Back When We Were Grownups

Four

Now she began to lead a whole other life — an imaginary, might-have-been life flowing almost constantly underneath the surface of her day-to-day existence.

If she had not attended Amy’s engagement party that long-ago evening, if Zeb had not made her laugh so that she seemed, for one brief moment, to be a joyous and outgoing person, if Joe Davitch had not walked up to her and said, “I see you’re having a wonderful time,” why, no doubt she would have stayed on in college.

Graduated with honors.

Married Will Allenby.

Dear Will Allenby, with his airy yellow curls and serene, contemplative smile, his nearly transparent eyes that seemed lit from within. She was startled to discover him complete and detailed in her mind, as if all these years he had been poised to step forward the very first instant she recollected his existence. He used to have a habit of raking his fingers through his hair whenever he was caught up in some intellectual discussion, and now she could see so clearly those agile, knuckly fingers (like the fingers of the son in her dream!) and the electric look of his hair. She recalled how he had loved listening to Bach, hated girls who giggled, and claimed an almost physical allergy to the color red.

Peculiar memories popped up out of nowhere: a high-school assembly, for instance, where the World’s Fastest Typist had given a demonstration. Plump and bald and expressionless, he had sat behind a tiny metal stenographic desk, facing his audience but gazing over their heads while his typewriter, seemingly of its own accord, chattered away without pause and spat sheets of paper onto the floor. Will had muttered under his breath during the whole performance. What did this prove? he kept asking Rebecca. The man’s assistant — a leggy blonde dressed in what appeared to be a carhop’s uniform — scooped up each page and proclaimed it to be perfect, one hundred percent accurate, x many words per minute; but why should they believe her? From this distance, the pages could be blank. Rebecca had tried to hush him, but Will had persisted. “This is outrageous!” he had said in a piercing whisper. “They’re wasting our valuable learning time!” She had grown annoyed with him; she had moved her arm away from where it was touching his. Now she liked remembering that. Cataloguing his flaws brought him back to her more convincingly. She dwelt upon his overlarge teeth, which she used to feel pressing knobbily behind his lips when they kissed; the puppy-dog clumsiness of his hugs; and the affectation (as she saw it now) of his “Au revoir” at the end of every evening.

It was true they had never slept together, but they’d talked about it endlessly. Why it was better to wait; how maybe it was silly to wait; what were the pros and cons. Will had a book called Married Love that he’d ordered from the back of a magazine. He had perused it from cover to cover and studied all the diagrams — the fallopian tubes like orchid stems and the Missionary Position. He read aloud from it to Rebecca and she listened with what she hoped was an expression of mild interest, her head slightly tilted and her eyes on a point in midair. (Although inwardly, of course, she was riveted by every word, and found it almost beyond belief that the married couples of her acquaintance could spend hours together engaged in any other activity.) Oh, she and Joe had had a very happy sex life, but now she was sorry she had missed the experience of figuring it all out with someone equally unskilled. Will would have been so scientific about it! So focused, so comically intense!

She used to write Will Allenby on her notebooks, and W.A.+ R.H. And, in very small, secretive letters, Rebecca Allenby. It had bothered her that a voice break was required between those two adjacent a’s. Rebecca Holmes Allenby, she had amended. Mrs. Willard Allenby.

She supposed that they would have married immediately after college. That was one of the steps in their life plan. They would have moved to some larger and more prestigious university where the two of them could pursue their Ph.D.’s — Will’s in physics, Rebecca’s in American history. She could visualize their apartment as concretely as if that, too, were a memory: a comfortably shabby flat in some faculty widow’s house just off campus, with brick-and-board bookcases, Chianti-bottle candlesticks, and a batik bedspread. Their meals would be very simple — bread and soup, say, on a cleared space among the books on the kitchen table. And every night after supper they would take a walk, just the two of them, hand in hand, learnedly discussing their respective research projects. The town they walked through seemed to be Baltimore and yet not Baltimore, the way places are in dreams. It was cleaner and more organized, and it smelled of fresh-grated nutmeg as Baltimore used to do before the spice factory moved to the suburbs. Also, there was no traffic. The only sound was the tapping of their shoes on the empty sidewalk.

Her true real life, was how she thought of this scenario. As opposed to her fake real life, with its tumult of drop-in relatives and party guests and repairmen. Gradually, she sank so deeply into her true real life that she grew remote and strange, and it took her minutes, sometimes, to pull herself together when she was asked a question. But nobody seemed to notice.

* * *

At the moment, her fake real life revolved around NoNo’s wedding. This was set for the twelfth of August — a Thursday, so as not to interfere with any paying events. NoNo kept insisting that it shouldn’t be a big deal, but even so there was the guest list to be seen to, the arrangements to be made for Barry’s family, the food to be discussed with Biddy. If Rebecca had had her way they would have scheduled a rehearsal, too, but so far the couple hadn’t even found a minister. (Neither of them belonged to any kind of church.) “Never mind,” NoNo kept saying, “I’m sure it will all work out”—an assumption that seemed foolhardy when you considered she had grown up in the Open Arms. And then she announced, out of the blue, that all she really cared about was the garden. “The what?” Rebecca asked.

“The garden. Did I mention that I wanted an outdoor wedding?”

Rebecca’s jaw dropped.

For starters, they didn’t have a garden. They had a scratchy little three-foot plot of rosebushes at the front of the house, for show, and a slightly larger plot of mostly weeds at the back of the house that ended where the kitchen building began. And since it was the hottest and driest summer in living memory, the weeds were not even green. They were a parched and frizzled beige, and the azaleas under the dining-room window had turned into dead brown twigs. Besides which, who in her right mind would want an outdoor wedding when the average heat index was a hundred and five degrees?

But NoNo said, “I am a florist, after all,” as if that explained everything.

“Well, then,” Rebecca said, “maybe, as a florist, you can tell me how to get a halfway decent garden inside of two weeks.”

“Don’t you have that lawn-mowing boy? Rock, or Stone, or whoever?”

“Brick,” Rebecca said. “He hasn’t been here since early July. There’s nothing for him to mow.”

“I’m sure he can think of something. Lay down sod, bring in a few container plants…”

Rebecca had always considered NoNo to be the easiest, the most compliant and obliging of the four Davitch girls. But now she wasn’t so certain.

And then came the food issue. All at once, NoNo decided she didn’t want Biddy to cater. This was after Biddy had planned out her menu and lined up a non-family wait staff. NoNo said she would hate to make Biddy work on her sister’s wedding day. Biddy said, “I’d work before the day. That was going to be my gift to you and Barry. I wouldn’t have to lift a finger during the actual wedding. I would show up in a dressy dress and behave like a regular guest.”

“I was thinking about the people who catered that shower last weekend,” NoNo said in a musing tone. “The Guilty Party, their name was. I have a copy of their menu.”

Biddy looked over at Rebecca. She said, “You just so happen to have a copy of their menu.”

“They do such nice, straightforward, uncomplicated food,” NoNo said.

Biddy’s eyes grew pink, and she turned and flounced out of the kitchen. A moment later, they heard the front door slam. All NoNo said was, “Hm-hm-hm!”—a little three-note humming sound — as she poured herself another cup of coffee.

Oh, Rebecca didn’t look forward to this wedding in the least.

And the worst of it, from her own point of view, was that Tina was attending. NoNo’s mother, Joe’s ex-wife, all the way from England, where she lived now. Because she had so far to come, she arrived three days ahead of time. A whole caravan of cars went to meet her at the airport — Biddy and Troy, Patch and Jeep, NoNo and Barry, and every available child — but even so, several pieces of her luggage had to ride back in people’s laps. She traveled like a movie star, with one suitcase devoted to shoes and another to cosmetics. And she didn’t carry a thing herself but sailed ahead of her struggling bearers, bestowing a smile to her right and her left as she entered the house. “Rachel, dear!” she cried. Rebecca said, “Rebecca,” and let herself be engulfed in a perfumed embrace. “What a sweet outfit!” Tina told her. Rebecca had given some thought to her outfit — a plain white blouse that she had gone so far as to iron and a conservative, non-Bag-Lady, navy A-line skirt — but now she saw that what she most resembled was an overweight flight attendant. Tina, on the other hand, looked gorgeous. She was tall and slim, with masses of auburn hair piled on top of her head, and all her features were stunningly exaggerated: large, long-lashed eyes, pillowy red lips, confident prow of a nose. Her blurry, clinging dress could have gone straight to the wedding, but Rebecca knew, from earlier occasions, that Tina’s attire at the wedding would outshine the bride’s. It was obvious that she was nearly sixty, but she made sixty seem sophisticated and sexy.

Rebecca sank into a depression, all at once. She folded her arms across her stomach and watched bleakly as Tina dove into her luggage, pulling forth lavish presents for every member of the family. (Her second husband — ex-husband, now — was a very wealthy man.) French colognes, Irish crystal, a genuine badger shaving brush for Poppy, a regiment of lead soldiers for her new grandson… and for Rebecca, an apron. “Thanks,” Rebecca said tonelessly, but her voice was lost among the others.

It had occurred to her, often, that the way to win your family’s worshipful devotion was to abandon them. Look at how Tina’s daughters clustered around her! The men acted bashful and smitten — especially Barry, who was meeting her for the first time — and the children were dumbstruck. Even Min Foo, no relation at all, wore a look of breathless expectancy when she arrived. “Minerva, darling!” Tina cried, sweeping her into her arms, and then she gave her a pair of carved ivory chopsticks for her chignon. Tina never used nicknames; it was always Minerva, Bridget, Patricia, Elinor with her. Rebecca supposed that was significant. Distance was the key, here: the distant, alluring mystery woman whose edges had not been worn dull by the constant minor abrasions of daily contact.

“Well,” Rebecca said, “I guess I’ll go see to dinner.”

Nobody offered to help.

In the kitchen, Alice Farmer was slicing tomatoes. Her angular, blue-black face was generally unreadable, but there was no mistaking the sardonic arch of her eyebrows. “Come to hide out, have you,” she said. (She’d been working here long enough to have witnessed several of Tina’s visits.)

“I’ve a good mind to eat at a Burger King,” Rebecca told her. “Let them get their own damn dinner.”

Alice Farmer gave a whistling hiss of a laugh and handed her a bag of corn to shuck.

Rebecca wondered how Joe would have behaved in this situation. She had never had the chance to observe him and Tina together. (The two women had first met at his funeral — probably a bizarre encounter, although Rebecca had been too numb with grief to notice.) Of course she had quizzed him about Tina while they were courting. “I suppose she’s very attractive,” she had ventured, and Joe had said, “Sure, if that’s the type you go for.”

“And she must have a beautiful voice.”

“Tina? She’s got a crow’s voice.”

“But if she’s a nightclub singer…”

“So-called singer. Quote-unquote singer.”

She had felt a wave of relief that must have been visible, for Joe had smiled at her and said, “Have you been fretting your head about her?”

“You did choose to marry her,” she reminded him.

“She did happen to be pregnant, Beck.”

“Well…”

“Do you think we’d have married if she weren’t? Either one of us? We were miserable together. At the end of that third pregnancy, she was counting the days till she delivered so she could leave.”

But now Rebecca heard the girls’ laughter clear back here in the kitchen — louder than usual, and merrier. You would think they’d had the world’s most doting mother.

She unraveled the tassels from an ear of corn and let herself return to her true real life, where she and Will had one child between them, one biological child. A boy, let’s say. (Girls were so complex.) A boy like the one on the train. They would have named him something dignified: Ethan, or Tristram. Something that couldn’t easily be shortened. He would be a solemn type even when he was very young — a watchful, focused baby, content to sit for long periods of time studying his surroundings. A quiet toddler. An inquisitive little boy. The kind who might take a clock apart out of scientific curiosity. “Tristram! What have you done?” she would ask, coming upon a heap of sprocketed innards. But she would feel secretly proud of him.

She would buy him — she and Will would buy him — books about dinosaurs, and Atlantis, and the boyhood of Thomas Edison. Maybe they would pick up an old music box at a thrift shop, and later a toaster or radio, something broken that he could tinker with and eventually get to working, much to everyone’s amazement.

He would probably have a little trouble making friends. Oh, she might as well face up to the fact! Nobody was perfect. His grade-school teachers would send home reports: A’s on his academic subjects but a C or D in phys ed, and a note to the effect that he lacked team spirit. That he worked poorly on group projects. That he experienced some minor difficulty in getting along with his peers.

She would go in for a conference and nod and look concerned, and then try not to show her pleasure when the teacher finished up by saying, “Apart from that, of course, your son is a real joy. None of my other students is as bright or creative as Tristram.”

“Yes, well, he’s always been very…” she would murmur. With her eyes modestly lowered.

In high school his sole companion would be a boy obsessed with computers. The two would spend whole weekends shut up in Tristram’s room, constructing something incomprehensible out of electrical wire and a disemboweled television set. She would knock and offer cookies; Tristram would say, “Huh? Oh. Thanks.” Then she would stand in his doorway a while breathing in the smells of machine oil and sweaty sneakers. It wouldn’t bother her a bit that he paid her no attention. She knew he had reached the stage where he had to start pulling away from her.

She knew that underneath, he would always love her.

“Hand me them corn ears, will you?” Alice Farmer said. “Miz Davitch? Pot’s on the boil. Could you please hand me the corn?”

Rebecca merely blinked at her.

* * *

There were so many people at dinner that the children had to eat separately. This caused several different arguments, because some of the children — the ones in their teens — felt they were old enough to eat with the grownups. And it didn’t help a bit that Tina kept saying, “Of course you’re old enough! Come sit next to me.” Rebecca had to step in, finally. “Tina,” she said, “this table seats twelve, and that’s how many adults we have. I’m putting all seven of the children in the kitchen.”

Tina shrugged and gave the teenagers a pouchy-lipped look of commiseration. Then she patted the chair to her right and said, “Oh, well, Barry, you sit next to me, then. And Hakim on my other side.” (The two best-looking men in the room, wouldn’t you know.) “Seven grandchildren!” she told Rebecca. “You and I could practically start a baseball team!”

Half of Rebecca felt flattered; there was a certain confiding, intimate quality to Tina that she always found seductive. But the other half wanted to point out that Tina had no right at all to claim Min Foo’s two children. She gave her a bland smile and then deliberately seated herself between her own favorites, Troy and Zeb, although her usual spot was next to Poppy. Poppy was down near the end, repeatedly asking if someone would please turn off the lights in the parlor. Nobody volunteered, though. They were all vying for Tina’s attention, the girls addressing her as “Mother” more often than was needed, forming their lips around the word in a self-conscious and unskilled manner.

It was pathetic to recollect that once, when Rebecca was first married, she had suggested to the girls that they call her “Mom.” “But you’re not our mom,” they had said. “That would be a lie.” Oh, children were such sticklers for the absolute, literal truth. (The other day, introducing Peter to the plumber, Rebecca had said, “Meet my future stepdaughter’s stepson; I mean my stepdaughter’s future stepson. My stepgrandson-to-be, I mean.” Mr. Burdick’s eyes had widened. No doubt he’d thought her unwelcoming, not to simply call the boy her grandson. But Rebecca knew from experience that Peter might all too well have contradicted her outright and made her look like a fraud.)

Alice Farmer sailed in, stately and important, holding a platter of crab cakes high above her head. “Why, Alice,” Tina said. “Are you still with us.” This gave Rebecca a twist of wicked satisfaction, because Alice Farmer hated being addressed by anything but her whole name. It was one of her quirks. Alice Farmer set the platter in front of Rebecca and sent Tina a long, flat stare beneath half-shuttered lids before she left the room.

“If I were Tina, I’d hire myself a taster before the next course,” Zeb murmured out of the side of his mouth. But Tina had blithely moved on, by now, to the subject of the wedding. She was asking Barry how he and NoNo had met, where he had proposed, what kind of ceremony they planned. Her questions were delivered with that falling intonation that the English use—“Won’t it be dreadfully hot in the garden”—and at some stage during her years abroad she seemed to have lost the knack of pronouncing her r’s. “God-den,” was what she said. Rebecca resolved to stop being so critical. “Could I offer you a crab cake,” she asked Troy, but unfortunately the question came out with that same downward note at the end. Troy gave a sputter of a laugh. Rebecca plopped a crab cake onto his plate, pointedly avoiding his eyes.

“We’ve finally found a minister,” Barry was telling Tina. “NoNo and I were in a restaurant the other night, talking about who we could get to marry us, and our waitress said, ‘Why, I could do that.’ Turns out she has some kind of certificate she sent away for through the mail. Perfectly legal, she says. A really nice lady. Says she’ll do it for free.”

This was news to Rebecca. All she’d heard was that the officiator would be a woman. She had pictured someone magisterial, wearing a flowing black robe like Sandra What’s-It on the Supreme Court bench. Now a whole new image popped up: a person in a dingy pink nylon uniform and a hairnet.

“Well, and why not,” Tina said cheerfully. “It’s all a big charade, anyhow. Isn’t it,” she asked Hakim. He gave her a dazzled smile. “Just a primitive tribal ritual,” she went on, “meant to make us forget we’re merely propagating the species. When I think what I could have accomplished if I hadn’t bothered with marriage! It’s enough to make me weep.”

“What,” Zeb said politely.

“Pardon?”

“What could you have accomplished?”

“Well, you’ll have to ask my voice teacher that. She was devastated when I married Joe. Absolutely devastated. ‘My dear,’ she said, ‘you are throwing away a God-given talent, purely to enter an institution invented by males for their own benefit.’ And she was right; I know that now. Oh,” she said, turning a radiant smile on Hakim, “women may find marriage useful during that little childbearing phase. But then as the years go by, they need their husbands less and less while their husbands need them more and more. Men expect all that listening and marveling and yes-darling-aren’t-you-amazing, those balanced meals and clean sheets and waxed floors, and then the blood-pressure monitoring and the low-sodium diet, and the hand-holding when they retire and can’t think what to do with themselves. And the wives, meanwhile, start longing to get free. They start running off to their ladies’ luncheons and their women’s book-club meetings and their girls-only wilderness trips.”

“Great, Tina,” Zeb said. “You certainly know the right thing to say to a bridal couple.”

The others laughed — some a bit uncertainly, Rebecca thought. But Tina lifted her chin and told him, “I don’t notice you’ve been in any rush to marry.”

“No, I guess I haven’t,” he said. “I’m still waiting for Rebecca.”

Rebecca sent him a grateful smile, but Tina did not appear to have heard. “Seriously, though,” she told the others. “You have to admit that love is a waste. It’s expensive, it’s inconvenient, it’s time-consuming, it’s messy…”

They laughed again, more easily now. They must have decided she was joking. That Tina: such a card.

But Rebecca didn’t think she was joking. Or not entirely. She suspected Tina was expressing exactly what she felt.

The funny thing was that she felt that way herself, at certain moments. She gazed around her at this tangle of relatives and in-laws, the children tumbling in from the kitchen to complain about some injustice, Poppy announcing his birthday party for the thousandth time, Peter slouching wretchedly on the fringes of the group…

And she thought what a clean, simple life she would have led if it weren’t for love.

* * *

Phone photographer, she reminded herself before she went to sleep. Phone NoNo to ask what music she wants. Pick up Poppy’s suit from the cleaner.

She knew she should switch on the lamp and make a list, but she was too tired. Instead, she tried to envision the list on the ceiling above her bed — a mnemonic device that never really worked. Ask Dixon if he could drive Alice Farmer home after the wedding, she added. She slid her left foot to a cooler spot on the sheet. Find out whether Barry…

Then she lost track of her thoughts and lay staring into the dark.

It made her might-have-been existence more real to imagine also the negatives. Will, for instance, would probably have been a workaholic. He was just the type to stay late at the lab and converse in monosyllables when his mind was on his research. There she’d be, serving him a gourmet dinner, wearing something enticing, brushing the back of his neck with her fingers as she poured his wine, and he would say, “You know? I think I’ve figured out where I went wrong in that last experiment.”

As for Tristram: he would never quite outgrow his social ineptness. She and Will would always worry about him a little. Although professionally he would be very successful, doing something scientific that she couldn’t pretend to understand, she didn’t suppose he would marry till relatively late. He tended to develop inappropriate crushes on shallow, bubbly blondes who didn’t return his interest. (You had to be able to see beyond his earnest, shy, fumbling manner.) Like his father, he would seem a bit removed from his own culture.

Oh, it wasn’t always easy, Rebecca would tell her friends.

* * *

“I can’t believe you’re going to let Poppy give a toast at the wedding,” Tina said. “He’s not in earshot, is he.”

“No, he’s up in his room,” Rebecca told her. “He had breakfast hours ago.”

She was hoping to make a point — it was after 9 a.m. — but Tina let it pass right over her head. “The man’s a total loss!” she said. “He seems to have about one-sixteenth of his mind left, every cell of it devoted to the savoring of sweets.”

Rebecca had never heard anyone use the word savoring in casual conversation. She wondered if Tina would spell it in the British way, with an our. She spent so long considering this — standing at the kitchen stove, watching a pat of butter melt and begin to sizzle — that Tina gave a cluck of impatience and reached past her for the egg carton. “My God, it’s some kind of cruel joke,” she said when she had lifted the lid. She was looking down at a double row of eggshells. Rebecca always put the shells back in the carton when she was cooking. In fact, she’d assumed that everyone did. This was what happened when people came to stay: they forced you to view your life from outside, to realize that there was, come to think of it, something faintly mocking about a carton full of empty shells. But two eggs remained intact, and she plucked those out and rapped them against the rim of the skillet.

“As for that birthday party,” Tina said, “I don’t know how you can even consider it! He’d forget you’d thrown it, anyway, half a minute later. And think of the conversation: round and round, the same subjects over and over. All his guests would go mad.”

Rebecca, too, suspected that Poppy might not remember the party afterward. Her hard work would come to nothing. But she said, “That’s okay; we’ll remind him.”

“Simpler just not to do it and tell him you had.”

“Also,” Rebecca said, dreamily stirring the eggs, “it can be kind of interesting when he repeats himself. New details come out, different slants on the old stories. Sometimes I end up learning something.”

“For what that’s worth,” Tina said. “He always was a bit of a bore, even when Aunt Joyce was alive; but now, good God! I guess she covered up for him more than we imagined.”

“Well, who knows? Maybe we’d say the same thing in reverse if he’d been the one who died,” Rebecca said. “Maybe the two of them together made a unit that worked, and whichever one of them went first would have left the other, oh, just… lopsided and lame.”

There was a short silence, during which Rebecca turned off the burner and carried the skillet over to the table. She dished the eggs onto Tina’s plate, set the skillet in the sink, and asked, “Coffee? Tea?”

Only then, turning from the sink, did she notice how intently Tina was studying her. “What,” she said.

Tina said, “Oh, nothing.” She settled at the table, scooping her long skirt beneath her. (Like someone in an old movie, she wore a full-length satin dressing gown to breakfast.) “Coffee, please,” she said. Then she said, “You must have felt sort of lopsided yourself, all these years.”

“Well,” Rebecca said.

“You don’t have any, shall we say, man friend, I suppose.”

“Oh, no,” Rebecca said. She poured a cup of coffee and set it in front of Tina.

“Quite right: why would you want one,” Tina told her. “Such a nuisance, they are.”

This struck Rebecca as unexpectedly kind. She sat down opposite Tina and said, “It isn’t that, exactly—”

“And after baby-sitting Joe Davitch!” Tina said. “No wonder you need a rest. God, the Davitches in general: a bunch of mopers. They could really weigh a person down.”

“Oh, well, I wouldn’t—”

“Any time I think of his mother, I picture her on the verge of tears. You know how her chin would pock up. How her lower lip would quiver. It’s ironic that her profession was throwing parties. I mean, just because your house has fourteen-foot ceilings doesn’t automatically make you a social butterfly, does it. I’ll never forget what I heard her tell an old friend once. ‘I like you, Ginny,’ she said, ‘but do we actually have to get together?’”

Rebecca smiled, hearing her mother-in-law’s plaintive little voice echoing across the years.

“And Joe’s father taking those pills,” Tina said. “Not even leaving a note behind. There must have been some sort of depressive chromosome or something, descending from both branches.”

“Well, but sometimes they were happy,” Rebecca said, because she was thinking, just then, of her twentieth-birthday party, all those people singing to her around the table.

“And then Aunt Alma, his father’s sister,” Tina said, “forever checking into Sheppard Pratt for little rest cures. Or how about Cousin Ed! Walking in front of that bus.”

Rebecca hated it when Tina showed off her inside knowledge of the Davitches. She herself had never heard of Cousin Ed, and she had thought Aunt Alma’s rest cures were a secret that Mother Davitch had confided to her alone. She said, “Yes, but in any family—”

“And the way Joe drove: those crazy left turns. Tell me those weren’t suicidal! Directly into the path of oncoming traffic. More than once I ducked under the dashboard; I bet you had that experience. Or did he do that only with me.”

No, he had done it with Rebecca.

When they were courting, it hadn’t alarmed her. She had been so trusting, back then. She remembered riding blissfully next to him, cradling his right hand in her lap as he made a dashing one-handed swerve across two lanes of speeding cars. But later she grew more anxious — especially after Min Foo was born. They had even had a couple of quarrels about it. “Who’s behind the wheel, here: you or me?” he had said, and she had said, “Yes, but my life’s at stake too, after all; mine and the children’s. I have a right to object!”

“You don’t think that’s the behavior of someone who wanted to do himself in?” Tina asked now.

For once there was a question mark, American-style, at the end of her sentence. But even so, Rebecca didn’t answer.

“In any event,” Tina said finally, “at least he didn’t take you along the night of the accident.” She glanced around the table. “I don’t suppose there’s orange juice.”

“I may have some in the fridge,” Rebecca said, not moving.

“Ah.”

Tina waited for a moment. Then she said, “Why don’t I fetch it,” and she slid back her chair and stood up. Her dressing gown made a sound like sand running through a sieve as she crossed the linoleum.

It was true that Rebecca had sometimes sensed some other quality, a glimmer of something like desperation, lying just beneath the surface of Joe’s exuberance. On occasion she had thought she detected a hollow note in his voice, a forced heartiness as he welcomed guests. Or was it just that in any marriage, you end up knowing more than you should about the other person? (The inner meaning of that sudden hitch to the shoulders, or that flicker in one temple.) Once or twice, after a party, she had found him slumped in the darkened front parlor, staring into space. “Joe?” she had asked. “Aren’t you coming to bed?” and he’d given his head a sharp shake and struggled to his feet.

She had felt at certain moments — but not always! not for long stretches! — that she was dragging him through an invisible swamp, and Joe was hanging back while she herself, to compensate, grew quicker and more energetic. See how easy it is? We’ll get through this in no time!

Through Mother Davitch’s stroke, and Aunt Joyce’s death, and Poppy’s moving in with them. Through the constant threat of financial failure — blank squares on the appointment book, painful calls from creditors. Through Mother Davitch’s death, too, and the time they nearly lost Patch to appendicitis.

But through the good things, as well. Min Foo’s birth. The older girls’ gradual adjustment to Rebecca. Zeb’s admission to medical school. The little pleasures of everyday life, like a perfectly weightless snowfall on a clear December night, or the sound of the children’s jump-rope chants outside on a summer evening.

“Yeah, sure, sweetheart,” Joe said when she pointed these out, and he would sling an arm around her and draw her close. Even then, though, she might catch a certain clouded look in his eyes, as if he were listening to some private voice that Rebecca couldn’t hear.

She did believe he loved her. But she couldn’t help feeling, sometimes, that he loved that private voice more.

Had she been a disappointment to him? That was her greatest fear. Consider how he had first seen her: the girl enjoying the party more than anyone else in the room. He had clung to that image obstinately, no doubt hoping that her happiness was contagious. And it hadn’t been. And besides, she was really no more or less happy than most other people she knew.

“This place is like a time machine,” Tina said out of the blue.

Rebecca started, wondering if her head was so transparent. But Tina was drifting obliviously around the kitchen. “Same old round-edged sink as when I was living here, only maybe a mite yellower. Same sticky wooden cabinets. Same scummy little plastic drinking glasses.” She raised her glass of orange juice, demonstrating. “Same baggy, rusty screen door,” she added, turning to gaze through it. “Why! It appears that some young man is carpeting your backyard.”

“Really?” Rebecca said. She stood up and went over to check. Sure enough, Brick Allen — bronzed and muscular, wearing shorts and boots and nothing else — was unrolling what appeared to be a bristly green stair runner. “It’s grass,” she told Tina. “We’re putting it in for the wedding.”

“How American. An instant lawn,” Tina said. She opened the door and called out, “Very impressive!”

Brick raised his head to see who was speaking. He took in Tina — her shimmering robe, the cant of her hip as she leaned against the doorframe — and then he said, “Well, thanks. I’ve been working out with weights.”

There was the briefest pause, and then Tina gave a husky laugh and turned to include Rebecca. But Rebecca didn’t laugh back.

She was thinking that if she’d been wise, she would have granted as much significance to Joe’s behavior that first night as he had granted to hers. Goodbye, he had said. Just that easily.

Not Au revoir, but Goodbye.

* * *

Imagine she was walking down the street one day and who should round the corner but Will Allenby. He would look the same as always, except older. (As an afterthought, she grayed his hair and etched two faint but attractive lines at the corners of his mouth.) “Rebecca?” he would say. He would stop. He would look at her. “Rebecca Holmes?”

Conveniently, he would not have married; or he would have married but found the woman lacking in some way, just never quite up to his memories of Rebecca, and now he was divorced and living nearby — say in one of those luxury high-rise condos overlooking the harbor. Oh, it wasn’t so far-fetched!

Might-have-been slid imperceptibly into could-still-be — a much more satisfying fantasy. He would invite her for an intimate supper. She would show up with a bottle of wine and he would seat her at a table next to the picture window, with the boat lights twinkling like stars below them and the Domino Sugars sign glowing in the distance. “So tell me, Will—” she would begin, but he would put his hand over hers and say, “Don’t we know each other well enough not to bother with small talk?”

And he was right; they did. They fit together perfectly, both of them so serious and cerebral and nonsocial, content to spend their evenings reading on the couch. Sometimes they would go to plays or concerts. She hadn’t been to a concert in years! It would be wonderful to walk down the aisle holding somebody’s arm; to have him remove her coat in a sheltering, cherishing way after they were seated; to feel his shoulder pressed against hers as they listened to the music.

“Where’s Beck?” the girls would ask each other.

“I think she’s out on a date.”

“A date!”

At that moment she would walk in the door, smiling a mysterious smile, her lips a little squashed-looking as if someone had been kissing her.

* * *

Macadam College had a vast selection of telephone numbers now, where once there had been only one. “Administration? Admissions? Alumni?” the operator offered. Rebecca said, “Alumni,” in a voice that was already shaky. And when she reached the Alumni Office, she felt her heart speeding up. “I’d like to have an address for one of my old classmates,” she said, gripping the receiver too tightly. She was relieved when she was transferred to another desk. It gave her a moment to compose herself.

Tina had taken her daughters to lunch, and Poppy was having his nap. This would be Rebecca’s one chance all day for privacy. She was sitting on the edge of her bed, about two inches of it, with her head bent close to the receiver and her free hand cupped protectively around her mouth.

An older woman asked, “May I help you?”

“Yes, please,” Rebecca said. “I’d like an address for someone from the Class of ’68. A Willard Allenby.”

This took so much breath (which she seemed to have very little of) that she ended with a gasp. Thank heaven, she thought, the next wait would no doubt be longer. But instantly the woman said, “Dr. Allenby?”

“Why, yes, I suppose he—”

“Dr. Allenby is right here!”

Rebecca made a sound distressingly like a squawk. “Right here at Macadam, I mean,” the woman told her. “He’s head of the physics department.”

Rebecca said, “Oh!” in a voice that was still not quite right.

Mercifully, the woman said, “Wait till I get the directory.” She dropped the receiver with a clatter.

Rebecca cleared her throat and sat up straighter. She noticed that her ceiling fan was trailing wisps of dust as it spun — rags of dust, actual streamers of dust.

“Here it is,” the woman said. “Four hundred Linden Street.”

Rebecca switched the receiver to her left hand and wrote down the address. Her handwriting was as wavery as Poppy’s. She wrote down the telephone numbers for Will’s office and his home — evidently Macadam was still enough of a backwater not to be paranoid about such things — and then she said, “Thanks so much!” in what she hoped was a breezy tone. “Bye!” And she hung up.

Linden Street was where the full professors lived — the settled, tenured professors with good salaries and established families.

Will must have a family.

How could she have supposed he was still alone at that library table, his books still spread around him?

She tore the page off her memo pad and folded it over and over until it was a tiny paper stick. For one irrational moment, she had an urge to chew it up and swallow it, but instead she tucked it out of sight underneath the telephone. Then she rose, smoothing her skirt, and went back downstairs.

* * *

By the afternoon before the wedding, Tina had become just the slightest bit less popular with her daughters. This always happened, Rebecca remembered now. Feelings would get hurt, misunderstandings would arise — the usual untidiness that came from rubbing elbows over a period of days. Patch, for instance, felt that Tina wasn’t being nice enough to Jeep. Not only that; she was being too nice to Barry. It turned out that Patch had entertained high hopes for Tina’s derailing the wedding. In her woman-of-the-world way, she would see Barry for the cad he was and then, by some magic, persuade NoNo not to marry him. Instead, Patch said, Tina had cozied up to him; she had made a fool of herself over him; she had behaved just shockingly, linking elbows with him at every opportunity and laughing her throaty laugh directly into his face, not even acknowledging the chair that Jeep pulled out for her at the table but deliberately choosing another chair, far away from Jeep and next to Barry. “Barry, of all people!” Patch told Rebecca. (She had stopped by for just a moment to drop off her youngest.) “We’re talking about a man who makes calls on his cell phone during dinner. Calls his own answering machine to leave himself a message. ‘Don’t forget my dress shoes in the back closet,’ he says. Right in the middle of a joke Jeep was telling!”

“Oh, honey, Barry didn’t mean… Your mother didn’t mean any harm,” Rebecca said.

Although she couldn’t help feeling guiltily pleased.

Then Tina suggested to Peter that he go along on the honeymoon. “Think about it,” she told him. “They’re planning to leave you in this mausoleum over the weekend with Rebecca. Practically a stranger! I don’t know about you, but I would never stand for such a thing. The three of you are a family now, tell them. You deserve to come too.”

It was unlikely he’d have followed her instructions — he just smiled uncertainly at his shoes and then slid a glance toward his father — but NoNo took offense anyhow. “You don’t know the first thing about it,” she told Tina in a low, trembling voice. “Barry and I have three days only, three short days, Friday, Saturday, Sunday; that’s all I’m asking, and now you have the nerve to say—”

“All right! All right! Never mind me!” Tina said, holding up both jeweled hands. “I’m just the fly on the wall, here.”

Then she turned back to Peter and gave him a sympathetic, I-tried-my-best shrug.

This scene took place in the family room upstairs, because downstairs they had a paying event. A man had engaged the entire public space — both parlors and the dining room — just so he could propose to the woman he loved. Evidently the Open Arms was where they had first met, at some sort of charity function. The details, he had said, he would leave to Rebecca, but he wanted this to be a grand and formal occasion with a tuxedoed waiter, a four-course dinner, and a strolling violinist. So Rebecca hired Dixon, who looked elegant in his rented tux although, sad to say, he had started growing one of those skinny jawline beards that seemed more trouble than shaving; and she asked Biddy to do the food and Emmy to play the piano, since she didn’t know any violinists. Emmy was diligent if not inspired; she sat at the old upright, wearing a tank top and a miniskirt and approximately fifteen earrings, and plunked out Chopin études while the couple sipped champagne on the front-parlor sofa. The man was gray-haired and portly, his cherubic face shining with sweat even though the air-conditioning was cranked so high that you could hardly hear Emmy’s playing. The woman was gray-haired as well but very pretty in a soft, genteel way, and she wore a trim navy dress and tiny navy pumps with straps across the insteps. Rebecca was able to observe all this because she kept inventing excuses to go down and check how they were doing. First she stepped in to welcome them, and then to say that hors d’oeuvres would be served in the other parlor (since it seemed a shame not to employ all the space they had hired), and then to announce dinner. She had the impression that the woman couldn’t think what to make of the situation. Upon arrival she had asked where the other guests were, and now she kept giving Rebecca anxious, searching smiles as if she were hard of hearing, although plainly she was not.

“This is a huge mistake,” Biddy whispered, slicing hearts of palm in the kitchen. “Such an unprivate proposal. What if she says no? I’ll die. I’ll burst out crying.”

She was serving a meal with a valentine motif: everything pink or heart-shaped or referring to hearts in some way. The main course would be beef heart. Talk about mistake! Rebecca thought. But of course she kept that to herself.

When she returned to the family room, she found NoNo flipping angrily through a magazine while Tina told Barry the story of her own proposal from the Englishman. “We were staying at the country house of friends of his,” she said, “and one evening over drinks our host said, ‘Tina, darling, I wonder if you could fancy linking up with Nelson, here.’ That was Nelson’s notion of a proposal. He was scared to ask me himself, he said later. Wouldn’t you think I’d have been warned off by that! The man had no backbone whatever. I’m surprised he could sit upright in a chair.”

She said nothing about how Joe had proposed, Rebecca noticed.

Peter and Poppy were watching a sitcom on TV. Or Poppy was watching. Peter wore a tense, fixed expression, and a sudden roar of canned laughter didn’t cause even a smile to cross his face. “Want to come downstairs and help with the dinner?” Rebecca asked him.

He rose so dutifully that she hurried to say, “Not that you have to or anything.”

“Go on, son; I’ll be down in a minute,” Barry told him. “We’ve got to be leaving pretty soon anyway. Big day tomorrow, hey, guy?”

Peter gave him a wan smile and trailed Rebecca out of the room.

What on earth would she do with this child for a whole weekend?

In the kitchen, Biddy was moaning over the coeur à la crème she’d just unmolded. “Beautiful!” Rebecca told her, but Biddy wailed, “How can you say that? It’s a fiasco!”

She must be referring to the slight indentation at the center. “Camouflage it,” Rebecca said briskly. “Didn’t I see some strawberries somewhere?”

“This is all NoNo’s fault,” Biddy said. “She’s made me lose my confidence. First she says I can cater the wedding and then she says I can’t, and then she says, oh, if it means so much she’ll let me do it after all; and ever since then, I swear, everything I’ve made has come out wrong in some way. Look at this! It’s an embarrassment!”

Meanwhile, she was just standing there. It was Rebecca who located the strawberries. “Here,” she told Peter. “Fill in that place in the middle and put some more around the edges.”

Peter first wiped his palms on the seat of his jeans, and then he took the bowl from her and started gingerly, meticulously placing the berries just so.

“Not much of an appetite out there,” Dixon said, walking in with two plates that looked untouched. “Do you think that’s a good sign, or bad? I’m pretty sure he hasn’t proposed yet, because all they’re talking about is some movie they’ve both seen.”

“It’s my cooking,” Biddy said gloomily. “I knew I’d overseasoned that beef heart.”

Rebecca said, “We should have asked if he planned to give her a ring. Then we could have put it in the dessert or something and he’d be forced to propose.”

“A ring! Isn’t she too old for a ring?” Dixon asked.

“With my luck, she’d just eat it,” Biddy said.

Rebecca said, “Now, Biddy, you’re being silly. This is a lovely meal, the beef heart is lovely, and Peter is doing such a nice job with the berries!”

Her voice cracked on a high note, but nobody was paying any attention anyhow. Except, perhaps, for Peter, who took on a full-cheeked look of pride when she complimented his work. He stepped back from the counter and cocked his head, appraising the dessert with narrowed eyes. Then he stepped forward again and added one more berry precisely in the center.

“You should have seen your father propose,” Biddy told Dixon. “He really and truly got down on his knees.”

“I didn’t know that!” Rebecca said — more to encourage the change of subject than anything else. “And what did he say, exactly?”

“He said, ‘Well, I suppose you can guess what I want to ask you.’ And I said, ‘Well, and I suppose you can guess what I would answer, too.’”

Rebecca laughed, but Dixon stayed very sober and alert, his eyes fixed on his mother’s face. (He could never hear enough about his father.)

“It didn’t occur to me till this instant that he didn’t actually ask,” Biddy said. “And I didn’t actually answer, either.” She shook her head. “Bring a serving spoon with you when you carry in the dessert,” she told Dixon. “Let them dish it out themselves. The more privacy the better.”

Then she started bustling around, scraping plates and wiping counters.

Rebecca would have liked to know how Troy had proposed, if propose was the proper word. Did he say, “Biddy, Dixon Senior may be dead but Dixon Junior is on the way, and I’ve always wanted a child to raise”? Or had it been more romantic? (“I do prefer men in general, Biddy, but I prefer you in particular and now I’d like to take care of you.”) Well, at least the arrangement seemed a success, contrary to all predictions. Rebecca was everlastingly grateful to Troy for sticking by Biddy so loyally and providing Dixon with some warmth in his life. Who could say for sure that it didn’t work just as well as a regular marriage?

Barry came into the kitchen, jingling his keys in his pocket, and told Peter it was time to leave. “Any errands I can run in the morning, call me,” he told Rebecca.

“Well, thank you, Barry. Have a good night.”

She looked past him and saw NoNo just behind him, her purse clutched to her chest. “Sweetie?” Rebecca said.

NoNo didn’t answer, but she came to stand beside Barry. Her head barely reached his shoulder — her dark, shiny cap of hair resembling an upside-down flower. She was such a little elf. Ridiculously, Rebecca’s eyes filled with tears. “Oh, sweetie,” she said. “You’re getting married! You’re all grown up! Oh, I know—” and she gave a laugh. “I know you’ve been grown up for ages, but, oh, here you are! About to be a wife!”

She reached out her arms, and NoNo stepped into them. They stood there hugging for a moment with NoNo’s purse pressed bulkily between them. Rebecca heard a sniff as delicate as a cat’s sneeze. She patted NoNo’s sharp shoulder blades and drank in her familiar smell — the rainy, limp smell of fresh violets.

From the passageway, Dixon said, “Hot dog!” He burst into the kitchen, and Rebecca and NoNo drew apart. “Well, he did it,” he said.

“Did what?” Rebecca asked.

“He proposed, Gram. Wake up!”

Then he described in detail how it had happened: the man taking hold of the serving spoon but setting it back down, swallowing so loudly that Dixon could hear it from where he stood. “I could tell that something was up,” he said, “so I got out of there. Walked out but then stopped just around the corner; so I heard him say, ‘Vivian, I know you must wonder why I asked you here all by yourself, and you probably think I’m a fool,’ he said. ‘Lord, I must look like such a fool, but I didn’t know how else to… Vivian,’ the guy said, ‘look. I really, really need you to marry me.’”

Biddy made a clucking sound, and Barry said, “Well, gee, he could have come up with something a little more romantic.”

“What did she say?” Rebecca asked. “Did you hear?”

“She said, ‘Steven, I’d be honored to marry you.’”

NoNo clapped her hands, and even Peter started grinning. Rebecca said, “Well, thank heaven. I’m so relieved.”

Although she also felt a little sad that her moment with NoNo had been cut short. Oh, nothing in this family ever flowed from start to finish without interruption. Their lives were a kind of crazy quilt of unrelated incidents — always some other family to consider, some strangers getting married or retired or promoted. (Even her own wedding had taken place at an earlier hour than she’d wanted because of an anniversary party scheduled for that night.)

When she was a girl, she had imagined her future as a single, harmonious picture. But what she had ended up with was more like the view in one of those multi-lensed optical toys that Lateesha was so fond of: dozens of tiny chips of pictures, each interfering with the others.

She saw Barry and Peter and NoNo out the back door, kissing Barry and Peter politely on the cheek and giving NoNo another hug. Biddy hugged NoNo too. Apparently she’d recovered from her hurt feelings. “Nighty-night, hon,” she said. “Get your beauty sleep, you hear?”

Then she and Rebecca set up the coffee tray.

“But don’t take it in quite yet,” Rebecca told Dixon. “Let them have a little time together on their own.”

It was some consolation, at least, to arrange that for somebody else.

* * *

She closed her bedroom door because Poppy and Tina were still up watching TV, and she sat down on the bed and drew the stick of paper from underneath the phone.

301, his area code was. She lifted the receiver and dialed it. Then she paused. Then she hung up.

It was nearly ten o’clock. Maybe he was asleep already. In the old days he’d been a night owl, but that could very well have changed.

Maybe his wife would answer. “Will, darling!” she would carol. “Some woman wanting to speak to you, darling!”

Or, “Dr. Allenby’s working late tonight,” in a forbidding tone. “Who’s calling, please?”

Rebecca lifted the receiver again, but this time she punched in his office number — the first three digits of it, at least, after which she paused so long that a voice came on the line saying her call could not go through as dialed. Even the recording — that impersonal, singsong “We’re sorry”—caused her heart to race, and she slammed the receiver back down. “You’re an idiot,” she said out loud. She rose abruptly and left the bedroom. “Ninny,” she told the mirror in the bathroom. “Silly moron,” she said as she yanked her toothbrush from its holder.

“What say, Beck?” Poppy called.

“Nothing, Poppy. Never mind.”

* * *

The big surprise was, the wedding went wonderfully.

NoNo was a vision in her white chiffon dress, with her giant yellow-and-gold bouquet, and Barry made a very handsome bridegroom, and Peter, wearing his first grownup suit, seemed touchingly dignified. The backyard was more or less presentable, if you ignored the sort of wide-wale effect produced by the strips of sod that had not had time to meld together yet; and the dead azaleas (which would have to wait to be replaced by professional nurserymen) had been cunningly costumed in billows of white netting — a solution proposed by NoNo herself, although even she had not foreseen that the netting would attract a flock of tiny yellow butterflies so decorative that they might have been sewn on by an inventive designer.

It was too hot, anyway, for the guests to venture outside for long. Until the ceremony began they stayed in the house, which Alice Farmer had cleaned and polished to a fare-thee-well. Nobody would have known that a curtain rod had torn itself loose from the wall in a cloud of plaster dust only that morning. Barry’s family — his brother and sister-in-law, plus a couple of cousins — kept admiring this and that, asking if the dining-room fireplace actually functioned (it didn’t) and if the people in the portraits were actual ancestors (they weren’t). Most of the Davitches arrived not too scandalously late and stayed on their best behavior throughout, never once bickering or stalking off in a huff; and the grandchildren were models of deportment. It was true that Rebecca’s mother and aunt — in town just for the day, since neither one of them liked sleeping in strange beds — kept to the edges of the gathering, Rebecca’s mother wearing her characteristic who-are-these-people expression. But at least they came; at least they each accepted a glass of wine, and conversed agreeably when spoken to, and Aunt Ida was heard to observe that she hadn’t seen such a beautiful bride in donkey’s ears. (“Years,” Rebecca’s mother said. “What?” Aunt Ida asked. “Donkey’s years, Ida.” But Aunt Ida was already turning away to flash her sweetest and most winning smile at Peter.) Also, Tina’s hot-pink gown was put to shame by Alice Farmer’s sequined turquoise cocktail dress with matching feather tiara. Rebecca found this immensely gratifying.

As for the waitress who officiated, she was nothing like what Rebecca had feared. Demeter, her name was, and she was at least partly Greek, with one of those strong, noble Greek faces. She wore a simple black dress and carried herself as if she were supporting an entablature. Granted, Rebecca still wished they’d rehearsed. The “Wedding March,” for instance — played on the piano by Emmy and relayed to the backyard via Min Foo’s baby monitor — continued all the way through to the end while the couple stood sweating in the hot sun waiting for her to finish; and then Demeter asked, “Who gives this woman…?” which no one had thought to prepare for. Rebecca was just opening her mouth to say that she did, in order to move things along, when Tina finally said, “Oh! Me.” But she was repositioning her corsage at the time, so that it seemed she was merely sort of tossing off the bride.

Well, these things happen. What mattered was that Barry and NoNo really appeared to enjoy their own wedding. As soon as the ceremony was finished, they moved back indoors and Zeb took over the stereo and people started dancing. Rebecca watched from the sidelines, smiling. She was wearing a red silk dress with a many-tiered skirt, and she felt like a gypsy queen. Everything that Biddy’s waiters offered her, she accepted — little canapés and stuffed pastry shells and several glasses of champagne. All of it tasted delicious. And the cake, when they wheeled it out, was a work of art: six layers, each decorated with a different kind of sugar flower to reflect NoNo’s profession. Unfortunately it listed to the right somewhat, but Barry and NoNo cleverly solved that problem by listing to the right themselves, arm in arm, when they posed behind it for the photographer.

The best thing about being stepmother of the bride was that Rebecca didn’t have to think up one of her rhymes. Troy offered the first toast — a nice little rumination about what couples learn from each other as they travel together through life. “From Biddy I have learned caretaking,” he said. “Feeding, nurturing, nourishing,” and he raised his glass to Biddy across the room, which made Rebecca a little teary because she had never before considered what Biddy had brought to Troy; it had always been the other way around. Then Barry’s brother delivered a humorous speech about Barry’s improved taste in women, and then Poppy struggled up from the couch to propose his toast, although he got confused and started reciting his poem instead. He was partway through it before Rebecca realized what was going on. (“If you weep away the days, or you try not to weep, or can’t,” he was intoning, “And pace the floor all night and sleep at dawn…”)

“Poppy,” she called. “Wait.” He paused, lips still parted, and turned so blindly in her direction that it stabbed her heart. She threaded her way through the crowd and came up and hugged his nearest arm to her breast. “A toast to NoNo and Barry,” she whispered into his tufted ear. “Long life and happiness.”

“Eh?” he mumbled. “Oh.” He turned to the others. “Long life and happiness,” he echoed. Then he seemed to collect himself, and in a stronger voice he added, “May your marriage be as happy as Joyce’s and mine was!”

Everybody clapped, and Rebecca squeezed his arm tighter and kissed his cheek.

“I got a little mixed up,” he told her as she helped him sit down. “But it was just for a second, there. I don’t think anyone noticed.”

“Not a soul,” she assured him. “Can I bring you a piece of cake?”

“I believe it was hearing the vows that took me back,” he said. “Seems like only yesterday I was saying those vows.”

“I know, Poppy.”

“People imagine that missing a loved one works kind of like missing cigarettes,” he said. “The first day is really hard but the next day is less hard and so forth, easier and easier the longer you go on. But instead it’s like missing water. Every day, you notice the person’s absence more.”

“I know.”

“But I surely never meant to spoil NoNo’s wedding.”

“You didn’t spoil it! You were fine,” Rebecca said. She caught a waiter’s attention and beckoned him over. “Look,” she told Poppy, lifting a plate of cake from the tray. “Fondant icing! Your favorite.”

“Ah, yes,” he said, brightening.

The photographer — just a college boy, a friend of Dixon’s — snapped Poppy’s photo as he raised the first forkful to his mouth. “I think I got that,” he told Rebecca.

Then Zeb came up and invited her to dance. The stereo was playing “Band of Gold.” “Where did that come from?” she asked as she stepped into his arms.

“It’s one of those 1950s collections,” he said. “Looked like good slow-dance music.” He steered her into Min Foo by accident and murmured, “Sorry.” Min Foo was so pregnant by now that Hakim had to hold her practically at arm’s length, leaning across her belly to set his cheek against hers. It made Rebecca laugh. Zeb drew back to smile at her. “You’re having fun, aren’t you,” he said.

“Yes,” she said, “I am.”

In fact she might have been tipsy, because everything made her laugh, after that. She laughed when Tina waltzed by clinging firmly to Peter, who wore the shocked, frozen look of a hijacking victim. She laughed when Alice Farmer, whose church forbade dancing, started swaying her head to the beat so enthusiastically that her feathers must be setting up a breeze. She laughed when “Band of Gold” switched abruptly to “Sixteen Tons” and everyone came to a stop and looked helplessly at everyone else. Then Dixon’s friend herded them outside for a huge group photograph. “Could the people not related by blood get over on the left end?” he asked. “Just in case, you know. Because I’m not absolutely sure I can fit you all into the picture.”

“How ingenious: a pre-cropped photo,” Zeb murmured, and Rebecca laughed till her cheeks ached.

Yes, she had to admit that the wedding went much better than she had expected.

* * *

Alone in her room, with everyone else in the house fast asleep and the champagne giving her courage, she sat on the edge of the bed and dialed Will Allenby’s home number.

The phone at the other end rang twice and then gave a click. “Dr. Allenby,” a man said. A man; not a boy. He had the worn, slightly furry voice of somebody middle-aged. She recognized the Church Valley accent, though, that turned Allenby into Allen-bih.

“Will?” she said.

“Laura?”

“Who?”

There was a sharp silence, during which she longed to hang up. But finally she said, “This is Rebecca Holmes Davitch, Will. Do you remember me?”

“Rebecca?”

She waited.

“Rebecca,” he said dully.

“I hope you weren’t asleep!”

“No…”

“Just tell me if you were! I know it’s late!”

It seemed she could not get rid of this insanely manic tone. She grimaced to herself. “In fact,” she said, “maybe I should call another time. Yes, why don’t I do that? Okay! Bye!”

She hung up and doubled over, burying her face in her lap. It felt to her as if something in her chest had started bleeding.