supplied it, wrote it down for herself, and hung up.

The plumber rose from the chair.

“Thank you.”

“Bring the old one back before you leave tonight.”

“I will.”

“Like the pump in March.”

He paused with his hand on the bag.

“I brought that back.”

“Eventually.”

After he left, Ruth moved the customer’s appointment into the first slot. She circled the time.

Martin called at one fifteen. He was on his lunch break. She could hear a truck reversing near him.

“Do we need onions?” he asked.

“There’s one in the basket.”

“Is it an onion or is it the onion?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“The one we’ve been moving from side to side for a month.”

“Buy two.”

He laughed. She pictured him standing outside the maintenance building with the phone braced between his shoulder and his ear. He would be looking into the lunch container while he spoke, as if its contents might have changed since morning.

“I’m going past the store after work. Chicken?”

“We had chicken Tuesday.”

“So we did.”

“What happened with the tires?”

“I’ll do them next month.”

“They said before winter.”

“Next month’s before winter.”

She looked at the message slip.

“Martin.”

“What?”

“Nothing. Just don’t leave it.”

“Soon as we’ve put back some of Kate’s money.”

Her daughter had finished her certificate program in June. The last bill had been paid in May. Kate was working in a dental office now, sending photographs of the lunches she packed and asking whether certain shoes looked professional.

“Chicken’s fine,” Ruth said.

“All right. If you think of anything else, text me.”

She listened to him close the lid of the container.

“Did you get enough?”

“For lunch?”

“Yes.”

“Plenty.”

After the call, Ruth turned the calendar over and put it back where it belonged. Two o’clock was forty minutes away.

She called Eddie.

He answered on the fifth ring. There was traffic behind his voice.

“A woman called here.”

“Good. I was hoping she’d get to it today.”

“You put me down as a reference.”

“Yeah.”

“You didn’t ask me.”

A vehicle passed close enough to swallow his answer.

“What?” she said.

“I said I figured you’d be all right with it.”

“Why would you figure that?”

“I don’t know, Ruth. You know how I work.”

She picked up the customer’s check and put it down again.

“Are you still coming at two?”

“Yes. I’ve got a ride.”

“We’ll talk then.”

“What are you going to tell her?”

“We’ll talk when you get here.”

She ended the call before he could ask again.

Four months earlier, a customer had called about a statement. He had paid the bill in cash on the day of the job. Twelve hundred and sixty dollars. He had a receipt.

Ruth asked him to read the number in the upper-right corner. It matched the copy in the file. She asked whose name was on it.

“Mercer. Young fellow.”

She told him she would straighten it out.

Then she took the receipt book from the van Eddie had been working on. The duplicate showed the same amount, the same date, his signature. The white original had gone to the customer. The yellow copy was still attached. Eddie hadn’t tried to remove it.

She waited for him to return from lunch.

At first he said he had meant to turn it in. Then he said he had needed it, and the difference between the two statements was the rest of that afternoon.

Rent. A payment on a used car that had already stopped running. Money he owed a friend. Ruth asked which of those had amounted to twelve hundred and sixty dollars. He said it hadn’t been just one thing.

“Did you think we wouldn’t notice?”

“I thought I’d have it back.”

“From where?”

He had no answer that she could use.

She remembered his hands on the edge of her desk. The nails were black at the corners. There was a small burn above his wrist from a pipe he had touched before it cooled. She had given him ointment for it a week earlier, told him to put something over it, and later asked whether he had.

He had been thirty-one then. Thirty-two now, if she remembered his birthday correctly. She had bought the cupcakes.

She told him to go home and come back the next morning for his things. He asked about Vic. She said she would handle Vic.

She went to the bank on her lunch hour the following day and withdrew cash from the account she shared with Martin. She put it into the company deposit with the other payments. The customer received a corrected statement showing nothing owed.

Vic asked why she was letting Eddie go. She said there had been too many problems with reliability. Vic had been unhappy with him for missing a Monday and leaving early the following Friday. He said he had warned her about taking people on because she felt sorry for them.

She let that stand.

At home, when Martin asked about the withdrawal, she said there had been a final charge from Kate’s program. He asked whether that was everything now. She said yes.

For a week she had expected Kate to call while they were both in the kitchen and mention having finished paying. For a month she had expected Eddie to bring back enough money that she could stop thinking about it. After that she stopped choosing a date.

Ruth opened the customer’s account on her monitor. Zero balance. She looked at it until the screen dimmed, then moved the mouse.

Eddie came at five past two in a white car Ruth didn’t recognize. He got out of the passenger side and leaned back to speak to the driver. Then he came through the front entrance carrying an envelope.

“Sorry. Traffic by the bridge.”

She looked at the clock. He saw her look.

“I said sorry.”

“I heard you.”

He had cut his hair. The short patch at the back was uneven, as if somebody had stopped before deciding whether the two sides matched. He wore clean jeans and a sweatshirt with the name of a tree company on it.

“Working there?” she asked.

He looked down.

“No. It’s my brother’s.”

She had forgotten about the brother. Or she had confused him with the friend whose room Eddie had been staying in when he left. He had moved twice since then. Once he had sent her the new address without being asked. She hadn’t known what to do with it.

“My ride can wait a few minutes,” he said.

“The box is in back.”

“Can we do that first?”

She moved the message slip away from the check.

“Are you in a hurry?”

“He’s got to get to work.”

“You picked two.”

“I know. If you’re busy, I can come another day.”

“No. You’re here now.”

She got up, taking her keys although the supply room wasn’t locked. Eddie followed her through the short hallway.

The shoe covers sat on the lower shelf in two identical cartons. Above them were rolls of plastic, folded drop cloths, and Eddie’s toolbox. She reached for it, but he stepped past her and took it down.

“Thanks for keeping it.”

“I needed the space.”

“You should’ve said.”

“I did say.”

“When?”

“Before you moved.”

He looked at her, then put the box on the workbench.

“You said leave it till I was settled.”

She remembered saying something like that. He had arrived to collect his last check carrying two supermarket bags. One held clothes. The other held a kettle and a bag of rice. She had told him there was no point taking the box on the bus if he didn’t know where he would put it.

He opened the lid. There were fewer tools than she remembered: a hammer, two pairs of pliers, a small wrench, a tape measure, a screwdriver with a transparent yellow handle. In the tray lay a pencil and several receipts.

“Is it all there?” she asked.

“Looks like.”

He picked up the tape measure and let it run out a foot, then back. The small click irritated her.

He put the envelope on the bench between them.

“For you.”

“How much?”

“One eighty.”

She opened it. Two fifties, three twenties, two tens. She counted the money again because the first count had been too quick.

“Thank you.”

“It’s a start.”

“It’s been four months.”

“I know.”

“When can I expect the rest?”

“If this job comes through, I can do something every week.”

She looked up.

“Is that why you put me down?”

“What?”

“So I’d know getting paid depended on what I said?”

“No. Come on.”

His phone sounded. He took it out and glanced at the screen.

“I have to tell him.”

Ruth waited while he typed. He put the phone back in his pocket.

“He’s leaving?”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t say you had to stay.”

Eddie closed the toolbox and pressed both catches down.

“Okay.”

She went back toward the office. He followed with the box.

At the counter, she put the envelope beside Dana’s message.

“What did you tell her about leaving here?”

“That it didn’t work out.”

“That’s all?”

“They asked how long I’d been here. What I did. Whether I could get here on time.”

“Can you?”

“To their place? Yes.”

He looked toward the window. The white car was gone.

“They run the buildings over by the old hospital,” he said. “Apartments, offices. The bus goes right there. They need somebody to work with the maintenance guys. Move things, paint, clean out units. I can do all that.”

“And she asked for a reference.”

“Yes.”

“So you gave her me.”

“You were my boss.”

“Vic was your boss.”

“You hired me.”

“On his behalf.”

Eddie put the toolbox on the floor, carefully, so it wouldn’t bang.

“Would you rather I’d given them Vic?”

Ruth didn’t answer. He watched her for a moment.

“Does he know?”

The phone rang. She picked it up, grateful for the first time that day to see Vic’s number.

He was at a house where the owner wanted a different faucet from the one on the estimate. Could she check whether the supplier had the other finish? Ruth gave him the number and said the exchange on the afternoon run had already been arranged, so if he wanted anything added he needed to call now.

“Will you do it?”

“I’m with somebody.”

“All right. Send me the number.”

She sent it. When she looked up, Eddie was still standing there.

“He doesn’t know,” he said.

“No.”

“You told me you’d handle it.”

“I did.”

“I thought you meant you’d tell him.”

“You were happy enough not to ask.”

He pulled the visitor chair away from the wall and sat. She hadn’t invited him to sit. She had also left him standing for nearly twenty minutes.

“What are you going to say?”

“I haven’t decided.”

“You know I was good at the work.”

She turned the message slip so the writing faced her.

“You were good at some of it.”

“I was good with people.”

He was. There had been an older man who wouldn’t let anyone move the washing machine because his wife had stored jars behind it. Vic called to say the man was impossible and the job would have to be rescheduled. Eddie stayed after the others left, brought the jars out one at a time, and lined them on a blanket where the man could see them. Most were empty. One held pennies and another held dead batteries. The man called the office afterward to say the young fellow had been careful.

Ruth had told that story to Vic. Twice, because the first time he was driving and she wasn’t sure he’d listened.

“And I learned fast,” Eddie said.

“You didn’t like being corrected.”

“Depends who was correcting me.”

She looked at him.

“Okay,” he said. “Sometimes.”

“If she asks whether you’re trustworthy?”

He rubbed his hands along his jeans.

“I don’t know.”

“That’s what references are for.”

“I know what they’re for.”

“What did you expect me to say?”

“That I did the job. That I left because I needed steadier hours.”

“You didn’t leave because of the hours.”

“I did need steadier hours.”

“That doesn’t make it why.”

He leaned back. The chair had a short leg; it clicked against the floor whenever someone moved.

“People say that stuff all the time.”

“What stuff?”

“That a job wasn’t a good fit. That they wanted something else. They don’t have to tell everybody every single thing.”

“This wasn’t every single thing.”

“I know what it was.”

She had been about to tell him. The amount was ready in her mouth.

A van pulled into the yard. Eddie turned toward the sound. Ruth could see one of the plumbers through the side window, gathering papers from the passenger seat.

“Come outside,” she said.

She took the envelope with her and left the toolbox beside the chair.

They stood by the fence where the paving ended. Along the other side, the tire warehouse had stacked pallets under a blue tarp. Rainwater collected in the folds. Every few minutes it spilled from one fold into another, although the rain had stopped before noon.

The plumber went into the building without approaching them. Ruth waited until the entrance closed.

Eddie put his hands in the front pocket of his sweatshirt.

“I shouldn’t have put you down without asking,” he said.

“No.”

“But you said if I needed anything, call.”

“And did you?”

“I needed the reference.”

“You didn’t call.”

“I’m saying I thought you meant it.”

“I did mean it.”

“So what was I allowed to need?”

She folded the flap of the envelope into its opening.

“I found you this job. I let you keep your things here. I paid what you took. I answered your texts when you couldn’t figure out your last check. I don’t think I’ve been difficult to ask.”

“No. You haven’t.”

He said it plainly. She waited for more.

“I couldn’t pay you,” he said.

“You could have answered me.”

“I did answer.”

“Three weeks later.”

“What would I say? Still don’t have it?”

“Yes.”

“And then you’d ask about the jobs. Which ones I’d applied for. Had I called back. Was I keeping the room clean.”

“I asked about the room once.”

“You asked if I was doing what I was supposed to so I wouldn’t lose that place too.”

There had been more to the question than that. He had sent her a photograph of a broken window and said his landlord was blaming him. She had wanted to know what had happened. She had asked three questions. He answered one.

“I was trying to help.”

“I know.”

“You don’t have to make it sound like something else.”

He looked across the yard at the van.

“I don’t know how to talk to you without starting there.”

“Starting where?”

“With what I did.”

“You still owe the money.”

“I know I owe the money.”

He took his hands out of the pocket, then put them back.

“I brought what I had. It isn’t all of it. I know. I’m not asking you to say it is.”

She looked at the envelope. One corner had darkened where her thumb was damp.

“You act as if it was easy for me.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Martin put off the tires on his car.”

Eddie looked back at her.

“Because of this?”

“He cut his hours in the spring. We were building that money back up.”

“I didn’t know.”

“It wasn’t sitting in a drawer waiting for someone to take it.”

“I know that.”

“Do you?”

He was quiet for a moment.

“Does he know?”

She could have answered by telling him it was none of his business. The sentence was familiar enough to feel ready-made.

“He thinks it went toward Kate’s school.”

“Why?”

“Because I told him that.”

The tarp shifted in the breeze. Water struck the asphalt on the other side of the fence.

“You told your husband it was for school?”

“Yes.”

“Why would you do that?”

“Because he wouldn’t have agreed.”

Eddie looked down at his shoes.

“You didn’t ask him either.”

“No. And I didn’t ask you to take twelve hundred and sixty dollars out of somebody’s kitchen.”

“I know.”

“He gave it to you because he thought you worked for us.”

“I did work for you.”

“Then why didn’t you bring it back?”

“Because I spent it.”

He looked directly at her.

“I spent it. I knew it wasn’t mine. Is that the sentence?”

She watched him. His face had gone red at the neck.

“I didn’t make you tell Martin it was something else,” he said.

She had been turning the envelope in her hands. She stopped.

“No,” she said. “You didn’t.”

Eddie looked away first.

For a while neither spoke. A delivery truck slowed at the mouth of the driveway, then continued toward the warehouse. The driver hadn’t been able to read the numbers on the building. Ruth had asked Vic to repaint them in July. She found herself considering whether she could order larger ones and put them up herself.

Eddie rubbed the back of his neck.

“If you tell her, I probably don’t get it.”

“I don’t know what she’ll do.”

“You know what most people would do.”

Ruth looked toward the office windows. From here her desk was a pale rectangle behind reflected sky.

“I have to talk to Vic first.”

He let his hand fall.

“Today?”

“Yes.”

“Because I put your name down?”

She started to answer yes. She could hear how it would sound.

“Because I should have told him in June.”

Eddie nodded once, without looking at her.

They went back inside. The plumber had left his time sheet on her keyboard. Eddie picked up his toolbox.

“Can I get some of that back?” he said.

Ruth looked at the envelope.

“No. Ten,” he said quickly. “Just ten. For the bus. I was going to get change off my brother.”

She took out one of the tens. He accepted it without thanking her, then seemed to notice and said thank you.

“One seventy, then,” she said.

“Yes.”

“That leaves a thousand and ninety.”

“I know.”

She wrote the amounts on the back of a blank receipt and gave it to him. He folded it into his wallet with the ten.

“What number is it from here?” he asked.

“The twelve. Across the main road. Not the stop outside the tire place.”

“Okay.”

He lifted the box. She could see the weight pull one shoulder lower.

“Will you let me know when you’ve talked to her?”

“Yes.”

He didn’t leave.

“I am sorry I put you down without asking.”

“I know.”

He went out. Ruth watched him reach the end of the driveway and turn left toward the main road. He shifted the toolbox to his other hand before she stopped watching.

Vic answered on speaker. She heard him tell someone that the trim would cover the mark.

“I need you here before four,” she said.

“What happened?”

“It’s about Eddie.”

There was a pause.

“Is he there?”

“He’s just left.”

“What’s he want now?”

“A reference. But I need to talk to you first.”

“Tell them he worked here. Dates. That’s all you need to do.”

“There’s something I didn’t tell you when he left.”

The sound on the line changed. Vic had taken the phone off speaker.

“What?”

She told him the amount. She told him whose payment it was and that Eddie had admitted keeping it.

“When did you find that out?”

“The day I let him go.”

“June?”

“Yes.”

“Where’s the money?”

“I replaced it.”

“With what?”

“My money.”

She closed her eyes. Opened them.

“Money from our savings,” she said.

Vic was silent long enough for her to hear a faucet running near him.

“I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

She spent the twenty minutes assembling the customer invoice, the duplicate receipt, the corrected statement, and the deposit record. She put them in date order on Vic’s desk. Then she moved the deposit record to the top because that was what he had asked about.

At her own desk, she looked at Dana’s number. She wrote beneath it: GOOD WITH CUSTOMERS.

She crossed that out.

PATIENT WITH CUSTOMERS. WORKED UNDER SUPERVISION.

She put the pen down. Across the room, Vic’s chair was turned toward the window. She straightened it so he could sit down without moving it himself, then wished she hadn’t.

He came through the back entrance carrying his work gloves. He put them on the counter and looked at her.

“Show me.”

They went to his desk. He sat; she remained standing. He read the receipt first, then the statement. He held the deposit record closer to his face.

“Cash.”

“Yes.”

“You took out cash.”

“Yes.”

He looked up at her.

“So this looks like he brought it in.”

“The customer did pay.”

“I know the customer paid. I’m asking what this looks like to me.”

She moved her hand away from the papers.

“Yes.”

Vic took his glasses off, folded them, and put them on the desk. He immediately picked them up again.

“Any other payments?”

“Not that I found.”

“You checked?”

“I went through the jobs he’d been on. Everything else was accounted for.”

“I want to see that.”

“All right.”

“And his file.”

“All right.”

He set the papers down.

“You told me reliability.”

“There had been problems with that too.”

“Ruth.”

She stopped.

“You knew what I’d think you meant.”

“Yes.”

The air conditioner switched off. In the sudden quiet she could hear somebody shifting a ladder in the yard.

“Why?” Vic asked.

“He said he’d pay it back.”

“He said he’d come in Mondays.”

She looked at the gloves he had left on the counter. One was folded inside the other. She had bought them in a carton of twelve pairs, and he complained about the fit every time he needed a new pair.

“I thought if I covered it, we could be done with it.”

“We?”

“The company wouldn’t lose anything.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“No.”

He leaned back. There was dust on one sleeve where he had pressed against a wall.

“I sent him into people’s houses.”

“I know.”

“Based on what you told me.”

“He did good work.”

Vic lifted one hand, not toward her but toward the stack of documents, and let it rest there.

“He took their money.”

“Yes.”

Vic read the name on the customer account again.

“Has anybody called the man?”

“I corrected his statement. I told him the payment had been located.”

“Located.”

She looked down.

“Does he need anything else from us?” Vic asked.

“No. His account’s clear. The work was finished.”

“We’ll go through it tomorrow. All of it.”

She nodded.

“I want to see what you checked. I don’t want anything changed in the records before I see it.”

“I wasn’t going to.”

He kept looking at her until she said, “All right.”

She went to her desk and brought him Dana’s message. He read the company name.

“They do the apartments on the hill.”

“That’s what he said.”

“What were you going to tell her?”

“I hadn’t decided.”

“If she asks whether we’d hire him again, we wouldn’t.”

Ruth pressed her thumb against the edge of the counter.

“All right.”

“You can tell her what work he did. You can tell her why he left. Give her my number if she wants it. But don’t tell her this was a layoff.”

“I wasn’t going to say that.”

“What were you going to say?”

She looked at the words she had written beneath Dana’s number.

“I don’t know.”

Vic took out his phone. He said he had to return to the job because the customer was waiting for him to finish the faucet. He gathered the documents into a folder and put them in his desk drawer.

“Tomorrow, before the guys come in.”

“Seven?”

“Seven.”

He put his glasses away. At the counter he picked up his gloves and looked toward the schedule.

“Why’s that house moved to first tomorrow?”

“Wrong part. I promised her eight to eight thirty.”

He started to say something, then nodded.

“Make sure it gets loaded tonight.”

After he left, Ruth stood at the counter until the van pulled out. Then she called the supplier to confirm the replacement was ready.

At four twelve, Ruth put on the headset. It caught under one earring, and she had to take it off and start again.

Dana answered on the second ring.

“Thank you for getting back to me.”

“Of course.”

“Do you have a few minutes now?”

“Yes.”

Ruth could hear typing. Dana said she had a short list of questions, then began with dates.

Ruth supplied them from the employee file. Eddie had been there a little under ten months. Full time at the start, then fewer hours when work slowed. He was a service helper. He worked with the plumbers, carried equipment, protected floors, cleaned up, and did the parts of a job he had been shown how to do. He wasn’t sent out to perform plumbing work on his own.

“Did he follow instructions?”

“Usually. He learned quickly. Sometimes he argued when he was corrected.”

“How did he do with residents or customers?”

“He could be very patient. Especially with people who needed things explained more than once.”

Ruth waited. She had more she could say about the jars and the blanket. Dana moved to the next question.

“Attendance?”

“There were some absences and late arrivals. Transportation was part of it.”

“Did he call ahead?”

“Not always.”

The typing stopped briefly.

“And the reason he left?”

Ruth adjusted the microphone. It had been close enough already.

“I dismissed him after he kept a cash payment a customer gave him.”

Dana didn’t answer at once. Ruth heard a faint click, possibly a pen.

“What was the amount?”

“Twelve hundred and sixty dollars.”

“Was there a dispute about what happened?”

“No. He signed the receipt. When I asked him, he admitted he’d spent it.”

“All right.”

“He’s begun repaying it.”

“To the company?”

“To me. I replaced the money.”

“How much has he repaid?”

“One hundred and seventy dollars.”

The amount sounded different without Eddie sitting across from her. She could have added today. She did.

Dana resumed typing.

“Was the owner involved in the dismissal?”

“I had the authority to end his employment. I didn’t tell the owner the full reason at the time.”

“And he knows now?”

“Yes. I spoke to him this afternoon, before calling you.”

Ruth looked at Vic’s empty desk.

“I can give you his number.”

“Please.”

She gave it. Dana repeated the final four digits, and Ruth confirmed them.

“Would he be eligible for rehire?”

“No.”

She waited for the next question. Dana waited too.

“The owner was clear about that,” Ruth said.

“And in your own experience, would you be comfortable supervising him again?”

Ruth put her hand flat on the desk. Under it was the impression of EDDIE on the next message sheet.

“For practical work, with someone there, I can imagine it. I wouldn’t put him in charge of payments.”

“Did your helpers ordinarily receive payments?”

“Sometimes a customer handed one over while the truck was being loaded. They were supposed to bring it straight to the office. We’re reviewing that.”

She had said we before she knew whether Vic would want her involved in the review.

Dana asked whether she had observed other dishonesty. Ruth said she hadn’t found another missing payment. Then she stopped because it was not quite the question.

“There were explanations for absences that changed afterward,” she said. “I can’t tell you which version was accurate.”

“All right.”

Ruth looked at the clock. The call had taken less than ten minutes.

“I don’t want to make it sound as though he couldn’t do anything,” she said.

“You’ve described his work.”

“Yes.”

“We’ll consider all of it.”

Ruth started to ask what the position involved, whether somebody would be with him, whether there was cash to handle. She stopped before the questions came out.

Dana thanked her. Ruth said she was welcome and ended the call.

She took off the headset. The earring came with it. She caught it against her shoulder before it fell and spent a moment fastening it without a mirror.

Then she texted Eddie.

I’ve spoken to Dana. I told her about your work and why you left.

She read it twice. She didn’t add anything about hoping it worked out.

By five, the wrong part had been returned, the right part had arrived, and Ruth had put it on the passenger seat of the van scheduled for the first appointment. She checked the address on the dashboard sheet. She left a note for the plumber with the customer’s name and the time she had promised.

At her desk she recorded the hundred and seventy dollars against the twelve hundred and sixty in the notebook she kept for household expenses. She had never written the original amount there under Eddie’s name. She did it now, on a clean page, with the date of the withdrawal.

She put the cash back in the envelope and the envelope in her purse.

There was no answer from Eddie.

At the front entrance, she took out her phone to tell Martin she was on her way. He had sent a photograph of two onions on the kitchen counter.

These meet your specifications?

She wrote Yes. Home soon.

Then she locked up.

Martin had cut one of the onions. The other sat beside the cutting board, still wearing the little net he had carried them home in. There was chicken in a pan on the stove.

“You got held up,” he said.

“A little.”

She put her purse on a chair and reached for a glass. Before she could fill it, he asked whether the exhaust fan sounded strange.

“It always sounds strange.”

“No. Listen.”

They stood listening to it.

“Something’s loose,” he said.

He turned it off. The sudden quiet made the kitchen seem smaller.

“Martin, the money in June wasn’t for Kate.”

He was holding a spoon. He kept it over the pan.

“What money?”

“The twelve hundred and sixty.”

She watched him work back to it. He put the spoon on the cutting board.

“What was it for?”

“Eddie took a customer’s payment. At work. I replaced it.”

Martin looked at her, waiting.

“I took it out of savings.”

“Our savings.”

“Yes.”

He turned the burner down.

“Eddie. The one you were helping with the room?”

“Yes.”

“You paid his rent?”

“No. He kept money somebody paid for a plumbing job. I put it back.”

“Why?”

“He didn’t have it anymore.”

Martin moved the cutting board away from the edge of the counter. A piece of onion had fallen beside it; he picked it up and put it on the board.

“That doesn’t answer me.”

She pulled out a chair but didn’t sit yet.

“I thought he could pay it back. Before it became a whole thing.”

“It was a whole thing when he stole it.”

“Yes.”

“Did Vic know?”

“Not until today.”

Martin stared at her.

“Today?”

“Yes.”

He walked to the stove and moved the pan off the burner, though he had already turned the heat down. Then he switched the burner off.

“Why did he find out today?”

“Eddie applied for another job. He gave them my name.”

“So they called you.”

“Yes.”

“What did you say?”

“I told them.”

“Today.”

“Yes.”

He sat at the table. Ruth sat opposite him. She could see a faint impression on his forehead where his work cap had been.

“Has he paid any of it back?”

“One seventy. Today.”

Martin closed his eyes for a moment.

“It’s here,” she said.

She reached into her purse, took out the envelope, and laid it on the table. He didn’t touch it.

“He brought a hundred and eighty, but I gave him ten for the bus.”

“You gave him ten.”

“His ride had left.”

Martin looked toward the window. A small insect moved against the screen. She had been meaning to find the gap where they got in.

“Did Kate ask us for anything in June?”

“No.”

“Nothing?”

“No.”

“So when I said we should tell her that was it for a while...”

“I remember.”

“You let me say that.”

“Yes.”

He leaned forward, his forearms on the table.

“Did she know?”

“No. She doesn’t know anything about it.”

“At least there’s that.”

Ruth looked at the envelope. The bank’s name was printed on the front. Eddie must have got it when he took the money out, or perhaps he had kept an old one. She wondered how long he’d had the hundred and eighty. Then she made herself look at Martin.

“I was going to put it back.”

“From where?”

“When he paid me.”

“And if he didn’t?”

She had considered overtime, although there wasn’t overtime available without asking Vic for work he could not invent. She had considered selling the exercise bike they used to hang laundry on. It might have brought a hundred dollars. She had not listed it.

“I hadn’t worked that out.”

Martin rubbed the bridge of his nose.

“We said five hundred.”

“I know.”

“Either one of us. We talk first.”

“I know.”

“You could’ve asked.”

She began to say that he would have said no. She got as far as his name.

He waited.

“I didn’t want you to stop me,” she said.

He sat back. Beyond him, the chicken was cooling in the pan. She wanted to get up and put it in the oven. The oven wasn’t on. She would have to turn it on first, find a dish, transfer the chicken, and there would be several minutes during which they could stop looking at each other.

She stayed in the chair.

“Is there anything else?” he asked.

“No.”

“Take a minute.”

She looked at him. He was serious.

She thought about their accounts, the credit card, the money she kept in the side pocket of her purse for parking. She thought about the Christmas present she had already bought him, which was not what he was asking.

“No,” she said. “Nothing else.”

Martin turned the envelope so the bank’s name faced him.

“Do you have it written down? What came out and when?”

“Yes. In the notebook.”

“Can I see it?”

Ruth took the notebook from her purse. She passed it across without turning to a page.

Gus was wagging at the spare-room door.

David stopped on the bottom stair. The dog sat with his head slightly tilted, waiting for something he expected to enjoy. His tail brushed the runner. Every few seconds he lifted his nose toward the handle.

“Need to go out?”

Gus glanced at him and looked back at the door.

The kitchen light was still on. David had meant to turn it off before bed, but lately going upstairs required a decision, and once he had made it he tried not to let anything interfere. Across the kitchen, the microwave said 2:13.

He knew that time. He wished he hadn’t looked.

Gus gave a small whine, almost conversational. Margaret used to make him guess which hand held a biscuit. He always chose the wrong one because she always changed hands behind her back. David had told her this was cheating. She had explained that it was a game she intended to win.

The dog was making that sound now.

David stood beside him and listened. Nothing came from the bedroom. He turned the handle, pushed the door inward, and reached around for the switch.

The bed was made. The wardrobe was closed. His chair stood by the bedside cabinet, its worn green cushion tipped upright where he had left it after vacuuming. The room smelled of the detergent he had used on the curtains.

“See?”

He said it to the dog, although Gus hadn’t asked him anything.

Gus walked in, put his nose against the chair, and stood still. David looked behind the door. The rubber wedge was there, blunt and gray, with a white scar where he had once caught it with the vacuum cleaner. For months he had kicked it into place with a basin of warm water balanced against his stomach. He could still feel the weight of the basin if he thought about it.

The dog came out again.

David put the cushion flat. It seemed an unnecessarily deliberate thing to do at two in the morning, but he had already done it. He switched off the light and left the door open.

In the kitchen, Gus drank noisily from his bowl. David filled the kettle. He opened the cupboard and reached past his own mug for the chipped blue one, then withdrew his hand without taking it down. He was irritated with himself. Margaret had been dead six weeks. He could remember which cup was his.

The kettle began its low rumble.

He switched it off.

Cold water would do. He drank some from the tap, wiped his mouth on his sleeve, and watched Gus settle by the doorway. There was a tissue caught in the fur beneath the dog’s chin. He removed it and put it in the trash.

“You’ve got a whole basket of toys.”

Gus looked pleased to be addressed.

David stood in the kitchen for another minute. The refrigerator started. A car passed outside. The house had never been silent, even when Margaret was alive; there had always been pipes, appliances, the faint ticking of the cooling oven. He used to know which sound belonged to which thing. Now he found himself listening to all of them.

At the bedroom he paused with his hand on the door. He had been closing it at night because he could see the bed from the stairs. In daylight, closing it felt worse. There seemed to be no satisfactory position for a door.

He pulled it shut.

Gus sat down in front of it.

“Come on.”

The dog’s ears moved.

“Gus. Upstairs.”

On the second call he came, slowly, looking back from the turn in the staircase. David left the kitchen light on.

Claire arrived at eleven carrying groceries in a bag that said she was helping to save the planet. A bottle of bleach had leaked inside it.

“Don’t put that on the table,” David said.

“Hello to you, too.”

He took the bag and set it in the sink. Claire kissed his cheek, then leaned back to examine him.

“You need a shave.”

“I’ve retired from that.”

“Fine. Become a wizard. Have you eaten?”

He had eaten two slices of toast standing at the counter. She accepted this with a nod, which was worse than a question. He began rinsing the bottoms of the grocery packages while she unpacked them.

“I’ve got things,” he said.

“You’ve got mustard and three kinds of cheese.”

“That’s four things.”

She opened the refrigerator and found a place for the milk. Above them the smoke detector chirped.

Claire looked up.

“I’ll do it,” he said.

“When?”

“Today.”

She fetched the kitchen stool. He got the battery out of the drawer and handed it to her. For thirty-eight years people had paid him to come into their houses and find out why something had stopped working. Now his daughter was standing on a stool because he had listened to a battery warning for four days.

“You could stay at mine,” she said, twisting the detector loose.

“I know.”

“A couple of nights. Bring Gus.”

“He’ll eat your cushions.”

“He can eat the yellow one. I hate it.”

David watched her thumb the battery into place. Her mother would have held it the same way, head bent, mouth slightly open with concentration. He looked down before Claire caught him doing it.

“Friday,” he said. “I’ll come for dinner Friday.”

“And stay?”

“We’ll see.”

She tested the alarm. Gus fled the kitchen, his feet skidding at the turn.

After lunch they went into Margaret’s sewing room to find a receipt for a customer who believed she had paid a deposit. There were garment bags on the rail and a pair of navy trousers hanging from the cupboard door. A note pinned to the waistband read: Wants these looser. Refuses to be smaller.

Claire laughed. She took the note off and showed him.

“Please tell me she didn’t give people these.”

“Only the ones she liked.”

He laughed too, and the sound surprised him enough to stop it. Claire slipped the note into her pocket.

They found the receipt. Margaret had written PAID across it so heavily the pen had torn the paper. Claire photographed it and sent it to the customer. David lifted a box of old account books from beneath the table. It was heavier than he expected.

“Leave it,” Claire said. “We don’t have to do all this today.”

He set it down again.

She stayed until three. On her way out she noticed Gus lying in the hall with his nose pointed at the spare room.

“He’s been doing that,” David said.

Claire crouched beside the dog and rubbed the thick fur behind his ears. Gus rolled against her knee, accepting affection without changing his view of the door.

“He misses her,” she said.

David nodded. It was the explanation he had wanted somebody else to give him.

That evening he fed Gus, ate some of the chicken Claire had brought, and opened the bedroom window for ten minutes. He checked the latch after closing it. He left the door resting against the jamb while he carried a cup to the kitchen.

When he turned around, Gus was standing on the runner with something blue in his mouth.

“What have you got?”

The dog approached with his head lowered, doing the slow, apologetic walk that usually meant a sock. David held out his hand. Gus released the material into it.

It was folded over itself, damp at one corner. Blue silk with small white birds. David shook it out, then stopped before the movement was finished.

Along one edge were seven pale stitches, crooked because Margaret had repaired it on a moving train. She had blamed him for booking a seat near the wheels. He had asked where she thought the other seats were.

He rubbed the stitches with his thumb.

The dog had gone back to his water bowl.

David laid the scarf on the table. He spread it flat. It was too familiar to examine properly; his hands knew where it would fold before he had decided to fold it. He picked up his phone and called Claire.

“What did your mother have on?” he asked.

“When?”

“At the funeral.”

There was a pause. He heard a television lower in the background.

“The green suit.”

“I know the suit. Around her neck.”

“Her bird scarf. Dad, you put it on her.”

He remembered the woman from the funeral home offering to help. He remembered saying he could manage, then discovering how difficult it was to tie silk around a neck that could not lift toward his hands. He had left the ends crossed inside the collar. He could see the crooked stitching lying against the green fabric.

“Dad?”

“I thought so.”

“What’s happened?”

“Nothing. I couldn’t remember.”

“You can call me when nothing’s happened.”

He closed his eyes. “I know.”

Afterward he searched the wardrobe, the drawers, and the cedar box beneath their old bed upstairs. None of her other scarves was blue with white birds. None had the seven stitches.

He came downstairs with a heap of them over his arm and stood looking at the kitchen table.

Gus wouldn’t come when he called.

At midnight David put the other scarves back upstairs. He left the blue one on the table and sat beside it with his phone. He had considered photographing it, but the photograph would only show a scarf. He could not photograph where it had been.

Gus lay beneath his chair. When David lowered the silk toward him, the dog stretched his nose forward, sniffed, and withdrew so abruptly that his skull struck the chair rung.

“All right.”

David put it down. A small crescent of moisture from the dog’s mouth had dried near the hem.

He looked up the funeral home’s number, although he had it in his recent calls. He imagined asking whether somebody had gone back into the coffin after he left. He imagined explaining how the scarf had come home. The screen dimmed in his hand.

At two he used the bathroom upstairs. He washed his face, brushed his teeth, and came down again. These were things a person did before going to bed. He had hoped one might lead naturally to the next.

Gus was sitting in the kitchen doorway.

David saw his ears lift. Then the microwave changed to 2:13.

From the other end of the hall a woman said, very softly, “David. Please don’t let him hear you.”

He gripped the edge of the counter. The kitchen looked exactly as it had a moment earlier. His reading glasses lay beside the scarf. There was a small piece of chicken fat stuck to the plate in the sink.

“Who’s there?”

“Who do you think?”

The impatience was hers. He could hear how her mouth would have tightened on the last word.

He went into the hall. Gus stood but did not follow.

“Margaret?”

“Keep your voice down.”

David put his palm against the door. It was cool. The paint had a rough place beside the handle where he had touched it before it dried, years ago. She had said nobody would notice. He had noticed it every day since.

“What’s happening?”

A bed spring creaked. It was a long, descending sound, much heavier than Margaret’s weight had ever made. David turned the handle.

“Don’t.”

He stopped.

Inside the room, something scraped the floor. He looked down at the narrow line of darkness beneath the door. It remained dark across its full width.

“Who’s in there with you?”

She didn’t answer. He heard breathing. Margaret had breathed through her mouth during the final weeks because her nose was always blocked. He had bought three kinds of saline spray and left them lined up on the cabinet. This breathing was deeper. It ended in a wet catch that made him think of someone trying to swallow while asleep.

“I’ll get somebody,” he said.

“Go back to bed. Take the dog.”

“I’m not leaving you in there.”

“David. Do what I’m asking.”

The breath came again, closer to the door. He let go of the handle and stepped backward. A board creaked inside, although there were no exposed boards in the bedroom. He had laid laminate over them twelve years ago.

Gus began to growl from the kitchen.

“Take him,” Margaret said.

David retreated down the hall. He caught the dog’s collar and guided him to the stairs. Gus resisted until they were past the bedroom, then climbed quickly, turning on the landing to wait.

David sat on the fourth step. He held the phone in both hands. The number for emergency services was easy to enter. The account he would have to give was not. Someone was in his wife’s bedroom. He had heard her talking to him. Yes, he was certain it was her. No, she could not come to the telephone.

He called Claire instead. The ringing seemed loud enough to wake whatever was in the room. He lowered the volume. When her voicemail answered, he said, “It’s Dad. Call me when you’re up. It’s nothing urgent.”

He stared at the screen afterward, ashamed of the last sentence.

Once, around four, he heard the bed creak again. He rose, and Gus put his body across David’s feet. By the time he stepped over him the sound had stopped.

He stayed on the stairs until the hall window turned gray. At six he went to the door and said her name. When there was still no answer, he opened it.

Morning light showed the undisturbed bed, the empty cabinet, the wardrobe with one handle hanging lower than the other. The saline sprays were gone. He had thrown them away himself.

The chair cushion had a deep hollow in its center.

As he watched, it slowly filled out.

David went in and pressed the cushion with his hand. The foam rose when he released it.

He stripped the bed and searched beneath it, then emptied the wardrobe and removed the heating-vent cover. Behind it lay the seven of clubs from a pack they had thrown away years ago.

The flower bed beneath the window was unmarked. He walked around the house. There was no hidden space. He had repaired, painted, or cursed at every part of it.

He filmed the room on his phone, turning slowly in the middle of it. On playback, his own breathing sounded very loud.

He took the bulb out of the bedside lamp. He couldn’t have said why. He put it in his pocket with the playing card.

Claire called at eight.

“What’s wrong?”

“I thought I heard your mother.”

He sat on the kitchen stool. Gus leaned against his shin.

“Last night?”

“Yes.”

“Like calling you?”

He looked down the hall. “Yes.”

Claire was quiet. Then she said, “I keep thinking she’s sent me a text. Every time the phone lights up. It’s stupid.”

“It isn’t stupid.”

“Well, neither is yours. Did you get any sleep?”

He told her a little. She offered to come after work. He said he was going to take Gus out, buy a few things, and have an early night. It was such a reasonable program that she accepted it. Before hanging up she asked whether he still intended to come for dinner on Friday.

“Yes.”

“I’m making that chicken thing she hated.”

“She didn’t hate it.”

“She asked if the recipe was legally binding.”

He smiled. Claire heard enough of it in his goodbye to sound relieved.

At the hardware store he bought a slide bolt, six screws, and a packet of felt pads for the chair legs.

Outside, Gus waited in the back seat with his head resting on the door. David helped him down and walked him along the strip of grass beside the parking lot.

The road to Claire’s was at the next intersection. He could be there in forty minutes. He had her spare key. There would be coffee in the kitchen, mail on the table, laundry drying on a rack by the window. He pictured sitting there until she came home and telling her everything.

Then he pictured Margaret waiting in the dark for his footsteps. He hadn’t asked if she was hurt. He had done as she told him and left her with that breathing.

He put Gus back in the car and drove home.

The bolt took less than ten minutes to fit. He used longer screws than the ones in the packet, driving them through the doorframe into the wood behind it. He slid the bolt into its keeper and pulled the handle. The door held. He withdrew it again.

He put the felt pads on the chair legs, remade the bed, and carried the chair into the hall. If he was going to listen, he would listen sitting down. He left it beside the stairs and shut the bedroom door.

In the afternoon he found a video from a trip they had taken four years earlier. Margaret stood beside the car holding an unfolded map. Wind kept bending the paper across her face.

“Stop filming and help me.”

His recorded voice said, “I thought you knew where we were.”

“I do. We’re in a car park with an idiot.”

She lowered the map and laughed. Her face was brown from the sun, her hair fastened carelessly behind her head. He had forgotten the strength of her voice. In the bedroom it had been small, every sentence requiring a breath first. The voice last night had sounded like that.

He watched the video three times. Then he set the phone to record and put it on the narrow shelf outside the bedroom. He tested whether it could hear him from the kitchen.

“One, two, three.”

His voice came back clearly.

At 2:13, Margaret asked for water.

David had been sitting in the chair for almost an hour. Gus lay on the first stair, keeping his paws tucked beneath him. At the sound of her voice the dog raised his head but did not wag.

“I’ve got some here,” David said.

He filled a clean glass in the kitchen. Halfway down the hall he remembered the bent straws she had needed and stopped. He had thrown those away too.

“Can you manage a glass?”

“Bring it closer.”

He set it on the floor beside the door.

“It’s there.”

“I can’t reach that.”

He touched the handle, but a sound came from deeper in the room, a heavy turning against the mattress. He stepped away.

“Is he awake?” he asked.

“Sit down.”

David returned to the chair. The voice was close to the wood now. He could almost feel her sitting opposite him, their knees separated by the door.

“Where’s Claire?”

“At home.”

“Does she know?”

“Not yet.”

“And Gus?”

“He’s here.”

There was a pause. He listened for movement, for the sound of a hand on the latch. When nothing came, he said, “Where are you?”

“Here.”

“I know, but where have you been?”

He heard the little inward breath he remembered from her illness.

“It’s difficult to explain.”

“Try.”

The mattress shifted. She said, “Talk about something else.”

He told her about the trousers. He told her the customer had asked whether the deposit could be refunded. Margaret said nothing for so long he wondered if she was still there. Then she said, “They’re paid for.”

The account books had been on the bedroom cabinet for a week. She had worked through them in bed, insisting that dying did not make it acceptable to lose track of other people’s money.

“Claire found the receipt,” he said. “She sent it. It’s sorted.”

“Good.”

He told her about the fence their neighbor was putting up. He told her Claire was worried about him, and then, because Margaret had always been the person he told these things, he said he was finding Claire’s worry difficult.

“She’s just trying to help,” he added. “I know that. She’s got enough on her plate.”

“Yes,” Margaret said.

Gus came down one stair and stopped.

“I watched that video,” David said. “With the map. You called me an idiot.”

He waited for her laugh.

“I remember,” she said.

“Where was it? I couldn’t think of the name.”

“By the sea.”

“No. The reservoir. Remember? We were looking for the mill.”

“The mill,” she said. “Yes.”

He rubbed his hands together. They were cold, although the house was warm. “We never found it. You said the sign had been put up by someone who didn’t want visitors.”

“Someone who didn’t want visitors,” she repeated, almost fondly.

He felt relief so sharply that he leaned back and shut his eyes. He had expected her memory to be damaged. He had expected something to have been lost. Whatever had happened to her, it was unreasonable to make her pass a test at two in the morning.

“You all right in that chair?” she asked.

“It’s the same chair.”

“Move closer. I can’t hear you.”

He shifted it forward. The new felt pads slid quietly over the laminate. His knees almost touched the door. For the first time in weeks he knew where he was supposed to be. There had been so many evenings like this, talking while she waited for sleep. He used to complain afterward about his back. He would have sat there until morning if she had asked.

A man’s voice said, “Quiet.”

David straightened. The word had come from the bed. Gus stood on the stairs.

“Who is that?” David asked.

Margaret made a hushed, urgent sound. Then the man spoke again.

“I’ll be back in a minute.”

It was David’s own voice, tired and distracted, pitched upward slightly to reassure somebody who was frightened.

He gripped the chair arms.

On the last night he had said those words before going to the kitchen. Margaret had been lying on her side, watching the lamp. He had asked if she wanted anything. She had made a small movement with her head. He had decided it meant no.

“I’ll be back in a minute,” the voice repeated.

“Stop it,” David said.

Margaret began to cry. He could hear her trying to keep the sound in, just as she had when being turned hurt more than she wanted to admit.

“You said you’d come back.”

“I did come back.”

“You weren’t here.”

“I went to make tea.”

He could see the kettle filling, the water foaming around the spout. He had leaned against the counter and spoken into the empty kitchen.

I can’t keep doing this.

He had meant the lifting, the sleeplessness, the terror of hearing her call and not being quick enough. He had meant watching her endure another hour. He had also, for a moment he could not make smaller by remembering it differently, meant all of it.

The clock had read 2:13 when he came back with his tea and found that she was no longer looking at anything.

He waited for the voice to say those words too.

It didn’t. Margaret only cried.

He stayed in the chair until the windows began to lighten, saying he was sorry. The glass of water remained beside his feet.

The recording was five hours and twelve minutes long. David listened to the beginning at the kitchen table with Gus pressed against his leg. He could hear himself shift in the chair, the refrigerator starting, a car passing. He moved forward through the quiet sections until Margaret asked for water.

He stopped the recording. His hand was shaking so badly that he had to place the phone flat before he could operate it. He selected the file and sent it to Claire with a message asking her to listen before calling him.

She called six minutes later.

“What is this?”

“Last night.”

“Where did you get Mum’s voice?”

He told her about the door and sent a photograph of the scarf’s stitches.

For several seconds she said nothing.

“I’m coming now,” she said.

“You have work.”

“I don’t care.”

“I’m coming to yours. I’ll pack a bag.”

“Now?”

“Before you finish. I won’t be here tonight.”

She made him promise. Then she asked him to leave the door closed, take Gus out somewhere, and call her if anything else happened. She would come after her morning appointments and they could drive back to her place together. He agreed to everything.

Before he packed, he returned the chair to the bedroom. In daylight it seemed wasteful to leave it blocking the hall. He placed it a foot from the bed, on the marks where it had stood throughout Margaret’s illness. The glass went into the dishwasher. He poured the untouched water away without looking at it.

He listened again while folding a shirt into his overnight bag. He found the place where the man’s voice said quiet. Just before the word came a short, double intake of breath.

David stopped folding.

He moved the recording backward. Margaret asked him to sit down. Before the sentence was the same sound: a small breath, a hitch, then a second, lower breath close behind it.

He played the two passages again. There was a faint click between the breaths. The click was there both times.

He found the video from the reservoir. Margaret’s laughter was loud and loose. He found a later recording Claire had made in the bedroom, after her mother had finished altering a jacket for a child. Margaret held up the tiny garment and complained that the customer had failed to attend his fitting because he was four months old.

Before speaking, she drew a tired breath. David, standing beside Claire, breathed out close to the phone. Between the two sounds, Margaret’s thumbnail clicked against a jacket button.

He played it again.

The thing in the bedroom had put the whole sound before Margaret’s words and before his own.

David set the phone on the bed upstairs. He went to the bathroom and vomited, then rinsed his mouth and stood holding the basin. Nothing moved downstairs. He could hear Gus drinking.

By noon he had packed his medication, two shirts, underwear, and the old sweatshirt he wore to walk the dog. He took the blue scarf in a clear food bag. He checked the slide bolt and left it fastened.

Claire arrived just after one. She went straight to him and put her arms around his shoulders. He had expected questions. The embrace made it difficult to speak.

Claire turned the bag over in her hands.

“She snagged it on my bracelet,” Claire said. “Before that trip. She told me she’d fixed it.”

“On the train.”

Claire put the bag down.

He played her the two breaths. She listened to the video with the small jacket, then to the hallway recording. Her mouth opened a little. She reached over and stopped it herself.

“We’re going,” she said.

“What do we tell somebody?”

“I don’t know yet. We can work it out at mine.”

They took both cars. Claire drove ahead, and David followed with Gus on the back seat and his bag beside him. Beyond the neighborhood the road widened. At a red light he watched his daughter adjust her mirror to check on him. He realized he had been holding his breath.

That afternoon he slept for three hours on her sofa. When he woke, Gus was snoring beside the yellow cushion. Claire was in the kitchen talking softly on the telephone. She said she’d call back, then came in carrying two mugs.

“I spoke to the doctor,” she said. “He can see you tomorrow. I didn’t know who else to start with.”

David nodded. He knew how it sounded. He had once replaced a dishwasher for a woman who said it whispered about her after midnight. He had listened politely, changed the machine, and made sure her son was there before leaving.

“You heard it,” he said.

“I know.”

She sat beside him. He drank the tea. It was too strong, which was how Margaret had made it, and he suddenly wanted to be in his own kitchen so badly that he had to put the mug down.

They ate at seven. They walked Gus together. Claire showed him the clean sheets on the spare bed and put a towel on the pillow. He thanked her for coming. She said he didn’t need to thank her and then, after a moment, said she was glad he had.

She stayed in the doorway while he unpacked. When he put the medication organizer on the cabinet, she picked up the empty bag and folded it along its seams.

“I called her on Tuesday,” she said.

He looked up.

“I was driving home. Something had happened at work. I got all the way through telling her before I realized it was the voicemail.”

David sat on the bed. “What happened at work?”

“Nothing important.”

“Tell me anyway.”

She shook her head. “That wasn’t why I told you.”

She kept folding the bag, making it smaller.

“I want to hear her too,” she said. “You understand that?”

“Of course.”

“I don’t think you do.”

He reached for the bag. She let him take it. He opened it again and put it on the chair, where it would be useful in the morning. Claire rubbed her palms down the front of her trousers.

“I’ll tell you about work tomorrow,” she said.

He promised to listen. After she left, he lay with the bedroom door open so he could hear her moving around the apartment. She ran water, closed a cupboard, and called goodnight. He answered loudly enough to be sure she heard.

At half past one he was still awake. He had taken his tablets. The little plastic organizer stood on the bedside cabinet, Wednesday’s compartment empty.

He could hear Margaret asking for water. He turned over. The sound was only a memory, but it carried the same demand as if it were happening now. He knew that something in the room copied voices. He did not know what else might be in there with it.

At one thirty-four he got up and dressed. Gus rose from the rug and followed him.

Claire came out of her room when he picked up his keys.

“Where are you going?”

“Forgot my tablets.”

She looked at the coat in his hand. “I’ll take you.”

“No. Go back to bed. I’ll be an hour.”

“Dad.”

He opened the front door. Gus squeezed past his legs. Claire called after him, but he was already helping the dog into the car, already occupying himself with the buckle, the ignition, the mirror. He backed out before she could reach him.

At the first intersection his phone rang. He let it ring, ashamed and determined, with the empty road ahead of him.

He reached the house at 2:16. The kitchen light was on. Across the road, the neighbor’s security lamp picked out the unfinished fence, its raw posts shining white. Nothing about the house looked changed.

He answered Claire’s next call before switching off the engine.

“I’m here,” he said.

“Your tablets are on the cabinet.”

“I know.”

He heard the indicator in her car. She had followed him.

“Stay outside,” she said. “I’m coming.”

“I have to look.”

“No, you don’t.”

He sat holding the phone against his ear. In the rearview mirror, Gus watched him.

“What if she’s in there?”

“You showed me the recording.”

“What if it’s using her?”

Claire said his name, his full name, as if addressing a stranger who had become unreasonable. He had never heard her do that before.

“Listen to me. I want you to wait where you are.”

He opened the car door.

“I’m keeping you on the phone.”

He put it in his pocket while helping Gus down. The dog didn’t want to leave the car. David had to take his collar and guide him to the ground. He was sorry as soon as he had done it. He could have left him with Claire. He had brought him to make a lie look ordinary.

Inside, the hall smelled of closed curtains and the sweet lotion Margaret had used on her hands. He had given the bottle to Claire. The chair was no longer visible through the doorway because he had bolted the door, but he could hear its legs moving across the floor.

“Margaret?”

“You came back.”

He laid the phone on the shelf, switched on the speaker, and looped Gus’s lead around the bottom of the newel post. The dog stood on the first stair, pulling the lead taut.

“Come to the door,” David said.

“I can’t get up.”

“Try.”

“Don’t make me shout.”

He crouched to retrieve the rubber wedge, which he had left beside the frame that afternoon. His knees made two dry cracking sounds. From the phone, Claire told him she was twelve minutes away.

He withdrew the bolt. It slid smoothly. The keeper and its screws were ordinary pieces of metal he had fitted with his own hands. He concentrated on them until he could breathe steadily.

“Is he asleep?”

“For now.”

David turned the handle and pushed.

The bedside lamp was on.

He could see its bare cord running down behind the cabinet to the socket. He had unplugged it as well as taking out the bulb. On the cabinet stood the water glass with its bent straw. The pink washbasin was under the bed, although it had gone into a rubbish sack with the disposable pads and the unopened packet of gloves.

Margaret sat at the edge of the mattress. She wore the cream nightdress with the blue piping. He could see the place near the hem where the stitching had come loose.

“You took your time,” she said.

He had thought he was prepared for her face. He had imagined something changed or incomplete, a face he would have to work to recognize. But she looked as she had on a middling day, when she could sit up for a while and complain about the pillows. Her hair needed washing. There was a small crease on her cheek from the bedding.

Behind her, the blanket covered a long shape. Its outline rose and fell.

David pushed the wedge under the door. The rubber gripped the floor. He left the hall light on and his phone facing into the room.

From under the blanket his own voice said, “Don’t touch her.”

Margaret looked down at her hands.

“Please,” she said.

He stepped inside.

For a moment he couldn’t move any farther. The room had the crowded arrangement he knew, with the chair drawn almost against her knees and the basin where his foot would catch it if he forgot. Even the road atlas was under the chair, its cover bent backward. She had kept it there long after a trip had become impossible, opening it on afternoons when she felt well enough to argue about hotels.

“Come here,” she said.

He went to her. She held out her left hand. He took it in his.

Her skin was cool and dry. He could feel the tiny raised edge of the scar beneath her thumb, where she had cut herself opening a tin. He had forgotten that scar. For several seconds the relief was so great that he could not see her properly.

“Oh, love,” he said.

She looked up at him with mild surprise, as though he had come home from the shops and made an unnecessary fuss.

“You look dreadful.”

He laughed once, a sound that hurt his throat.

“Haven’t slept.”

“And that jacket.”

He looked down at the brown jacket he wore for working outside. One pocket hung lower than the other from years of carrying screws.

“What’s wrong with it?”

“We’ve discussed this.”

They had. She had tried to throw it away while he was wearing it. He put his free hand over hers. The shape under the blanket moved, and he stopped smiling.

“Who is that?”

Margaret glanced over her shoulder, but only her eyes moved. Her neck remained very still.

“Sit down first.”

“I want to know.”

“David, I can’t hold myself up all night.”

He drew the chair closer and sat. Its feet settled into pale grooves beneath the mattress edge. He noticed the new felt pad on one leg had peeled back and was stuck to the floor. The grooves continued beyond it toward the bed.

Margaret leaned forward. He knew the movement and raised his arm to support her. She stopped before resting against it.

“Just stay until I fall asleep.”

“Then what?”

“Then you can go.”

He leaned forward and kissed her forehead. Her hair brushed his mouth. It smelled of the shampoo he had used when washing it over the basin, holding the back of her head in one hand while he poured with the other. She had always told him the water was too hot before testing it.

“Is this hurting you?” he asked.

“Only when you move.”

He settled back carefully. Her knees were touching his. Beneath the thin nightdress he could see the shape of the joint, as familiar as the scar in her palm. He had wrapped a towel around those knees while changing the sheets so she wouldn’t get cold.

“I don’t know what to do,” he said.

“You’re doing it.”

He looked at their joined hands. The left sleeve of his jacket was turned up where he had washed his face at Claire’s. Margaret used to straighten his cuffs before they went out, sometimes while arguing with him about something else. He wanted her to do it now. He wanted to be late for dinner because she couldn’t find an earring. He wanted to be irritated with her and certain there would be time afterward to stop.

“Can you come home with me?”

“We are home.”

He looked around the room. The lamp cast the same light across her shoulder. He had spent hours in that chair wanting to be elsewhere. Now he struggled to remember why.

Her hand tightened. He looked down. Her thumb lay against the outside of his wrist, although he had taken her left hand with his left. He shifted his fingers, trying to understand the position. The pressure moved beneath his palm without her wrist turning.

She tucked a loose thread at her cuff back into the sleeve. It eased out again, slowly, pointing toward his hand. There was no draft on his face, but the thread moved as though searching for one.

From the hall Claire said, “Dad, answer me.”

Margaret’s eyes went to the doorway.

“Turn that off.”

“It’s Claire.”

“I know who it is.”

The shape behind her made a small, dissatisfied sound. Margaret’s mouth moved at the same instant, as if she had swallowed something unpleasant.

David leaned sideways to see past her.

“Take the blanket off him.”

“Leave him alone.”

“Who is he?”

His own voice answered from the pillow. “You’ll wake her.”

Margaret looked at him. Her lips were parted. The words had seemed to come from behind her, but he had felt the breath of them on his fingers.

He began to stand.

“Sit down,” she said.

“I need to speak to Claire.”

“She’s always finding ways to take you away from me.”

He stopped moving. He looked directly at her face. Margaret had disliked several of Claire’s decisions and one of her boyfriends. She had spent an entire Christmas dinner refusing to address him by anything but the dog’s name. But when Claire called, she had answered. During the last weeks, she had made David leave the room so their daughter could complain without worrying about him.

“You never said that about her.”

Margaret’s expression softened at once.

“She’s got enough on her plate.”

The words were his. So was the little apologetic emphasis on enough. He had said them outside the door the night before.

He tried to withdraw his hand.

Something beneath the bed touched his shoe.

Gus cried out. It was the sharp, surprised yelp he had made when he caught his paw in a drain cover as a puppy. The sound came from directly beneath David’s chair. He bent forward before he could think, reaching with his free hand toward the darkness under the mattress.

Through the doorway he saw Gus standing on the stair. The dog’s mouth was closed. His lead stretched from his collar to the post.

Under the bed, Gus cried again. Before the cry came Margaret’s tired breath, David’s lower one, and the small click of a thumbnail against a button.

David straightened so violently that the chair struck the bedframe. Margaret’s fingers tightened across his knuckles. He reached past her with his right hand and caught the blanket.

“Don’t,” she said, in both voices.

He pulled.

There was no man beneath it. The raised shape folded down along its length, taking Margaret backward with it. For an instant he saw her face stretched sideways without losing its expression. Then the mattress opened around the place where she sat, and something pale moved through the opening in broad, slow folds.

Her hand stayed on his.

“David,” she said. “Look what you’re doing.”

He pulled away. Her forearm lengthened out of the sleeve. The blue piping stayed at the wrist while the skin beyond it continued to arrive, pale and seamless, until her face was on the pillow and her hand still held him beside the chair.

He couldn’t get his left foot back. Something had closed around his ankle beneath the frame. He kicked with the other leg and struck the washbasin. It rolled on its rim, making a ridiculous plastic clatter.

“Don’t make this difficult,” Margaret said.

He had said that to her once while changing a wet sheet. She had cried, and he had apologized. The thing used the same gentle, exhausted tone he had used afterward.

He pushed against the bed with his right hand. The surface gave beneath his palm and rose around his fingers. He snatched it back. The hand holding his left shifted its grip, and he felt the bones press together.

“You said you’d stay.”

He drove both heels into the floor and shoved the chair backward. It tipped, hit the wardrobe, and fell. The grip on his ankle slid over his shoe. He pulled his foot free of it and landed on his right shoulder with the chair underneath him.

Pain ran down his arm. He could not get a full breath. His left hand was still raised above him, caught in Margaret’s hand. He planted his bare heel against the bedframe and pulled with the weight of his whole body.

For a moment nothing gave. Then the skin across his knuckles tore and his hand came loose.

He fell flat. Blood ran between his fingers. The bedroom door was moving toward its frame. He watched the wedge slide an inch across the laminate, then catch. The gap stopped narrowing with less than a foot left open.

Beyond it, Gus was barking. Claire’s voice came from the phone, thin and insistent.

“Get out of the room. Dad, get out.”

David rolled onto his stomach. His injured hand wouldn’t take his weight. He pushed with his right forearm and dragged himself toward the door, catching the edge of the road atlas beneath his knee. The cover tore. A page stuck to the blood on his fingers.

The chair scraped behind him. He looked back. It was upright again, moving toward the bedside in short, deliberate pulls. One arm lay across its cushion, palm up, waiting where he would have put his hand.

Margaret’s head rose from the pillow.

“You’ll fall,” she said.

He crawled faster. Something caught the back of his jacket and pulled him flat. The collar pressed against his throat. He turned onto his side, got his right arm out of its sleeve, and tried to shrug free. His left cuff caught on his swollen hand.

He couldn’t breathe properly. He pulled the sleeve with his teeth, tasted old fabric and blood, and pushed his damaged fingers through. The jacket left him abruptly. He struck his chin on the floor.

His phone was visible now, upright against the wall on its shelf. He could see the green call symbol. He could see Gus’s feet planted on the stair, the lead vibrating with each bark. He fixed his eyes on those feet and dragged himself toward them.

At the door he turned sideways and pushed his right shoulder through the gap. The wedge slipped. The edge of the door pressed against his ribs, forcing air out of him. He reached across the hall and caught the bottom of the stair rail. The wood was solid beneath his fingers.

He pulled until his hip cleared the frame and his legs followed. He lay on the runner with his cheek against the dog’s lead.

“Gus,” Margaret called.

The dog stopped barking. His ears went forward. David caught the lead as Gus stepped down toward the opening, then hauled it back and wrapped it around his wrist.

“No. Stay here.”

He got his knees beneath him. A pale hand was coming through the gap at floor level, its fingers feeling along the laminate. It stopped at the metal strip beneath the door and curled there. He could see the scar beneath its thumb.

David reached inside the gap with his right foot and kicked the wedge loose. He caught the outside handle with his good hand and pulled the door toward him. The hand flattened against the jamb. The door stopped an inch from closing.

“You’re hurting me,” Margaret said.

He braced his bare heel against the opposite skirting board and leaned backward, holding the handle with his right hand and the lead trapped beneath his left forearm. The door shuddered. The pale wrist turned a full circle. The fingers bent backward and withdrew through the remaining space.

The latch caught.

He drove the bolt home with the heel of his hand.

For a few seconds he couldn’t get up. He sat with his back against the opposite wall, staring at the little brass keeper. There was blood on the handle and a strip of blue paper stuck across his knuckles.

Behind the door, Margaret began asking for water again.

He unlooped the lead from the post, picked up the phone, and went outside with the dog.

Claire found him in the passenger seat with both doors open. He had helped Gus into the back and then been unable to work out how to shut everything without using his left hand. Blood had soaked through the kitchen towel he had snatched from the oven rail.

She stopped her car behind his and ran across the driveway.

“Let me see.”

He held out his hand. She looked once, then pressed the towel back over it and told him to keep it raised. Her fingers were shaking as she unlocked her phone.

From the downstairs window, David’s voice called, “Claire.”

She looked up.

The kitchen light showed the edge of the blind. The bedroom window was dark. The voice came again, louder this time, asking her to come around to the door.

Claire turned back to her father. He had not moved his mouth.

“Don’t go in,” he said.

She called for help. She gave the address, said her father was injured, and said there was someone inside the house who must not be approached. When the dispatcher asked a question David couldn’t hear, she said she didn’t know how many people, and then she repeated that nobody should enter the downstairs bedroom.

She stayed beside him while they waited. Once she looked toward the window, but when the voice called again she kept her eyes on his hand. He watched the blue-white light of her phone fall across her face. There was a red line on her cheek where she had slept on a crease in her pillow.

“I lied about the tablets,” he said.

“I know.”

“I’m sorry.”

She nodded without looking up.

He thought of the video with the map. For a confused moment he wanted to go back for it, and his good hand moved toward the open car door. Then he saw his phone on the seat beside him. It was there. The video, her laugh, everything he had recorded was there.

A patrol car arrived with its lights turning silently over the houses. Claire went to meet it. She pointed toward the bedroom window and held out her phone. One of the officers listened while the other stood beside David’s car, asking him what had happened to his hand. David said something inside had held it. He couldn’t make the account any clearer than that.

The officer heard the voice from the house. He looked down at David, then called his colleague back from the front path.

They stayed outside. The injured hand needed attention; Claire would take him to the hospital while the officers waited for assistance. She gave them both recordings and her telephone number. David watched one officer move to the pavement where he could see the bedroom window without standing beneath it.

Claire helped Gus onto the back seat of her car and settled David in front. The dog pushed his head between the seats. David put his good hand beneath the heavy chin.

When Claire started the engine, Margaret called his name.

It was her ordinary voice now, clear and slightly impatient, the voice that had called him back for his keys or the shopping list. He looked toward the house. Claire waited with her foot on the brake.

“Drive,” he said.

At the end of the driveway she called him again. He kept his hand on the dog.

At eleven o’clock the band started “Shout,” and every Russo over the age of fifty went to the floor like it was a fire drill.

Tommy stayed at table nine with his club soda. He had asked the bartender for a lime in it, the way he always did at these things, because a club soda with a lime looks like a drink and nobody asks you about it. Fourteen months, and he still did that. His sponsor said there was no shame in camouflage. You don’t owe anybody an explanation at a wedding.

His cousin Gina was in the middle of the floor with her dress hiked up in one fist, going lower and lower with the song while her new husband’s family stood in a loose ring and looked a little afraid. The husband was from Glastonbury. His people drank white wine and left early. By ten-thirty they had mostly gone, and now the room belonged to the Russos, which meant the tie had come off every man at the head table and somebody’s grandmother was holding a cigarette she wasn’t allowed to light.

Uncle Carmine was on the floor too. He was seventy-three and had a new hip, and he was doing the thing with his arms he had been doing at weddings since the Nixon administration. His shirt had come out in the back. His face was the color of the tablecloths.

Tommy watched him and felt what he always felt watching Carmine, which was a kind of love that didn’t need anything from anybody. Carmine had taught him to swim at Hammonasset. Carmine had taught him to drive, in this same Buick’s older brother, in the Stop & Shop parking lot on Sunday mornings before the store opened. Carmine was the uncle who slipped you a twenty and told you not to tell your mother, then told your mother himself the minute you left the room.

The song ended. Everybody clapped for themselves. Carmine made it back to his chair and sat down hard.

A few minutes later, Aunt Connie came across the room with her purse under her arm and her shoes in her hand. She sat down in the empty chair next to Tommy and put a set of car keys on the tablecloth between them.

“He can’t drive,” she said.

“No kidding.”

“I’m staying at Gina’s tonight. I promised her I’d help with the gifts in the morning, and she’s got the baby monitor for the dog, don’t ask.” She pushed the keys another inch toward him. “Can you take him home?”

Tommy looked at the keys. There was a small plastic Saint Christopher on the ring, the paint worn off his face.

“Me?”

“You’re the only one,” Connie said, and then she heard what she’d said and looked at him. “I mean you’re the only one who’s sober.”

“I know what you meant.”

She put her hand on his wrist for a second. She didn’t say anything else about it, and he was grateful for that.

For eleven years, at every wedding and every funeral and every Christmas Eve, somebody had taken the keys away from him. His mother. His sister. Once, memorably, a state trooper. He had been driven home from this family’s parties in the back seat of more cars than he could count, and a couple of times he had woken up in the back seat of a car that wasn’t going anywhere.

He picked up the keys. They were heavier than car keys should be. Carmine kept his whole life on that ring: the house, the shed, the church hall where he was on the parish council, a key to Connie’s sister’s condo in Florida that nobody had used since 2011.

Across the room, his mother was watching him. She didn’t come over. She just raised her glass of wine about an inch off the table, and he nodded, and she put it down.

The Buick

It took ten minutes to get Carmine out of the building. He had to say goodbye to everybody, and everybody had to tell him he looked great, and he had to tell Gina’s new husband that Gina had been a biter as a child, and he had to go back for his jacket, and then he had to go back for the jacket’s contents, which turned out to be a comb and two cigars in a plastic sleeve.

The parking lot was cold and wet. It had rained during the toasts. The Buick was at the far end under a light that buzzed.

“I’ll drive,” Carmine said.

“No, you won’t.”

“I’m fine.”

“Aunt Connie gave me the keys.”

Carmine considered this, rocking a little on his heels. Then he put up both hands like a man being arrested. “The wife has spoken.”

Tommy got him into the passenger side. It took a while. The new hip didn’t like to bend, so Carmine went in backward, sitting first and swinging his legs around one at a time, groaning like it was an opera. Tommy buckled him in because Carmine couldn’t find the buckle and was starting to take it personally.

Then Tommy walked around the back of the car and stood for a second by the trunk.

He wasn’t sure why he stopped. The rain had left everything shining. From inside the hall he could still hear the band, muffled, playing something slow now for the last few couples. He could smell wet asphalt and the cigarette somebody was finally smoking by the door.

He got in, adjusted the seat, and started the car. The radio came on loud, an oldies station out of Hartford. Carmine turned it up.

“Who taught you to drive?” Carmine said.

“You did.”

“That’s right. Stop & Shop.” He tapped the dashboard. “Hands at ten and two.”

“Nobody does ten and two anymore. It’s nine and three now. Because of the airbags.”

“The airbags,” Carmine said with enormous contempt, and closed his eyes.

The Old Road

Winsted was forty minutes up Route 8 if you took the highway. Carmine didn’t take the highway. Carmine had never taken the highway. The highway was for people from New York.

“Take the old road,” he said, eyes still closed. “Through Thomaston.”

“It’s longer.”

“It’s prettier.”

“It’s midnight. You can’t see anything.”

“I know what’s there.”

So Tommy took the old road. It ran along the river most of the way, two lanes with no shoulder, past closed gas stations and a Dunkin’ Donuts and the dark shapes of the old brass mills. The wipers went every few seconds. The radio played the Four Seasons, and Carmine sang the high parts without opening his eyes, and he was not good, and he did not care.

After a few miles he stopped singing and opened his eyes and looked at Tommy.

“So how’s the thing,” he said.

“What thing?”

“The program. The meetings.”

“It’s good.”

“You still go?”

“Four times a week.”

Carmine whistled. “Four. Like a job.”

“Kind of.”

“And it works?”

Tommy thought about how to answer that. He could give the answer he gave at work, or the answer he gave his mother, or the one from the Big Book about how it works if you work it, which always made people nod like he had said something about the weather.

“So far,” he said.

“So far.” Carmine nodded slowly, like this was the most reasonable thing he had heard all night. “One day at a time, huh?”

He said it the way a lot of people said it, with a little smile around the edges, half teasing. Tommy had learned not to mind. People made fun of the slogans because they didn’t know what it was like to need one.

Carmine reached into his jacket. For a second Tommy thought he was going for the cigars. Instead he came out with a nip bottle, one of those little plastic airplane bottles of Seagram’s, and cracked it open with his thumb.

“Carmine.”

“What? You’re driving. I’m not driving.”

“There’s an open container law.”

“Arrest me.” He drank half of it. The smell hit the car right away, sweet and sharp, and Tommy felt it land somewhere behind his breastbone, the way it always did. Not a thought. Lower than a thought. Something in him that sat up and turned its head.

He cracked the window. The cold came in, and the smell of the river, and he breathed that instead.

Carmine noticed. He looked at the window and then at the bottle in his hand, and for a second something went across his face that Tommy couldn’t read.

“This bother you?”

“It’s fine.”

“Tell me if it bothers you.”

“It’s fine, Uncle Carmine.”

Carmine screwed the cap back on and put the bottle in the cup holder. He didn’t finish it. He looked out the window at the dark.

Thomaston

They came into Thomaston a little after midnight. The whole town was asleep except the bar on Main Street, which had its lights on and two men smoking out front under the awning. The traffic light in front of it was red. There was no one else on the road, and Tommy stopped anyway and waited, because that’s what you do.

“Donna’s wedding,” Carmine said.

Tommy looked over. Carmine was still looking out the window, at the bar.

“What about it?”

“You remember it?”

“Sure. Sort of. I was a kid.”

“You were fourteen.”

The light turned green. Tommy drove through.

“It was at the Elks,” Carmine said. “In Naugatuck. July. Hot as hell. You were in that suit your mother bought you at Sears that was too big in the shoulders.”

“I remember the suit.”

“Me and your father and Frankie DeLuca were out in the garage behind the hall. Frankie had a cooler. You came looking for your father because your mother wanted him for a picture.”

Tommy kept his hands on the wheel. Nine and three.

“You remember this,” Carmine said. It wasn’t a question.

He did. He hadn’t thought about it in a long time, but he remembered it the way you remember certain afternoons from being a kid, where you can’t recall anything that happened the week before or after but that one day is sharp all the way through. The garage smelled like cut grass and gasoline. The door was open and the light was coming in low and orange. His father was sitting on an upside-down bucket with his tie in his pocket. And Carmine held out a red plastic cup and said, here, Tommy, you’re a man now, try this.

It was Seven and Seven. It tasted like a flat soda somebody had spilled perfume into. He coughed, and all three men laughed, and his father slapped him on the back and said that’s a Russo, and Frankie DeLuca said give the kid another one. Carmine gave him another one.

He remembered walking back into the hall afterward feeling like the floor was a boat. He remembered his mother taking one look at him and saying, what did they do, and his father saying, relax, Lucy, it’s a wedding. He remembered being happy. He remembered it as one of the happiest nights of his life, and he had never, not once, told anybody that part.

“I remember,” Tommy said.

“I gave you that drink.”

“I know.”

“I thought it was funny.”

“It was a wedding,” Tommy said. “Everybody was drinking.”

“You were fourteen,” Carmine said again, louder, like Tommy hadn’t heard him the first time. “I held it out to you like I was giving you a present. I thought, that’s how it goes, that’s how I got mine. My uncle Nunzio gave me mine at twelve. I thought I was doing you a favor.”

Tommy didn’t say anything. The road bent left along the river, and he followed it.

“Then you got the DUI,” Carmine said. “The first one. You were nineteen. Your mother called Connie crying, and Connie told me, and I sat in the kitchen and all I could think about was that garage.”

“Uncle Carmine.”

“And then the second one. And then the thing with the job. And then that time in the hospital, when you were, when they didn’t know.” He stopped. “Every time. Every time I heard something, I was back in that garage holding out that cup.”

His voice had gone thin and high.

Tommy realized he was gripping the wheel so tightly his hands hurt. He made himself loosen them.

He had made his own list, the way you’re supposed to. Fourteen names on a yellow legal pad. He had sat across from his sister in a diner and told her about the money he took out of her purse. He had written a letter to the manager at the Honda dealership. He had called his mother. He knew how to say I was wrong. He had gotten good at it.

Nobody had ever told him what to do when someone brought their list to you.

He had spent eleven years blaming everything. His father, his job, his ex-girlfriend, his brain chemistry, the state of Connecticut. He had never blamed Carmine.

Carmine had been carrying it for twenty years. Tommy hadn’t even known it was there to carry.

“I’d have found it somewhere,” Tommy said. “If it wasn’t you, it would’ve been somebody else. A kid at school. Anybody.”

“Yeah,” Carmine said. “But it was me.”

There wasn’t anything to say to that, so Tommy didn’t try.

He wanted to pull over. He wanted to stop the car on the side of the road and turn and look at his uncle and have it out, whatever it was, the thanks or the anger or the absolution or whatever would come if he let it. A closed gas station came up on the right, its lot empty and wide enough to turn into. He eased off the gas. Carmine shifted beside him, trying to settle his new hip against the seat. Tommy let the entrance pass. The job tonight was to get him home. He let the thing sit in the car with them.

Winsted

Carmine fell asleep somewhere past Torrington. His head went against the window, and his mouth opened, and he snored in a way that sounded like someone sanding a door.

The radio played the Drifters, then the Platters. Tommy turned it down but didn’t turn it off. He thought Carmine might wake up if it went quiet.

He thought about his father, dead four years now, sitting on that bucket in the garage. His father had never said anything about that day. His father had never said anything about any of it. When Tommy went into treatment the first time, his father drove him there and carried his bag to the door and said, you’ll be fine, you’re a Russo. Same words. Tommy had heard them differently by then.

He thought about the nip bottle in the cup holder, half full, sweating a little in the warm car. He could see it at the bottom edge of his vision without looking at it. He did not look at it. He had learned that too. You don’t have to look at a thing to know exactly where it is.

At a stop sign in Winsted he picked it up, rolled the window down, and poured it out onto the road. Then he put the empty bottle in his coat pocket, because he wasn’t going to throw it on the ground in front of somebody’s house.

Carmine’s house was a small green ranch at the top of a hill, with a flag on the porch and a plastic heron by the front walk that Connie hated and Carmine refused to get rid of. The porch light was on. Connie had left it on for them.

Tommy parked and came around and opened the passenger door. Carmine woke up confused, and for a second he didn’t know where he was, and he looked at Tommy like he was looking at a stranger.

“You’re home,” Tommy said.

“Oh.” Carmine blinked. “Oh, good.”

Getting him out of the car was worse than getting him in. Tommy unbuckled him and got an arm under his shoulders and counted three, and they stood up together, both of them breathing hard. Carmine leaned on him the whole way up the walk. He smelled like cigars and sweat and the wedding.

At the door, Carmine patted all his pockets and found nothing, and Tommy remembered the keys were in his own hand. He found the house key on the ring and opened the door and reached in and turned on the hall light.

Carmine stood on the threshold. He had one hand on the door frame to hold himself up. He looked back at Tommy, and his eyes were wet and red, and he was sober in the way drunk people sometimes get sober for about ten seconds when something matters.

“You’re a better man than me,” he said.

Tommy thought about the garage. The orange light, the cup, his father’s hand. He thought about the Stop & Shop parking lot on Sunday mornings, Carmine’s big hand over his on the gearshift, Carmine saying easy, easy, you got it, you got it, don’t look at me, look at the road.

“You taught me to drive, too,” Tommy said.

Carmine looked at him for a long moment. Then he nodded once, and put his hand on Tommy’s cheek, the way he used to when Tommy was small, a quick hard pat that was almost a slap. Then he turned and went into the house.

Tommy waited on the porch until he heard the bedroom door. Then he locked the front door behind him, and walked back down to the Buick, and sat in the driver’s seat without starting it.

After a while he took out his phone and texted Connie.

Home. He’s in bed.

The reply came back fast. She’d been waiting up.

Thank you honey. Keep the car tonight. Bring it back tomorrow.

He started the engine. The radio came back on, loud, the Four Seasons again. He turned it off, and then he turned it back on, low, and drove down the hill with the window cracked, taking the old road home.

We got my mother’s china cabinet halfway through the door before Ben asked whether the plates were still inside.

“Only the good ones,” she said.

I had the low end. From where I stood, with a brass handle entering my stomach, all of them felt good.

“Ma.”

“I wrapped them.”

Ben closed his eyes. Behind him, the door closer pushed steadily against his shoulder.

“We’re putting it down,” he said.

“You’ll scratch the floor.”

“Then we’re putting it down carefully.”

We lowered the cabinet onto the blanket we’d used in the van. My mother watched its feet touch the floor, then bent to inspect a mark that had been there when we arrived.

“That’s old,” I said.

“How do you know?”

“Because I saw it before we brought the cabinet in.”

She considered this. “Get a picture.”

Ben looked at me across the cabinet. Sweat had darkened the collar of his shirt. He was fifty-eight, three years younger than I was, and had one knee that occasionally required the rest of us to reconsider our plans. We’d carried the cabinet up the stairs because it wouldn’t make the turn into the elevator. My mother had ridden up with her purse.

I took a rubber wedge from my tool bag and pushed it under the door. Ben rolled his shoulder.

“There’s an elevator,” my mother told us.

“We saw it.”

“You should have used it.”

“Next time,” Ben said, “we’ll put it inside the cabinet.”

She laughed and tapped his arm. She liked him. That was never as simple as it sounded.

My sister appeared from the bedroom carrying a pillowcase full of something that clinked.

“Who packed the medicine cabinet?”

“I did,” my mother said.

“Where’s the medicine?”

“In my purse.”

Elaine opened the pillowcase. “Then why do we have three bottles of nail polish remover?”

“Because they’re expensive.”

My mother had been in the apartment twenty minutes. Already there were places we ought to have put things, things we ought to have brought, and a switch that ought to have controlled a different light. The living room faced a parking lot instead of her garden. She had looked through the window once and asked whether the curtains could go up first.

We emptied the cabinet. Each plate was wrapped in a dish towel, with enough care to survive anything except being transported inside a piece of furniture by two old men. I passed them to Elaine. Ben checked the shelf brackets and found one loose.

“Good thing we stopped,” he said.

My mother looked away.

I worked at a community college, where people called me when a door wouldn’t latch or an auditorium had been promised to three departments. I knew the furniture measurements. I’d measured her cabinet twice. I had not thought to open it.

Ben steadied the bottom while I tightened the bracket. He gave my wrist a small squeeze when I reached past him. Then he pointed to the cabinet’s right foot.

“You take that corner. On three. Actual three.”

“You always go on two.”

“Because you say three while you’re still explaining.”

We lifted it, got it through, and set it against the wall my mother had selected. She studied it.

“Maybe the other wall.”

Elaine said her name. Not Ma. Rosa.

“I’m only looking.”

Ben went downstairs for another load. I was standing in front of the cabinet catching my breath when my mother reached up and straightened my collar. She worked the folded edge out from underneath itself, then brushed something from my shoulder.

“There,” she said.

I stood still until she’d finished.

When I was nine, I could sell a used car without having driven one.

There was a man on television who stood among rows of cars and shouted about prices while pointing at things outside the picture. Everything was unbelievable. The selection. The savings. The fact that his competitors continued to exist.

I did him at family parties.

An uncle would say, “Do the car guy,” and somebody would turn down the television. I liked the moment before I began, when people were settling back and giving me their faces. My mother would already be smiling. She knew what was coming and liked it anyway.

I used her handbag as a microphone. I’d walk between the dining room chairs, describing them as late-model vehicles with low mileage and financing available to qualified buyers. I didn’t know what financing was. I knew qualified buyers were supposed to feel good about themselves.

One afternoon I sold my Uncle Lou the chair he was sitting in.

“You’ll never get another deal like this,” I told him.

“How much?”

I named a number I’d heard on television.

“That’s a lot for a chair.”

“It’s got a man in it.”

The room broke up. I could feel the laughter through my feet.

I went further. My Aunt Jean had a way of lifting her wrist when she thought someone was being ridiculous. I gave Uncle Lou the wrist. I told him, in her voice, that he was impossible, absolutely impossible, and should take his business elsewhere.

Someone said, “Look at him.”

I thought that meant keep going.

Then my cousin Richie, who was seventeen and therefore practically a man, copied the movement. He let his hand fall loose and minced between two chairs.

“Little lady,” he said.

There was more laughter. Different laughter, although nobody had moved.

“Enough with the hands,” Uncle Lou told me. “Stand like a boy.”

I put the handbag on the table. Aunt Jean reached for it and said Richie ought to find something useful to do. Someone turned the television back up. A baseball player was running across the screen. I had no idea what had happened to the ball.

I stayed beside my chair until my mother called me into the kitchen.

She had saved the corner of the baked macaroni where the cheese went brown. I liked that part. She put it on a plate and cut a piece of bread for me.

“You were funny,” she said.

I looked at her.

“You know how they get. Don’t encourage them.”

She adjusted my collar. It was a shirt with a stiff edge that scratched my neck. She had ironed it that morning while I watched cartoons, and when I complained she had put a folded handkerchief inside the back so it wouldn’t rub.

She was the person who did that.

She was also waiting for me to say I understood.

I nodded. She kissed the top of my head and told me to eat before my cousins took everything.

Later I stood in the bathroom, between the hamper and the sink, and tried the car man again. The mirror was low enough for me to see my shoulders. I kept my arms down. The sentences came out less easily. I had to find other things to do with my face.

At the next party I sold the sofa. My uncles laughed. Nobody said anything about my hands.

For years afterward, when somebody asked what I’d been like as a child, my mother said I was a born entertainer.

The woman across the landing came over with a folding shopping cart and a roll of paper towels.

“You can use these,” she said. “Both of them. The cart I need back.”

She was short and broad, with gray hair gathered in a clip and a sweatshirt from a university I doubted she’d attended. The sleeves were rolled to different heights. She surveyed the boxes with the attention of somebody who knew which of them would still be there in November.

“Don’t put anything against that heater.”

My mother immediately looked at me. I moved a box.

The woman introduced herself as Mrs. Alvarez. My mother told her where she’d lived before, how long she’d been there, and how little of her furniture she had been permitted to keep.

“She kept all of it,” Elaine said.

“Not the dining room.”

“You don’t have a dining room.”

Mrs. Alvarez nodded toward the cabinet. “That’s nice.”

My mother brightened. It had belonged to her mother, she explained. Then it had belonged to her. She paused, giving the object an ancestry more dignified than the three minutes we’d recently spent discussing its feet.

Ben came up in the elevator with a box of lamps. One shade was balanced on his head. My mother had put it there downstairs because his hands were full, and he’d left it.

Mrs. Alvarez looked at him.

“Is that included?”

“He’s extra,” I said.

Ben lowered the box. My mother took the shade off his head and smoothed a dent with her thumb.

“This is my daughter, Elaine. She lives right down the road. And my son, Nicholas.”

“Nick,” I said.

“And this is Ben, his neighbor. He was good enough to come and help.”

I was holding a lamp cord. There were three knots in it, each apparently dependent on the other two. I remember that very clearly.

“You live in the same building?” Mrs. Alvarez asked me.

“Yes,” I said.

Ben’s hands stayed on the box.

“Can’t get rid of him,” I added.

Mrs. Alvarez smiled. My mother smiled. I pulled a length of cord through a knot that wasn’t the right knot and made it smaller.

We did live in the same building. We owned it together. There was one kitchen, one bathroom with inadequate storage, and a bedroom where Ben had been complaining about my reading light for seven years.

“Good neighbors are important,” Mrs. Alvarez said. “The man downstairs used to take my trash. Then he got married.”

“What happened?” Elaine asked.

“He still takes it. But now I have to give her cookies too.”

My mother laughed. She invited Mrs. Alvarez to stay for coffee, although the kettle was missing and the coffee was somewhere between the two addresses. Mrs. Alvarez said she had laundry in the basement.

“Later. You’ll be here.”

She left the cart beside the doorway. As she went out, Ben lifted his hands from the lamp box and straightened. I reached for the other end.

“Bedroom?” I asked.

He shook his head. “She’s got a table for them in here.”

His voice was normal. I found that encouraging.

Elaine went downstairs to check the van. My mother began telling Ben which lamp needed a new switch. He listened and turned it over to look at the base.

I got the cord untangled. I wound it neatly around my hand, then unwound it because we were going to need it plugged in.

From the bedroom my mother called, “Nicholas, come look at this window.”

I went immediately.

Danny Walsh had a cassette player with one speaker that worked only if you held the case shut.

He brought it to my house in a grocery bag. His older brother had dropped it, then said Danny had broken it by lending it to him. We were sixteen. We knew this sort of thing could happen.

I had a small screwdriver set and more confidence than the equipment justified. We spread the pieces across the desk in my bedroom. My mother brought us sandwiches and asked Danny about his family. He answered politely, with the patience of somebody who had learned that adults often asked several questions without leaving a space for the answers.

She liked him. She said so afterward. Nice boy. Good manners.

We worked on the cassette player three afternoons that week. By the second afternoon we’d repaired the speaker and broken the button that ejected the tape. The tape belonged to his brother too.

“We could just tell him it only plays this album now,” I said.

“He doesn’t like it that much.”

We tried turning the machine upside down. A small spring fell out.

“That seems important,” Danny said.

He had a gap between his front teeth. When he laughed he sometimes put his tongue there, as if checking that it was still available. I began saying things to make him do it.

On Friday, my mother went to pick up my grandmother. My father was at work. Danny sat beside me on the bed while I held two bare wires against the speaker terminal. The song came through with a rough buzzing underneath it.

“Don’t move,” he said.

I didn’t.

His knee was against mine. He left it there. I watched the little plastic reels turn through the window in the cassette. There was a scratch across the window. I followed it with my eyes because looking at him seemed likely to stop whatever was happening.

Then he said my name.

I turned. He kissed me so quickly I barely had time to close my eyes. When he pulled back, the music stopped. I’d let go of the wires.

“Sorry,” he said.

“It’s the connection.”

“I didn’t mean that.”

“I know.”

I kissed him. We sat there afterward, touching shoulders, while the cassette turned without making a sound. He picked up the loose spring and rolled it between his fingers.

“We should probably figure out where this goes.”

“Probably.”

Neither of us moved.

That Monday, a boy named Gary made a joke about Danny in the school cafeteria. It concerned the way Danny had looked at somebody in gym. There were five of us at the table. Danny was in line, close enough that I could see the carton of milk on his tray.

Gary looked at me.

“You’d know. He’s always at your house.”

I could have said we were fixing something. That answer was there. I had used it with my mother and my father and everyone who had asked.

Instead I said, “Jesus, I’d have to be desperate.”

Gary laughed. The boy beside him knocked his elbow into mine.

Danny had stopped moving. Someone behind him wanted the milk. He shifted his tray and let them reach past.

I looked down at my lunch.

He didn’t sit with us. After school I caught him near the bus and began explaining that Gary was an asshole. Danny said he knew.

“Then why are you mad at me?”

The bus driver closed the luggage compartment with a bang. Danny looked toward the sound.

“I’m not coming over,” he said.

He got on the bus. I stood beside the yellow fender and tried to think of something I could say through an open window.

For several days I left the cassette player on my desk. Then I put the parts in the grocery bag and returned them at school. He took the bag by its handles.

“You have to hold the wires together,” I told him.

“Okay.”

“It plays.”

“Okay.”

My mother asked about him that weekend. I said he was busy.

She was ironing. She pressed steam into a sleeve and lifted the iron to inspect her work.

“He was a nice boy,” she said.

I went upstairs.

The window in my mother’s bedroom opened perfectly. She didn’t like the screen.

“There’s a little space at the bottom.”

I pushed it into its track.

“Now there isn’t.”

She leaned close to check. Outside, somebody was walking a small white dog along the edge of the parking lot. She watched them until they disappeared behind a car.

“I could have stayed another winter.”

I put my hand on the sill.

The previous winter she’d called Elaine at two in the morning because the boiler had stopped. It hadn’t stopped. The thermostat needed batteries. She’d gone downstairs to look at the boiler herself and sat on the cellar steps because she couldn’t get back up without resting. She hadn’t told Elaine that part until the next day.

“You’ll like it here,” I said.

“I didn’t say I wouldn’t.”

She went to find the kettle.

Ben carried in the bed rails. He had the bolts in a plastic sandwich bag and a socket wrench sticking out of his pocket. I took one rail from him.

“Window’s fixed.”

“Good.”

“We may need to move the parking lot.”

He put the headboard against the wall. I waited for him to say something about that. He took the bolts out of the bag and counted them.

We’d been together long enough that his ordinary silence had varieties. There was the one in which he was listening to music only he could hear, considering an instrument he’d left on his bench. There was the silence before coffee. There was the one that followed my asking him a question whose answer was printed on the container in my hand.

This was none of those.

I fitted the rail into its slot.

“She didn’t mean anything,” I said.

He looked at the bolt in his fingers.

“What did you mean?”

“When?”

He looked up.

“I didn’t want to turn it into something.”

Ben handed me a washer. “Hold that end level.”

I held it. He tightened the bolt. The wrench clicked in the small room.

“She’s having a rough day,” I said.

“I noticed.”

“Eighty-four years old, leaving the house.”

“I know how old she is.”

There was a washer missing from the other side. I knelt and looked under the dresser. I looked inside the sandwich bag. I could have used one from my tool bag in the hall, but for a while finding this particular washer became important.

“Here,” Ben said.

It was on the windowsill. He’d put it there.

We finished the frame and brought in the box spring. My mother came to the doorway to tell us which way the mattress went.

“The label at the bottom,” she said.

“We’ve got it, Rosa.”

Ben was always gentle with her. He could spend twenty minutes showing her how to change a television input and do it again the next time she called. Once she’d told me he was more patient than I was. I had agreed. It was convenient for me that he was.

He pressed down on the mattress and checked the frame for movement. Then he picked up the plastic bag and put the spare bolt in his pocket.

“I’ll take the van back,” he said. “Then I’ve got to get that clarinet barrel before the shop closes.”

“We’re getting food,” I said.

“You go ahead.”

My mother heard us. “You’re not staying?”

“I’m going home afterward.”

“I was going to order from that place Elaine likes. They have the eggplant.”

“Thank you. Another time.”

She waited. Ben bent to pick up his tool bag.

“Take something with you.”

“I’m all right.”

He kissed her cheek. He told Elaine he’d call her when the van was back with her friend. At the doorway he asked whether I had my car keys. I’d driven separately that morning.

I touched my pocket.

“Yes.”

“Okay.”

He took the stairs. I listened until I couldn’t hear his feet.

My mother stood beside the bed, holding a pillow against her stomach.

“I didn’t know he had to work.”

I could have left it there.

I said, “He doesn’t.”

Tom and I bought the wood for the shelves the following weekend. By then he had stopped being angry about the afternoon, or had stopped discussing it. At thirty-six, I found those conditions practically identical.

We’d been together eight years. Our apartment had a wall long enough for bookshelves, but the floor dropped almost an inch from one end to the other. Tom had measured it in six places. He had a drawing on graph paper and a saw borrowed from a friend who wanted it back by Sunday.

“We can shim the bottom,” he said.

“We could move.”

“We moved the last time you didn’t want to paint.”

That was unfair. There had also been a parking issue.

He was good with plans. He made a shopping list with the board lengths written beside the quantities, then showed me the space left for the stereo. We disagreed about the height. I wanted room above it. He wanted fewer opportunities for me to leave things on it.

“Things such as?”

He looked at the stereo. There was a screwdriver, a coffee cup, and a pair of my socks on top.

“I was going to move those.”

“Before or after the fire?”

He’d made coffee. The apartment smelled of it and the toast he’d burned while looking for his pencil. There were days when I knew exactly how fortunate I was, although I rarely said so in a way he could use.

My mother called as we were getting ready to go.

Her kitchen faucet had begun making a noise. She held the telephone near it. I listened to water running through a perfectly ordinary faucet.

“Do you hear that?”

“I hear water.”

“Underneath.”

She wanted me to come over. My aunt and cousin were coming for lunch. She had made peppers. I could look at the faucet while I was there.

“We were just going out.”

“Well, come first. You have to eat.”

She didn’t ask who we was. She knew.

I told Tom I’d be an hour. He put the graph paper on the table and said he’d clear the wall while I was gone.

The faucet needed a new aerator. I unscrewed the old one, rinsed out some grit, and screwed it back on. Four minutes. I ran the water for another minute to be certain, then stood beside the stove eating a piece of bread dipped in the pan.

My mother put a plate in front of me.

My aunt arrived. My cousin came with a woman I hadn’t met. We ate and talked about a restaurant that had closed and a relative who had purchased a boat without consulting his wife. My cousin’s girlfriend asked whether there was anybody in my life.

“He works too much,” my mother said.

I smiled and reached for the bread.

“That’s what he used to tell me,” the woman said, touching my cousin’s arm.

We all laughed.

I remember enjoying that lunch. I wish I could report that I sat there in agony, aware of every minute. The peppers were good. My aunt had an account of a bus trip to Atlantic City that involved a missing husband and the wrong motel. I wanted to hear the end of it.

When I finally checked the clock, my mother was cutting cake.

I stayed for a piece. Then I helped carry the lawn chairs into the garage because rain was coming.

At home, Tom had cleared the wall. The books were stacked on the floor in careful columns. He’d vacuumed the baseboard and taped the graph paper beside the empty space.

“What happened?” he asked.

“The faucet was worse than she thought.”

“You should have called.”

“I know.”

He looked at my shirt. There was a spot of sauce near the bottom.

“Did you eat?”

“She gave me something.”

He put the saw back in its case.

Elaine called the next evening while I was out. She and Tom talked. She mentioned our aunt’s visit and asked whether he’d heard about the bus trip. There was no conspiracy to expose me. People were having ordinary conversations with the information available to them.

When I came home, he asked how long the faucet had taken.

I said I couldn’t remember exactly.

He waited.

“Ten minutes,” I said.

“And you were there four hours.”

“I couldn’t just get up in the middle of lunch.”

“Why didn’t you tell me there was lunch?”

“Because you’d have been upset.”

He sat on the sofa. Behind him, the rectangle of cleaner wall showed where the old bookcase had been.

“I could have done something else,” he said.

“We can go next Saturday.”

“I was here waiting for you.”

I began to explain my mother. He shook his head before I’d finished the first sentence.

We built the shelves. They held our books for another ten years. One corner needed two shims, and we had to cut a hole in the back for the stereo cord. Every time we moved, we took them apart and numbered the boards so they would go back together correctly.

Elaine unpacked the groceries while I lined a drawer with paper my mother had saved from the old kitchen.

It didn’t fit. The drawer was wider and shorter. My mother wanted me to trim the back, where nobody would see it, and leave the front edge because it had a pattern.

“Where’s Ben?” Elaine asked.

“Returning the van.”

“Is he coming back?”

“No.”

She put a bag of rice in the cupboard. “Did he get something to eat?”

“I don’t know.”

“You two have a fight?”

I put down the scissors.

“He’s upset about Ma telling the neighbor he’s my neighbor.”

Elaine kept her hand on the rice.

“Oh, Nick.”

“What?”

“Today?”

My mother was in the bedroom, searching for the fitted sheet. We could hear her moving boxes.

“When would be good?” I asked.

“I’m not doing this.”

She took out the rice and put it on a lower shelf. She’d been at the old house since seven. For six weeks she’d taken my mother to look at apartments, filled out forms, and listened to the reasons each place would be impossible. I had visited four of them. Elaine had visited eleven. Her husband had hauled three carloads to the donation center and brought one back after my mother discovered which dishes he’d taken.

“I know you’ve done a lot,” I said.

“It’s not about what I’ve done.”

“Some of it is.”

She looked at me, then shut the cupboard.

“She’s scared. She’s in a strange place. She doesn’t know these people.”

“Neither do I.”

“Ben knows she loves him.”

I pressed the paper flat inside the drawer. It curled at one corner.

“He heard me agree with her.”

Elaine looked toward the bedroom.

“Then talk to him.”

“I will.”

“Good. Because I can’t have a family conference every time somebody says the wrong thing.”

My mother came in carrying the sheet. She had found the fitted one but was concerned about a mark near the hem.

“It’s clean,” Elaine said. “I washed it.”

“I didn’t say it wasn’t clean.”

She put it on the counter, over the scissors.

“What wrong thing?”

Elaine began putting cans away. I watched a can of tomatoes disappear into a cupboard containing drinking glasses.

“Ben’s my husband,” I said.

My mother looked at me.

“I know who he is.”

“You told her he’s my neighbor.”

“I just met the woman.”

“I know.”

“I don’t have to tell her everything.”

“You told her Elaine’s your daughter.”

“Well, she is.”

I waited. My mother pulled the edge of the sheet toward her and examined the mark again.

“I was trying to keep things simple.”

“It wasn’t simple for him.”

She looked toward the door. “Is that why he left?”

“He left because I went along with it.”

“I didn’t ask you to.”

“No.”

That answer seemed to leave us without our next lines. Elaine put down a can. My mother folded the corner of the sheet over the mark.

I could have become loud. I was good at being loud when I had a case. I could assemble thirty years of evidence without leaving the room. My sister knew it. Her shoulders had already gone up, ready for the part where she would have to remind me that our mother was old.

I picked up the scissors from beneath the sheet.

“I shouldn’t have agreed with you,” I said.

My mother took the sheet back to the bedroom. Elaine stood beside the sink. The faucet dripped twice, stopped, then dripped again.

“You’re not wrong,” she said quietly.

I looked at her.

“But could you please help me finish?”

I trimmed the paper. She gave me two pieces of tape to hold the curled edge down. We put the cutlery in the drawer. My mother came back and moved the spoons to the other side.

Elaine ordered lunch. We ate from containers on the little kitchen table, with the chairs too close to the wall. My mother had ordered enough for Ben. She kept looking at the extra carton.

“Take that home,” she told me.

“All right.”

She asked whether I’d checked the smoke detector. I said I had. She asked where the spare lightbulbs were. I showed her. Then she asked again whether the landlord knew about the mark on the floor.

I sent Elaine the photograph.

After lunch I unpacked the medicine from my mother’s purse. The bottles went in the cupboard she’d chosen, away from the stove. She checked each label before letting me put it down.

I wrote the pharmacy number on a card because the print on the bottle was small. She put the card beside the telephone.

“Your writing’s getting terrible,” she said.

“I can type it.”

“I can read it.”

I capped the pen. Outside, the white dog was back. Its owner waited while it examined the same patch of grass.

The van was gone.

Tom used a white rental truck. He hadn’t wanted me to drive it.

By then there were many things he didn’t want me to do, although I still understood myself as the person in the relationship who could handle things. I paid bills. I worked. I repaired what broke. I could be trusted with an emergency, provided it wasn’t one I had created.

He put books in liquor-store boxes. I found that pointed until he told me they were free and had handles.

I was forty-six. There had been several bad years and enough good weekends between them to make each bad year seem interruptible. I could stop drinking for a week. Sometimes two. I could take him somewhere, cook something, become for an evening the man he remembered making plans with.

Then he would ask about money, or where I’d been, and I would become indignant at the question.

The particular argument before he left concerned money we’d put aside for a trip. I’d taken some of it. I told him the car needed work. When he asked which work, I named a part I’d replaced the previous spring.

He remembered. He’d held the light while I did it.

I told him he’d got the dates wrong.

We stood in the kitchen with the bank statement between us. He had his reading glasses on, the pair with one arm that never folded properly. I remember wishing he would take them off. They made him look patient, and I needed him to be unreasonable.

“All right,” he said finally.

I thought we’d finished.

A month later he was packing.

He took a square glass baking dish from the cupboard and wrapped it in newspaper. His mother had given it to him before we met. I’d used it for years. When he set it in a box, I said, “You’re taking that?”

He looked at the dish, then at me.

“Yes.”

I let him pack it. But I went on noticing the things he took. The good scissors. A lamp. The kitchen timer shaped like a tomato. Each object appeared to be making a decision against me.

His friend came at ten. Together they dismantled the shelves. Tom had the old numbered drawing. He put a piece of masking tape on each board and wrote the numbers again where the pencil had worn away.

“I can help,” I said.

“We’re all right.”

He didn’t say it cruelly. He had already arranged to be all right without my help.

When the truck left, I stood in the apartment with the better light and all that additional space. I called in sick on Monday. On Tuesday I went to work. I told people we’d grown apart.

For four years, that was the version.

I moved twice. I lost things in boxes I never unpacked. I changed the places where I bought alcohol so the same person wouldn’t see me too often. There were mornings when I checked my telephone before I checked the time. There were also mornings when nothing appeared to have happened, and I used those as evidence.

At fifty I called a treatment program from the parking lot at work. I had written the number on the back of a requisition form. The woman who answered asked whether I could talk privately. I looked at the empty passenger seat and said yes.

Getting sober gave me evenings of an almost insulting length.

Once, early on, I made a pork chop and boiled a potato. I ate them, washed the pan, and looked at the clock. Six-forty.

I called a man from my meeting.

“What do you do now?” I asked him.

“Right now? I’m folding towels.”

“I mean all night.”

“I’ve got quite a few towels.”

I sat at the table while he folded them. He told me about a problem with his dryer. I told him how to check the vent. By the time we hung up, it was after seven.

I made that call again. Other calls. I went where I’d said I would go. When I couldn’t manage a whole evening, I managed enough of it to telephone somebody.

Tom did not come back. Once I wrote him a letter. I kept the part where I apologized and removed most of the part where I described how hard everything had been for me. He acknowledged it. He hoped I would stay well.

I folded his reply and put it away.

“Nicholas?” my mother called.

I turned from the window.

“The kettle. Did somebody throw it out?”

The kettle was in a box marked CHRISTMAS.

So were the toaster, two bath towels, and a ceramic rabbit with a chipped ear. The box had been Christmas the last time we’d used it. My mother considered the label a historical record rather than a direction.

I plugged in the kettle and found the tea. Elaine had to go home to let her dog out. She stood in the kitchen checking things off a list on her phone.

“Bed, bathroom, food, medications. Internet guy comes Tuesday. Nick, you’ll be here?”

“Between ten and twelve.”

“They said eight to noon.”

“I told them ten. Ma knows.”

My mother looked up from the tea box.

“I can let a man into an apartment.”

Elaine kissed her. She gave me a brief hug at the door, one arm around my shoulder, the other holding her purse and an empty food container.

“Text me when you leave,” she said.

“I will.”

“You don’t have to stay all day.”

I nearly laughed. She almost did too.

My mother and I drank tea from cups wrapped that morning in her underwear. She’d washed the underwear. She told me twice.

We found places for a few more things. Her address book went beside the telephone. Her glasses went into the dish she used for them, although she was wearing another pair. I put the television remote in her hand and showed her which button turned everything on.

“That’s not the news,” she said.

“I’m showing you the button.”

“Well, put on the news.”

There was a knock. Mrs. Alvarez stood outside with her empty laundry basket against one hip.

“Can I steal my cart back?”

I looked behind the door. We’d filled it with towels and a box of cleaning products, then forgotten it.

“Sorry.”

“Don’t be. If I leave something anywhere, somebody puts something in it. Including my son.”

I lifted out the box. My mother came to the doorway, still holding the remote.

“Come in. We’re having tea.”

“I’ve got clothes downstairs. Dryer finally finished.”

Mrs. Alvarez looked past me into the apartment.

“Your helpful neighbor go home?”

The cleaning box had a damp patch underneath. A bottle had leaked. I put it on the tile instead of the wood and stood up.

“Ben’s my husband,” I said. “I should have said that before.”

Mrs. Alvarez shifted the basket.

“Oh. Well, tell him thank you. He carried my detergent down.”

“I will.”

She took the cart from me and pushed it a few inches. One wheel caught sideways.

“There. That’s what it does. You lift it a little.”

She demonstrated. My mother watched.

“I’ve got a man coming for the television Tuesday,” she said.

“Ask for a morning appointment. By afternoon they’re behind.”

“I did.”

They talked about the cable company. Mrs. Alvarez told her which grocery store delivered and warned her that the downstairs entrance stuck when it rained. She backed the cart toward the elevator, the basket balanced on top.

My mother waited until the elevator doors closed.

“You could have left it alone.”

I bent to check the leaking bottle. The cap was loose. I tightened it and wiped the bottom with a paper towel.

“I could have.”

“You make it sound like I did something terrible.”

“I told her who he is.”

She held the remote with both hands. The television was talking behind her. A man was explaining the chance of rain.

“I don’t know these people,” she said.

“I know.”

I wanted her to look at me. I wanted to see something settle in her face. She looked at the damp patch on the tile instead.

I wiped it up.

It was after four. I put the leftover eggplant in a bag, checked that her telephone was charging, and showed her where I’d left the clean sheets. She asked whether the window was locked. We checked it together.

“You’re going?”

“Yes.”

She followed me to the door. I picked up my tool bag and removed the rubber wedge. The door began to close. I caught it with my foot while she stood in the opening.

“Tuesday,” she said.

“Ten o’clock.”

“Ring. Don’t just come in.”

“I don’t have a key yet.”

“Well, ring.”

I kissed her cheek. She held my arm for a moment, then let go so I could get through.

I called Ben from the car before I started it.

He answered on the fourth ring. There was music behind him, low enough that I couldn’t identify it.

“Van’s back,” he said. “Full tank.”

“Thank you.”

“Elaine’s friend wasn’t there. I left the keys with his wife.”

“Okay.”

I shifted the bag of food off the passenger seat because it might tip over, although the car wasn’t moving.

“She’s having a hard time,” I began.

I heard Ben set something down.

“I know,” he said.

I looked through the windshield. The white dog had come out again, this time with a different person. It went directly to the patch of grass.

“That wasn’t what I called to say.”

Ben said nothing.

“I agreed with her. Then I made a joke.”

“I heard you.”

“I’m sorry.”

A car door closed somewhere behind me. I watched the dog finish its business. Its owner pulled a blue bag from a roll and stood waiting for it to find something else worth doing.

“I didn’t know what you wanted me to say,” Ben said.

“You didn’t have to say anything.”

“I know I didn’t have to. I was standing there trying to work out whether I should.”

I put my hand over my eyes.

“You shouldn’t have been.”

“No.”

We were quiet. The music changed. It was something with a trumpet.

“I told Mrs. Alvarez before I left,” I said.

“Told her what?”

“That you’re my husband.”

“Okay.”

I waited, then understood that okay was what there was.

“She said to thank you for carrying her detergent.”

“It was on the landing. I was going down.”

“Still.”

He made a sound that might have been agreement.

“What’s going to happen the next time?” he asked.

“I’m going to say it.”

“You told me that at Easter.”

I remembered. A cousin had asked who Ben was and my mother had answered before I could. That had been my explanation: before I could. We’d discussed it in the car. Ben had watched the road while I described the timing.

“Yes,” I said.

I had several things ready. I had been startled. I had been tired. I had spent the morning trying to keep my mother from crying over a house she hadn’t even liked for the last five years.

“I need to do it,” I said.

Ben didn’t answer immediately. When he did, his voice was closer to the telephone.

“Did you eat?”

“We ordered. Ma sent the eggplant.”

“I had a sandwich.”

“Do you need anything from the store?”

“Milk. We’re nearly out.”

“Anything else?”

“Just milk.”

“I’ll be home in half an hour.”

“Okay.”

After we hung up, I sat there long enough for the dog and its owner to go back inside. Then I texted Elaine that I’d left. I started the car.

At the store I bought milk. I stood for a while in front of the bakery case. Ben liked the little lemon cakes. There were four in a box, decorated with strips of peel nobody ate.

I put them in the basket. At the end of the aisle I went back and left them where they’d been.

There was a chair on the kitchen counter when I got home. Most of a chair. The seat leaned against the fruit bowl. Four legs lay on a towel beside an arrangement of clamps, and the back was on the floor where I nearly stepped on it.

Ben stood at the sink washing glue off his fingers.

“Watch the back,” he said.

“I see it.”

“You saw it with your foot.”

I moved it and set down the groceries. There wasn’t room for the eggplant. I held the bag while deciding what could safely be touched.

“You took it apart.”

“It came apart.”

“All of it?”

“Once I’d started.”

He dried his hands and moved a clamp. I put the food in the space he’d cleared.

He’d bought the chair at a yard sale the previous month because it was well made. Since then he’d been making it well again. One joint had led to another. The workbench downstairs was occupied by a bass clarinet and a tray of keys laid out in an order I was not permitted to improve.

“I could clear the basement table,” I said.

“It’s fine here.”

“You’d have more space.”

“Nick. Leave it.”

I put the milk away.

We’d met at the college. He’d come to look at a piano in the rehearsal room, discovered he couldn’t do what it needed, and given the music department the name of somebody who could. The department secretary had called me because nobody could find the key to the room.

I found it on the hook where it belonged. Ben watched me take it down.

“Complicated system,” he said.

“Years of training.”

He was wearing a sweater with a hole near the cuff. He kept catching his thumb in it. I wanted to ask him something that would give him a reason to stay after we’d finished with the piano. I had been sober four years. I could tell strangers embarrassing things about myself in church basements, but asking one man whether he’d like coffee required a trip to the bathroom first.

He said yes. At the coffee shop he spilled sugar on the table and tried to gather it with the edge of his library card. I watched him make a small, increasingly uneven pile.

“You could leave it,” I said.

“I’m nearly there.”

I liked him before he looked up.

Now he stood in our kitchen rubbing a dried line of glue from his wrist. I took off my shoes and put them by the back door. My socks had collected bits of something from my mother’s floor.

“She settled?” he asked.

“As much as she’s going to.”

“Curtains?”

“Up.”

“Good.”

He meant it. He’d seen her looking at the parking lot too.

I washed my hands. Ben fitted two pieces of the chair together and checked them without glue. I stood beside him until he handed me the towel.

“You can dry the cups.”

I did. There were three in the rack. When they were dry I put the towel over the oven handle instead of finding another job.

“I’m going over Tuesday for the internet,” I said.

“You told me.”

“You don’t have to come.”

“I’m working Tuesday.”

“I meant generally.”

He set the chair pieces down.

“I don’t mind helping your mother.”

“I know.”

“I mind that I keep going somewhere with you and then I have to wait and see who I am.”

I leaned against the counter. A clamp handle pressed into my hip. I moved it.

“I know,” I said again.

“Stop saying that.”

“All right.”

He looked tired. I hadn’t properly looked at him all day. I’d watched his expression for information about how much trouble I was in, watched his hands, watched him leave. There was a red mark along his forearm from carrying the bed frame.

“Next visit,” I said, “I’ll talk to her before we go. You can decide if you want to.”

“And if she does it anyway?”

“I’ll correct her.”

He nodded once. He picked up the glue bottle and found its cap hardened shut.

“Christ.”

I reached for it. He moved it away.

“I can get it.”

I let him.

We warmed the eggplant. Ben said the sauce was sweeter than he liked, then had more. We ate at the little table by the window because the kitchen counter belonged to the chair. Across the street, a man was trying to fold a length of garden hose into a container too small for it.

Ben watched him over my shoulder.

“He’s going to need a bigger pot.”

I turned to look.

“Or a smaller hose.”

“You could go help.”

I looked back at him. He had the corner of his mouth turned up.

“I’m off duty.”

He held my eyes for a moment, then reached for his water.

Afterward I put the dishes in the dishwasher. Ben went downstairs to put the clarinet barrel away. I stood at the sink and thought of the glass baking dish Tom had taken, how automatically I’d reached for it the first time I cooked after he left. I hoped he still had it. Then I wondered whether he did, whether it had broken in some other kitchen, whether he ever thought about it at all.

I shut the dishwasher and pushed the button.

Ben came up with a different pair of shoes.

“I’m going to walk a little. Knee’s stiff.”

“Now?”

“Before it gets dark.”

“I’ll come,” I said.

He bent to tie his shoes. I sat beside him to put mine on.

“Ready?” he asked.

Outside, the air had cooled. The man across the street had abandoned the hose in two large loops beside its container. Ben inspected the result without comment. We turned toward the park.

He walked slowly at first. I matched him. We passed a house where somebody was frying onions, then another with a television loud enough that we could hear the audience laughing through the window.

At the corner, Ben pointed at a white house set back behind a hedge.

“That’s the one that had the awful porch.”

“No. The next street.”

“It was that one.”

“The one you’re thinking of had stone steps.”

“Those are stone.”

“Concrete.”

He stopped and looked at me.

“You’re going to make that distinction?”

“Only because they’re different things.”

He laughed. We stood on the corner while a woman on a bicycle went past with flowers sticking out of her basket.

“Five dollars,” Ben said.

“You already owe me five dollars.”

“For what?”

“The actor in that movie.”

“That was him.”

“We looked it up.”

“You looked it up.”

We went down the next street to find the other house. It was farther along than I remembered. Ben’s knee had loosened, but I asked him once whether he wanted to turn back.

“And let you say it was just around the corner for the next six months?”

We kept walking. A sprinkler ticked behind a fence. At the end of the block the street opened onto the little park, where the benches faced a pond mostly hidden by reeds.

The house was there, with stone steps and a porch enclosed in old glass panels. It was still awful.

Ben stood looking at it.

“That’s a different awful porch,” he said.

I began to answer, then laughed. He was already laughing. Somewhere inside the house a light came on, and we moved along before anybody wondered what was wrong with us.

At the park entrance he stopped to move his keys into his other pocket. Then he took my hand.

“Down by the water?” he asked.

“All right.”

We crossed the grass where the path wore out.

I didn’t steal the dog. For the first week I didn’t even open the gate.

He came to the fence while I was putting out the trash. A short, wide dog, mostly brown, with a white chest and ears that seemed to have received different instructions. One stood up. The other considered it.

I had half a piece of toast in my hand. He looked at the toast, then at me, then back at the toast. It was a more focused conversation than most I’d had that week.

“You’ve probably already eaten.”

He sat down.

I gave him the corner. There was no butter on that part. I mention this because my sister later asked what I thought I was doing, feeding somebody else’s dog. I wasn’t preparing him a breakfast. It was a corner.

The next morning he was there again.

I knew his name was Toby. Simone called it from her back entrance most evenings, sometimes more than once. There was a silver tag on his collar. He wasn’t wandering loose, and I wasn’t confused about where he lived.

My kitchen window faced the side of her yard. I could see the fence, most of the patio, and a plastic chair with one leg shorter than the others. An addition at the back of her house blocked the entrance. When she called him, I heard her without seeing her. Then Toby disappeared around the corner.

During the day he spent a considerable amount of time beside the fence.

So did I, but I was gardening.

I had retired in February, after thirty-five years in furniture. The store gave me a clock and a photograph of everyone standing in front of a sectional we had never managed to sell. The clock was engraved ROGER BAINES, WITH THANKS. It chimed every fifteen minutes until I found the switch on the back.

At sixty-four, I was supposed to be making plans. People asked me about travel. I had been to Florida. I had been to Florida several times. I couldn’t see that going again would occupy the next twenty years.

My former wife had moved to a condominium fifteen minutes away. We had been divorced for four years and were on sufficiently good terms for her to ask whether a dining table she was considering would fit in her elevator. She sent me the measurements. I told her no. She bought it anyway, and the delivery people took the legs off.

I had a house, a reasonable income, and three appointments on the calendar for the entire month of May. Two were the same appointment, because the hygienist had changed her day.

Toby began arriving at the fence before I’d put the coffee on. I didn’t always give him something. Sometimes I talked to him, and once I showed him a photograph of a rabbit that had eaten the tops off my beans. He declined to take responsibility.

I bought biscuits on a Friday. The bag said HEALTHY REWARDS, which seemed preferable to whatever else they sold.

“How old’s your dog?” the cashier asked.

“It’s the neighbor’s.”

She scanned the bag.

“I don’t have a dog,” I said.

“Do you need a receipt?”

“Yes.”

I have always kept receipts. Even for things you cannot reasonably return once a dog has eaten them.

The following week I began to notice Simone’s hours.

On Monday, when I got up at five thirty, her car was already gone. On Wednesday, I saw her come home after nine. She carried two grocery bags and a stack of mail held between her teeth. I couldn’t have done that. Some of our mail comes in large envelopes.

I mentioned her long days when we met at the curb on Saturday.

“Laundry,” she said.

I thought she meant the laundromat.

“At the hospital. I do early shifts.”

“And evenings?”

“Sometimes I pick up work.”

She was breaking down a cardboard box for recycling. It was one of those boxes that looks as though it ought to fold and won’t. I took the other end. Between us we flattened it.

“Toby must miss you.”

“He likes being home. Likes to watch the street.”

“He’s at the fence a lot.”

“He can see better there.”

She slid the box into her bin. She was younger than I had first thought, perhaps thirty-eight or thirty-nine. When she wasn’t wearing the hospital clothes and carrying three things at once, there wasn’t much reason to take her for forty-five.

“How old is he?”

“Seven.”

“Had him long?”

“Six years.”

“He seems like a good dog.”

“He’s a good dog when it suits him.”

She smiled at him through the fence. He wagged his tail without leaving the patch of sun he had selected.

As we went up our separate driveways, she told me the gate caught at the bottom. A week earlier, a plastic pot had blown from my patio into her yard, and I had waited until she got home to ask for it.

“If something goes over again, just get it,” she said. “But pull the gate all the way shut. You have to lift it a little.”

“I can take a look at that for you.”

“My cousin’s doing it.”

“It’s probably just the hinge.”

“Probably.”

She went inside. Toby followed her voice around the corner of the addition.

The fence was cedar, installed by a previous owner. One panel near my compost bin moved when I leaned against it to pull weeds. I put my hand on it and tested it a second time. I intended to tell her about that too, but I had already offered one repair she didn’t want.

I started leaving my kitchen entrance open while I worked outside. The house got stuffy in the afternoon. I moved a small rug away from the sink and put it near the threshold so dirt wouldn’t come in. Then I put a bowl of water on the patio.

Toby couldn’t reach it from his yard. I understood that. Birds could drink it.

On Tuesday a patio chair arrived. The old one had cracked across the seat. I had inspected four replacements before choosing a model whose advertised weight capacity could have supported both me and the delivery driver. It came in six pieces, which I hadn’t expected at that price.

The driver brought the carton through my side gate. As he set it down, a piece of white packing foam escaped through the split in the cardboard and blew over the fence. It landed in Simone’s yard. Toby approached it with the seriousness he brought to everything that might be food.

I went through her gate before he could eat it.

He was delighted. He put both front feet on my leg, then ran to the patio, then came back to confirm I had understood the invitation.

I picked up the foam. The leash was hanging on a hook on the trellis. Toby looked at it. I looked at it. Then he looked at me again.

“Fifteen minutes,” I said.

I had meant that I could spare fifteen minutes. I wasn’t negotiating with him.

He let me clip the leash to his collar. We went out through the gate, which I lifted and pulled shut exactly as Simone had asked.

At the end of the driveway he turned left. I had intended to turn right, toward the park.

“Come on.”

He braced himself. It was impressive how much of him could be pressed toward the pavement. I offered the park again. He offered the left.

We went left.

The first thing he wanted to see was the hedge outside the house on the corner. We spent some time there. Then he wanted to see the other end of the same hedge. I had walked past it for nineteen years without feeling that anything remained undiscovered.

A woman pushing a stroller stopped.

“Hello, handsome.”

It took me a moment to establish that she meant Toby.

She asked if she could say hello. I said of course. She crouched beside him, and he leaned against her knee as though she had been missing for months.

“How old?”

“Seven.”

“You don’t look seven,” she told him.

I waited, but she had no corresponding observation for me.

Farther on, Toby stopped beside a strip of grass and assumed a position I recognized too late. I had brought keys, a phone, my wallet, and a small umbrella because the weather report had been uncertain. I had not brought a bag.

A man with a large black dog was approaching from the other direction. I asked whether he had a spare.

He gave me two.

“Keep one,” he said.

I thanked him. He didn’t require an explanation, but I said I was only taking a neighbor’s dog around the block.

“Still does it,” he said, and went on.

The walk took thirty-five minutes. When we got back, Toby drank from the bowl I had put out for birds. I waited until he was finished, then took him into Simone’s yard.

I hung the leash on the hook. The loop had been facing the house before. I turned it to face the house again.

I meant to tell her when she got home. I was assembling the chair when I heard her car, and by the time I’d found the washer I dropped, she had gone inside.

The second walk was easier because I had bags.

I kept them in a drawer by the kitchen sink. The third walk was easier because I remembered to take them out of the drawer.

By the end of that week, Toby knew what it meant when I put on my outdoor shoes. He watched from his side of the fence. I could see him through the glass, moving from one foot to the other while I tied the laces.

I took him at about two, after lunch and before the schoolchildren came down the street. There were fewer cars then. We usually went left, though on one occasion he accepted the park and then spent ten minutes examining the parking lot.

Afterward he came into my kitchen to cool off. I held the entrance open. He crossed the rug I had put down and went straight to the one beside the sink.

I made myself a sandwich. He watched. I put a little food in a dish for him. He finished it and watched me some more.

“That’s plenty.”

He sat down.

This worked less well on me the fifth time than it had the first, although it continued to work.

The floor couldn’t have been comfortable. I had a cushion in the spare room, but the cover was pale and the filling was loose. If Toby punctured it, there would be material everywhere. I had seen a customer bring back a similar cushion after a dachshund got through the seam. She maintained it was a manufacturing defect. I told her the zipper hadn’t eaten itself.

At the pet store, a young woman asked what size dog I had.

“About this.”

I held my hands apart. She looked at the space between them.

“Weight?”

“I haven’t weighed him.”

“Breed?”

“Brown.”

She waited.

“Some kind of terrier. Low to the ground.”

She showed me a bed shaped like a shallow loaf pan. I asked about the density of the foam. She turned it over and read the label. So did I.

“Orthopedic,” she said.

“That isn’t a density.”

“It’s the one people like.”

“People aren’t sleeping in it.”

She looked at me for a moment, then showed me a larger one. I bought it because Toby ought to be able to stretch out. It occupied most of the back seat of my car. At a traffic light I looked around to make sure it hadn’t shifted.

The next afternoon I put it in the warm spot by the radiator. The heat was off, but that corner was sheltered from drafts. Toby stepped onto it, turned twice, took one side in his teeth, and pulled it toward the middle of the kitchen.

“It goes here.”

I moved it back. He moved it out again.

“Duke,” I said. “Leave it.”

I can’t say why Duke. He had a broad chest and a way of entering a room. Toby sounded like someone who needed reminding to bring his gym clothes home.

He left the bed where it was and lay on the sink rug. I took that as partial cooperation.

I tried Duke again the following day. He came over. I had a biscuit in my hand, but I don’t think that invalidates every observation one makes about a dog.

When Patricia called to say she was bringing me a plate from a luncheon, I put the bed in the spare room. It was too large for the kitchen, and I was considering returning it. The receipt was in the drawer.

She arrived with lasagna and a container that didn’t belong to her and therefore had to come back. She was older than me by three years and had never found a reason to stop mentioning it.

“What is all this?” she asked.

“Dog food.”

“I’ve worked that out.”

I had transferred it from the torn bag into a storage bin. I dislike open bags. They fall over and invite things.

“It’s for next door.”

“Why does it say Duke?”

I had written DUKE on a strip of masking tape and put it across the front.

“So I know what’s in it.”

“What’s in it is dog food.”

“Yes.”

“Isn’t that dog called Toby?”

“By her.”

Patricia put the lasagna down.

“By the person whose dog it is?”

“It’s a nickname.”

She looked toward the spare room. I had failed to shut it all the way.

“Have you bought him a bed?”

“It was reduced.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“I may take it back.”

“After he’s slept in it?”

“He hasn’t slept in it.”

That was true, as far as I had been able to establish. He had slept beside it, against it, and once with only his head on it.

Patricia pulled out a chair.

“Does Simone know he’s here?”

“She’s at work.”

“Roger.”

“I take him out sometimes. He enjoys it.”

“Ask her.”

“I will.”

“You could get your own dog.”

“I might travel.”

“Where?”

“I don’t have to decide now.”

She took the lid off the lasagna so I could see what she’d brought. A square was missing from one corner.

“I got hungry at a light,” she said.

I put the kettle on. She told me about a man at the luncheon who had brought his own salad dressing and refused to explain why. I would have liked to ask him. Patricia said he probably knew that about people and was protecting his afternoon.

Before she left, she asked if I’d come over the next time she had people in for cards. There would be four of them, six if I came and brought a friend.

“Who’s the fifth?”

“You, Roger.”

“I’ll let you know.”

She wrote her container’s return requirements on a piece of paper and put it beside the stove. I sent her a photograph of it later to demonstrate that I was taking the matter seriously.

There was one afternoon when nothing in particular happened, and I remember it better than the days when things did.

We went to the park. Toby permitted this because somebody had dropped part of a sandwich near the entrance. I saw it before he did and steered him around it. He spent the next fifty yards glancing backward, plainly disappointed in my judgment.

At home I put the new chair in the shade. He sat beneath it while I read. Every now and then the book lowered because I wanted to see whether he was asleep. He wasn’t. He was watching the same place on the fence. I never found out what was there.

A delivery man came into the yard carrying a box nearly as tall as he was.

“Baines?”

“Yes.”

“Signature.”

“What is it?”

“Shower door.”

“I haven’t ordered a shower door.”

He looked at his phone, then at the box. Toby got up to smell the bottom.

“Number sixteen?”

“Sixty-one.”

The man shut his eyes.

“Other end of the street,” I said.

He turned around with the box. Toby followed him to the gate, circling to get one more look at the door. The man tried to rotate the box without stepping on him.

“He expecting something?”

“Everything.”

After they got through, Toby sat facing the gate for several minutes, waiting for the shower door to come back. I laughed. He looked at me with one ear upright and then resumed waiting.

Later the letter carrier saw us coming back from a shorter walk. She knew Toby.

“Helping Simone out?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Good for you.”

I accepted that.

Simone came home early that evening. I had already returned Toby to her yard. I heard her call him and went to my window in time to see him running around the addition, his back legs trying to keep up with the front.

It was good that he responded to her. You wouldn’t want a dog that didn’t come when called.

I went back to my computer. There was a company that engraved identification tags in several shapes. A bone seemed obvious, and a heart was unsuitable. I chose a plain brass circle.

DUKE, I entered.

Below it I put my phone number. It would be useful if anything happened while I was taking him out. The form wanted an address as well. I left that blank.

The tag arrived in a small padded envelope three days later. I took it out and held it between my finger and thumb. The letters were deeply cut. It was good work.

I put it back in the envelope and placed it in the drawer with the waste bags. The next day I moved it underneath them.

Simone came over on a Thursday while I was rinsing out the water bowl.

“Can we talk?”

She stood on the other side of my gate. She had a jacket over her work shirt and a loaf of bread under one arm.

“Of course.”

“Have you been walking Toby?”

“A little.”

“How often?”

“Some afternoons.”

“The mail carrier said she’d seen you.”

“Yes. We ran into her.”

She put the bread on top of the gatepost. It didn’t fit there, so she picked it up again.

“I appreciate you wanting to help. But you need to ask me before you take him out.”

“I thought you’d be pleased he was getting exercise.”

“I’m pleased he gets exercise. I need to know where he is.”

“It’s only around the block.”

She waited.

“And the park, occasionally.”

“How are you getting him?”

“Through the gate.”

“You said if something went over.”

“What?”

“That was what we talked about. If something blew into the yard.”

I put the bowl down.

“He spends a lot of time at that fence.”

“He likes the fence.”

“He likes going out too.”

“I know he likes going out, Roger. I walk him.”

I hadn’t seen that very often. I was about to say so when she looked through the entrance behind me.

“Have you been feeding him?”

“Just something after the walk.”

“He hasn’t been finishing his dinner.”

“Well, if he’s already had...”

“Yes,” she said. “That’s what I’m saying.”

I looked at the water bowl. A leaf had fallen into it while we were talking.

“I bought decent food.”

“Please stop.”

I looked up.

“The food and the walks. Until we’ve talked about it first.”

“You’re gone a lot.”

Her expression changed.

“You can call me if you’re worried. You have my number.”

“Sometimes these things are easier to do than make a whole arrangement about.”

“This needs an arrangement.”

She picked up the bread, which she had tucked under her arm again without my noticing, and went home.

The next morning there was a padlock on the gate.

It was a small brass one, hardly sufficient if anyone had serious intentions. I wasn’t testing its security. I noticed it from my side.

Toby came over as usual. He sat down. I didn’t have anything in my hand, but he looked at it anyway.

On Friday he began scratching his ear.

He would stop, walk a few feet, and sit down to do it again. Once he shook his head hard enough to turn himself sideways. Then he went behind the addition, where I couldn’t see him.

I waited at the kitchen window. The kettle switched itself off.

When he came back, he rubbed his head along the fence.

I called Simone. We had exchanged numbers the winter a branch came down across both driveways. Her message said to leave my name, though I assumed it would appear on her screen.

“It’s Roger. About the dog. Call me when you get this.”

I made tea. I carried it outside. Toby scratched his ear.

“Let me see,” I said.

He pressed his nose through the gap between two boards. I couldn’t see anything except his nose.

The veterinary clinic was in the same plaza as my dentist. I called and described the scratching. The woman asked whether he was eating and drinking. I said yes, although I had not seen him eat or drink since Wednesday.

“We have a cancellation at eleven twenty,” she said.

It was eleven.

I could have called Simone again. I could have sent a message saying what I proposed to do. Instead I put on my shoes.

The loose panel beside the compost bin was held by one screw at the top. I had found that out weeks earlier while pulling bindweed. I lifted the bottom and turned it enough to get through. It took some effort. A person in a hurry could have torn his trousers.

Toby watched from the other side, delighted with this new entrance.

I got the leash from the trellis. On the way back through, he went first and I followed on one knee, holding the panel above my shoulder. There was nothing dignified about it. I got dirt on the front of my shirt.

At the car I opened the rear door for him. He went around to the other side. I opened that door. He went back to the first. Eventually I got him in by staying still, a method I wish I’d tried earlier.

He rode standing with his chin on the seat back. His breath smelled of something I hoped the veterinarian would also address.

At the clinic a cat in a carrier was making a noise like an appliance with a sock caught in it. Toby took an immediate professional interest.

“Name?” the receptionist asked.

I looked at the silver tag hanging under his chin.

“Toby.”

“And your last name?”

“Baines. I’m looking after him.”

“Owner’s name?”

“Simone Avery.”

She found him in the computer.

“We’ll need to speak to Ms. Avery.”

“I can pay.”

“We still need to speak to her.”

She checked the number on his tag against the screen and called. I moved us away from the cat. Toby sat on my foot and scratched.

The receptionist turned slightly in her chair.

“Yes. He’s here now.”

I studied a poster about ticks. There were four photographs, all larger than I wanted them to be.

The receptionist held out the phone.

“Ms. Avery would like to talk to you.”

I had to cross the waiting room with Toby, who took this as another opportunity to visit the cat.

“Hello.”

“What are you doing?”

“His ear was bothering him.”

“Where did you get him?”

“At the house.”

“How did you get him out?”

“I’ll explain when I see you.”

“You can explain now.”

The receptionist was looking at her screen. A man holding a large white rabbit had stopped stroking it.

“There was a loose part of the fence.”

Simone said nothing. I could hear machinery behind her, a steady thumping.

“He was scratching a lot,” I said.

“I booked him for tomorrow morning.”

“Oh.”

“I moved my Saturday shift.”

“Well, we’re here now.”

“Yes,” she said. “You are.”

She told me to hand the phone back. The receptionist listened, asked two questions, then said she would note the permission in his record.

When she hung up, she told me Simone would collect him from my house after the appointment. I was to stay there.

It was the first time in years anyone had given me instructions through an intermediary. I didn’t care for it.

The veterinarian found an ear infection. Nothing required heroic action. She cleaned his ear, explained the medicine, and wrote the instructions down for Simone. Toby bore the examination with great suffering until someone opened a container of treats. His recovery was immediate and complete, apart from the ear.

I paid the bill. The receptionist put the receipt in the bag.

Outside, Toby tried to get into a blue car that wasn’t mine. Its owner was eating a breakfast sandwich behind the wheel. I couldn’t fault his reasoning.

Simone arrived while I was washing the dirt off my hands.

She had changed out of her work shoes but was still wearing the blue pants and shirt. There was a red mark across the bridge of her nose from her glasses. She stood on the front step with her car keys in her fist.

Toby pushed past my leg. He put both front paws against her knees, slid down, and did it again.

“Hi, baby,” she said.

He tried to get all the way into her lap while she was standing.

“Let me in the door.”

I stepped back. She wasn’t talking to me.

She crouched and put a hand on either side of his face. He licked her chin. When she stood, he followed her into the kitchen and sat looking up at her.

I had arranged the bag from the clinic on the table, with the instructions beside it and the receipt face down. The kettle was on.

“Tea?”

“No.”

“Coffee, then?”

“Roger.”

I switched off the kettle.

“Which part of the fence?”

“Beside the compost.”

“Show me.”

We went out through my back door. Toby came with us. He passed Simone, then me, then stopped directly in front of my feet.

I pointed out the panel.

“You went under that?”

“Around, mostly.”

She looked at the dirt on my knee.

“You went into my yard.”

“Yes.”

“After I put a lock on it.”

“He was in discomfort.”

“I know. That’s why he had an appointment.”

“I couldn’t know that.”

“You could have asked.”

“I called.”

“You left me a message. Then you took him.”

Toby had found the gap. He put his nose under the board and wagged his tail, willing to demonstrate.

“Come here,” she said.

He came. She held his collar and waited for me to attach the leash.

I had put it on the table. I went inside to get it. When I came back she was still standing there, bent a little at the waist, her hand under his chin. Her phone rang in her pocket. She took it out, looked at it, and silenced it.

“I thought he was out there all day.”

“He has a dog door.”

“Where?”

“Behind the addition.”

I looked toward it, though I couldn’t see any more from where we stood than I could from my kitchen.

“He can go in whenever he wants,” she said. “He’s got water in the house. He’s got a bed. Sometimes Luis comes by. Sometimes the walker actually turns up.”

“I didn’t see anyone.”

“I don’t know what to tell you about what you didn’t see.”

I put the clip on the collar. It took two tries. My thumb kept sliding off.

She straightened.

“There are days he’s by himself too much. I know that. I get home and he’s waiting, and I still have to go out again. I don’t need you telling me.”

“I wasn’t trying to...”

“You told me. Yesterday. Standing right there.”

She pointed with the keys.

A car passed in the street. Toby turned to look, lifting the leash with his chest.

“Don’t go into my yard again,” she said. “Not through the gate. Not through the fence. If you think something’s wrong, call me. If I don’t answer, you wait unless the house is on fire.”

“All right.”

“I need you to mean it.”

“I do.”

She watched me for another moment, then went into the kitchen to get the medicine.

I followed. Toby paused to inspect the place beside the refrigerator where his food bowl had been. I had put it in the cupboard when I heard her car.

Simone read the instructions. She folded them along the crease the clinic had made and put them in the bag.

“What have you been feeding him?”

I opened the pantry. I’d folded the bag and put it behind the bin. DUKE was printed in black marker across a strip of masking tape.

She looked at the tape, then at me.

I took the bag out so she could read the ingredients. She glanced at it.

“He gets the chicken one. Too much of that will upset his stomach.”

“The man at the store said...”

She waited.

“I’ll stop giving it to him.”

She put the medicine under her arm and picked up the leash.

“The bed,” I said.

She looked into the living room. The bed was beside my chair. I had moved it there because he seemed to prefer that spot.

“You could take it.”

“No.”

“It’s already been used. I can’t return it.”

“I didn’t ask you to buy it.”

“I know.”

Toby heard the change in our voices, or the movement toward the door, or something entirely unrelated to either. He went over and picked up the little cushion that came with the bed. He brought it to Simone with his tail going.

She looked down at him.

“Seriously?”

He held on to the cushion.

We stood waiting. He seemed prepared to wait longer.

“All right,” she said. “I’ll take the stupid bed.”

I carried it to her car. It was much larger in the doorway than it had looked on the floor. I turned it sideways, which helped very little, then remembered it was not a sofa and folded it in half.

Simone opened the rear door. Toby jumped in with the cushion.

“I’m sorry I took him without asking,” I said.

She held the door, looking at the dog.

“I’ve got to get back to work.”

I nodded.

She shut the door and went around to the driver’s side. Toby stood on the seat looking through the window. I raised a hand. He was watching a woman carry a grocery bag across the street.

The corner beside my chair needed vacuuming.

There were hairs under the baseboard heater and a piece of something that might once have been a biscuit. I pulled the chair out, cleaned beneath it, and pushed it back. Then I went around the kitchen with the same attachment, since I already had it out.

I didn’t take the tape off the food bin. I turned it around.

At five thirty I called Patricia.

“Can you still use a sixth?”

“For cards?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve got six now.”

“Oh.”

“Come anyway. I’ll sit out a hand.”

“I don’t want to put anyone out.”

“Then bring my dish.”

I washed it, though I had already washed it. In the cupboard I found two of her smaller containers. I put those inside.

She opened her door with a pencil tucked behind one ear. There were people talking in the kitchen and someone laughing hard enough to cough.

“Where’s your friend?” she asked.

“What friend?”

“The one you were going to bring.”

“I didn’t say I was bringing one.”

“I know. I’m teasing you.”

I handed her the stack of containers.

“God,” she said. “It’s like an estate sale.”

At the table a woman named Marcy asked what I did. I said furniture, then corrected myself. She wanted to know how to get a white mark off a table. I asked whether she knew the finish.

“Brown.”

Patricia dealt the cards.

“Don’t get him started.”

For the next twenty minutes I explained finishes. Marcy listened for perhaps three of them. Then a man on my left asked whose turn it was, and it turned out to have been mine for some time.

I lost eleven dollars. Patricia said that was a reasonable fee for the lecture.

When everyone had gone, I helped carry glasses to the sink.

“Simone took the dog home,” I said.

Patricia put down the sponge.

“Where else would she take him?”

I told her about the clinic. She listened without helping me. When I reached the fence, she made me go back.

“You crawled through?”

“Under. Partly.”

“How long have you been retired?”

“Three months.”

She shook her head.

“I used to leave you alone all summer.”

“I was fourteen.”

“You had more sense then.”

I dried a glass and held it toward the cupboard. She pointed to the other one.

“Was the dog all right?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

“I apologized.”

“Good.”

She passed me another glass.

I stayed until the kitchen was finished. At the door she told me they played every other Friday.

“Do I need to call?”

“Yes. I need to know how many chairs.”

Luis repaired the fence on Sunday.

I was in the kitchen when I heard the drill. By the time I got outside, he had put three screws through the panel and was checking the one beside it.

“I could have done that,” I said.

He looked up. He was a broad young man with a thin mustache and protective glasses pushed onto his head.

“It’s done.”

“Those boards split if you don’t drill a hole first.”

He held up a drill bit.

“Right,” I said.

Toby was on the other side with him. He came to the fence when he heard my voice. I put my hand down and he sniffed it, then moved along to where Luis had set a paper bag containing his lunch.

Luis moved the bag onto the table without looking at him.

The following week it rained. Toby appeared less often. When he did, I said hello from my side. I kept my hands out of my pockets so he wouldn’t think I had anything for him.

I poured the dog food back into its bag and took it to the shelter. The woman there thanked me and asked whether I was interested in meeting any of the dogs.

I looked through the glass door behind her. A volunteer was trying to get a large yellow dog to sit for a photograph. Each time she stepped back, he stood up to follow her.

“Not today,” I said.

She didn’t ask why.

On the way home I stopped for a sandwich and ate it at a table instead of in the car. The bread was better than the filling. I went back to the counter and asked where they bought it.

By Thursday I had a new dentist appointment. The hygienist had been sick. I wrote it on the calendar, crossing out the old one rather than erasing it. May looked a little busier that way.

That afternoon Simone knocked.

She stayed on the step when I opened the door.

“I need to ask you something.”

“Of course.”

“Tuesday. Could you walk Toby?”

I looked past her toward her house. She shifted her bag on her shoulder.

“My walker’s quit. Luis can’t come until six. I’m still trying to find somebody.”

“Yes,” I said.

“I’ll bring him over at two before I leave. Half an hour, forty minutes. Then put him in his yard and close the gate. He can get into the house himself.”

“I know.”

She looked at me.

“I know now,” I said.

“The gate will be unlocked. I’ll leave his water out too. Don’t give him a meal. Luis will feed him.”

“All right.”

“Just Tuesday for now.”

“Yes.”

She took a step back, then stopped.

“And his name’s Toby.”

“I know his name.”

On Tuesday I was ready at one twenty.

There was no reason to be ready at one twenty. My shoes were on, the weather was fine, and the route required no research. I took a book to the patio and read the same page until I heard Simone’s back door.

I went inside for the bags. The envelope with the brass tag lay under the roll. I moved it aside and tore off three bags. The first wouldn’t open, so I opened all three at the sink, checking them against the light, and put them in my pocket.

When Simone knocked, Toby was wearing a blue harness.

“He pulls less in this,” she said.

“I hadn’t found him much of a puller.”

At that moment he saw a squirrel and attempted to remove her arm.

She waited until he stopped. Then she handed me the leash.

“Three at the latest.”

“Three.”

She gave me two small treats in a folded piece of paper.

“These are fine.”

I put them in my other pocket.

Toby looked at that pocket, then at me. He was already negotiating.

Simone bent to rub his head.

“Be good.”

She stood and looked at me.

“You too.”

“I’ll try.”

She went to her car. Toby watched until she got in, then took three determined steps toward the street. The harness did help, although he seemed to consider it an inconvenience that persistence might overcome.

At the corner we met the man with the black dog who had lent me a bag on our first walk. He asked how we were doing.

“All right,” I said.

The dogs greeted each other at considerable length.

“What’s his name again?”

“Toby.”

“Hello, Toby.”

Toby ignored him. The black dog had something to say about the base of a mailbox, and he wanted to hear all of it.

When they were finished, the man went right and we went left. At the next patch of grass Toby stopped again.

I checked my watch. We had twenty-six minutes before we needed to turn around.

He lowered his nose into the grass and moved it an inch. Then another inch.

“Toby,” I said. “Any time.”

He took a little longer. Then he lifted his head, and we went on.

The woman with the tablet asked Paul whether his religious preference was still Catholic.

He was looking at the bag on the pole. There was perhaps an inch of liquid left in it. He had been watching the inch for some time.

“Is that going to affect when I get out?”

“No.”

“Then leave it.”

She touched the screen. “And your sister is picking you up?”

“If she’s speaking to me.”

“She’s called twice.”

“That doesn’t necessarily mean she’s speaking to me.”

The woman smiled, but she had other things to ask. Did he have stairs at home? Someone who could stay? A way to obtain his prescriptions? He answered yes to all three. At the last question he hesitated, and she looked up.

“My sister’s taking care of those,” he said.

She made a note.

His left forearm lay on a pillow. The dressing covered most of it, and beyond the dressing his hand looked as though it belonged to someone older and wealthier, someone who had never opened his own jars. He lifted his fingers. They moved. The wedding ring he no longer wore had left a pale indentation that was visible only when the hand swelled.

The dog had come through an open gate. Paul had been carrying a bag of groceries, with a baguette protruding from the top, and had thought the animal wanted the bread. He remembered saying hello. He remembered the pressure before he remembered pain.

Now a laminated sheet on his tray explained sepsis. It had cheerful blue circles in the corners. He turned it facedown.

Outside the window, a man in a fluorescent vest was blowing leaves from one part of Hartford Hospital’s grounds to another. The leaves kept returning. Paul watched him until the man noticed and raised a hand. Paul raised his good one.

His phone vibrated.

Lena: Don’t leave without me.

He typed: Thought I’d jog home.

The answer came immediately. Don’t start.

He set the phone down and considered getting dressed. His sister had brought trousers with an elastic waist. She had placed them on the chair without comment, which had required considerable restraint on her part. There had been a time when he would have thanked her by announcing that he was not an invalid.

The bag on the pole still contained its inch.

On the windowsill were three folded discharge packets from earlier in the year. Lena had brought them in a folder because the doctors kept asking questions neither of them could answer from memory. The first had Sloan Kettering across the top. Beneath it were Hartford Hospital and Yale. She had written dates on the corners in red.

January. April. August.

Now it was November, and there would be another packet.

The nurse came in to check the pump. Her name was Beth. She had a small ink stain on her wrist that had survived several washings.

“Nearly there,” she said.

“You’ve said that before.”

“I was right before.”

She looked at the inch of liquid with him.

“Anything you need while you wait?”

Paul almost said a new body. It was the kind of remark that made people laugh politely and then leave him alone. He looked at the form beside the sepsis sheet.

“Is there a chapel here?”

“There is.”

“Can anyone use it?”

Beth stopped examining the pump and looked at him.

“Anyone,” she said.

The first doctor had said terminal with his hands folded on the desk.

Paul remembered the hands better than the face. One thumbnail was shorter than the other, bitten down almost to the skin. He had looked at that nail while Caroline asked questions. He had been forty-five, wearing a suit because he had come directly from work. His wife still had her coat on.

The doctor explained what they had found in his brain. He showed them an image. Paul tried to identify the part of himself that had forgotten the name of the street where he lived, the part that had made his right hand drop a coffee cup without warning. The image looked impersonal, like a survey of land somebody was considering buying.

Caroline asked how long.

The doctor gave an answer that contained months.

Afterward, in the parking garage, Paul couldn’t find the car. He had the keys in his hand and was pressing the button, listening for the horn. Caroline took the keys and walked to the next row. He followed her, furious with her for being able to do something he couldn’t.

On the drive home he said they needed to cancel the people coming for dinner Saturday.

“I’ll do it,” she said.

“I’ve already bought the lamb.”

“We can freeze it.”

He looked out the window. They drove another mile before he began to cry. Caroline kept one hand on his knee until they reached their exit.

Lena found the number for Sloan Kettering. She called from his kitchen, leaning over a yellow pad, spelling his surname into the phone. He told her there was no point. She held up one finger without looking at him.

At Sloan, another doctor reviewed the images and talked about treatment. Paul asked whether the first doctor had been wrong.

“You have a serious illness,” the doctor said. “I’d like to talk about what we can do next.”

Paul waited for someone to replace terminal with a word he could live inside. No one did. There were appointments, consent forms, a surgery date. Caroline bought a notebook. Lena bought a train ticket. He bought an expensive pen and lost it before the second appointment.

The night before surgery he knelt beside the bed in the apartment they had borrowed from a friend. He hadn’t knelt to pray since his mother’s funeral. The floor hurt his knees. He moved a folded towel beneath them and began again.

He offered things. Money first, then time. He promised to stop being impatient with Caroline, to call his father on Sundays, to do something useful with whatever remained. He worked through the promises with the care he usually brought to a contract. By the end he had given away so much of his future that he wondered what would be left for him to enjoy if he were allowed to keep it.

Caroline stood in the doorway in her nightdress.

“Come to bed,” she said.

“In a minute.”

She sat on the edge of the mattress and waited. He heard her take off her earrings and place them in the little dish she had brought from home. When he finally stood, she caught his elbow because one leg had gone numb.

After surgery there were stretches he could not recover. People referred to conversations he didn’t remember having. A nurse at Sloan helped him find a word by waiting while he worked toward it. She didn’t supply it. He had needed the word spoon. When it came, he said it three times.

Treatment followed. Caroline learned to sleep with her handbag looped around her ankle. Once he woke and found her eating a sandwich over a wastebasket so she wouldn’t scatter crumbs beside him.

“You could go downstairs,” he said.

“I know.”

“You don’t have to sit here.”

She looked at him. “I’m eating my lunch, Paul.”

He turned his face toward the window. Later he apologized. She gave him half the sandwich, although he had said he didn’t want any.

The months the first doctor had named passed. Then more passed. At one appointment Paul wore the same suit he had worn to the original diagnosis. It hung loosely across his shoulders. He wanted someone to notice that he had outlasted it.

The news that day was good. He asked if good meant cured. The doctor described what the images showed, then explained the next appointment. Paul nodded without listening to the date. In the elevator he gripped Caroline’s hand so hard she had to ask him to stop.

They ate outside on a warm afternoon. He ordered food he could taste. Across the street, a woman argued into her phone while trying to unlock a bicycle. He watched her with an affection he would have found embarrassing a year earlier.

On the way home he called his father. They talked about the treatment, then the weather, then a problem with the old man’s television. Paul promised to come look at it on Sunday.

For several months he did.

He had used cocaine before he was ill. He liked to omit that part when telling the story later.

The pain medication came after surgery. It was prescribed, explained, counted into a bottle with his name on it. Caroline kept a written schedule because at first he couldn’t trust himself to remember. He took what the schedule said. When the pain eased, the instructions changed.

He discovered he preferred the older instructions.

There were days when nothing hurt except the prospect of the next scan. He took a pill on those days too. He could sit beside his wife and watch a film without thinking about what might be growing inside his head. When she asked if he was comfortable, he could say yes and mean it.

Later, when she noticed the bottle emptying too quickly, he said she didn’t understand what he had been through. She put the bottle on the counter and went out into the garden. He watched her through the window pulling weeds with bare hands.

The cocaine returned at a dinner with an old friend. There was a bathroom with a broken lock, and his friend stood outside it while Paul used the edge of a membership card he no longer remembered acquiring. When he came back to the table, the evening seemed to have been waiting for him.

He talked. He ordered another course. He made the waiter laugh. For several hours nobody treated him as a man whose brain might kill him.

On the train home, when his heart would not settle and the brightness began to feel like exposure, he took something from the bottle in his coat.

Caroline was asleep when he got in. In the bathroom he turned on the shower so she wouldn’t hear him searching through the cabinet.

He kept his appointments at Sloan. He arrived early, dressed carefully, answered the questions. He was frightened enough of cancer to be conscientious about it. In the space between appointments he obtained pills from people who didn’t ask for his date of birth. He carried cash folded behind the insurance card in his wallet.

When Caroline found the cash, he said it was for emergencies.

“What kind?”

He told her she had become suspicious of everything.

She stood beside the kitchen counter with his wallet open. He could still see the garden through the window behind her. It was autumn now. The beds she had cleared were covered with leaves.

“How much is here?” she asked.

“I don’t know. A couple of hundred.”

She counted it. He watched her straighten the bills against the counter. She had taken off her gardening gloves, but there was still dirt beside one thumbnail.

“Three hundred and twenty.”

“All right.”

“Where’s the rest?”

“What rest?”

She set the money down and opened the bank account on her phone. She put it beside the bills.

“Thursday.”

“I can read it.”

“Then where is it?”

He picked up the phone. There were other withdrawals on the screen. He scrolled past them and went back to Thursday.

“Things come up.”

“What came up?”

He put the phone down facedown.

“Could we do this after dinner?”

“What did you spend it on?”

He named the parking garage at Sloan. Lunch. A prescription. She nodded at each one, and for a moment he thought she was helping him remember.

“That doesn’t come to this,” she said.

“Not everything gives you a receipt.”

“I didn’t ask for receipts.”

He took a glass from the cupboard. The first one had something dried inside it. He held it toward the light, then put it in the sink and got another.

“You could put that in the dishwasher,” she said.

He did, harder than he intended.

“I’m trying to have a normal evening.”

“So am I.”

He filled the glass. She turned the phone over again.

“Is there more somewhere else?”

“More what?”

“Money you’ve taken out.”

“You can see the account.”

“I can see this account.”

He drank half the water. It hurt going down. He wanted her to notice that he had to stop.

“Do you think I like living like this?”

She looked at him.

“The appointments. Waiting for them to call. Every time I forget a word.”

“I know.”

“You don’t know. You get to leave.”

“Leave where?”

He touched the side of his head.

She put one hand flat on the counter. He remembered that hand closing around his in the parking garage, taking the keys. He could still become angry about the keys if he let himself.

“I drove you on Thursday,” she said. “You didn’t pay for parking.”

“I meant another day.”

“You said Thursday.”

“I’m allowed to get a day wrong.”

“Yes.”

She said it without hesitation. He looked down at the glass.

“The money, Paul.”

He told her about another withdrawal before she found it. He gave her the amount, then added that he hadn’t spent all of it. She asked what he had spent. He said he would have to check.

“You had the whole thing out in cash.”

“I said I’d check.”

From the stove came the small click of the oven cooling. Neither of them had taken the food out.

“Your sister thinks I should be grateful,” he said.

Caroline closed her eyes.

“She said it at Christmas. You heard her.”

“Yes. I heard her.”

“As if staying alive is something I’m doing to inconvenience everybody.”

Caroline picked up her gloves.

“Where are you going?”

“To wash my hands.”

“We’re talking.”

“Then tell me what you bought.”

He set the glass beside the sink. She stood there another moment, the gloves pinched between two fingers. Then she went down the hall.

Her phone went dark beside the money. He put the bills back in his wallet and left the phone where it was.

Two weeks later he went to stay at a hotel. He said he needed somewhere quiet. Caroline packed his charger and left it on top of the suitcase.

The hotel had a vending machine by the elevators and a mirror opposite the bed. He asked to change rooms because the mirror disturbed him. In the next room there was another mirror.

One evening Lena came with clean shirts. She stood beside the desk while he told her he was getting things under control. He had been saying this for nearly an hour when she reached past him and picked up the television remote.

“What are you doing?”

“Turning it off.”

He looked at the television. He hadn’t noticed it was on.

“You need help,” she said.

“I’ve had quite a bit of that.”

“For this.”

He laughed, and her expression changed. He wished immediately that he could take the laugh back. Instead he defended it.

She left the shirts. At the door she said she would take him somewhere whenever he was ready, but she would not bring him money again.

He told himself she enjoyed having power over him. Then he opened the envelope she had left on the desk. Inside was the receipt for the shirts he had asked her to collect from the cleaners. She had paid it herself.

He lay on the bed with the receipt in his hand until his phone rang. He knew the number. He answered before the second ring.

He went to Puerto Rico because he had been happy there once.

There was enough money left for a flight and an apartment near the water. He told Lena he was taking a break. She asked what he was taking a break from. He said he would call when he arrived, and then didn’t.

For three days he bought coffee from the same woman and sat at an outdoor table watching people go to work. He took photographs of the sea and sent them to his sister. She replied to the photographs with questions. He answered by sending more photographs.

On the fourth day the small cut on his leg had become difficult to ignore. He had scraped it against a broken chair in the apartment. He put on long trousers and went out anyway. By evening he was shaking so badly that he couldn’t get the key into the lock.

The woman from the apartment downstairs found him sitting on the landing. She asked him something in Spanish. He knew enough to say he was all right. She crouched in front of him, touched his forehead, and took out her phone.

At the Presbyterian hospital in San Juan, someone cut the trouser leg open. He objected. They were expensive trousers, and he had very little money left. The nurse continued cutting.

Later he learned the letters MRSA. At first they were simply another sound passing above him. The days came in pieces. A tray appeared. Someone removed it. The light in the doorway became the light from the window and then the doorway again.

When he could speak clearly, he asked for his bag. The nurse brought it and stood while he searched. His hands were too clumsy to open the inner pocket. She offered to help.

“It’s private,” he said.

She stepped back.

He had reached the packet when a doctor came in. Paul stopped moving. The doctor looked at the bag, then at his face, and asked what he had been taking.

He began with the prescriptions. He gave the names carefully. The doctor waited.

Outside the room, someone laughed. Paul could hear a trolley wheel squeaking along the corridor. He looked down at the open pocket and told the doctor the rest.

The doctor asked when he had last used. Then he asked how much. He wrote the answers down without changing his expression.

Paul had expected an argument. The absence of one left him exhausted.

He called Lena that afternoon. She answered on the first ring and said, “Where are you?”

“In hospital.”

There was a silence.

“Which one?”

He read it from the paper beside his bed. She asked for the room number, the doctor’s name, and whether he had told them about the cancer. Then she said she would call back.

He lay with the phone resting on his chest. An hour passed. He had begun to imagine she had finally decided not to answer him anymore when a nurse came in with a message. His sister was getting a flight.

Lena arrived wearing the cardigan she wore on cold airplanes. She put her suitcase against the wall and kissed the top of his head. He had rehearsed an explanation involving heat, dehydration, and the state of the apartment stairs. She pulled up a chair.

“Don’t,” she said.

He closed his mouth.

She stayed six days. She washed his face with a cloth because he was embarrassed to ask the nurses again. She spoke to doctors and took notes. On the fifth day she sat beside the bed and cried without making a sound. He pretended to be asleep because he didn’t know how to comfort her without promising something he might not do.

The next morning she told him she had to go back to work. He said he understood. When she stood to leave, he caught her sleeve.

“I know,” she said, although he hadn’t spoken.

After she left, he kept the television on. He watched cooking programs he could not follow, baseball he did not care about, advertisements for cars he would never buy. He became angry when anyone changed the channel, although he rarely knew what he was watching.

Then, during what he thought was the second week, breathing became work. The room filled with people. He remembered trying to apologize for something. Someone told him to save his breath.

A pulmonary embolism joined the infection on the list beside his name.

When he was back in a room with a window, a nurse called Inés wrote the date on the whiteboard. He asked what day it was. She tapped the date. He said he meant how many days he had been there.

She checked.

“Twenty-three.”

He looked toward his suitcase. Lena had put it on top of the wardrobe before leaving. He couldn’t imagine having enough strength to reach it.

Inés brought a chair to the bedside. Later she helped him sit in it. He had assumed the chair was for a visitor. By the time he was upright, his shirt was wet against his back.

“How long?” he asked.

She looked at the clock. “Let’s start with five minutes.”

He managed four.

The next day he asked her not to write the date where he could see it. She uncapped the marker, considered him, and wrote it anyway.

“You asked me six times yesterday,” she said.

He laughed. It came out as a cough. She waited until he could breathe comfortably, then handed him a tissue.

At night he addressed God with a fluency he had never achieved in church. There was no bargaining now. He named what had been done to him. He named what he had done himself and objected to the distinction being used against him. He demanded an explanation for the brain tumor, the infection, the clot, the terrible need that persisted even when getting out of bed required assistance.

When nobody answered, he used language that would have distressed his mother.

The man in the next bed asked him to lower his voice.

Paul apologized. After a minute the man offered him an unopened packet of crackers. Paul took it, although his mouth was dry and eating them would be difficult. He put the packet on his tray and left it there until morning.

On the thirty-first day Caroline called.

He sat up straighter when he heard her voice. He asked how she was. She said she was well. He asked about the house, and she told him the gutter over the back door had finally been replaced.

“I was going to do that.”

“I know.”

He looked at the date on the board.

She said Lena had told her he was improving. He said he was. Then neither of them spoke for several seconds, and he found himself listening to the sounds in the house behind her. A cupboard closed. Water ran. He knew exactly where she was standing.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

She breathed out.

“I know that too.”

He waited for her to say he could come home. She didn’t.

Before hanging up, she told him she was glad he had called the doctor when he got sick. He said a neighbor had done it. He could have let the mistake stand. He wasn’t sure why he hadn’t.

On the forty-second day, Inés brought his clothes in a plastic bag. The trousers with the cut leg were gone. Lena had arranged for someone to bring a pair of drawstring shorts and a shirt that was too large.

He dressed sitting down. The effort left him resting with one shoe on. Inés waited by the doorway, looking at a chart, giving him the privacy of appearing occupied.

When he stood, she took the bag from him.

“I’ll carry that.”

He let her.

Lena met him downstairs. She had flown back to take him home. In the car, he looked at the water between buildings and tried to remember the photographs he had sent her. The sea was the same color. He had expected that to seem significant. Mostly he wanted to lie down.

At the airport his sister kept the documents in a folder on her lap. He asked what they would do when they landed.

“Go to my house tonight. Tomorrow, the appointment.”

“What appointment?”

She opened the folder and showed him. They had discussed it. He had agreed. He could not remember whether agreement had felt like a decision or merely the shortest way to end the conversation.

He looked at the address and handed the paper back.

“All right,” he said.

The first time he spoke in a meeting, he told them about surviving cancer.

He told the story well. He had practice. He described the first diagnosis, Sloan, Caroline sleeping in chairs, the months that became years. People listened. When he finished, a man across the circle thanked him and asked what had brought him there that week.

Paul looked at the floor.

“Drugs,” he said.

The man nodded.

It took longer to tell that story. He kept finding places where an explanation seemed necessary. The other people let him finish. Sometimes somebody recognized a part of it and laughed, and the laughter was so unlike pity that he wanted to hear it again.

Ray approached him after a meeting while Paul was struggling with the lid of a coffee cup. He took the lid, pressed it down properly, and gave it back.

“Want to walk?”

They went around the block. Ray had worked nights for most of his life and still looked as though he had been woken at the wrong hour. He asked whether Paul had eaten. Paul said he wasn’t hungry.

“That wasn’t the question.”

They bought soup. Paul disliked the way Ray watched him take the first spoonful. He disliked needing to be watched. Halfway through the bowl he realized he was hungry.

He learned to call before making arrangements he intended to conceal. Sometimes he called and lied anyway. Sometimes he sat with the phone in his hand until the person he wanted to buy from stopped answering. On those nights he resented everyone who had congratulated him earlier in the day.

Once he went as far as the cash machine outside a pharmacy. The screen offered him a receipt. He pressed no, took the money, and folded it before he had counted it.

At the car he put his keys between his teeth so he could get the phone out. His hands were shaking. The person he meant to call was near the top of the list. Ray was farther down.

He called Ray.

“Busy?”

“Some. What’s up?”

“Nothing. I was out.”

He could hear a television. Ray lowered it.

“Where?”

Paul told him the name of the pharmacy.

“Picking something up?”

“No.”

A woman came out carrying a paper bag and pressed the button on her car key. The car beside his flashed its lights. He moved so she could get past.

“I took money out,” he said.

“How much?”

“Enough.”

Ray said nothing. Paul took the keys out of his mouth. There was a ridge from the metal against his lower lip.

“I haven’t done anything.”

“I heard you.”

“I’m telling you before.”

“Yes.”

The woman backed out. Paul watched her leave, irritated that Ray had made nothing more of the call.

“Can I come over?”

“I’m here.”

Paul opened the car door and sat. He started the engine, then turned it off because he hadn’t decided which way he was going.

“Stay on,” he said.

“All right.”

He put the phone on speaker and set it in the holder. The cash pressed against his thigh when he fastened the belt.

Ray asked whether he remembered the way. Paul said he did. They spoke very little after that. He could hear Ray moving around his kitchen. A cupboard closed. Water ran.

At a red light Paul began crying so hard he couldn’t see. When the light changed, the driver behind him sounded the horn. He pulled into a parking lot and stopped.

“What was that?” Ray asked.

“Somebody behind me.”

“Where are you now?”

Paul read the name above a closed store. Ray said he knew it.

“I need a minute.”

“Take it.”

He wiped his face on his sleeve. Ray remained on the line. After a while Paul could read the street sign through the windshield again. He told Ray he was coming and pulled out of the lot.

Ray made toast. There were envelopes and a screwdriver on the counter. He moved them so Paul could put his plate down.

Paul ate standing up. Ray sat at the table with his own toast. He had left the television low enough that the people on it seemed to be talking in another room.

“What were you busy with?” Paul asked.

“Lamp.”

“Did you fix it?”

“No.”

Paul looked at the screwdriver. Then he reached for the other piece of toast.

The next morning he still had the money.

He paid Lena back in amounts small enough to annoy him. She wrote each payment in a notebook. At first he thought she was keeping evidence. Later he asked to see the book. She turned it toward him and pointed to the total that remained.

“I thought it was more,” he said.

“It was.”

Caroline met him for lunch at a place neither of them had been before. He had brought a list because he was afraid of forgetting something important. She let him take it out, then asked him to put it away.

“Just talk to me.”

He did. When he began explaining a withdrawal from their joint account, she raised her hand. He stopped. She told him what that week had been like for her. There were details he had never known because he had been occupied with his own emergency.

He kept his hands flat on the table and listened.

After lunch she hugged him in the parking lot. He knew from the way she stepped back that the embrace was not a beginning. He drove home without calling anyone until he reached the apartment. Then he called Ray.

Three years passed. There were anniversaries, tests, dental appointments, a broken washing machine, days when he thought about drugs and days when he didn’t. He found work he could manage. He bought a proper bed. His sister stopped looking in his bathroom cabinet when she visited.

One Sunday he went to Mass and stood at the back. He knew when to sit, when to rise, when to answer. His body performed the service more confidently than he did.

At Communion he stayed in place. A woman returning to her seat smiled at him as she passed. He had expected his refusal to be visible in some larger way. She merely moved her handbag so he could sit down.

Afterward he approached the priest while two men were talking to him about a leaking pipe.

“Could I speak to you sometime?”

The priest took a card from his pocket and wrote a number on it.

“Call the office tomorrow. Ask for Father Andrew.”

Paul looked at the card. “I don’t know if I believe anymore.”

One of the men examining the pipe looked away. Father Andrew put the pen back in his pocket.

“Come anyway,” he said.

Paul kept the card behind his insurance card. He didn’t call for five months.

In January the doctor at Sloan moved his chair closer before speaking.

Paul noticed. He had learned to notice where people placed their chairs.

The cancer was back.

Lena reached for the folder in her bag. Her fingers went directly to the pocket where she kept a pen. Paul watched her uncap it. She had brought a sandwich for the train home, wrapped in foil. He could see it beside the folder, a small, absurd provision for a day that had just become something else.

The doctor described the next steps. This time Paul listened to the dates. He asked what would happen if the treatment didn’t work. His sister wrote down the answers, leaving space between them for questions she hadn’t yet thought of.

Outside, she asked whether he wanted to eat.

He shook his head.

They found a bench near the station. She divided the sandwich anyway. He held his half while people hurried past with their collars raised against the wind.

“I did everything,” he said.

Lena looked at him.

“The appointments. The pills they actually tell me to take. I stopped. I got my life straight.”

She folded the foil around her half of the sandwich.

He wanted her to say that it wasn’t fair. He wanted it said by someone other than him. Instead she moved close enough that their shoulders touched and asked whether he wanted her to call Ray.

He took out his phone himself.

That evening, at home, he found Father Andrew’s card. The office was closed. He left a message and immediately wished he hadn’t. In the morning the priest called while Paul was making coffee.

They met in a room that smelled of old paper. There were two mugs on the desk and a space heater beside the filing cabinet. Father Andrew asked how long Paul had been ill.

Paul began with the first diagnosis and found he could not stop. He told him about Sloan, the drugs, Caroline, San Juan. He counted the days in hospital. He described the sound a machine made when he bent his arm, and the humiliation of needing a stranger to hold him steady while he used the bathroom. He told him about the new scan.

The priest listened. When Paul stopped, the space heater clicked off.

“I think this is hell,” Paul said.

Father Andrew looked at him for a moment.

“Here?”

“Here. Being alive. Everyone waiting for something to be taken away.”

He had expected to feel ashamed of saying it. Instead he felt the relief of having set down an object whose weight had become familiar.

“And God?” the priest asked.

“That’s what I came to ask you.”

Father Andrew rubbed one thumb along the handle of his mug. He looked tired. Paul hadn’t noticed before.

“I don’t have an explanation for what’s happened to you.”

Paul leaned back. He had prepared arguments against several possible answers. He sat with them, unable to use any of them.

Somewhere beyond the office, a woman called the priest’s name. He called back that he would be a few minutes. She said there was water coming through the ceiling again.

He closed his eyes briefly.

Paul almost smiled.

“You should go,” he said.

“We can finish.”

“I don’t think I can.”

Father Andrew nodded. He wrote another date on the back of the card. Paul put it in his wallet.

In February he returned to Sloan for treatment. In March the results were encouraging. He and Lena ate the sandwiches she had packed. On the train home he slept with his mouth open and woke to find she had taken a photograph.

“Delete that.”

“Absolutely not.”

In April a cough that had seemed ordinary became pneumonia. At Hartford Hospital he lay watching his chest rise under the blanket and tried not to count. Lena arrived with the folder and a face that made him look away.

Nights passed with him propped against pillows. A young respiratory therapist adjusted equipment and asked whether he wanted the television on. He said no. Later he asked her to turn it on after all. She found a baseball game and left the volume low.

He called Ray when he could manage a conversation. He said he was afraid of the medications they might give him. Ray asked whether the team knew his history. Paul said yes.

“Keep telling them what you need,” Ray said.

Paul had wanted a simpler rule, one he could follow without having to trust anybody. He watched the therapist return to check on him. She had tucked the blanket around his feet before leaving the first time. He told her he was frightened. She pulled up a chair while she listened.

When he went home, Lena carried the laundry basket upstairs and put it beside the washing machine. She sorted the light clothes from the dark ones while he sat on a stool.

“I can do that,” he said.

“Tomorrow you can do it.”

He let her finish.

By July he could walk to the end of his street without stopping. He went early, before the heat. A woman watering her garden began saying good morning to him. After a week she asked his name. He told her. The next morning she used it.

In August he was taken to Yale with a heart attack.

He remembered the ceiling above the stretcher, then another ceiling, brighter and closer. Someone cut his shirt. He tried to lift his head to see what was happening and a hand settled against his shoulder.

“Stay with us, Paul.”

He resented the instruction. He had been trying to stay for years.

When he woke afterward, there was a dressing, equipment, a nurse asking questions he was relieved to know the answers to. They had opened the blocked artery. He asked the nurse to say that again. She did.

Lena stood at the foot of the bed with her handbag against her chest. This time she had come without the folder. He looked at the empty place beneath her arm where it usually was.

“You forgot your paperwork.”

She began to cry.

He reached for her. She came around the bed, and for a while he held her hand without saying anything. Her wedding ring pressed against his fingers. Somewhere in the room a telephone rang until somebody answered it.

Later, when they were both tired enough to speak normally, he said death had got too greedy that year.

Lena wiped her face with the last dry part of a tissue.

“Don’t encourage it,” she said.

He laughed carefully because his chest hurt.

By October, he had acquired a plastic pill organizer with compartments large enough to make him feel he was packing for a journey. His sister filled it beside him the first week. After that he did it himself, reading each label twice. The medicines had changed. He kept the current list on the refrigerator and carried a copy in his wallet.

He resumed his short walks. At the garden, the woman told him she had wondered where he was. He said he’d been away. She gave him two tomatoes, one of them split at the stem, and apologized for the damaged one.

He ate it over the sink when he got home.

He called Father Andrew’s office again. The priest was out. Paul asked whether the church was open during the week. The woman who answered told him the hours and warned him that a group used the hall on Thursdays, so parking could be difficult.

He wrote the hours down.

Before he went, the dog came through the gate.

There were people afterward, the owner apologizing, a neighbor picking groceries off the road, someone wrapping his arm in a clean towel. He answered questions and went where he was told. He watched a woman put the baguette back into its paper sleeve even though one end had been crushed under a tire.

He received treatment. He came home with instructions. For a few days he believed he had been allowed a relatively small disaster.

Then Lena called and couldn’t understand what he was saying. She came to the apartment and found him sitting in his coat with one arm through the wrong sleeve. He told her they needed to catch a train. She asked where. He couldn’t remember.

At Hartford, the familiar corridors kept becoming unfamiliar halfway along. He asked a nurse whether he was in San Juan. She told him he was in Connecticut. Ten minutes later he asked again.

When the confusion cleared, he remembered enough of it to be embarrassed. Beth told him he had been very ill. He said he knew. She adjusted the pillow beneath his arm and did not argue with the answer.

On the third night he asked for something to write on. She brought a pad and a pen. He wrote the date, then his name beneath it. He could form the letters. He turned the page and began a note to Lena.

He wrote instructions about the keys to his apartment, where to find the documents, who to call at work. Halfway down the page he began a sentence about his funeral.

He stopped.

He was tired of leaving instructions for rooms he would not occupy. He turned to a clean page and asked her to bring his slippers. He had left them beneath the bed, and the hospital socks kept twisting around his feet.

In the morning she brought the slippers. She held the note in one hand while she put them on the floor for him.

“These?”

“Those.”

“You couldn’t have texted?”

He looked at the pad on the tray.

“I wanted to write it down.”

She placed the note in her handbag.

The inch of liquid finally disappeared.

Beth disconnected the tubing and secured the dressing. Paul watched her hands. He had become familiar with the small differences between people who did the same job: the ones who told him before touching him, the ones who warmed cold fingers, the ones who remembered which arm hurt. Beth moved the pillow before he had to ask.

“Your sister’s parking,” she said.

He dressed slowly. The trousers were easier than he had expected. The shirt was harder. He had to stop and ask for help with the left sleeve. Beth guided the fabric over the dressing and waited while he buttoned it with one hand.

He put the discharge papers in Lena’s folder. There was room if he removed the information about parking from the January appointment. He folded that page and put it in the wastebasket.

On the way out he asked to see the chapel. Lena looked at him, then at the volunteer pushing the wheelchair. The volunteer knew the way.

It was a small room. There were chairs, a table, a book open beneath a lamp. Someone had left a packet of tissues on the seat nearest the door. Paul asked to sit for a minute. Lena went to find coffee.

He moved from the wheelchair into an ordinary chair. His slippers were in the bag on his lap. He could feel their soft weight through the plastic.

For a while he listened to the sounds outside. Wheels passed. A door closed. Somewhere a child was objecting to being picked up. He waited for a sentence he could honestly address to God.

Nothing came.

He had said everything in San Juan. He had said it again in Father Andrew’s office, in the dark at home, under his breath while the machines at Yale watched him sleep. He had offered bargains, accusations, promises that had proved easier to make while frightened than to keep when well.

A woman came in and sat two chairs away. She wore a visitor’s sticker on her coat. She took off her glasses and held them in both hands.

Paul looked back toward the open book.

After a few minutes she began to cry. He reached for the packet of tissues and set it on the empty chair between them. She took one without looking up.

He stayed until Lena returned. His sister stood in the doorway with two cups. He raised his hand to show he had seen her. She waited.

He bowed his head. He did not try to decide whether anyone was listening.

Then he got back into the wheelchair and let them take him to the car.

Lena stayed two nights. She had meant to stay longer, but on the second afternoon her husband called because water was coming through their kitchen ceiling. Paul heard her giving instructions in the hallway. She had the same voice she used when someone at an appointment couldn’t find his paperwork.

When she came back, he said, “Go home.”

“I will.”

“Now, Lena.”

She looked around the apartment. There were meals in the refrigerator, his medicines on the counter, a clean dressing on his arm. He sat in the chair by the window and let her look.

“You’ll answer your phone?”

“Yes.”

“Even if you’re sleeping.”

“Especially then. I’ll tell you what a pleasure it is.”

She put on her coat. At the door she came back and kissed his forehead, something she had begun doing in hospitals and now seemed unable to stop. Once she was on the stairs, he locked up.

The apartment made its own noises. The refrigerator started. A neighbor ran water. Paul stood in the kitchen deciding whether he wanted tea. There was nobody to ask him, and for a moment he resented having to decide.

He made it too strong and drank it anyway.

That evening he called Ray. They talked about the dog, the hospital, a man from their meeting who had moved to Florida and kept sending photographs of fish.

“You need anything?” Ray asked.

Paul looked at the pill organizer. He had put it beside the sugar bowl. He could move it somewhere less visible, but he would have to remember where.

“Stay on a little.”

Ray did. Paul washed his cup while Ray described a problem with his truck. He set the cup in the rack and dried the counter. When they hung up, the kitchen was ready for morning.

In the following weeks he went to appointments. The wound closed slowly. A clinician measured it, and he found himself pleased by a difference he would once have considered too small to mention. His sister wrote the next date on the kitchen calendar. January was already filling.

He slept badly some nights. On one of them he took out the papers from Sloan and read the same paragraph until the words stopped meaning anything. He put them away and found a western on television. The men in it kept getting shot in the shoulder and riding horses afterward. He watched until daylight.

One morning he heard a dog barking on the stairs and waited behind his door until it passed. Through the peephole he saw a little terrier pulling an elderly man toward the exit. He stood there after they were gone, his keys pressed between his fingers. Then he opened the door. Outside, the man was trying to untangle the leash from a railing. Paul walked past on the other side of the pavement. At the corner he stopped to let his breathing settle before continuing to the mailbox alone.

In December he returned to his meeting. Ray had saved a chair near the door. Paul sat down, then noticed that somebody had put the coffee beyond the reach of a man using a walker. He got up again. He carried two cups back carefully, taking the long way around the folding chairs.

When it was his turn, he said he was glad to be there. He had said it before. This time he stopped after saying it.

The first Thursday he went to the church, he nearly turned around because the parking lot was full.

He found a space by the bins behind the hall. A woman came through the side door carrying an empty cardboard box. He asked whether he was all right to park there. She said yes, provided he didn’t block the collection truck.

He moved the car another foot.

Inside, the church smelled faintly of furniture polish. Someone had plugged in a vacuum cleaner and left it beside the last pew. Its cord crossed the aisle. He stepped over it and sat halfway down, on the right.

There were no candles burning near him. Above the altar, a work light stood on a tripod beside a ladder. One of the bulbs in the high ceiling was out. He could see its dark shape among the others.

He sat with his hands in his lap. The healing skin pulled when he turned his wrist. He moved his hand until it was comfortable.

A door opened behind him. A man came in and began winding the vacuum cord around his elbow. Paul listened to the plug striking the wooden handle. He thought of leaving so the man could work, but the man carried the machine out and closed the door.

Paul stayed.

He looked toward the altar and tried the beginning of the Our Father. The familiar words brought back his mother’s voice, quick and impatient at bedtime, already thinking about the things she had to do downstairs. He remembered her pulling the blanket out from beneath his feet so she could tuck it in properly.

He lost his place.

After a while he heard people in the hall. Chairs scraped. Somebody laughed, then coughed. Through the wall came the uneven sound of dishes being stacked.

His phone vibrated. Lena wanted to know whether he had eaten. He wrote that he would when he got home. Then he added that he was at church.

Her answer came while he was still holding the phone.

Okay.

No other message came.

He put the phone away. He could feel the January appointment card in his pocket, its corner bent from the way he sat. He took it out and smoothed it against his knee. Nine in the morning. He would have to leave early. Perhaps Lena could meet him at the station instead of driving to his apartment first.

He put the card back.

In the hall, someone dropped a spoon. It struck the floor and skittered, and a woman’s voice said she had it. Then the dishes began again.

Paul leaned against the pew. His feet were cold, but the rest of him was warm. He closed his eyes. For several minutes he heard the people next door eating and talking, and did not follow any of the voices. When he opened his eyes, the light had shifted on the floor.

Her father had been in the house forty seconds when he found something wrong that she hadn’t asked him to fix.

“This hinge is going.”

He stood at the kitchen cabinet with one hand on the open door. Teresa had left it open because the plates were still in a box. In the cabinet were a bottle of olive oil, three light bulbs, and the folder containing everything she had signed to acquire the house.

“The bedroom’s down the hall.”

“I know where the bedroom is.”

He lifted the cabinet door, demonstrating the movement. She looked at the clock above the stove. Nine thirty-two. He had said ten.

“Traffic was nothing,” he said.

“You live twelve minutes away.”

“Today it was ten.”

He closed the cabinet carefully, as though she had been throwing it against the wall. His toolbox was beside his foot. The coffee can in his other hand had held the same screws, small tools, and things that might become useful for most of her life. The red label had faded to pink. A piece of tape covered the place where the metal rim had split.

Teresa moved Nina’s cereal bowl off the electric bill.

“Coffee?”

“Wouldn’t say no.”

She gave him the blue mug. It had a handle too small for two fingers and too large to hold comfortably with one. She knew this when she chose it.

“What time did you get up?” she asked.

“Usual.”

“That tells me nothing.”

“Five.”

“For what?”

He looked at her over the mug. “I didn’t know there had to be an occasion.”

She smiled despite herself and opened the refrigerator for the milk.

The house was a ranch with a shallow roof, a narrow driveway, and a dining area the listing had called a dining room. Teresa could touch both walls of it if she stood at an angle. Three weeks after moving in, she still caught herself making improvements in her head that she would not be able to afford. French doors at the back. Built-in shelves. A stove whose burners had settings between raw and black.

For now there was a lamp without a shade and a box marked CHRISTMAS holding shoes. The refrigerator seal was new. So was the connection behind the dryer. Both repairs had been described to her as fortunate discoveries.

Arthur looked at the boxes beside the table.

“Miscellaneous,” he read. “Miscellaneous. Miscellaneous.”

“They go in different rooms.”

“How do you know?”

“I’m the miscellaneous department.”

Nina appeared in the hallway wearing socks and the enormous sweatshirt she had slept in. Her hair lay across one cheek in a flat brown strip.

“Grandpa.”

“There she is.”

She put her arms around him without looking fully awake. He rested his chin briefly on her head.

“Can you fix it today?” she asked.

“We’ll have a look.”

“It’s so annoying.”

“I’ve heard,” Teresa said.

Nina was already leading him down the hallway. Teresa followed with the milk still in her hand, then went back to put it away.

At the bedroom Nina demonstrated. She pushed the door until the bottom caught, then turned sideways and applied her shoulder. The scrape went through Teresa’s teeth.

“Don’t force it,” Arthur said.

Nina stopped.

Teresa had said those words every day for three weeks. She stood beside her father and wished, with a smallness that embarrassed her, that Nina would give him an argument.

He crouched and ran two fingers over the floor. A pale curved mark showed where the door traveled.

“They put this over the old flooring.”

“That’s what the handyman said.”

“What’d he want?”

“Two hundred and forty.”

Arthur made a noise.

“He had to come out. There’s a minimum.”

“I ought to come out of retirement.”

“You say that every time anyone charges for anything.”

“Because they keep doing it.”

Nina grinned. He eased the door backward, checked the hinges, then lowered his face to look along the bottom edge.

“Didn’t they mention it when you bought?”

“It was open when we looked at the house.”

“Hm.”

“The inspector checked the roof and the furnace. I was more concerned about those. There were three offers, and if I’d started asking for every little...”

She stopped. Arthur had not looked up. He was rubbing a mark on the floor with his thumb.

“It needs a little off the bottom,” he said.

Nina’s room smelled of shampoo and an apple she had failed to finish. Clothes covered the desk chair. On the dresser a framed photograph of Nina and Eric at a baseball game leaned against a bottle of lotion. Teresa had packed that photograph herself, wrapping it in a dish towel so the glass would not break.

“Clear us a path,” she told Nina.

“There was a path before everyone got in it.”

Arthur smiled at the floor. Teresa couldn’t tell whether she was supposed to smile too.

She went to the kitchen drawer for the handle. Nina had chosen brushed nickel over brass on a Sunday afternoon when choosing hardware together had briefly seemed like the beginning of enjoying the house. The package had sat beneath the takeout menus ever since.

Arthur took it from her and turned it over.

“What’s she need a lock for?”

“For her door.”

“I can see that.”

Nina stood with an armful of clothes, watching them.

“It’s the one we bought,” Teresa said.

He pressed a thumbnail against the plastic. “These packages. You need a tool just to get at the thing.”

“There are scissors in the kitchen.”

He gave it back. Teresa put it on the dresser beside the baseball photograph.

“Get me an old towel,” he said. “Something you don’t care about.”

She had an entire drawer of those. The good towels had gone with Eric, though neither of them had intended that to be the arrangement. She found a green bath towel with a pink bleach mark and carried it down the hall.

Arthur folded the towel under the door and told her where to stand.

“Hold it there. Don’t let it come toward you.”

“I’ve got it.”

“Once I get this last pin out, you’ve got the weight.”

“I know.”

He had removed the top pin and set it in the coffee can. The second struck something inside with a short, hard chink.

She looked past his shoulder into Nina’s room.

The old room had been at the end of an upstairs hallway. Blue carpet, white furniture, a poster Teresa had bought with babysitting money and hung with tape because her father wouldn’t allow holes in the wall. At sixteen she had thought he was bluffing until he returned with the hammer.

He hadn’t raised his voice then. That had made her angrier. She had spent the argument holding herself ready for shouting, and now he was kneeling beside the hinge as if she’d asked for a repair.

“What are you going to take next? The windows?”

He had laid the first pin on the hall table. It rolled into a dish where her mother kept buttons.

“Keep going,” he said.

She had kept going. It was easy to remember that part. Whenever the story came up, which it occasionally did over dinner if someone else’s daughter was giving them trouble, her father could still quote the windows.

“Teresa.”

She tightened her grip.

“Lift a little.”

She lifted. Nina’s door came away from the frame, heavier than she’d expected, and she adjusted her hands while Arthur took the other side.

“Watch your fingers.”

“I am.”

They turned it edgewise. Nina stepped onto the rug beside her bed to let them pass, gathering a T-shirt with her toes and reaching down for it. Teresa’s eyes went to the opening they were leaving. From the hall she could see the whole bed, the dresser, the chair with its uncovered seat.

Arthur walked backward toward the kitchen.

“You all right?”

“Yes.”

“Say if you need to put it down.”

“I’ll say.”

At the back step he stopped while she worked out how to descend without bringing the bottom edge against her shin. The door was solid and plain, painted several times, with a dent near the handle that belonged to a family they did not know.

Outside, he had set two folding sawhorses on the flat patch beside the patio. They lowered the door onto them. Teresa flexed her hands.

“You brought everything.”

“That’s the idea.”

He shifted one sawhorse an inch and checked for wobble.

Her door had leaned against the garage wall behind two bicycles. At first she had gone down to look at it. She would stand in the doorway from the kitchen, seeing it between the handlebars, and try to judge whether he’d moved it. Once the bicycles changed positions and she thought that meant he was getting ready.

She had stopped looking before winter. By then there were folding lawn chairs in front of it, and the Christmas lights, and a bag of salt.

Eight months.

Arthur reached into his toolbox.

“Have you got an extension cord?”

“Somewhere.”

“No, never mind. Brought the battery saw.”

He lifted it out. She looked at the gray hair above his collar, a narrow strip he missed when he shaved the back of his neck. He had been forty-five. Nearly her age now.

“The sanding block’s by your sink,” he said. “Would you get it?”

She went inside.

Nina had moved to the far side of her bed to pull a sweatshirt out of a box. Only the top of her head showed. Teresa stopped in the hall, then kept going before Nina looked up.

At the sink she found the sanding block beside Arthur’s mug. He had left a crescent of coffee on the counter. She wiped it with her thumb, rinsed her hand, and exchanged the blue mug for the large white one.

When she brought the block outside, he was measuring.

“How much comes off?”

“Just enough.”

“How much is just enough?”

He gave her the number, and she nodded as though she’d been checking his work.

He stretched the tape across the door and made a pencil mark. Then he measured again from the other side. She knew the order of it. At eleven she had loved being allowed to hold the tape, loved the hooked metal end biting into the edge of a board while her father went backward across a room. She used to call out measurements before looking.

“Seventy-nine feet.”

“For a pantry shelf?”

“It’s a big pantry.”

He would pretend to consider it. Sometimes, if the owner was out of earshot, he would say they were going to need a bigger truck.

Now he straightened and rubbed the base of his thumb.

“Does that hurt?” she asked.

“Only when I use it.”

“You could’ve said you weren’t up to this.”

“I’m up to a door.”

She folded the towel they’d used and laid it on the patio chair. Across the fence a neighbor was pulling dead stems out of a pot. Teresa had met him once and forgotten his name. She raised her hand. He raised his, holding a fistful of brown leaves.

Arthur watched until the man went inside.

“That lock opens from the outside, you know.”

“It’s a bedroom handle, Dad. Not a vault.”

“I’m saying they don’t do much.”

“It’ll keep somebody from walking in when she’s changing.”

“Nobody’s stopping her from changing.”

“People forget to knock.”

“Who? There’s two of you.”

“Then me. It’ll stop me.”

He rested both hands on the edge of the door. “We never needed locks inside a house.”

Teresa took a small piece of paint off her sleeve.

“It’s the handle I want.”

He lifted his hands, palms toward her, then reached for his safety glasses.

She hated those lifted hands. More than she would have hated an argument, which at least would have left something she could answer.

He clamped a straightedge across the door, checked the pencil marks, and asked her to stand back. She watched from the patio while he made the cut. The saw drowned out the neighbor’s radio. A narrow piece fell away at the end, and the smell of fresh wood rose through the smell of grass.

When he set the saw down, she said, “You took mine off.”

He removed his glasses.

“What?”

“My bedroom door. You took it off.”

He looked toward the house, as if she might be talking about a room here. Then his expression changed.

“Oh, that.”

She waited.

“You were something else that year.”

Nina called from the kitchen.

“Mom. Where’s the charger?”

“Where you left it.”

“If I knew where I left it...”

“The drawer beside the stove.”

Arthur picked up the sanding block. Teresa watched him run it over the cut edge, testing with his fingers after each pass.

“We bought the new handle last Sunday,” she said.

“I know. You’ve told me.”

She had told him no such thing. She went inside before she could start arguing about that too.

The charger was on the counter, partly hidden by a grocery bag. Nina found it while Teresa was opening the drawer. Neither said anything. Nina plugged her phone into the outlet above the counter and left it with the screen lit.

“I’m washing my hair.”

“All right.”

“Don’t run the kitchen water.”

“I remember.”

She hadn’t remembered the first time. Nina had made a sound from the shower that brought Teresa running with a butter knife in her hand.

Teresa took the cheese and turkey out of the refrigerator. She had bought the turkey for Arthur because he claimed not to like ham and ate it whenever Marian served it. There were tomatoes from a farm stand, one already soft at the stem. She cut around the spot.

The phone made a small vibrating sound against the counter. Leah’s name appeared above a line Teresa did not read.

On Thursday Leah’s mother had answered the phone from a grocery store. No, the girls weren’t at her house. She’d thought they were at Teresa’s.

Teresa had been at her desk with a customer’s unpaid invoice on the screen and a stack of time sheets under her elbow. She managed the schedules and billing for a heating company. Most afternoons she could tell you where six men were within half an hour, which truck had the part they needed, and who would arrive home late. She had spent twenty-three minutes not knowing where her daughter was.

Nina had finally answered with wind breaking up her voice.

“We’re at the lake.”

“What lake?”

“The lake.”

As if there were only one body of water in Connecticut and her mother was being deliberately dense.

Who drove? A friend. What friend? Leah knew him. Where were they now? Coming back. Teresa had heard a boy say something and the girls laugh, and for the rest of the call Nina had sounded as if her mother were an interruption everyone in the car was waiting for her to finish.

Now the whole conversation might be here, on the counter. The driver’s name. How old he was. Whether this had happened before Thursday.

She moved the phone away from the wet tomato seeds. It was warm in her hand. The screen had not locked. There was a photograph of Leah making a face beside Nina, and below it the beginning of the thread.

She could find out in less time than it would take to wash the knife.

From the bathroom came the clatter of a bottle falling in the tub, followed by Nina’s muffled “Shit.” The water kept running. Teresa stayed where she was, thumb beside the glass.

She had been reasonable on Thursday for at least the first five minutes after Nina got home. She remembered making that effort. Then Nina had said she hadn’t told her because she knew she’d do exactly this, and Teresa had asked whether being lied to was supposed to improve her mood.

It would be useful to know what actually happened. It would be useful, for once, to ask a question whose answer she already knew.

The screen dimmed. She put the phone on a folded dish towel and went back to the tomato.

She cut the slices too thin. They folded when she tried to lift them.

Outside, Arthur called for a clean rag.

She took him one from the laundry basket. He had opened a small can of primer and was stirring it with a piece of wood.

“Seal this up so it doesn’t take on moisture.”

“How long?”

“For it to dry? We’ll eat first. Then see.”

He looked at the rag.

“This’ll do.”

It was the bottom half of a T-shirt Nina had outgrown. Teresa had cut it up during the move, after carrying it through two houses in a bag marked donation.

Arthur brushed the exposed wood with short strokes. She watched for a moment, then said she was making sandwiches.

“No rush.”

“I wasn’t rushing.”

He kept brushing. She went inside and got three plates from the box.

One of the kitchen chairs was missing. The movers said they had delivered four. Teresa had three, a signed inventory, and a photograph of someone else’s ottoman which the moving company had emailed to ask if it belonged to her.

She sat on the folding stool she’d been using to reach the upper cabinets.

“You can’t eat on that,” Arthur said.

“I’ve been doing it.”

“Take this chair.”

“You stay there.”

“I’ve got a couple in the basement.”

“The missing one might still turn up.”

“Chairs don’t usually conceal themselves.”

“Maybe it didn’t like the house,” Nina said.

Teresa laughed, then bent to pick up the corner of her napkin, which had caught in the stool’s hinge.

Nina’s wet hair darkened the shoulders of her clean shirt. She had tucked her phone into the pocket of her sweatpants and brought Arthur a glass of water without being asked. When Teresa had asked her to set the table, she had said she was in the middle of something.

Arthur lifted a corner of the bread on his sandwich.

“No tomato,” Nina said. “I remembered.”

“I like a tomato.”

“Not in a sandwich.”

“That’s right.”

“You say it gets the bread all wibbly.”

“I never said wibbly in my life.”

“You absolutely did.”

Teresa passed him the mustard. He looked into the white mug.

“Thought I had a different cup.”

“That one leaks.”

It didn’t, but she had no wish to explain.

Nina told him about a substitute teacher who had mistaken a student’s name for a note on the attendance sheet. The joke took longer than it should have because Arthur kept asking what the student’s name actually was. Nina repeated the whole thing, patiently, and Teresa ate her sandwich.

“So he just kept saying it?” Arthur asked.

“Yes.”

“And nobody told him.”

“Eventually.”

“You people are terrible.”

Nina smiled. “Thank you for doing the door, by the way.”

“Thank me when it shuts.”

“It already looks better without it.”

“That can be arranged,” he said.

Teresa set her sandwich down.

Nina didn’t seem to notice. She was using a finger to collect the crumbs on her plate.

“Put that in the sink when you’re done,” Teresa said.

“In a minute.”

Arthur was looking through the kitchen window toward the sawhorses. Teresa watched Nina turn a crumb into a smaller crumb.

“What time were you planning on Leah’s tomorrow?”

“After lunch.”

“And her mother’s going to be there?”

“Yes.”

“Did you ask?”

“We already talked about this.”

“We talked about where you said you’d be on Thursday. That wasn’t especially helpful.”

Nina looked at Arthur, then at her mother.

“Can we not?”

“I’m asking a question.”

“In front of Grandpa.”

Arthur reached for his water. He had become careful about where he looked. Teresa could feel the next sentence waiting, ready and justified: You should have thought about that before you lied.

“We’ll talk later,” she said.

“Great.”

Nina stood. The plate hit the sink hard enough for Teresa to turn, but it didn’t break. Nina went down the hall.

Arthur chewed, swallowed, and wiped his mouth.

“Hasn’t changed much.”

“What hasn’t?”

“Sixteen.”

Teresa moved the tomato she’d taken out of her sandwich to the edge of the plate.

“How long do you think my door was off?”

He looked at her.

“The bedroom door,” she said.

“I know which door.”

“How long?”

“Oh, I couldn’t tell you now.”

“Try.”

“A few weeks. Until you settled down.”

“Eight months.”

He put the uneaten half of his sandwich on his plate.

“It wasn’t eight months.”

Teresa had not expected this to be the first thing they disagreed about. She had expected him to say she deserved it, or that she was leaving out what she’d done. She had expected the familiar conversation in which she grew louder and he grew more certain that her volume proved his point.

“It was September when you took it off.”

“September.”

“Before school pictures. I had the shirt with the collar that wouldn’t stay down.”

“That doesn’t tell me when the door...”

“It was gone at Christmas. It went back on in May.”

He shook his head.

“Dad.”

“I’m thinking.”

She held the edge of the table. The stool was too low, her knees slightly above her hips. She wanted to stand but didn’t want to be the person who stood up during an argument.

“You painted the upstairs hall. That’s when it went back.”

“We painted that hall more than once.”

“Yellow. Mom picked yellow.”

“That was supposed to be cream.”

“Whatever it was supposed to be.”

“I told her it would look different once it was on four walls.”

“May. You put my door back when you painted.”

She had come home from school to find newspaper spread along the upstairs hall. Her mother was on a ladder with a brush, painting around the smoke detector. The bedroom door stood open. Teresa put her book bag down and touched the knob.

“Watch the frame,” Marian said. “It’s wet.”

“Is it staying?”

Her mother looked down from the ladder.

“Of course it’s staying. Don’t start.”

Teresa hadn’t been starting anything. She went into her room and closed it gently. The latch clicked. She sat on the bed in her jacket until her mother called up to ask whether she wanted a grilled cheese.

At dinner her father talked about the price of paint. Teresa passed him the potatoes. Nobody mentioned the door, and she didn’t thank him because thanking him seemed wrong, though for several days she worried that he was waiting for her to do it.

She had wanted to tell Arthur this too. Now he was sitting across from her in the kitchen she owned, and she was still trying to establish the month. She looked at his hands resting beside his plate, the broad fingers, the pale line where his wedding ring usually sat. He had taken it off for the work. It would be in the little pocket of his jeans.

He looked toward the hallway. A drawer opened in Nina’s room, then shut. Teresa wondered whether Nina had put in her earbuds. She hoped so and then disliked herself for hoping it.

“You were out past midnight,” Arthur said.

“Yes.”

“Your mother was beside herself.”

“I know.”

“We called everybody.”

She had been at a house where the parents were away. Not a wild party, though that was what her mother called it for years. There had been beer in a cooler and music playing through speakers too small for the volume. Teresa had sat on the back steps beside a boy from another school, waiting for him to kiss her. By the time he did, her ride was gone.

She had called home from the kitchen wall phone. Her father had arrived in his work pants and a jacket over his undershirt. She could still remember the porch light catching the pale strip of his throat. She had been relieved to see him until he opened the truck door.

“You had a right to be angry,” she said.

“Thank you.”

“But eight months.”

“You slammed it in my face.”

“I closed it.”

“You slammed it.”

She had closed it hard. She remembered the poster lifting away from the wall and settling again. She could spend the rest of lunch arguing over the force she’d used at sixteen.

“All right. I slammed it.”

“You don’t slam a door in somebody’s face when they’re speaking to you.”

The refrigerator motor shut off. Through the kitchen window she could hear a dog barking from two or three yards away.

“I had to change behind the closet door,” she said.

He looked down at his plate.

“Your mother would’ve given you the bathroom.”

“She was in the bathroom. Or you were. Or somebody was coming over and I was supposed to hurry.”

At Christmas she’d had a black dress with a zipper down the back. Marian had bought it too early, on sale, and by December it pulled across the shoulders. Teresa stood behind the closet door trying to work the zipper with one hand. Her other hand held the door open at the angle that blocked the hallway.

The closet smelled of shoes and the sachet her grandmother had given her. If she leaned too far, the door moved. If she didn’t lean, she couldn’t reach the zipper. From downstairs Aunt Rita called to ask whether they should save her something before her father ate all the stuffed mushrooms.

Marian called back that she was coming.

Teresa hooked the closet door with her bare foot and used both hands. The zipper caught on the lining. She had stood there getting hot, crying a little, furious that she was crying over a dress when people were downstairs waiting to tell her how nice she looked.

“Mom used to call out before she came upstairs,” she said. “So I’d know somebody was coming.”

“She was considerate.”

“Yes.”

He took the last swallow of coffee.

“That house wasn’t a train station, Teresa. Nobody was walking through your room.”

“They could see in.”

“We weren’t looking at you.”

“I didn’t know when you were going to be there.”

She heard herself repeat it. She had been here before, in her car, in the shower, saying this to a version of her father who eventually ran out of objections. The real one was picking at a piece of bread stuck to his thumbnail.

“I apologized.”

“You said the words.”

“What else was I supposed to say?”

“It was your attitude.”

“What would have counted?”

He looked up.

“An apology. What would you have accepted?”

“You can’t put it like that.”

“I’m asking.”

“When somebody means it, you know.”

She looked at the napkin on her lap. There was mustard on it, though she hadn’t used any.

“I meant I wanted my door back.”

“Well.”

He said it quietly. There it was, apparently. The thing she’d just admitted.

She set the napkin on the table.

“I still needed one.”

Arthur leaned back. His chair made a small creak.

“We can’t settle every old argument this afternoon.”

“We’ve never settled this one.”

“I came to help you.”

“I know why you came.”

He folded his napkin in half, then in half again, and put it beside his plate. For a moment she thought he might get up and take his tools to the truck.

Instead he said, “I’ll see how that’s drying.”

He pushed his chair in after he stood. Teresa stayed on the stool while he went out through the kitchen. The back door caught on the mat. He bent and moved the mat with his hand before closing it.

Teresa took the plates to the sink. She scraped the uneaten food into the trash, putting her father’s sandwich on top of the tomato ends. Then she retrieved it and wrapped it. He might want it later. It was turkey from the counter, nearly twelve dollars a pound.

Nina appeared with a hairbrush.

“Are you guys fighting?”

“We’re talking about something old.”

“I could hear.”

Teresa looked at the hallway. Of course she could.

“He really took your door?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s what he did.”

“I mean what happened.”

Teresa put the knife down. Nina was pulling strands of hair out of the brush and rolling them between her fingers.

“I came home late. Very late. Then we had an argument and I shut the door while he was talking.”

“And he took it off for eight months?”

“Yes.”

“That’s insane.”

Teresa ran water over the knife.

“I hated it,” she said.

Nina glanced toward the yard. Her grandfather was crouched beside the toolbox, looking for something. He had a piece of white rag tucked into his back pocket.

“Grandpa?”

“Yes, Nina. Grandpa.”

“I know. It’s just.”

She looked at the brush. Teresa waited, but Nina did not finish.

“Am I still getting the handle?”

“Yes.”

“The one with the lock?”

“Yes.”

Nina pulled the last hair free and dropped the little roll in the trash. Teresa wanted to tell her to push it down so it wouldn’t drift onto the floor. She didn’t.

“We do need to talk about Thursday.”

Nina’s shoulders dropped.

“Seriously?”

“We never finished.”

“Because you kept asking the same thing.”

“I still don’t know whose car you were in.”

“Evan’s.”

“Evan what?”

“I told you I didn’t know.”

“Then find out.”

Nina took her phone from her pocket and began typing with both thumbs. Teresa resisted asking who she was texting. The screen clicked softly with each letter. She hadn’t known Nina had the sound on.

“It’s Leah’s friend, really.”

“How old?”

“Eighteen.”

“Does he go to your school?”

“Not anymore.”

“And you decided to go with him.”

“Leah was going.”

“That isn’t an answer.”

“It is an answer. You just don’t like it.”

Teresa gripped the edge of the sink. Outside, her father straightened slowly, one hand on his knee.

“Were you wearing a seat belt?”

“Yes.”

“Was he drinking?”

“No.”

“Anything else?”

“Oh my God.”

“Answer me.”

“No.”

The word came out with enough force that Teresa looked toward the window again. She could not tell whether Arthur had heard. Nina saw her look.

“See? You don’t like him hearing either.”

“Keep your voice down.”

“Then stop asking me things in the kitchen.”

Teresa opened her mouth. She had paid for a handle, arranged the repair, made lunch, and been told to stop asking questions in her own kitchen. The words in her own kitchen arrived with a complete sentence attached. She could almost hear how well it would work.

She wiped her hands on a towel.

“All right,” she said. “Come here.”

She led Nina into her bedroom, the only room with a chair free of boxes, and shut the door. The bed was unmade. Her work pants hung over the chair back. She moved them to the bed and sat. Nina remained standing, studying a water stain on the ceiling.

“I need to know you can get home,” Teresa said.

“I got home.”

“Yes.”

“So.”

“Was he a good driver?”

Nina looked down at her phone.

“Fine.”

Teresa waited. A car went by outside, the bass from its radio audible before the engine.

“He was showing off a little,” Nina said.

“How?”

“Going around the turns. I don’t know. It wasn’t a big deal.”

“Did you ask him to slow down?”

“Leah did.”

“And?”

“He did. Eventually.”

Teresa pictured a narrow road, a boy’s hands on the wheel, Nina in the back pretending not to mind. She put her feet flat on the floor.

“You could have called me.”

“You were working.”

“I would’ve left.”

“And then I would’ve had to hear about it the whole way home.”

“I wasn’t going to...”

Nina looked at her.

Teresa pulled a loose thread from the seam of her pants.

“I would’ve been angry.”

“Exactly.”

“But I would have come.”

“That doesn’t make the other part disappear.”

“No.”

Nina’s phone sounded. She read the message.

“Brennan,” she said. “His last name is Brennan.”

Teresa repeated it to herself, then wished she had a pen. Nina was already typing again.

“Next time the plan changes, tell me. Before you leave. An address. Who’s driving.”

“Fine.”

“And if you’re already somewhere and you want to leave, call. I’ll pick you up.”

“Without the whole thing?”

“We can talk after we’re home.”

“So still the whole thing.”

“Maybe. But you won’t have to sit in my car and hear it while I’m driving.”

She could promise that much. She might need to keep her mouth shut all the way across town, but she could do it.

Nina leaned against the dresser.

“Dad wouldn’t make it this complicated.”

“Your dad wasn’t the one calling Leah’s mother at the grocery store.”

The answer was too quick. She saw Nina withdraw behind her face.

“I’m not talking about your father,” Teresa said.

“You just did.”

“Yes. I did.”

She lifted her work pants from the bed and folded them over her knee. There was nothing wrong with the pants. They didn’t require her attention. She put them down again.

“You can be angry with me and still give me an address.”

“I said fine.”

“All right.”

“Can I go?”

Teresa wanted more than fine. She wanted some evidence that Nina understood the twenty-three minutes at her desk, the absurd things she’d pictured, the customer’s invoice turning into shapes she couldn’t read. She wanted Nina to give her one sentence she could carry back to the kitchen.

“Yes.”

Nina opened the bedroom door.

“And bring in the plates from outside,” Teresa said.

Nina looked back.

“We ate in here.”

“Right. Never mind.”

Her daughter went down the hall. Teresa stayed in the chair until the phone in her own pocket began to vibrate. Eric wanted to know whether he could pick Nina up an hour earlier next Friday.

She typed that he should ask Nina, then deleted it. She checked the calendar and said yes.

Arthur had turned the door slightly on the sawhorses. Sun reached one half of it now. The white primer on the bottom edge looked dry, though she knew better than to put a finger on it without asking.

“More coffee?”

“No, thanks.”

He held out his phone.

“Your mother sent something. Glasses are in the truck.”

Teresa took it. Marian had sent a photograph of a carton of half-and-half and the words THIS ONE PLEASE. Beneath that was a second message: Not the fat free.

“She needs this on your way home.”

Teresa showed him the photograph.

“I know what half-and-half looks like.”

“She says not the fat-free.”

“I got the wrong one once.”

She gave back the phone. He squinted at it, put it in his pocket, then took it out again and set it on the patio table so he wouldn’t sit on it.

Teresa leaned against the fence. The yard had seemed larger before they moved in. The real estate photographs had been taken from angles no human being would naturally occupy. She could see a piece of bright blue plastic caught under the forsythia. Some previous child’s toy. She’d been meaning to pick it up for three weeks.

“You used to like helping me,” Arthur said.

“I did.”

“That pantry on Woodridge. Remember the lady with the dog?”

“Two dogs.”

“One kept stealing my pencil.”

“The other one ate your sandwich.”

“He got the first half. I wasn’t giving him the second.”

“You washed it off.”

“The top piece of bread. There was nothing wrong with the rest.”

She could see him at the laundry sink in that woman’s basement, holding the bread under the faucet while Teresa laughed so hard she had to sit on the stairs. He had made her promise not to tell Marian. She’d told her before he got his boots off.

Arthur rubbed a dried fleck of paint from the door’s face.

“You could be difficult.”

“I know.”

He nodded once.

“You still left me without a door.”

His thumb stopped moving.

For a little while she heard only the neighbor’s radio. A man was advertising replacement windows. Every third window was apparently free.

Arthur picked up the rag and wiped his hands.

“We can bring this in now.”

Teresa looked at the door. She could ask him to leave it there. She had enough in checking to pay someone, if she moved the dentist appointment and waited on the shelves. The thought gave her a brief, unpleasant satisfaction. He would have to carry his tools past the job he hadn’t finished.

Inside, Nina dragged something across her bedroom floor, clearing room for them.

“Which end?” Teresa asked.

“Same as before.”

She moved into place. Arthur waited while she got both hands under the edge.

At the kitchen entrance Arthur started to turn before she was ready.

“Wait. There’s a box.”

He stopped. She pushed the box with her foot, but it caught on the mat. She put her end down.

“Give me a second.”

She moved it against the wall, lifted the door again, and told him she was ready.

Nina had cleared more than a path. The chair was empty, the books stacked against the bed, the apple gone. She stood in the hallway with the package containing the handle.

“Thanks,” Teresa said.

Nina shrugged and put the package on the dresser.

Arthur lowered himself to the floor. Teresa held the door upright while he lined up the hinges. The towel took some of the weight, but her arms began to ache before the first pin went in.

“Up a little.”

She lifted.

“Too far. Back.”

“I can’t see what you’re seeing.”

“I know. Right there. Hold that.”

The pin slid home. He tapped it into place, then worked on the others. When he leaned back, his knee cracked loudly enough for Nina to wince.

“I’m not falling apart,” he said.

Teresa fetched the cushion from her bedroom chair and put it beside him. He shifted onto it without comment.

They tested the door. It swung over the place where it had caught, and Nina made a pleased sound before it reached the frame. Arthur opened it, closed it, checked the gap at the top.

“Let me get that handle.”

He cut open the plastic package with the kitchen scissors. Teresa held out her hand for the scraps. He gave them to her a piece at a time, then unfolded the instructions. After a moment she went to the truck and brought his glasses.

“Was getting to that,” he said.

She put them in his hand.

Nina sat on the edge of the bed, watching him remove the old knob. He set its screws in the coffee can. One missed and rolled under the dresser. Nina got on her stomach and retrieved it.

“You don’t have to save everything, Grandpa.”

“That’s a good screw.”

“Congratulations.”

He gave a short laugh. Teresa put the packaging in the hallway so nobody would step on it.

The new handle looked smaller once it was on. A plain silver lever, a little button on the inside. Arthur tightened the screws, tried it several times, then moved the strike plate a fraction so the latch caught without pushing.

“Try now.”

Nina got up. She closed the door slowly, opened it, then closed it from inside. They heard the button click.

Arthur looked at Teresa. She kept her eyes on the handle.

The door opened again.

“Can I put a hook on the back?” Nina asked. “For my robe?”

“You’d want...” Arthur began.

He stopped and looked at Teresa.

“We’ll get one,” she said. “Something that won’t come through the other side.”

“I was hoping for a big spike.”

“You’ll have to use your own money.”

Nina smiled. Arthur put the scissors in his toolbox by mistake, then took them out and handed them back.

“Little release tool,” he said, showing Teresa a thin metal piece from the package. “For if it ever gets locked by accident.”

She took it with the instructions.

Nina closed the door once more. This time she stayed inside.

Arthur stood beside Teresa in the hallway. He looked along the edge nearest the hinges.

“Good fit.”

“Yes,” she said. “It is.”

They carried the tools outside. Teresa swept the sawdust into a dustpan while Arthur folded the sawhorses. He put the narrow offcut in the truck because it was wood and he had places for wood. The old handle went into the trash after he tested its latch one final time.

Nina came out as he was closing the toolbox.

“Thank you, Grandpa.”

“You’re welcome, sweetheart.”

She hugged him, rising onto her toes. Teresa stood with the dustpan in her hand.

“Are you coming to the concert?” Nina asked.

“When?”

“Next month. I told Grandma.”

“Tell her again. She likes being told things.”

“Thursday. The twenty-second, I think.”

“Send it to your mother. She’ll send it to me.”

“I can send it to you.”

“All right. Do that.”

Nina took out her phone and sent him the school notice while he stood there. His pocket sounded. She pointed at it.

“Now you have it.”

“I do.”

She went inside, calling over her shoulder that she had homework. Teresa waited until she’d gone before she emptied the dustpan.

In the kitchen Arthur washed his hands. He noticed the cabinet again when Teresa opened it for a clean towel.

“Want me to tighten that before I go?”

“Another day.”

He dried between his fingers, then laid the towel over the oven handle.

Teresa found his wrapped sandwich in the refrigerator.

“Take this.”

“I didn’t finish?”

“No.”

He put it in the paper bag she gave him. She added the remaining slices of tomato in a separate container. Her mother would eat them with salt over the sink, the way Teresa did.

At the truck Arthur checked his pockets, remembered his phone was already in one of them, and patted the other for his keys.

“Thanks for the door,” Teresa said.

“No trouble.”

He opened the driver’s door and put the lunch on the passenger seat. She stood beside the mailbox. The post leaned, but he hadn’t mentioned it.

He turned back to her.

“Those hinge screws. Give them a look in a couple weeks. With the use, sometimes they’ll loosen.”

“I’ll check.”

He nodded and got into the truck. She waited while he adjusted the mirror. He had backed out of tighter places with loads twice as wide, but she watched the road for him anyway.

At the end of the driveway he raised two fingers from the wheel. She raised her hand. Then he was gone, and she carried the broom inside.

By five, Teresa had found the lids to three containers, paid the electric bill, and discovered that the stove drawer would not close if she put the roasting pan in it. She moved the pan to a cabinet. The cabinet wouldn’t close either. She left it on the counter.

Her father sent a message saying he’d gotten the right half-and-half. Beneath it was a photograph of his thumb covering most of the carton.

She wrote, Looks good.

Nina had music on in her room, low enough that Teresa could hear the singer but not the words. The door had stayed closed since Arthur left. Once, passing on the way to the bathroom, Teresa had noticed the absence of the strip of light that used to fall across the hall. She had kept walking.

At six she took chicken from the refrigerator and cut it into pieces for a pan. Rice, broccoli, the sauce Nina liked. She answered a work message about Monday’s first appointment, then put her phone on top of the refrigerator where she would have to get up to look at it.

The kitchen window had cooled. She closed it and caught the dish towel in the frame, opened it again, moved the towel. A grain of rice stuck to the side of her hand. She rinsed it off.

“Nina. Dinner.”

No answer.

She divided the broccoli between two plates. Nina would leave the stems. Teresa gave herself most of them and spooned the sauce over the chicken.

“Nina.”

The music continued.

She put the pan in the sink. It hissed when the water hit it. She was tired of calling, tired of figuring out whether her daughter hadn’t heard or had decided that hearing could wait. The rice was getting cold. There were still boxes in the dining area, and tomorrow she would have to buy groceries again.

She went down the hall with a sentence ready about not running a restaurant.

At Nina’s door she reached for the new handle. Her fingers stopped just short of the silver lever.

She knocked.

“Wait,” Nina said.

Teresa shifted her weight. She could hear the faucet running in the kitchen.

She let her hand fall to her side.

Warren bought the goggles before he registered, because goggles could be returned.

The young man at the sporting goods store asked whether he wanted them for a pool or open water.

“Pool.”

“Training or recreation?”

Warren looked at the wall of goggles. There were more decisions here than he had anticipated.

“Swimming,” he said.

The young man nodded without apparent injury and took down a pair with clear lenses. He explained the adjustable nose bridge. Warren asked about the more expensive pair beside them. They had a wider field of vision.

“How wide do you need?” Warren asked.

“It depends what you want to see.”

He bought the clear ones.

The recreation center was across the road from the place where he had his tires rotated. With the car in the shop, he had walked over to use the restroom. Along one side of the building, tall windows looked into a pool. Four people were standing in the water, talking. A woman with white hair pushed away from the edge on her back. She traveled perhaps six feet, stopped, and stood up. Another woman said something Warren couldn’t hear. The first woman laughed with her mouth open.

He had watched until a man sitting on a high chair turned toward the windows. Then he continued to the entrance.

Inside, a rack held flyers for summer camps, pickleball, and a lecture about coyotes. Under ADULT BEGINNER SWIM, someone had written FOUR SPACES LEFT in red marker. Six Thursday evenings. Six thirty to seven fifteen. The price was less than the tire rotation.

He took a flyer. At the tire place he folded it twice before putting it into his jacket.

Celia was at the dining table when he got home. A sheet of dark green cloth lay under her hands. Beside it were a metal ruler, a brush, a jar of glue, and a pale tool shaped like a tongue depressor.

“What is that?”

“A bone folder.”

“Made of bone?”

“This one isn’t.”

“So it’s a folder.”

“Yes, Warren.”

She drew it along a crease. He put the goggles on the one corner of the table that remained available.

“Thinking about a swimming class.”

Celia looked up.

“Here?”

“At the rec center.”

“I mean here in town.”

“Yes.”

She picked up the package. They had been married forty-one years. She knew he didn’t swim, although she had never asked him to describe how completely he didn’t.

“With Erin coming out sometime. The boy’s always in the water.”

“Did she say they were coming?”

“We talked about summer.”

“We talked about going there.”

“Either way.”

Celia turned the goggles over to read the back.

“Do you need a cap?”

“It doesn’t say.”

“You’d look nice in a cap.”

He took the package from her.

“It’s six weeks.”

“Then you’ll want to register.”

She went back to the cloth. He stayed beside her for a moment, watching her smooth out a wrinkle he hadn’t noticed.

He had retired from purchasing for a company that manufactured commercial kitchen equipment. For thirty-two years he had asked people whether a quoted price included freight. Now he spent part of most mornings looking into prices for things they weren’t certain they needed. Celia still worked three days a week at the optometrist’s office. On Tuesdays she went to a bookbinding class where, so far, she had made two books with nothing in them.

He opened the recreation center’s website. The registration form asked for his age. He typed sixty-eight, discovered it wanted numerals, and corrected it. Under swimming ability, the choices began with NO EXPERIENCE.

He selected that. It seemed unnecessarily definite.

Before he entered the payment information, he went upstairs to find his bathing suit. He owned two. One had a white drawstring gone gray; the other still had its tag. He tried on the one with the tag. It fit well enough if he didn’t tuck anything into it.

Downstairs, the page had timed out.

He registered again.

On Thursday he arrived with two towels, the goggles, sandals, a small bottle of shampoo, a change of underwear, and a plastic bag for wet things. The bag was from a liquor store. He turned it inside out.

At the desk, a woman told him to go through the men’s locker room and wait by the shallow end. She pointed left. He went left and then came back because there were two doors.

“The one that says Men.”

“Right.”

He had seen it. He wanted to be sure it wasn’t for the gym.

The locker had instructions printed inside. Warren read them, closed the locker, and tried to turn the dial. It wouldn’t move. A large man in a red bathing suit reached around him and pressed the door with his thumb.

“Now.”

It turned.

“Sticks,” the man said.

“I thought it was something I was doing.”

The man shrugged and went toward the showers.

Warren kept his shirt on until he had put everything else away. When he took it off, the air felt cooler than the room had felt a moment earlier. He shut the locker and tested it twice.

The pool was louder inside. Every small noise returned from somewhere else. Children occupied two roped lanes at the far side, and an instructor was collecting bright foam animals into a basket. A man swam past on his back, looking up at nothing. Warren watched him turn his head without stopping.

“Beginners?” a woman said.

She sat on a bench with a towel across her thighs. She had short gray hair and a bathing suit with a blue skirt. There was a red mark on her ankle where her sock had been.

“Yes.”

“Good. I was about to go ask.”

He sat, leaving room between them. She said her name was Debra.

“Warren.”

“Have you done this before?”

“Not here.”

She looked at him, then at the pool.

“Anywhere?”

“Not a class.”

“Me neither.”

The man from the locker room came out with a towel over his shoulder. He saw Warren and pointed back toward the lockers.

“You get out of there all right?”

Debra glanced between them.

“The lock,” Warren said.

“First test,” the man said. “I’m Stan.”

A younger woman joined them, holding a water bottle and looking across at the children. She introduced herself as Amira. Before Warren could decide whether to ask which children were hers, a woman in a red shirt came over with a clipboard.

“I’m April. Everybody here for the adult class?”

“Unless there’s another group in worse shape,” Stan said.

April checked four names. She looked to be in her twenties. A small patch of the bridge of her nose had escaped her sunscreen.

She asked whether anyone had something she should know before they began. Warren had completed the health form at home. He said no. Amira told her she was uncomfortable putting her face in. Debra said she didn’t like her feet leaving the bottom. Stan said he was uncomfortable with the general proposal.

“And you, Warren?”

“Same, really.”

“Which part?”

He looked at the water.

“The feet.”

April nodded and made a note. She asked what had brought them in. Debra had switched to an earlier bus route and now finished work in time to do something in the evening. Amira pointed toward two children at the far side.

“They’re learning. I don’t want to keep telling them it’s fine when I won’t get in.”

Stan worked at a hotel. Employees could use the pool, and he had been walking past it for eleven years.

“About time I got my money’s worth.”

Warren said his daughter and grandson were coming east for a vacation.

“This summer,” he added.

“Oh, nice,” April said. “How old is he?”

“Eight.”

He was seven. Eight in August. Warren didn’t correct it.

April put the clipboard on the bench and led them to the wide steps. She was already in her swimsuit under the red shirt. She took the shirt off, stepped into the water, and waited.

Warren let the others go first.

The rail was warm at the top and cold where it entered the pool. He moved down one step, then another. Water went up the loose legs of his bathing suit. His stomach drew in without his permission.

“It’s warmer once you’re in,” Stan said.

“I know.”

At the bottom, Warren kept his hand on the rail. The water reached his lower chest. He could see his feet on the pale floor. His left foot appeared to be farther away than it should have been.

April had them walk along the wall. Then back. The water pulled at him when he turned. It wasn’t unpleasant, but it required attention. When Debra let go of the edge to adjust her goggles, he noticed.

They spent a long time on things he had expected to take a minute. April demonstrated wetting her face, lowering her mouth into the water. Stan blew so hard that he coughed. Amira laughed and immediately apologized.

“No, that was a good one,” he said.

Warren bent his knees. Water touched his chin. He straightened.

April was watching.

“Take your time.”

“I’ve got it.”

“All right.”

He tried again. He could do it when he knew she had turned to someone else. His mouth made a low, ridiculous noise under the water. He was grateful it couldn’t be distinguished from the general noise of the pool.

By the end of the lesson, he had put his face in three times. He hadn’t gone anywhere.

In the locker room, the bench in front of his locker was covered by someone else’s clothes. He stood with his towel around his waist and waited until Stan moved a pair of socks.

“How was it?” Stan asked.

“Basic.”

“I was hoping for basic.”

Warren pulled his shirt over his head. It caught between his shoulder blades. He reached behind him, made it worse, and had to take it off again.

“Want a hand?”

“No. Thank you.”

On the drive home, his skin smelled faintly of the pool even after the shower. He stopped at a light and rubbed the steering wheel with his thumb.

There was a photograph in their upstairs hall of Celia and Erin in a lake. Erin was twelve. She was standing on Celia’s shoulders, both arms out, and Celia’s mouth was wide with the effort of keeping them upright. He had taken three pictures before they fell.

He remembered the afternoon around the photograph. The bags under his chair. The damp paperback he had kept moving out of the sun. Celia calling to ask whether he wanted to come in, and his raising the camera to indicate a task already in progress. Later he had bought them all ice cream. Erin had lost half of hers getting into the car, and for weeks afterward he had found dried pink spots on the seat belt.

Celia was watching television when he got home.

“Well?”

“There’s a lot to it.”

“Did you like it?”

“The goggles leaked.”

“Can you return them?”

“They’re probably fine.”

He took the wet things upstairs. There was a bar in the shower where Celia hung things that couldn’t go in the dryer. He moved a washcloth to make room for his suit.

At the second lesson, April adjusted the strap of his goggles. She asked before touching them. He bent his head so she could reach.

“You had this twisted.”

“I followed the diagram.”

“Easy to do.”

She handed them back. They fitted better immediately.

Stan had bought a cap. It was yellow, with a small black brand name above his forehead. Debra asked whether the hotel required it.

“Streamlining.”

“For when?” she asked.

Warren laughed before he could stop himself. Stan looked pleased.

April divided her attention among them, giving each person something slightly different to do. Warren had imagined a class would proceed together, with an explanation followed by a shared attempt. Instead, Amira worked on getting her face wet while Debra practiced moving her hands. Stan asked a question about his breathing that April had already answered.

Warren waited by the wall until she came to him.

“I want to understand what the next part is,” he said.

She explained it. He would keep hold of the edge and let the water take more of his weight. She would stay beside him.

“And the getting back down?”

They went through that too.

“Because it would seem to me the tendency would be to tip.”

“Let’s try the first part.”

He took hold of the edge. He could feel the ridges of the tile with the pads of his fingers. Nothing happened. He tried lifting one foot, then put it back. April waited without filling the silence.

“I’m doing it,” he said.

“I see.”

He looked at her. There was no smile he could object to.

“Can I support you here?” she asked, indicating his upper arm.

He said yes.

For an instant his feet left the floor. The pull under his ribs startled him. He bent sharply and stood again, water running out of his goggles.

“That’s it,” April said.

“It wasn’t much.”

“Try it again.”

The next time lasted longer. He could feel the size of the rest of him behind his shoulders. His bathing suit lifted away from his thighs. The water made a small, steady sound against his ears.

Then his feet were down, and he was standing where he had been.

Debra had watched from a few feet away.

“There you go.”

He pushed the goggles onto his forehead.

“I think I was getting in my own way.”

“I’m doing that with both legs.”

April moved on to Stan. Warren stayed at the wall. After a moment he tried it once more, within the small amount she had just shown him. It worked less well. When she came back, they did it again.

At seven fifteen, a different group waited on the deck. Warren was surprised to see them.

In the lobby, Amira’s children stood at a machine deciding between crackers and pretzels. They wore identical green jackets, though one was much taller than the other. Amira said they could have one thing between them.

“What if we don’t like the same thing?” the taller child asked.

“Then one of you will have a difficult evening.”

Debra was getting her jacket out of a bag. Stan’s cap had left a straight red line across his forehead.

“Anybody else hungry?” he asked.

“I was hungry before,” Debra said.

Warren had meant to go straight home. Instead he stood with them while Amira negotiated a packet of pretzels. The smaller child asked whether grown-ups got badges.

“We’d better,” Stan said.

“You don’t,” Amira told him.

“That’s going in my evaluation.”

Warren noticed the clock above the desk and thought he ought to leave. Celia wasn’t expecting him at a particular time. He stayed until the packet was open.

At home he found her putting a book under a stack of heavy cookbooks.

“That needs clamping,” he said.

“It needs weight.”

“I’ve got clamps.”

“I know.”

He put his bag down.

“I floated a little.”

She turned from the table.

“Did you?”

“With help.”

“How did it feel?”

He moved his hands, palms down, as if there might be a way to show her.

“Odd.”

“Good odd?”

“Yes.”

She smiled. He went to the refrigerator and found the plate she had left for him.

Before the third class, Debra was eating peanut butter crackers at a table in the lobby. Her uniform shirt had dark patches under the arms. She waved him over with the packet.

“Dinner,” she said.

“You didn’t have time?”

“Route ran late.”

Warren sat opposite her. Through the windows behind the desk he could see a maintenance worker pulling a long cover off something in the courtyard.

“Traffic?”

“Wheelchair lift wouldn’t come down at the hospital. Then it wouldn’t go up.”

“Maintenance issue?”

“I expect so.”

“Those should be inspected before the vehicle goes out.”

Debra finished chewing.

“I’ll let them know.”

He looked down at the table. A previous occupant had peeled most of a sticker from it, leaving a white crescent.

“What did you do?” she asked.

“Purchasing. Before I retired.”

“What did you buy?”

“Parts. Sheet metal. Insulation. Whatever the plant needed.”

“Sounds like my job, except mine’s all snacks.”

He smiled. She offered him the packet. He took a cracker to make it clear he hadn’t been criticizing her dinner.

“Miss it?” she asked.

“Some of it.”

“Which part?”

He considered the people he no longer had to call twice, the meetings about meetings, the man who had always put delivery problems in the subject line of an email and then asked for the impossible in the body.

“I liked knowing who to call.”

Debra nodded and shook the last crumbs into her palm.

Amira came through the entrance with the children ahead of her. She was carrying one sneaker.

“Whose is that?” Stan asked, joining them from the hallway.

“Mine,” she said.

It was purple and no longer than her hand.

Stan laughed.

The children went toward the desk, arguing about who would hold the membership card. Amira sat for a moment.

“Vacation getting closer?” Debra asked Warren.

“Not until July.”

“Where are you going?”

“The Cape.”

Celia liked the Cape. They had gone there four years earlier, in September, after the crowds. It was the first place that came to him.

“Nice,” Debra said. “Ocean?”

“The place has a pool.”

“That’ll be warmer.”

She got up to throw away the packet. Warren stayed in his chair. He had supplied a month and a pool.

Stan leaned a hand on the table.

“What part of the Cape?”

“We’re still working that out.”

“But you’ve got the place?”

“Erin’s handling it.”

Stan nodded. He was rubbing one knee through his pants.

“Long drive for me. Anything after an hour, I have to get out.”

Warren asked about his knee. They were still discussing it when April appeared at the entrance to the pool and called them in.

That evening Stan moved through the water without anybody holding him.

It wasn’t graceful. His arms seemed to be making separate arrangements. But he went from where April stood to the steps, farther than any of them had gone, and when he stood up his face was transformed by surprise.

“Well,” he said. “Look at that.”

Amira clapped once. Debra said, “Jesus, Stan.”

“Booking my cruise.”

Warren smiled. He could feel the smile sitting on his face.

April came back toward him.

“Same thing as before,” she said. “No need to rush.”

He knew there was no need. He wanted her to stand a little farther away. Her position seemed to assume a failure that hadn’t happened yet.

He pushed off harder than he intended. For a moment he was moving. Then water entered his nose, and he lifted his head to get clear of it. His hips dropped. He reached for the wall and found it with the side of his hand.

His feet struck the floor. He was standing. April was beside him.

“All right. Stay there a moment.”

“I am.”

He coughed. He could see Stan at the steps, adjusting his cap. Amira was looking at him. She looked away when he saw her.

April asked whether he wanted to sit out for a minute.

“No.”

“Then we’ll stay at the edge.”

“I thought you said to come toward you.”

“I did. You lifted your head before you were ready.”

“Because I couldn’t breathe.”

“I know. We can go back a step.”

He wiped his mouth with his hand. His heart was beating in a way he disliked. Nothing had happened. He had been able to stand the entire time. Knowing this made it harder to tolerate how his hands felt.

“You keep saying relax,” he said.

“I haven’t said that.”

“That’s the implication.”

April glanced toward Debra, who had a question. She held up one finger to indicate she’d be there in a moment.

“I can explain it again,” April said.

“Perhaps someone with more experience teaching adults would explain it differently.”

She was still beside him. A whistle sounded at the other end of the pool.

“I’ve been teaching this class for five years,” she said. “If something isn’t clear, ask me. But that isn’t fair.”

Warren looked at the water between them.

“I’m just saying it isn’t working.”

“Today was harder. We can work with that.”

She waited another moment, then asked him to stay by the wall while she helped Debra. He remained there, holding the edge with both hands. Nobody was watching now. He resented the ease with which everyone had stopped.

He did the simpler exercise twice. On the second attempt, his breathing was quieter. When April returned, he said he’d had enough for the evening.

In the locker room, Stan was sitting on the bench with one foot in his underwear.

“Not as easy as it looks,” he said.

“What?”

“Any of it.”

“You seemed to manage.”

“Yeah, well. Tomorrow I may forget.”

Warren opened his locker. He hadn’t showered. He wanted his clothes on and the bag closed.

Stan said something about next week. Warren answered without turning. By the time he looked around, Stan had gone to another bench.

Outside, a school bus was parked across three spaces, its engine running. Warren pulled his keys from the side pocket of his bag and noticed that the goggles weren’t there.

He checked the other pocket. Then the bottom, under his damp suit. He had taken them off beside the pool.

Through the glass entrance he could see Debra talking to April at the desk. April had put her red shirt back on. Debra was laughing about something.

He shut the bag and went to his car.

The following Thursday, at five forty, Warren emailed April to say a family obligation would keep him from attending.

He considered adding Sorry for the late notice. He did add it. The email looked better with that sentence.

Celia came home carrying a bag of oranges and a flat parcel wrapped in brown paper.

“Not going?”

“Not tonight.”

She put the oranges in the fruit bowl. One rolled onto the counter, and she caught it against her stomach.

“You all right?”

“Fine.”

She carried the parcel to the dining table. Inside were two pieces of gray board and a packet of paper printed with small blue flowers. Warren followed her.

“More supplies?”

“For the next one.”

“What happened to the one you’re making?”

“It’s under the dictionaries.”

“The cookbooks weren’t enough?”

“I needed one.”

He stood at the end of the table while she laid the board on a cutting mat. His phone showed six twelve.

“There’s going to be glue on this table.”

“There’s a mat.”

“Outside the mat.”

“I haven’t opened the glue.”

He moved a chair back. She had put a length of book cloth over it. He lifted the cloth, uncertain where to put it, and she took it from him.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong.”

“Then stop inspecting.”

He went to the kitchen. There was a pot on the stove and no lid on the pot. He found the lid. Then he took it off because she might have wanted whatever was in it to reduce.

The kitchen clock said six twenty-four. The class would be gathering at the bench. Stan would have something to say about the cap.

He opened the refrigerator and stood in front of it.

“Are you looking for dinner?” Celia called.

“No.”

“What are you looking for?”

He closed it.

“I’m not sure it’s the right class.”

She appeared in the kitchen doorway with the metal ruler in her hand.

“I thought you liked it.”

“It’s four people. You can’t get much individual instruction.”

“Four sounds small.”

“Not if everybody’s at a different level.”

“What level are you?”

He didn’t answer immediately. She waited.

“The bottom one, apparently.”

“Isn’t that what you signed up for?”

He pulled out a kitchen chair and sat. The chair made a scraping noise that seemed louder than it needed to be.

“I had a bad night.”

“Last week?”

“Yes.”

“Did something happen?”

He told her a little. He said he had swallowed water. He said the instructor didn’t seem to understand why that might put someone off. Celia rested the ruler on the counter.

“Did you tell her?”

“Yes.”

“What did she say?”

“That we could go back to something easier.”

Celia looked at him.

He shifted in the chair.

“I may not have said it well.”

“All right.”

He expected her to ask what he had said. Instead she picked up the ruler.

“Are you finished with it?”

“The class?”

“Yes.”

“Maybe. It’s not as if Erin’s made any plans.”

Celia leaned against the counter.

“She hasn’t made any plans at all. I spoke to her yesterday.”

“I know.”

“Did you want to do this?”

He looked toward the dining room. From where he sat he could see the blue flowered paper, curled slightly along one edge.

“Yes.”

“Then I don’t know what Erin’s got to do with it.”

She went back to the table. He heard the small scrape of the ruler on the mat.

A few minutes later she called him in.

“Hold this end, will you?”

He stood beside her and pressed the ruler where she pointed. She drew the knife along its edge, lifted the cut strip, and held it against the board.

“Crooked,” she said.

“It’s not bad.”

“It’s crooked.”

She put it aside and measured another piece. He waited with his hand on the ruler until she needed it again.

After dinner, he opened April’s email address. He wrote that he thought he had left his goggles by the pool. Clear lenses, gray strap. He asked whether anyone had handed them in.

Then he added that he would be there next Thursday.

April gave him the goggles from a drawer behind the front desk. They were dry, with a faint white deposit along one lens.

“Those yours?”

“Yes. Thank you.”

“No problem.”

He stayed where he was. She had a stack of forms under her arm and a pen tucked into the neck of her shirt.

“I was rude to you.”

She looked at him.

“Last time.”

“I remember.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Thank you.”

A man behind Warren was waiting to ask about the basketball court. Warren moved aside. April answered the man’s question, and Warren went to the locker room.

Stan was already there, working a sock off his foot. Warren put his bag on the bench beside him.

“Missed you last week.”

“Yes.”

“Everything okay?”

“Yes. Thank you.”

Stan rolled the sock into a ball and put it in one shoe.

“I was short with you,” Warren said.

“When?”

“Last time I was here.”

“Oh.”

“After the class.”

Stan looked at him more carefully.

“I thought you didn’t want to talk.”

“I didn’t. I didn’t have to be unpleasant about it.”

“All right.”

Stan bent to the other sock. Warren took his shirt off. He could hear a shower running, then someone banging twice on a pipe.

“How was last week?” he asked.

“Got water in my ear. It’s still in there.”

“Still?”

“Not really. Feels like it. Debra says shake your head sideways.”

“Did you try?”

“I look bad enough already.”

Warren laughed. Stan worked his foot into a sandal and stood.

At the pool, Amira had both children with her. Their lesson had been canceled because their instructor was sick, and they would sit on the bench where she could see them. She gave them a book and told them not to get up.

The taller child asked whether they could watch her.

“Quietly.”

“We know how to watch.”

“Let’s find out.”

Debra was in the water already, frowning at a foam board.

“I hate this thing,” she told Warren.

“What did it do?”

“Behaved exactly like she said it would.”

April asked Warren to show her where he’d got to before they tried anything new. He wanted to explain that he might be stiff after missing a week. Instead he held the edge and did what he remembered.

Some of it came back. Some didn’t. There was a moment when his feet began searching for the floor before he had decided to stop. April noticed.

“Once more?” she asked.

He nodded.

Across from him, Stan was having trouble turning back onto his feet. He could move forward, but stopping still required an amount of activity that made the children put down their book. Amira told them to read.

“He’s doing good,” the smaller one said.

“Read.”

April went to Stan, then returned. Warren had been listening to what she told him. He asked her to show him that part again.

She did, and he tried it while she stayed beside him. He came upright sooner than he’d intended. There was no particular trouble. His feet were on the floor.

“Again?”

“Yes,” he said.

Near the end of the lesson, she offered him a choice between going on to the next exercise and repeating the one he was doing.

“This one,” he said.

She nodded. When she went to help Amira, he stayed where he’d been told and waited his turn. It was mildly boring. He watched a clock with an enormous red second hand make most of a circuit.

In the lobby afterward, Debra said she was going to the public swim on Sunday after the course ended.

“Week from this Sunday,” she said. “Ten o’clock. Anybody want to come?”

“Working,” Stan said.

Amira was helping one child find a sleeve. She said possibly, if her husband wasn’t working too.

“Would April be there?” Warren asked.

“No idea. It’s public swim.”

“So what would we do?”

“Practice.”

“For what?”

Debra looked at him while she pulled her keys out of her bag.

“I’d like to be less terrible.”

He smiled.

“Are you coming?” she asked.

“I’ll check.”

“Ten, if you do.”

She went out. He stood beside the desk until Amira had both children organized, then held the outer door while they passed. The smaller child said good night to him by name. He hadn’t known the child had learned it.

At home he wrote POOL, 10 on the calendar for the Sunday after next. Celia’s writing occupied most of the squares around it. A dentist appointment. Her shifts. Somebody named Pam whose birthday she remembered every year.

He put the pen back on its string.

The final Thursday, a woman at the desk asked Warren whether he knew where the adult swim class met.

“Through the locker rooms, shallow end.”

“Is that the class for people who can’t swim?”

“Yes.”

She was about his age. She had a folded brochure in her hand and hadn’t brought a bag.

“I’m thinking about the next one,” she said. “My son keeps after me.”

“It’s a small class.”

“Are they patient?”

“Yes.”

She looked down the hallway.

“I’ll think about it.”

He almost told her to sign up. Instead he pointed out the desk where she could ask about dates and went to change.

Stan had abandoned the cap. When Warren asked about it, he said his wife had seen him in it.

“What did she say?”

“Nothing at first. That was the problem.”

On the deck, April had put a short stack of registration forms beside her clipboard. Amira asked whether the next class would be the same time. It would. Debra wanted to know if she could repeat the beginner course. April said people did it all the time.

“Good,” Debra said. “I was afraid you’d promote me.”

The lesson was mostly things they had tried before. Warren had expected a new task, perhaps something that would establish what the six weeks had accomplished. April simply asked what each of them wanted to work on.

He chose moving away from the edge and getting his feet back under him. She stayed close on the first try. On the second she gave him a little more room.

He went perhaps the length of his body. When he stood, he turned to find the wall. It was there, just behind him. The distance looked smaller from this direction.

“Again?” April asked.

He went back.

The third time he stopped too early. The fourth time he felt the movement continue after the small effort that had started it. His legs were heavy and then they weren’t. He could hear something through the water, a low repeated thump that might have been people walking on the deck.

He stayed there a moment longer than he had meant to.

When he stood, April was smiling.

He said, “That one was better.”

“It looked comfortable.”

“It was.”

Then he tried again and got water in his nose.

At seven fifteen, nobody wanted to be first up the steps. Stan claimed the air was too cold. Debra asked one more question, and Amira moved a few feet along the edge while she listened to the answer. Warren stood near them, making small circles in the water with one hand.

April said they had to let the next class in.

“Oh, all right,” Debra said.

They climbed out and collected their towels. April gave each of them a form for the next session. Stan asked whether there was a discount for already knowing how to use the locker.

“There should be,” Warren said.

April smiled and went to speak to the next group. The four of them stayed by the bench, drying their faces.

“Well,” Amira said to Warren, “you’re ready for the pool in July.”

He had forgotten about July for most of the hour.

“There’s no trip,” he said.

“Oh.” She lowered her towel. “That’s too bad.”

“No. It wasn’t canceled.”

Debra had been putting the registration form into her bag. She stopped.

“We hadn’t planned one.”

Stan looked at him.

“The Cape?”

“Yes. I don’t know why I said that.”

He did know, at least enough of it. He held the goggles in both hands and straightened the strap.

“I wanted to take the class. It sounded better with the grandson.”

Amira glanced toward Debra. It was quick, but he saw it.

“Do you have a grandson?” Stan asked.

“Yes.”

“Just checking.”

Warren gave a short laugh. Nobody joined in immediately.

“He’s in Minnesota,” Warren said.

“You said.”

“Yes.”

Debra zipped her bag.

“Still coming Sunday?”

“Yes.”

“Ten.”

“I’ve got it.”

Amira said she’d let Debra know whether she could make it. Stan told them to have a good time, which sounded oddly formal coming from him. They separated for the locker rooms.

Warren was at his locker when Stan came around the end of the row.

“Any good up there?” Stan asked.

“Where?”

“Minnesota. I’ve never been.”

“It’s nice. Cold in the winter.”

“Cold here.”

“Colder.”

Stan considered that while he opened his locker.

“Not much of a selling point.”

“The boy’s there.”

“Right.”

Warren took his time drying his feet. He could think of several things he might add, but Stan had started telling him about a banquet at the hotel. Two hundred and forty people, three different entrées, no final count until tomorrow. Warren asked whether the numbers usually changed much.

“Always more chicken,” Stan said. “They pick the fish six months ahead. Then they get there and see it.”

At home, Celia was reading in the kitchen. His plate was in the microwave.

“Last one?”

“Last of this session.”

She put a finger between the pages.

“Did it go well?”

“Yes.”

He sat opposite her.

“I told them there wasn’t a vacation.”

“What vacation?”

“The one I said we were having. With Erin.”

Celia watched him for a moment.

“You told them we’d booked something?”

“More or less.”

“What did you tell them?”

“That I wanted to take the class.”

She nodded and took her finger out of the book.

“Do you want to eat now or shower first?”

“Eat.”

“You smell like a pool.”

“So I’m told.”

He got up to warm the plate. When the timer sounded, he brought it back to the table. Celia moved her book so he could put the glass down where he liked it.

On Sunday, Warren woke before seven. The pool didn’t open for public swim until ten. He had breakfast, read part of the paper, and put a load of laundry in.

Celia was going to meet a woman from her class at an art supply store. They wanted to look at paper. Warren asked whether it was open on Sunday.

“At eleven.”

“You’ll be early.”

“We’re getting coffee.”

He nodded. She was looking for her reading glasses. They were on top of her head, but he had learned to wait until she asked.

At nine he packed one towel, the goggles, and a clean pair of underwear. His suit was already on under his pants. He took it off and put it in the bag instead. He would change there.

On the way out, he picked up the calendar pen and wrote the next course’s registration date in a square near the bottom. Celia had left him room.

The recreation center was busy when he arrived. Children in shin guards occupied most of the lobby. One was crying because his mother had brought the wrong water bottle. Another lay on his back, examining the sole of his shoe.

At the desk, a man was searching through his wallet for a membership card. He put down three credit cards, a receipt, and a photograph before finding it. Warren waited behind him.

“Public swim,” he said when it was his turn.

The woman told him the price. He paid for one visit. She offered him a pass for ten, but he said he’d think about it.

In the locker room, he chose a locker that opened properly. He folded his pants, put his shirt on top, and sat to take off his shoes. Someone in the next row was humming a tune he almost recognized.

The pool looked different without the class. A few people were swimming in the lanes. In the shallow section, a woman held a little girl under the arms while the girl attempted to kick both legs at once. The lifeguard was speaking to a man who wanted to bring a large inflatable ring into the water.

Warren put his bag on the bench. He checked the clock. Ten oh two.

Debra wasn’t there yet.

He sat and fitted the goggles over his eyes, then took them off. The strap had left a mark on his fingers. He laid them on the towel and looked toward the locker room entrance.

The little girl laughed. Her mother lifted her clear of the water, and she objected until she was lowered again.

Warren stood up. He took the goggles with him.

At the steps, he let the man with the ring pass. The ring had been deflated and hung over his arm like an enormous orange sleeve. Warren moved down into the water, one hand on the rail.

It was cooler than he remembered. He stood at the bottom until the feeling passed, then walked along the edge to an open space. He could see the clock from there and the bench with his bag.

He lowered the goggles over his eyes and pressed them into place. A little water got under one side. He adjusted it.

Then he turned toward the open water and pushed gently away from the wall.