That Old CapeMagic

8 Bliss

How quickly it had all fallen apart. Even a year later, most of it spent in L.A., the speed of what happened after Kelsey’s wedding took Griffin ’s breath away.

For the first time in what seemed like forever he’d slept through the night and awakened to a sense of profound well-being, his funk, or whatever the hell it was, having finally fled. The morning breeze billowing the chintz curtains smelled of the sea, reminding Griffin of their honeymoon in Truro. Later in the morning they’d drive there, and this, too, made him happy. Joy was usually an early riser, but last night’s sex, together with too much to drink, had made her lazy and content as well. When he touched her bare shoulder she purred like a cat, which might mean she was amenable to a reprise of last night’s intimacy, though it was also possible she was just enjoying the special indulgence of sleeping in after the long, grueling semester. Or remembering that Laura was now engaged. Before Griffin could make up his mind which it was he’d drifted off again.

It was almost ten-thirty when he felt Joy get out of bed and heard the shower thunk on in the bathroom. The long, languid summer, two and a half glorious months without classroom responsibilities, stretched out before him, all the more real, he supposed, for beginning here on the Cape. Two days ago he’d been hoping he might spend them writing whatever Sid-the poor bastard-had to offer, but that wasn’t going to happen. So be it. After last night’s conversation with his mother, he was thinking again about taking another run at “The Summer of the Brownings.” The little girl’s death, whether or not she was right about that, would give the story some added weight. He’d cut back big-time on the characters based on his parents, unwelcome intruders that they were. Asserting his authorial prerogative, he’d reduce the story to its essence: an innocent summer friendship set against the backdrop of a terrible reality both boys are aware of but can’t quite acknowledge directly. This new strategy would force Peter into the narrative foreground, not a bad idea, either. He might even weave in some harbingers of Vietnam.

He was busy revising the story in his head when his cell phone commenced buzzing on the nightstand like a fly on its back. He usually turned the damn thing off before going to bed, but last night he’d apparently forgotten.

“Griff,” said Tommy. “What’s happening today, locusts?”

“No clue,” Griffin said, though sun was leaking through the chintz curtains. “What’re you doing up so early?”

“I’ve been up,” he said. “Anymore, I pee three times a night, at least. Don’t tell me you’re spared this, because I hate you already.”

“Why?”

“Same old reason. The woman you’re married to. All my life I’ve been a good woman shy of true happiness. It’s tragic, really.”

Neither man said anything for an awkward beat. In the next room the shower thunked off.

“Anyway, Sid gets planted later this morning.”

“That’s not wasting any time.”

“As per Jewish custom. We have Jews out here, remember? Also Negroes and Hispanics. You forget, living there in pale New England.”

The bathroom door opened, and Joy came out, toweling her hair dry. Who? she mouthed. Griffin could tell from her smile that she expected it to be Laura.

Tommy, he mouthed back, and she quickly covered up, as if his cell were equipped with a streaming-video camera.

“There’s going to be a big memorial do in a couple of weeks, though,” Tommy was saying, and he rattled off the names of half a dozen stars and directors, all former Sid clients, who’d already committed to attend. “You think you’ll come?”

“I don’t see why not. Once I get my grades turned in, I’m a free man.”

“Why don’t you and Joy come out for a week. Hell, two weeks. We’ll have some laughs.”

Joy was now bent over the small pad of B and B stationery, scribbling something.

“I’m working on this thing right now that’s going nowhere,” Tommy continued. “You can read it and tell me what’s wrong. If you’re nice I might even let you fix it. And Joy will hit it off with this woman I’m seeing. It’ll be like old times.”

Joy tore the page off the tablet and showed it to him: Don’t commit me.

“Sounds like fun,” he said. “Joy’s shaking her head no, but I’ll work on her.”

At which her face clouded over and she returned to the bathroom, closing the door behind her. Just this quickly last night’s magic, the sense of well-being it had engendered, evaporated.

Half an hour later they were in the car, having checked out of the B and B. They’d lolled in bed too long to take advantage of the second B. Even the giant coffee urn had been cruelly removed from the dining room by the time they’d both showered and dressed. The apologetic owner said they could leave one car there, drive the other to Truro, then pick it up on the way back. Joy disliked Griffin ’s roadster, which felt unsafe compared with her SUV, and her hair would be a lost cause by the time they arrived, but she gave in grudgingly when he observed there wasn’t much point in having a convertible if you weren’t going to put the top down on a bright summer day on the Cape.

“That was Route 6,” she remarked when he drove beneath it. The divided highway was the most direct route to the Outer Cape.

“Are we in some kind of hurry?” His plan had been to take two-lane 6A, a much more scenic drive that hugged the shoreline. If they happened on a likely spot, they’d stop and scatter his father’s ashes.

“No,” Joy said, “we’re certainly not.”

The day was warm, but the emotional temperature had plummeted.

“Can I use your phone? I forgot to put mine on the charger last night. It’s running on juice.”

Running on fumes? Because she forgot to juice the phone? Griffin opened his mouth, then closed it again, handing her his phone without comment. After last night’s festivities, it was far too early to call Laura, but he held his tongue about that, too.

“Hi, sweetie,” Joy said, after several rings, “did I wake you? Oh, I’m sorry. I just wanted to tell you again how thrilled we are.”

With the top down, Griffin could hear his daughter’s voice but not what she was saying. Probably going over again what Andy had said last night, how he’d asked, the whole play-by-play. It was the kind of conversation she and her mother delighted in, and Joy, glum a moment before, was smiling now, the world made right again. Griffin told himself not to be bitter.

“We’re on our way to Truro,” she was saying. “No, just for tonight. I need to get back, and now it’s looking like your dad may be going to L.A., so…” A beat, then: “No, he’s fine.” Another pause. “Please be careful driving home.” She hung up and returned his phone to the cup holder.

“If you really need to get back, we don’t have to go to Truro,” Griffin ventured. “It was your idea.”

“I know whose idea it was.”

Griffin couldn’t understand how they’d gotten there so quickly but they were clearly on the cusp of a serious falling-out, like the one that had sent him off to Boston and the Cape by himself. The thing to do, obviously, was to avoid hostilities. The day was drop-dead gorgeous, and with a little patience and forbearance there was no reason they couldn’t reclaim the better emotional place they’d found the night before. In a couple hours they’d be at the inn where they’d honeymooned, and all would be well. That was what he wanted, wasn’t it?

“It’s just that your story has some continuity problems,” he said, deciding that he’d push this far and no further. Because if Joy really wanted to have this out, better to do it now.

“It’s not a story. Or a screenplay. It’s my job. My life.”

“Our lives.”

When she didn’t say anything to this, he continued. Impossible, really, to stop, once you’d started. Still, best to be conciliatory. “All I meant was, if you’re too busy at work to go to L.A., fine. But if you’re really that busy, why are we going to Truro? That’s what I’d like to understand.” Okay, the emphasis maybe wasn’t entirely conciliatory.

“No, that’s what you don’t want to understand.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning what you’re determined not to understand couldn’t be simpler. It makes no sense to go all the way to L.A. unless we stay a week. I can’t afford that much time away right now. Your semester’s over. I’m happy for you. But I’m still flat out. I have two new staff to hire and a new boss to train. The day will come when he can spare me for a week, but not now. Truro is one day. I wouldn’t be working on the weekend anyway. So tomorrow I’ll miss half of one day. Not a whole week. You can pretend that doesn’t make sense, but it does.”

Which it did, as far as it went. “Fine,” he said. “Now I understand.”

“And I really hate it when you do that.”

“When I ask you to explain something? I’m not entitled to understand your thinking?”

“No, I hate it when you talk to me in script metaphors. My ‘story isn’t tracking.’ It has ‘continuity problems.’ Like I’m making things up. Like we’re still in L.A. Like you wish we’d never left. Like you regret the life we have.”

Of course he knew better than to say what came next, though it wasn’t the words themselves. If he’d delivered the line with a good-natured, self-deprecating grin, all would have been well. That’s probably what he was trying for, but he could feel the tight grimace on his features when he said, “Aren’t you going a little ‘over the top’?”

Before Joy could respond, his cell vibrated in the cup holder, and irritation morphed instantly into full-blown rage. “What, Mom?” he said through tightly clenched teeth. “What? What? What?”

It took a while, but they finally found where they’d honeymooned. It was smaller than Griffin remembered but otherwise unchanged, except that it was no longer an inn. An elderly woman in a straw hat was weeding the mulch around some new plantings on the front lawn. She looked up when she heard the car door shut and struggled to her feet as he approached. “It’s hell getting old,” she said, shading her eyes with one hand, scout fashion. “I’d like to ride in a car like that once more before I die.”

“You just might be the woman of my dreams,” Griffin said.

“Who’s that, then?” she wondered, indicating Joy.

“My wife. She hates it.”

“Her hair, right?”

He nodded.

“Attractive woman. What can an old lady do for you?”

“This used to be an inn,” he told her, aware that this might not be news to her. “My wife and I stayed here on our honeymoon. Thirty-four years ago.”

“I’ve owned it almost that long,” she said, turning to regard it. “Bought it with my husband. Then the rat-bastard up and died.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry?”

She turned back to look him over. She had the palest, most piercing blue eyes he’d ever seen, full of kindness but even more full of intelligence. He’d hate to have to lie to her for a living. She looked in Joy’s direction. “So what’s wrong?”

“We’ve been arguing.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry?” he said. “Can you recommend an inn here in Truro?”

She shook her head. “Between here and Provincetown there isn’t much but motels. Borderline sleazy, most of them. You want something nice, you’d best head back toward Wellfleet. Couple of good inns there.”

“Thanks. We’ll take your advice.”

“Do that.”

“If you don’t mind my saying, I don’t think I’ve ever heard a woman of your generation use the term rat-bastard before.”

“I used to be a writer. Still love words, the sound of them. Fart-hammer is my new favorite, though I can’t seem to find a sentence to put it in.”

“What did you write?”

“Biography, mostly. A poem or two, when the fit was on me. ‘Strange fits of passion I have known…’”

“‘And I will dare to tell, / But in the Lover’s ear alone, / What once to me befell,’” he continued. But if his ability to finish the stanza impressed the old woman, she gave no sign. “My parents were both English professors,” he explained, stifling the urge to tell her that one of them happened to be in the trunk of the car. “I’m another, actually. And a writer, too.”

“Hah!” she said. “No wonder your wife’s in tears.”

It was true. Joy was crying. She hadn’t been when he got out of the car, but now she was. Silently, but not trying to hide the fact, either.

“Go to her,” the woman suggested.

“I can’t stay here?”

“I’m sorry, no.”

Back in the car he took a deep breath. “Are you going to tell me about it, Joy? I know you called him back when I was in the shower.” He’d seen it listed on the phone’s recent calls list.

She didn’t pretend not to know what he was talking about, and he was grateful for that. She wiped her tears on the back of her wrist, and for a moment they just sat there. The old woman had gone back to her weeding, though Griffin had the distinct impression she hadn’t forgotten about them.

Finally, Joy said, “We can talk about it if you want. But first call your mother back.”

“Why?”

“Because she’s your mother. Because you yelled at her. Because she’s old. Because you’ve only got one.”

That night Griffin ’s insomnia returned with a vengeance, payback, apparently, for the previous night’s blissful sleep. Joy, to her credit, had tried to head the argument off. “We don’t have to do this,” she said after he called his mother back, leaving a brief apology on her machine for barking at her and promising to call again later in the week to discuss a visit. “There’s no need. Nothing happened.”

But she seemed to know they’d quarrel, and that the argument would be the most intense and bitter and wounding of their marriage. They’d finally quit out of exhaustion sometime after midnight, and since then he’d lain awake listening for the clock on the nightstand, which buzzed faintly every time the minute hand changed over. Amazing, really, how many bad thoughts you could cram into the sixty seconds between buzzes.

The day he found Joy sobbing in the shower, some part of him had known Tommy had to be involved. Even back when he and Elaine were still married and they were a foursome traipsing off to Mexico, Griffin knew about his friend’s crush on Joy. Out on the balcony of their resort hotel, working through some crucial scene, he would look up from the typewriter and see Tommy staring down at the pool below, and he could tell it was Joy he was looking at, not his own wife. Nor was his partner much interested in disguising the fact. “Lucky fellow,” he’d say before they went back to work. It had been part of the narrative of their long friendship that Griffin was born fortunate. Raised by two college professors, he’d gone to good schools that without exception identified him as gifted. Tommy, who was several years older, had grown up in a series of foster homes, knocked around rough urban public schools, his dyslexia undiagnosed, and was thought by everybody, including himself, to be dumb and lazy. First the army, then the community college where he’d met Elaine, after that some studio gofer work. “We’re both lucky,” Griffin would respond with a sweeping gesture that included their lovely young wives, the pool deck below with its palm trees and swim-up bar, the ocean just beyond the pink patio walls, the portable typewriter that provided them with all of this. “Yeah, sure,” Tommy always replied, “but there’s luck and then there’s luck.”

At what point had his feelings for her been reciprocated? This Joy had refused to tell him, asking what difference could it possibly make, so he’d spent the long night scrolling back through their marriage, especially the times he’d behaved badly. There’d been a fair number, he had to admit. Had his wife already fallen for Tommy the day she told Griffin she hated jazz? Probably not, but the seed might well have been sown that early. It was also around this time, he recalled, that Tommy had been desperately trying to locate his birth mother. “Why, for Christ sake?” he’d asked him one drunken night, hoping to diminish his friend’s need for something that was bound to disappoint him. “Don’t you realize how fortunate you are?”

“Jack,” Joy said, cautioning him.

“No, look at the man.” Griffin appealed directly to her here. “He has no baggage. He moves about the world a free man. He possesses large, untapped reserves of the very ignorance that bliss was invented to reward.”

“Yeah,” Tommy said, “but the thing is, she’s out there somewhere. And she’s older now. Things change. What if she’s wishing she never gave me up? What if she wants to tell me how sorry she is?”

“That’s what you don’t understand about parents,” Griffin explained. “They don’t apologize. We apologize. Take this last weekend.” Again he turned to Joy, who, knowing what was coming, looked away. “We’re summoned to Sacramento, right? It’s the twins’ birthday. The rest of the family’s going to be there so of course we have to be there, too. It’s Momma Jill making the pitch. On and on. When she finally lets her voice fall, we explain that we can’t-”

“Who explained?” Joy interrupted.

“They’re your parents,” Griffin pointed out.

Tommy and Joy exchanged a suffering look.

“Explain,” Griffin continued, “that we’re under deadline on this script-”

“Yet again,” Joy added.

“So,” Griffin said. “End of discussion? Hardly. Now it’s Poppa Jarve’s turn-”

“You promised you weren’t going to do that anymore,” Joy said, still gazing off into the distance. Griffin had recently taken to calling him (never to his face) not Harve but Jarve, so he wouldn’t be the only one in the family whose name didn’t begin with a J. Joy had found that funny at first but quickly changed her mind, claiming it was mean-spirited.

“And we have to go through the whole thing all over again.”

“Who has to?”

“Because to Harve, what you and I do for a living isn’t real work.”

“He does have a point,” Tommy said, raising his margarita so they could clink glasses.

“But we stand firm and-”

Tommy and Joy, together, this time. “Who stands firm?”

“So now, because we can’t go to Sacramento, everybody’s feelings are hurt.”

“We could’ve gone,” Joy corrected. “We chose not to.”

“But that’s my point,” Griffin said. “We’re adults. Shouldn’t we be able to choose? Every night this week you’ve been on the phone apologizing. First to your father, then your mother, then your sisters, then your father again.” He turned his attention back to Tommy now. “This is why our ancestors came to America. To ditch their symbolic parents. To become grown-ups in their own right.”

“I’m not saying we’d start some heavy relationship, my mother and I,” Tommy tried to explain. “I’d just like to know if she’s alive or dead… if she’s, you know, okay.”

“Isn’t that her job?” Griffin said, getting worked up on his friend’s behalf. “To wonder if you’re okay?”

Now Tommy appealed to Joy. “Do you ever win an argument with this guy?”

“Let… me…think,” Joy said, leaning toward Tommy so he could rub her neck, pausing just a comic half beat before saying, as if it had never occurred to her before, “Why, no.”

Later that same night, though, when he and Joy were in bed, the discussion had turned more serious. “Why shouldn’t he yearn for his biological mother?”

Okay, Griffin conceded, it made perfect sense that he should. But what made such yearning possible was that he didn’t know the woman. He expected Joy to object to his cynicism, but instead she snuggled up against him and said, “We hurt their feelings, my parents’. That’s why I apologized.”

Who said she never won any arguments?

Another buzz, another minute.

Joy had known about Tommy’s crush on her, of course. How could she not? She just hadn’t expected ever to feel the same way about him, she told Griffin. One day she just woke up and realized she did. But what day? When?

After Laura, was Griffin ’s best guess. It was the birth of their daughter, together with Tommy’s divorce, that really changed the dynamic of their lives. It was then that he’d finally given in and accepted Harve and Jill’s offer of a loan. Which guaranteed, Griffin complained to Tommy, that he and Joy were now officially hitched to the parental sled. They’d have little choice but to obey every summons to Sacramento. Tommy took Joy’s side, of course. What could be more natural than for her to want their daughter to know her grandparents, her aunts and uncles and cousins? She simply wanted Laura to grow up with the kind of family memories she herself cherished. Who wouldn’t? (Griffin, for one, but he understood his orphan friend’s question to be rhetorical.) Tommy, who desperately wanted a family, and Joy, who had one-they’d made an effective tag team. “Look,” she said, “we’re talking about a weekend every other month. I’m no fonder of their gated community than you are, but taking their money doesn’t mean we have to start voting Republican or something. Sacramento ’s purely logistical. Where else is the family supposed to gather if not at my parents’? Our apartment?” Plus, she went on, the timing was right. Vietnam had been over for years. They were in their late twenties now, and it was time to start applying a salve to all those never-trust-anyone-over-thirty generational wounds.

“Hey, talk to your old man,” Griffin said, because it was Harve who always brought up the war, Harve who stubbornly refused to admit it had been a mistake, Harve who loved to pronounce that the domino theory “had never been disproved,” as if the war’s detractors had failed at this, too. Besides, he thought but didn’t say, no such reconciliation was needed where his parents were concerned. As old-school lefty intellectuals, it never would’ve occurred to either of them that Asian adventurism could be anything but monumental folly. Better yet, they lived on the other side of the country, still completely involved with the continuing psychodrama of their own screwed-up lives. They neither demanded nor particularly encouraged visits. They’d never feigned any interest in children, and a grandchild was unlikely to alter that. When Griffin called to tell her Joy was pregnant, all his mother said was “So she finally got her way, then.” She. Unbelievable. By that point they’d been married for-what, seven years? And his mother still didn’t call his wife by name, just the feminine pronoun. Who could be expected to remember and use the names of people who hadn’t done graduate work? On the rare occasions when either of his parents phoned, Griffin always took the call in the den behind a closed door. “You don’t have to do that,” Joy would remind him when he emerged again, ten or fifteen minutes later, usually in a foul mood.

“No reason to inflict them on you,” he’d reply, and she’d let it go because, of course, the intended implication was all too clear. A plague on both their houses was the bargain he’d tried to drive back in Truro, and he meant to keep up his end, even if she didn’t.

The entire time Joy was pregnant, nobody had been more solicitous of her than Tommy. In honor of little Enrique (he was convinced it would be a boy) he’d quit drinking-to clean up his act, he claimed, to be worthy of his godson. Griffin remembered vividly the first time he held the baby, how reluctantly he’d handed Laura back, then turned to him and said, “Mr. Lucky.” And how right he was. Griffin had known it the moment he took his daughter from the nurse at the hospital, sensing in her ferocious, squirming little body reason enough for his own existence.

But here was the thing. Tommy had known it all along, as Joy swelled and waddled, whereas Griffin, God help him, when he looked at his pregnant wife, kept hearing his mother’s disembodied voice: So she finally got her way, then.

Yeah, it must have been around then, he decided, and who could blame her? How could Joy not feel affection for a man who’d happily drunk mineral water during her pregnancy so she wouldn’t be the only one abstaining from alcohol? Tommy’d called the house right after Griffin left for work that morning, Joy explained, and not even to speak to her, that was the ironic part. He’d heard about some writing gig he thought Griffin might be interested in. But then he’d asked her how things were going, and she’d just broken down. Her mother had recently been diagnosed with breast cancer and was beginning treatments that week, and now here she was on the other side of the country, with Laura growing up fast, becoming a young woman before she’d gotten her fill of her as a child, and, well, hearing Tommy’s voice on the line had made her realize that he, not Griffin, was the one she’d really wanted to talk to about everything, Tommy who would understand the sense of loss coming at her from all directions. He’d been, it came home to her as she sobbed there in the shower, her best friend. He might have been more if she’d allowed it. Maybe she should have.

Buzz. Griffin watched the alarm clock’s minute hand turn over.

At six, he rose and slipped quietly into a pair of shorts, an old polo shirt and sandals. He was pretty sure Joy was awake, too, that she’d slept no more and no better than he had, so he wasn’t surprised when she spoke.

“Do you really have to do this now? Have you looked outside?”

“I won’t be long. Go back to sleep.”

Outside, Wellfleet was lost in dense, liquid fog. She was right, of course. The sensible thing would be to wait for it to burn off, but he was determined to disprove without further delay the most ludicrous of the charges his wife had leveled against him. By mid-morning they’d be back in Falmouth to pick up Joy’s car and head back to Connecticut, to the life they’d managed to undermine so thoroughly.

It was far too wet to put the top down, but he did it anyway, hoping he’d be less blind. By the time he inched down the mussel-shell drive into the street, the inn was completely swallowed by the fog, and his shirt collar was cold and soaked through. Somewhere in the distance he heard the lonely tolling of a buoy, but he had no idea which direction the sound was coming from.

The town dock was probably his best bet. There might be people around even this early, but anyone standing more than a few feet away wouldn’t even know he was there, much less what he was up to. This assumed, of course, that he could find the dock. But if he couldn’t, no big deal. Except for its outer tip at Provincetown, the Cape was narrowest here at Wellfleet, just a couple miles wide. You couldn’t drive very far in any direction without coming to water of some sort, an inlet or a freshwater pond. Creeping forward at a pace that barely registered on the speedometer, he squinted into the gray soup, trusting that he’d see what he was about to hit before impact. Because it would be ironic if he got in an accident while driving to scatter the ashes of a man so prone to them.

Had he ever in his life been so exhausted? Not having slept was part of it, but the quarrel itself, he knew, was what had drained him. He and Joy were no strangers to argument, of course. What couple married thirty-four years was? But usually their disputes were contained. They were about something, not everything. Yesterday’s had started out like that, focused on his wife’s admission that yes, for a time she’d been in love, or something like love, with his old friend. But that perimeter had quickly been breached by Joy’s claim that the issue between them now was about him, not Tommy. Since his father’s death nine months ago, she said, his dissatisfaction had become palpable, as was evidenced by how excited he’d become at the prospect of a screenwriting gig. What he wanted, she told him, was his old life back, to be young and free again. She understood how losing a parent could cut you loose from your moorings. She’d lost her own mother, hadn’t she? But moving back to L.A. (and that was his real intention, she insisted, next week’s visit being just the opening gambit) wouldn’t make either of them young again, nor, she was dead certain, would it make him happy.

Griffin had laughed at the notion that he was “unmoored” (or even fazed, for that matter) by his father’s passing, and though he grudgingly conceded that the notion of moving back to L.A.-getting back in the game, for Christ sake-had its attractions, he denied categorically that he harbored any illusions about the place restoring his youth. If anything, the culture out there would have the opposite effect by making him feel his age even more acutely. But did the fact they weren’t young anymore mean they had to be prematurely old? Why spend the rest of their lives in curriculum meetings and eating in the same three or four local restaurants with the same bunch of dull academics? Did they have to be so settled? Wasn’t that the same as “settling”? They’d left L.A. because of Laura, but she was an adult now. By this time next year, she’d be married. Obviously, their circumstances had changed. Couldn’t their thinking and future plans reflect this?

What would be so wrong with, say, dividing their time? This past winter had been brutal. Even Joy had to admit that. Why not keep an eye out for an apartment in L.A. where they could spend each spring semester? Okay, the college wouldn’t be thrilled by him going down to half-time, but before leaving on this trip, he’d floated the idea past the dean of faculty, who’d said that the school, rather than risk losing him entirely, would likely be flexible. Once they were back in L.A., Griffin could reestablish his contacts in the film world, and the money he’d make there would more than offset the loss of academic income. But for Joy settled wasn’t the same as settling. To her, settled just meant that they’d chosen wisely all those years ago. She happened to love the life they were living now; moreover, it was one they’d agreed on. And what would become of her full-time job when Griffin went to part-time? Was she expected to sit and watch while he had his middle-age meltdown?

Thus far, Griffin had held his own. He’d always wielded superior rhetorical skills (Do you ever win an argument with this guy?) and over the last decade he’d honed them further in the classroom. But admit it, he wasn’t on his game. He never should’ve allowed their dispute to expand beyond her and Tommy, and even to his own ears, his voice, though he was careful not to raise it, sounded shrill, almost desperate. Usually, by this point Joy would have become frustrated and given in, yet the quarrel ground on. It was like a poker game where the wagering suddenly accelerated, each player raising instead of calling, then raising again, until all the blue chips were in the center of the table, more than either could afford to lose, or, maybe, in this case, to win. His father’s death, she kept insisting, was the true source of his current malaise, and her steadfast refusal to surrender this causal linkage had thrown him off his stride. Truth be told, the chronology did give him pause, because the idea of returning to L.A. had taken root not long after his father’s car was found at the turnpike rest stop. Since then he’d become more aggressive about looking for film work, checking with Sid every couple of weeks to see if he’d heard of any assignments he might be right for. He never made those calls when Joy was around, but of course they’d showed up on their long-distance bill, and she’d put two and two together. And he couldn’t really blame her for being angry that he’d sent up a trial balloon with the dean of faculty before broaching the subject with her. Why had he done that? Because he’d been pretty sure she’d hate the idea, maybe even veto it preemptively. So he’d gone ahead without her.

Reluctantly, Griffin was forced to entertain the possibility that he was in the wrong. Maybe her case against him wasn’t airtight, but it was fundamentally sturdy, whereas his defense against her accusations was merely skillful, artifice teetering on the head of a pin. Panicking, he’d tried to retreat to more solid ground. If he had a few secrets about phone calls to his agent and conversations with his dean, what about the whopper she’d been keeping all these years? He wasn’t the one who’d fallen in love with somebody else; she had. And indeed it was this knowledge, the details of it, that kept playing on a loop through his brain, like a pivotal scene in a script (yes, Joy would hate the metaphor, but there you were) that was out of kilter, jeopardizing the whole.

INT. TASTEFUL B &B ROOM: NIGHT.

A man (mid-fifties, slender and moderately good-looking despite his receding hairline) is peering out the window, but his haggard face is reflected back at him in the glass. A woman his age, beautiful but despondent, is seated on the four-poster bed, her head in her hands. Clearly, they’re arguing and have been for some time.

HUSBAND

Is it over? Can you at least tell me that much?

WIFE

(looking up in disbelief)

Over? Can’t you see it never even started?

HUSBAND

Okay, say I believe you and you never-

WIFE

Say you believe me?

HUSBAND

(ashamed of himself)

Even if it never… My question is, are you afraid to see him again? Is that why you won’t go to L.A.?

WIFE

I don’t know…Maybe.

He turns to face her now. Neither speaks for a long beat.

HUSBAND

Explain something to me. How come you get to be disappointed with our life and I don’t?

WIFE

(shaking her head)

Don’t you see? I’m not disappointed. That’s why I’m not willing to risk what we have. We’re talking about something that happened a long time ago. It shouldn’t have, but it did. I let my feelings get the better of me, and I’m sorry for that. I’m sorry yours got hurt. But I chose you. Aren’t the last two decades proof?

But he still can’t believe she was in love with someone else, ever.

HUSBAND

(petulant)

Proof you love your daughter.

WIFE

I do love our daughter.

HUSBAND

(bitter)

Plus, how would you explain to Harve and Jill and Princess Grace of Morocco that you loved somebody new? That would mean you changed your mind about something, and nobody in your family ever does that.

CLOSE ON THE HUSBAND. He knows better than to continue in this vein, but he can’t help himself.

HUSBAND (CONT’D)

What is it your father always says? Nobody’s ever disproved the domino theory?

WIFE

At least we’re finally addressing the real subject.

HUSBAND

(incredulous)

Which is?

WIFE

Our parents.

HUSBAND

Hey, my parents couldn’t be more out of the picture. They have been right from the start.

WIFE

(so sad)

Can’t you see, you’ve got it all wrong. You always blame my parents for intruding into our lives. You think I’m spared when you take your parents’ phone calls in the den with the door closed.

HUSBAND

Let me see if I understand this. Are you really saying my parents are the reason you fell in love with Tommy?

ON THE WOMAN NOW. She’s on her feet, facing him, gaining confidence. In all their married lives, she’s never so openly confronted him before.

WIFE

I’m saying that out of sight isn’t out of mind. You think you don’t let your mother into your life-into our lives-but you blame her when a bird craps on you. Think about that. You believe your father’s gone because he died, but he isn’t gone. He’s haunted you this whole year. Right now he’s in the trunk of your car, and you can’t bring yourself to scatter his ashes. Do you think maybe that means something?

Griffin came to a stop sign, or what he assumed was a stop sign-something octagonal, possibly red. He listened for the approach of an oncoming vehicle, but there was no sound, nothing except the tolling of that far-off buoy. He took a left, recalling, or seeming to, that this would take him through the village and down to the harbor. But that was somehow wrong, because almost immediately the road was lined on both sides by dark, ghostly trees instead of houses, which meant he was heading away from the harbor. Never mind. It didn’t have to be the harbor, or even saltwater. All that had seemed to matter yesterday, but not today. The important-no, critical-thing was to dispose of the man and, in doing so, win the only winnable part of yesterday’s argument. That was the crux of Joy’s case. That his parents, despite their physical absence, had intruded on their marriage as much as hers had, that he perversely wanted them to. If he could prove her wrong about this, then maybe her whole argument would collapse.

Outside of town the fog was, if possible, even thicker, and Griffin ’s hair was now as wet as if he’d just stepped out of the shower. Turning on the wipers helped a little, but his headlights, even on low beams, just made matters worse. Every quarter mile or so he’d pass a mailbox that marked a narrow dirt road where he could turn around and head back into town, but for now, not wanting to appear indecisive even to himself, he was content to keep moving forward. A minute later he passed beneath a highway-Route 6, he guessed-which explained why he hadn’t come to the shore yet. In another mile or two, if this road was reasonably straight, he’d reach the National Seashore on the Atlantic side. Hard to imagine a more remote stretch, especially at this hour of the morning and in this weather. No chance he’d be interrupted there.

WIFE

You want this to be about one day-the day you found me so brokenhearted-but it isn’t. You’re unhappy every day, and it’s getting worse. You’re a congenitally unhappy man.

HUSBAND

(choking back his emotions)

I’m never happy? I wasn’t happy last night?

WIFE

Okay, last night, for a few short hours, you were. But you always retreat, Jack. It’s like you’re afraid it won’t last. Like if you admit to being happy, someone will steal it from you.

(A BEAT, while he considers this)

Yes, there was a time when my heart went out to Tommy, and yes it got broken. But I mended it. I mended my heart.

ON THEIR REFLECTION IN THE GLASS. His, in the F.G., goes OUT OF FOCUS as hers comes in.

WIFE

I’m sorry I haven’t been able to mend yours, because God knows I’ve tried. I’m exhausted from trying.

HUSBAND

(looking gut-shot)

Maybe you should stop.

WIFE

(heartsick, looking away)

I have. That’s what you’ve noticed these last few weeks. Me stopping.

FADE OUT.

Congenitally unhappy. The word was not hers, of course. In thirty-four years he’d never known her to use it until yesterday. But Tommy loved it, even though Griffin always had to correct his spelling-congental or congentle-on the page. (“Think of genitals,” he’d advised, to which Tommy had responded, “I don’t like to think of genitals. I’d rather spell it wrong.”) No doubt he’d used the word yesterday when Griffin was in the shower and she called him back to explain why she wouldn’t be coming along to L.A. Griffin could imagine how the conversation had gone, Joy confiding how their marriage was deteriorating, how they seldom made love anymore, how his ambient discontent had deepened to the point of pathology, how he’d been driving around for the better part of a year with his dad’s ashes in the trunk of his car. And Tommy-because in the end he was Griffin ’s friend-advising her not to be hasty. “This shit ain’t new, kiddo. The guy’s always been a congenital malcontent. He doesn’t even realize he’s doing it. Remember the famous house categories, back when you guys were looking? Can’t Afford It and Wouldn’t Have It As a Gift? Tell me that isn’t Griff all over. This is the man you married when you could’ve married me, Mr. Happy-Go-Lucky.”

Griffin couldn’t help but smile at this imagined conversation, how he didn’t come off very well even when he himself held the reins of invention. But it was true that back then he’d adopted his parents’ mantra. Tommy and Joy had made relentless fun of him, even after he explained that he’d just been riffing on how his parents had classified at a glance every single property in the fat Cape real-estate guide, that his use of these same categories was meant to be ironic. But Tommy hadn’t bought any of that. “Explain irony to me,” he said. “I went to school, but that’s a concept I never really understood. Ironic guys like you confuse me especially.”

When the trees fell away on both sides of the road, Griffin heard surf pounding nearby, though he knew how deceptive the sound could be. One summer (before the Brownings or after?) his parents had rented a place with a second-story deck, from which you could see the ocean beyond the dunes, a good quarter-mile away. Each night he fell asleep in profound stillness, only to awaken to crashing waves right outside his window, as if during the night the turning tide had breached the dunes. But when he rose and joined his father on the deck, the ocean was right where it had been the day before. His father had explained it, how the wind had changed during the night, now pulling the sound toward them instead of pushing it away, and this made sense, the way science always does, because you know it’s supposed to. But the next morning, when Griffin again awoke to the same thunder, the explanation felt inadequate to the experience. The sound was just too close, too loud, and again he expected to find the lower rooms of their rental cottage flooded. Only repetition-the same thing happening night after night-had diminished and finally banished the magic.

But the beach was near. He could smell the salt, and this close to the shore, the fog had begun to dissipate. Squinting, he was able to make out a line of rolling dunes and beyond it a pale yellow orb, like a lamp with a forty-watt bulb covered by a sheet, near where he imagined the horizon to be. For a while the road he was on paralleled the shore, then abruptly ended in a large dirt parking lot. A lone pickup truck was parked there, probably some intrepid fisherman trying to get a jump on the blues.

A weathered boardwalk ran between the dunes, at the end of which Griffin slipped off his sandals. Looming ahead was some sort of structure-a building on the beach, maybe, or a ship at anchor?-but he couldn’t tell which until he got closer and the ghostly shape resolved itself into a restaurant with a large wraparound deck and a ship’s mast growing up through the roof. A rear door stood wide open, and he could hear someone moving around inside. The owner, probably, someone swamping the place out before the other employees arrived. Possibly even a thief. If whoever it was saw him and demanded to know what he was up to, what would he do? Raise his father’s urn by way of explanation? He hurried along before any such embarrassment could come to pass.

Almost immediately he could tell his plan was deeply flawed. From the boardwalk the waves looked to be breaking about knee-high, but now he saw it was more like waist-high. The restaurant had become just a gray silhouette in the mist behind him, and he was reluctant to go much farther up the beach. After all, the building marked the entrance to the parking lot, and if he allowed it to disappear completely, how would he find his car again? What he’d been hoping for, he realized, was a stone jetty or a pier, something that jutted into the water, something he could walk out on and, at the far end of, release the ashes into the churning sea. But there was nothing of the sort, which meant he’d have to wade out into the surf, submerge the urn and open it into the undertow. That would require dexterity, timing and, he feared, a good measure of luck. The lid was secured by two flimsy-looking metal clasps that would probably fly open if he got hit by a big wave before he was ready. It’d be more sensible to dig a hole at the water’s edge, pour the ashes in and cover them over. Later, when the tide came in, the push and pull of the waves would mingle the ash with sand and water, and his father would at last become part of the grit of the world. How different was that, really, from pouring the contents of the urn off the end of a dock or over the side of a boat?

Well, it was different. Plus, now that he looked more carefully, he saw the tide was already in. The water might not come any farther up the beach.

WIFE

Is it possible you haven’t scattered your father’s ashes because you need him in some way?

HUSBAND

(stern, cold)

Need him? My father? I didn’t need him alive. Why would I need him dead?

He took a deep breath, kicked his sandals aside and, gripping his father with both hands, entered the surf.

Driving back to Wellfleet, completely soaked, Griffin noticed what had been shrouded in fog when he was coming from the other direction. There, arranged in a horseshoe just as he remembered them, were the cottages where he and his parents and the Brownings had stayed that summer. At first, he wasn’t sure he trusted his eyes. That he should stumble on the place now seemed beyond improbable, as if the physical world were suddenly and mysteriously linked to his own psychic necessity. Having passed the entrance, he pulled onto the shoulder and backed up, his tires grinding on the gravel in the stillness.

On second thought, maybe it wasn’t the same place. The sign, OFFSHORE COTTAGES, WEEKLY/MONTHLY RENTALS, didn’t ring any bells, and in the center of the horseshoe, where the playground had been, there was now an in-ground pool enclosed by a chain-link fence. Beyond this were a shuffleboard court and several stone barbecue pits topped with heavy metal grates. But after more than four decades wouldn’t it have been even stranger if there weren’t significant changes? More difficult to reconcile was his memory of being able to walk to the beach that summer, which had to be a good half mile away. Had he conflated elements of the Browning summer with other vacations? Perhaps he’d added the detail of walking to the beach when he wrote about it as an adult, and it had been assimilated as memory.

About half the cottages looked occupied. Otherwise identical, each was painted a different pastel color and named-Sea Breeze, High Tide, Quarter Deck, Scallop Shell. Did he actually remember his parents making fun of the kitschy names, or was this just something they would’ve done? It was still only seven-thirty, too early to call his mother and ask. Besides, even after talking to her, he still wouldn’t know.

If these were the same cottages, then Dunwanderin would have been theirs-two-thirds of the way up the right-hand side of the horseshoe. It faced diagonally across the pool patio toward what would have been the Browning cottage. Feeling his sleepless exhaustion drag him down, Griffin put the car in park and closed his eyes, allowing himself to become again a twelve-year-old boy in the backseat of his parents’ car. The memory of their arrival here that first day was suddenly there, more vivid and detailed than ever before-his mother and father just staring at the cottage, neither making any move to get out. What they were doing, he knew from experience, was comparing the actual cottage with the description of it they’d been sent last January by the Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce, the brochure’s charming becoming tiny; rustic becoming dingy; fully equipped becoming attic furnished. In other words, crappy.

“Good,” said his father finally, his voice full of false cheer, “there’s a deck.”

“That?” said his mother, pointing. The warped, splintered boards weren’t even bordered by railings, and tall, spiky black weeds were sticking up between the planks. “You call that a deck?”

“Hey, there’s a table and four chairs, right? Perfect for us. You, me, Jackeroo and Al.” Clearly, he’d come to a decision, and he meant to make the best of the situation. It had been a long drive from the Mid-fucking-west, and Griffin ’s mother had been angry the whole way, failing to cheer up even when they crossed the Sagamore and his father had bravely broken into “That Old Cape Magic.” The New York State Thruway motel where they’d stayed the night before had been crappy, and this was going to be crappier still.

A screen door banged on the other side of the compound, and a little girl, shrieking with delight, came running toward them, her brother at her heels. They both stopped near the swing set, heads cocked, taking the measure of the newcomers. (At the wheel of his convertible, some forty-five years in the future, Griffin could feel himself smile at the sight of them.)

“Wonderful,” his mother said, no doubt envisioning an army of bratty kids, every cottage swarming with them. “Just great.”

“Mary, it’ll be fine,” Griffin ’s father said. “Next year we’ll do better. They never freeze salaries two years in a row.”

“I like it,” Griffin piped up from the backseat, sensing his father needed an ally. There was a tiny window under the eaves on the cottage’s second floor, and he’d intuited correctly that this room would be his.

His mother stared straight ahead, incredulous. “We’re paying how much?”

“It’ll be fine,” his father repeated, “unless you prefer to be miserable.”

“It’s like an oven up here,” she remarked when they shouldered open the door to the tiny room under the eaves. Not much bigger than a closet, it was only about five feet in height from floor to peak. His father, no giant, had to duck when he entered. “This is the kids’ room, all right,” he said when Griffin ’s mother, shaking her head in disgust, went back downstairs. Three cots with thin, stained mattresses crowded the room, two along opposite walls, the third folded up behind the door. His father threw open the tiny window, and together he and Griffin repositioned one of the cots directly beneath it to catch any stray breezes. At the base of one wall, where the A formed by the roof was at its widest point, were built-in storage compartments.

“Wanna bet that’s where they keep the games?” his father said, pulling on the stuck door. His parents never brought games of their own on vacation, preferring to see what each new rental provided, though they were usually very old board games with pieces missing, unplayable. When the door didn’t budge, he yanked it harder. This time it opened and his father yelped, pulling his hand back fast, as if from a fire, and then made the mistake of straightening up, the crown of his head smacking the low roof beam. “Ow!” he said, rubbing it with both hands. Whenever he injured himself, he looked betrayed, as if somebody else, maybe Griffin, was responsible. He complained of having what he termed a “low threshold of physical discomfort,” what Griffin ’s mother termed “being a big baby.” He came over now, bending low so Griffin could examine his scalp. “Is the skin broken?”

“Sort of,” Griffin said. An impressive knot was rising where his father’s hair was thinnest. The skin was abraded, a dozen tiny spots of blood just starting to form.

“Bleeding?”

“Just a little.”

Now his father was examining his injured thumb, where a dark splinter had been driven under the skin. “This vacation isn’t starting very well, is it?”

Griffin admitted it wasn’t.

“Your mother…,” he began, but broke off in order to chew at the splinter.

Griffin waited.

“Damn,” he said, showing Griffin this wound, too. “It’s in there.” The thick end of the splinter was close to the surface, the slender end, a mere shadow, much deeper.

“What about Mom?”

“Right now she’s on the warpath, but she’ll calm down.” He seemed to be talking to himself more than to Griffin. “She just needs…” He let his voice trail off again, as if to admit that he had no idea, really, what his wife needed, then went back to gnawing on his thumb.

They could hear her opening and closing kitchen cabinets downstairs. “No wineglasses,” she muttered. “Not a single goddamn wineglass.” Then, calling up: “Bill! You’re not going to believe this.”

“Gotta go,” his father said, grinning sheepishly, and headed downstairs.

There was no chest of drawers in the room, so Griffin laid out his week’s worth of vacation clothes on the extra cot and shoved his suitcase under it. When he thought he heard scurrying in the shadows of the storage cabinet, he quickly shut the door with his foot. Kneeling on the bed, he peered outside. Even with the window open, the room was still stifling hot, with barely enough breeze to flutter the curtain. On the sill a big green fly, dazed, was buzzing around on its back. It had been trapped between the window and the screen, but now, with the window up, its freedom was at hand. Its mind, though, if it had one, hadn’t adjusted, the old hopeless reality holding sway. Griffin watched the stupid thing spin and buzz until he heard a door open below and his mother emerged onto the deck, where she just stood with her arms crossed. When his father appeared a moment later, Griffin had a good view of the top of his head, where the tiny spots of blood had connected in a purple blob.

“Look,” he said, bending down to show her.

“Good,” she said.

“This, too.” He was showing her the splinter now, and she winced-something about this smaller thumb injury apparently touched her in a way the larger one hadn’t.

“You’re a mess,” she said, not unkindly.

His father lowered his voice then, but Griffin could hear him anyway. “She doesn’t mean a goddamn thing to me. You know that.”

His mother shook her head in despair. “I thought we agreed we weren’t going to do this anymore. Either one of us.”

“We did. I don’t know what comes over me. I hate myself. Really, you’ve no idea how much. I don’t know why you have anything to do with me.”

His mother allowed herself to be gathered into his arms then, and they stood there for a long time without speaking. “Okay,” she finally said, as if surrendering something large, something she’d meant to cling to. “We’re on the Cape.”

“And it’s great.”

She nodded, surveying the cottage and the entire compound once again. Griffin could tell that while nothing had changed, things looked better to her now than they had ten minutes ago. She took his father’s hand and examined the splinter more closely. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go find some tweezers.”

“Hello, Indiana!” came a hearty male voice, and when Griffin looked up, the two kids and their parents were coming toward them, waving enthusiastically. Apparently they’d noticed the out-of-state license. Griffin saw both his parents stiffen at being personally linked with the Mid-fucking-west. When they turned to greet the other family, he couldn’t see their faces anymore but knew they were offering the newcomers their most forced, rigid, unnatural smiles, the ones that convinced exactly no one, but, because they were identical, carried a certain authority. He noticed his mother had put her arm around his father’s waist, which meant that at least as far as these people were concerned, they were a single entity again, with the same contemptuous mind.

Strange, Griffin thought, opening his eyes on the present. He’d used none of this in “The Summer of the Brownings.” He’d meant for the story to be about the Brownings and felt that his parents, or rather the parents of the boy in the story, had already taken up too much narrative space. He’d wanted to focus on his friendship with Peter, with a subplot on the crush he’d had on the boy’s mother, the dawn of something like sexual awareness in a twelve-year-old. Except this wasn’t what the experience had been about. The idea that there might be something seriously wrong between his parents had not been new that summer. Their unhappiness, together and separately, had been a given throughout his childhood. That was why they needed the Cape, even more each passing year, to make things right between them, at least for a while. The Browning summer was just the first when he’d begun to understand what ailed them. If he’d had a true sexual awakening that summer it was this: what was wrong between his parents was about sex. At the time, that was as precise as he could make it, and he yearned neither for additional information nor further illumination. Indeed, to keep these at bay he’d escaped into that other, happier family. The Brownings had offered the refuge he needed, though any happy family would have probably served the same purpose, which meant he hadn’t so much told the story of that summer as avoided telling it. That was why a puzzled Tommy had concluded it must be about a kid discovering he was gay. Poor fucking kid, he’d said, perhaps sensing the presence of the real story that never got written. Griffin looked up at the dark window under the eaves now, half expecting to see his own worried twelve-year-old face still framed there.

The irony of all this, Griffin realized, was one even Tommy, who’d once jokingly asked him to explain irony, would appreciate. Because Griffin had attempted to do in the Browning summer story precisely what his wife was now accusing him of having done in their marriage: he’d tried but failed to keep his parents out. Right from the start (of the story, of his marriage), despite his best efforts, they’d managed to insinuate themselves. When Joy suggested they honeymoon on the Maine coast, Griffin convinced her that what they needed was a dose of the old Cape magic, that weakest of marital spells. In Truro they’d made plans for a life based on what they foolishly thought were their own terms, Joy articulating what she wanted, Griffin, tellingly, what he didn’t want (a marriage that even remotely resembled his parents’, as if this negative were a nifty substitute for an unimagined positive). Even as he rejected their values, he’d allowed many of their bedrock assumptions-that happiness was a place you could visit but never own, for instance-to burrow deep. He’d dismissed their snobbery and unearned sense of entitlement, but swallowed whole the rationale on which it had been based (Can’t Afford It; Wouldn’t Have It As a Gift). Joy’s contention that his parents, not hers, were the true intruders in their marriage had seemed ludicrous on the face of it, but he saw now that it was true. They were mucking about still, his living mother, exiled in the Mid-fucking-west (justice, that) but using seagulls as surrogates, his deceased father, reduced to ash and bits of bone, still refusing to take his leave.

He’d tried. Joy probably wouldn’t believe him, but he had tried. Failed, sure, awkwardly and foolishly, but was he not his father’s son? He’d gone out a good twenty yards into the cold surf, turning his back to the waves as they broke, holding his father out in front of him with both hands like a priest with a chalice, as if keeping the urn dry until the precise moment of submergence were a necessary part of the idiotic liturgy. He’s haunted you this whole year, Joy had accused. Right now he’s in the trunk of your car, and you cant bring yourself to scatter his ashes. Do you think maybe that means something? And so, by God, as soon as he was waist-deep, he’d put an end to the folly.

Except that when he plunged the urn into the turbulence and positioned his thumbs under the latch that secured the lid, the sand beneath his feet gave way to the very undertow his father had always feared, and Griffin lost his balance. To regain it, he held his arms out to his sides like a surfer. Had he dropped the urn then, or had the next wave knocked it out of his hands? He couldn’t remember. One second he had it; the next it had disappeared into the churning froth. Lost, he remembered thinking as he lunged after it, feeling around in the surf with both hands like a blind man until the next wave, larger, knocked him flat. Regaining his feet, he thought, My father is lost. Hilarious, really. After all, he’d been dead for nine months. But he was lost only now, this instant, and somehow this was worse than dead, because dead wasn’t something Griffin could be blamed for.

How long had he stood there, paralyzed, mortified by his clumsy incompetence, wave after wave leaping past him onto the shore? Do something, he thought, panicked, but what? How many times as a boy had he watched his father seize up in the middle of a room, a portrait of indecision, with no idea of where to turn, an angry wife tugging him in one direction, a pretty grad student who’d confused him with the romantic hero of some novel they’d been studying pulling him in the opposite? It was as if he’d concluded that if he remained where he was long enough, whatever he wanted most would come to him of its own volition. Griffin remembered willing him to act, to do something, because it frightened him to see anybody stand frozen in one place for so long, unable to take that first step, the one that implied a destination. Now, waist-deep in the roiling surf, the sands shifting dangerously beneath his feet, he finally understood. Because of course it was the doing that had brought him to this pass, and now, having done the wrong thing, the thing he never would’ve done if he’d been thinking clearly, there was nothing further to do but hope that chance, not known for compassion, would intervene in his undeserving favor.

Which in defiance of both logic and expectation it finally did, the dreaded undertow returning his father’s urn in a rush of sand and water, banging it hard against Griffin ’s anklebone, and this time his blind hands located it in the froth. He yanked the urn from the surf intact, its latches, somehow, unsprung.

Found. That was the word that leapt into his consciousness, like a synonym for triumph.

Back at the B and B Joy was packed and waiting. If she noticed the condition of his clothes, she didn’t say anything, nor did she remark on the fact that, when he popped the trunk and tossed in their bags, his father was still in the wheel well. Her silence alone was an eloquent indictment. He considered telling her that he’d stumbled on the very place where his family had vacationed when he was twelve and as a result he at last knew how to go about revising “The Summer of the Brownings.” But why should she care?

They took Route 6 as far as Hyannis, then Route 28 to Falmouth, all of it in silence. His cell phone vibrated once, but he saw it was his mother and let it go to voice mail. He was simply too dispirited to talk to her, especially with Joy in the car. Old habits like taking her calls in private were the hardest to break. In Falmouth they transferred Joy’s bag into her SUV, an act disturbing in its symbolism, since both vehicles were bound for the same destination, their home.

They headed in tandem for the Bourne Bridge, Joy in the lead. What he needed to do was think about the future, to figure out how to get back to the place they’d been the night of Kelsey’s wedding. Hard to believe, but that was just twenty-four hours ago. It felt like a lifetime, as if he and Joy had been traveling, lost, up and down the Cape forever. Odd that the future should be so difficult to bring into focus when the past, uninvited, offered itself up so easily for inspection. According to his mother, he’d pitched a fit, refusing to get into the car when it was time for them to leave the Cape that Browning summer, but that wasn’t how he remembered it at all. As his parents were loading the car, the man they’d rented the cottage from had come by to pick up the keys.

“What’s this?” his father asked when he was offered a bright red folder.

“Next year’s rates and availability,” the man told him. “You get first crack and a hundred dollars off because you stayed with us this year.”

“I don’t think we’re interested.”

The man glanced at Griffin ’s mother, then, to see if husband and wife were on the same page about this, and finally at Griffin himself. “How about you hang on to it, young fella,” he said, perhaps sensing that returning to these same cottages next summer was what Griffin wanted more than anything in the world. “In case they change their mind.”

No one had spoken a word by the time they got to the Sagamore. Griffin ’s mother looked like she meant to say nothing all the way back to the Mid-fucking-west. His father’s thumb had seemed to heal, but the splinter had resurfaced, and he’d chewed on it until the thumb became infected. It was now swollen to twice its normal size, and when the car rumbled onto the bridge, perhaps remembering that this same splinter had elicited sympathy a fortnight earlier, he tried to show it to Griffin ’s mother, but she just looked away. He should’ve quit right then, but knowing when to give up wasn’t one of his father’s strong suits. “Am I running a fever?” he said, leaning across the seat so Griffin ’s mother could feel his forehead. “I’m burning up, aren’t I?”

But she just continued to stare out the window.

“Fine,” his father said, leaning back, his brow untouched. “Just great.”

“Just great,” Griffin now echoed as the Bourne Bridge appeared in the distance. Feeling feverish himself, he put a hand to his forehead, but of course you really needed someone else for an accurate read. If Joy had been in the seat next to him, and he’d asked, she wouldn’t have refused him. He knew that much. But even though nothing in the world would have made him happier right then than the gift of her cool touch, he also knew he wouldn’t have asked her. Because even if he did have a temperature, it would feel like trying to elicit sympathy he didn’t deserve, his father’s son.

A hundred yards from the Bourne, his phone vibrated again. Seeing who it was, he pulled onto the shoulder and answered, just as Joy’s SUV climbed up onto the bridge and disappeared from sight.

“I think I found out what Sid had for you,” Tommy told him. “You remember Ruben Hand? Ruby?”

The name rang a vague bell, but…

“We were going to write that film for him back in the day, but the money went south? Anyway, he’s in TV now. He’s got this made-for-cable movie thing, some story about a college professor. Sid apparently pitched you.”

“You know this how?”

“My guy pitched me. If we could convince Ruby we’re right, we could do it together. Take six to eight weeks, ten at the outside. You’d be back grading your grammar exercises by Labor Day. Decent money. Possible series to follow if it works.”

“Ruby Hand. The guy I’m remembering was an asshole.”

“That’s right, a producer.”

“I’m in the car right now. How about I talk to Joy and call you back when I get home.”

“Not to influence you, but I could use the gig.”

“Okay if I ask you a question?”

“Sure.”

“Are you still in love with Joy?”

Not even a second’s hesitation. “Sure,” said his old friend. “Aren’t you?”

Such a simple question. Such a simple answer. Yet somehow, sitting there in the shadow of the Bourne Bridge, he’d managed to twist it all around. To make it instead a question of whether Joy still loved him. If she did, he told himself, she’d be waiting for him on the other side. Years ago, finally leaving L.A., they’d made the journey in two cars loaded down with things they didn’t trust to the movers. That was before cell phones, of course, but after the first day they had it down to a science, each intuiting when the other was going to need to stop for gas or food or the lavatory. They tried to stay close, within sight of each other, and whoever was in the lead would periodically check the rearview mirror and, if the other car wasn’t there, slow down or pull over until it caught up. Would Joy remember? Had she seen him pull over? If so, she’d be waiting for him on the other side. Or, more likely, farther on. By now, he was sure, she’d have checked her mirror, and noticed he wasn’t there.

Turning off his cell, he put it back in the cup holder. He didn’t want to talk to her on the phone. There’d been too much talk already. He just wanted to see her off on the shoulder, waiting for him, concerned for his well-being. If she pulled over, he’d know that whatever was between them could be worked out.

Carefully pulling out into traffic, he climbed onto the Bourne, passing the sign-DESPERATE?-a group called the Samaritans put there to discourage leapers. From the elevated midpoint of the bridge, he could see a steady stream of cars that reached almost a mile down the highway, but none were off on the shoulder. Half an hour later he switched his cell back on, hoping to see that he’d missed a call, but none had come in.

9 Rehearsal

The rugged Maine coastline was stunning, Griffin had to admit, the light so pure it almost hurt. He couldn’t help wondering what would have happened if his parents had fallen in love with this part of the world instead of the Cape. Certainly it would have been more affordable, but that begged an obvious question: would they really have wanted something they could afford? After all, much of the Cape ’s allure was its shimmering elusiveness, the magical way it receded before them year after year, the stuff of dreams. Coastal Maine, by contrast, seemed not just real but battered by reality. Where Cape Cod somehow managed to give the impression that July lasted all year, Maine reminded you, even in lush late spring, of its long, harsh winters, of snowdrifts that rotted baseboards and splintered latticework, of relentless winds that howled in the eaves and scoured the paint, leaving gutters rusted white with salt. Even the people looked scoured, or so it seemed to Griffin as he drove down the peninsula toward the Hedges, the resort hotel where Laura’s wedding would take place tomorrow. Wouldn’t Have It As a Gift, his mother informed him, in answer to his unspoken question.

Since her death last winter, she’d become even more talkative than when alive, ever anxious to share her opinions with Griffin, especially, but not exclusively, during his long, insomniac nights. Proximity-she now rode in the left wheel well of his rental car-also made her chatty. With any luck this would soon end. The plan was to drive down to the Cape after the wedding, find a resting place for both his parents. He’d had many months to think it over, but he still had no better plan than the one she’d proposed this time last year, to scatter his father on one side and his mother on the other. Maybe that would shut her up. Fat chance, she snorted.

All of Joy’s family and most of the other guests were staying at the Hedges so they wouldn’t be tempted to drive after drinking too much at the reception. Griffin had been offered a room there, too, but given the separation and the fact that he was bringing a guest, he thought it might be better to stay someplace nearby. When he suggested this, neither Joy nor Laura had objected, so he’d booked a room at a small inn half a mile up the peninsula.

It hadn’t started out as a separation, at least not in the legal sense. After Wellfleet, they’d agreed that Griffin would go to L.A. for the summer and write the made-for-cable movie with Tommy, who had a spare room in his condo and was glad to have someone to help with expenses for a couple months. The time apart would do him and Joy good. Absence had been known to make other hearts grow fonder, so why not theirs? Though in truth they barely discussed what was happening, Wellfleet having drained them of words. When they got home, he’d simply gone online and booked a flight to L.A.

“And I tell our daughter what?” Joy asked, as he stuffed two large suitcases with what he’d need for the summer.

“Tell her I’ll be home as soon as we deliver the script.”

“We’ve never lied to her.”

“That’s a lie?”

The following morning he’d driven to campus to finish reading the kids’ portfolios and put his academic life in some semblance of order. There was a summer program at the college, and his office would probably be used by visiting faculty. He put his father’s urn in the locked bottom drawer of his filing cabinet, promising himself he’d deal with it when he returned. Later that same day when he tossed the suitcases into the trunk, Joy noticed the urn was gone. “In your office?” she said when he told her what he’d done. “Why there?” she asked.

“I didn’t think it was fair for you to have to look at it every day,” he said, registering her sad, defeated smile. He understood-how could he not?-that this sort of “consideration” was at the crux of what was between them, but he was at a loss how to do things differently.

In L.A. the work had not gone well. It was clear from the start that he and Tommy didn’t view the material the same way. “Look,” his friend said. “You’re making too much of this. It’s Welcome Back, Kotter, except at college. The kids are smarter than their professor. They’re educating him. That’s where the laughs come from.” Never having taught, he seemed not to understand how arbitrary and artificial, how downright contrary to reality, this concept was. In the old days they’d been able to read each other’s minds, finish each other’s sentences, but more than a decade had passed and they’d lost the knack. Worse, Joy was now between them. Tommy seemed to know that not all was well in their marriage, but not much more. Griffin, who kept expecting to be cross-examined about what the hell was going on, didn’t know what to make of it when he wasn’t. It could mean Tommy didn’t have to because Joy, when she called him from Wellfleet, had already explained the situation in detail, but the opposite inference-that his friend was mostly in the dark but was respecting their privacy-was just as likely. To find out Griffin would have to ask, and this he refused to do.

After he’d been in L.A. for a couple weeks, Tommy finally said, “So, you’re not going to call her?”

“She knows how to reach me,” Griffin responded, both surprised and genuinely appalled by the bitterness and childish petulance in his voice. He’d been telling himself he hadn’t called her because he had no idea what to say. But the truth was uglier. What he was waiting for, he realized, was for Joy to blink, and with each passing day it became increasingly apparent that she wasn’t going to. In Wellfleet she’d told him as much, that his unhappiness had exhausted her, that it would be a relief not to have to deal with it anymore. Okay, if that was what she wanted.

Except for the proscribed subject of Griffin ’s marriage and not being able to hit their work stride, he and Tommy did all right. They both by nature were respectful, so they seldom crowded each other, and their mutual affection hadn’t waned. After that one remark about not calling Joy, Tommy made it a point to mind his own business, and Griffin returned the favor. His friend started drinking around five in the afternoon, just a glass of wine, no hard stuff anymore, but didn’t stop until he called it a night and went to bed. His color wasn’t good, and his paunch, while not large, was oddly asymmetrical, like it might contain a large fibroid cyst. For his part Tommy pretended not to notice that Griffin seldom slept for more than three or four hours. He himself got up to pee half a dozen times every night and sometimes poked his head into the living room, where Griffin would be watching television with the sound down. They were, that is, careful, as if consideration and not honesty was the bedrock of true friendship.

In this fashion the summer limped along. When Griffin arrived, they’d moved Tommy’s desktop from the guest bedroom to the dining room, and it was here they convened each morning. Tommy always brought in a pot of coffee from the kitchen, and Griffin would print out two sets of the last couple of days’ worth of work, which for continuity’s sake they always read over before beginning a new scene. One morning Griffin looked up from his pages to see Tommy studying him with a mixture of sadness and irritation. “Griff,” he said, “do us both a favor. Go home.”

“Another week and a half and we’ll have a draft.”

“Fuck the draft. You’re miserable. And you’re hurting that woman.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I know her. And what about your daughter?”

Laura, in fact, was not taking it well. She’d called him twice in L.A., wanting to know what was going on. What she’d worried about most of her life was finally happening, even as she and Andy were planning their own wedding. He’d tried to comfort her, saying that he and her mother hadn’t decided anything yet, but the only thing that would really comfort her was for him to go home and resume his old life, to pretend nothing had happened in Wellfleet.

Two weeks later, in mid-August, he and Tommy turned the draft in to Ruby Hand. They both thought it stank but were of different minds about what was wrong with it, agreeing only about two things: that the script was unlikely to get better without additional input and that their producer was an even bigger dickhead than they remembered. Good luck getting valuable notes from him. He was prompt, though, give him that. He called the very next day, when Tommy was out. He’d read the script and thought it was definitely “a step in the right direction.” How about they all think about it for a few days and exchange notes later in the week?

“That’s that, then,” Tommy said when Griffin told him about the conversation.

“What do you mean?”

“God, have you really been gone that long? That ‘step in the right direction’ jazz is code.”

“You think we’re fired?”

“No, I know we’re fired.”

He’d always had an almost preternatural gift for knowing when the ax was about to fall, but in this instance Griffin wasn’t sure he agreed. “Our contract calls for a polish.”

“He’s going to eat the polish, Griff. Trust me, we’re shitcanned. You might as well pack your bags.”

Griffin decided to come clean. “I called the college last week,” he said, “and they’re granting me a year’s leave.”

Tommy nodded, then shook his head. “Joy knows about this?”

“Possibly. There aren’t many secrets in small colleges.”

“But you haven’t told her.”

“Not yet, though it won’t be a surprise. She predicted it, in fact. Also, I might’ve found an apartment.”

Tommy just sighed.

“I’ve stayed too long,” Griffin said. “If we land another gig, maybe we could rent a small office.”

Later that week, both their cells rang at the same moment. Griffin ’s said MOM CALLING, so he took it outside onto the patio. He’d been in L.A. a week before remembering his promise to visit and bring her the books and journals she wanted. “Maybe I can find what you need out here,” he’d offered, after telling her where he was and why, or at least the small part he wanted her to know. “August is soon enough,” she’d told him, confirming his earlier suspicion that she didn’t need them to begin with. Their conversation had been short, suspiciously so, he thought. It was almost as if she was relieved he wouldn’t be coming to see her as planned. Nor had she called him since, which was stranger still. For her, summer was open season for pestering.

“Mom,” he said now, “how are you?”

But it wasn’t his mother. The woman identified herself as Gladys, her next-door neighbor. She’d become concerned when Mary didn’t answer her knock that morning. They were on the buddy system, Gladys explained, which meant they each had a key to the other’s apartment, in case she locked herself out or something else happened. This was something else. She’d found Griffin’s mother in bed, still in her nightgown, the curtains drawn and the room dark in the middle of the day. She was staring at nothing and gasping for breath, barely conscious, unresponsive. A heart attack, the emergency people thought. They’d given her oxygen and just minutes ago taken her to the hospital. “She keeps your number on the refrigerator,” Gladys said. “I hope she won’t be upset with me for using her phone to call. I could’ve used my own, I suppose, but I didn’t think.”

Griffin told her he was sure it would be okay.

“She hasn’t been feeling good,” Gladys said.

“I didn’t know that.”

“She didn’t like to say anything.”

Since when? Griffin thought. Were they talking about the same woman?

“We aren’t really buddies,” Gladys admitted. “That’s just what we call it. The buddy system. When you’re all alone, you need someone close by.” Hearing this, Griffin swallowed hard. “I’m not sure your mother even likes me very much, but I didn’t mind bud-dying with her. She could be very nice when she wanted to.”

Griffin thanked her and said he’d be on the first flight he could catch, then hung up and just stood there on the balcony until Tommy poked his head out to check on him. “That sucks,” his friend said when Griffin told him what was up, that he had to fly to Indiana.

Tommy insisted on driving him to LAX. At the curb they parted awkwardly, like a married couple in the middle of a spat.

“Okay if I call Joy about this?”

“I’d rather you didn’t.”

“I might anyway.”

Griffin saw no reason to argue. “I’ll let you know what’s up once I get the lay of the land.”

They shook hands.

“I never told you I found my mother.”

“No kidding.”

He nodded.

“And?”

“And you were right.”

The Hedges occupied the tip of the peninsula, surrounded on three sides by water. The main building was a grand old structure with a huge porch bordered by eight-foot-tall yew trees that were painstakingly sculpted into a massive hedge. Farther down the sloping lawn, more hedges formed what Griffin guessed was a labyrinth. When he pulled into the gravel lot, he saw Joy’s sister June emerge from an opening in the hedge with a crying child in tow. They were quite a ways off, but it was incredibly quiet, especially after L.A., and he could hear her say, “Poor sweetie pie, did you get lost? Didn’t Grammy tell you that might happen?”

It was still an hour before the rehearsal dinner was scheduled to begin. Griffin thought it would be good to arrive early, but now he wished he hadn’t. There were a couple dozen cars clustered near to the hotel. The lot was huge, though, big enough to handle a convention, so he parked in a remote spot. Joy’s family probably would regard this, too, as standoffish, but during his year in L.A. he’d had two minor but costly auto mishaps-one on the freeway, not really his fault, the other in a mall parking lot, entirely his fault-and his insurance premiums were again on the rise. (Interesting, he thought, that his late mother yapped at him incessantly, whereas his dead father was content to communicate via crumpled bumpers and detached side-view mirrors.)

The evening was cool, with a nice breeze off the water, so he decided to just sit in the car for a few minutes and gather himself for what promised to be an ordeal. But Joy must have had an eye out for him, because right after turning off the ignition he caught a glimpse of her in the rearview mirror, coming down the porch steps. On the dashboard was the literary magazine that featured “The Summer of the Brownings.” He’d brought a copy along with the idea of giving it to Joy, but he now realized the timing was wrong and left it where it was. All is vanity, his mother said, quoting whom? Shakespeare? Thackeray? The Old Testament? Google it, she suggested. Lord, Griffin thought. Last year, based on slender evidence, Joy had been convinced that his father was haunting him. What would she make of him losing arguments with his deceased mother? Not that he had any intention of telling her.

“Joy,” he said, getting out of the car and giving her the best smile he could muster, “you look terrific.”

Which she did. She’d lost some weight, which showed most flatteringly on her face. Her eyes, though, revealed the strain of the last year, and a wave of guilt washed over him, its undertow jellying his knees. He could tell she was registering the physical changes in him as well, and these, he knew, were even more pronounced. What he’d been wondering since leaving the inn was whether they would embrace. He didn’t want to presume anything and reminded himself to react, not initiate, though now the moment arrived and his wife of thirty-five years was in his arms before he could react. Then just as quickly she stepped back before he could even evaluate what kind of hug it had been. This, he told himself, was probably how the next twenty-four hours would go. One moment moving on to the next with a terrible efficiency, before it could be really taken in. Dear God, how would he ever get through it?

“You look tired,” Joy told him. “Was it a rough flight?”

“Not particularly,” he said. “The sleeping thing’s gotten worse.” He actually hadn’t meant to tell her that, but three decades’ worth of intimacy was a hard habit to break. Was he trying to elicit sympathy?

“I’m sorry to hear it.”

“It’s been a little better the last couple weeks,” he lied. Actually it was worse, but having received the sympathy he’d elicited he now felt unworthy of it.

“Have you seen a doctor?”

“I’ve got an appointment as soon as I get back,” he said, another lie. How many more would he have to tell to balance out the first true statement?

“It’s been a rough year,” she said, quickly adding, “Your mother, I mean,” lest he conclude she meant their being apart.

That first heart attack, back in August, had done serious damage, and the surgery necessary to repair it, the heart specialist had explained, was not without risk, especially for a woman her age. Without the operation she’d have only a year or two, maybe as little as six months. The upside of the surgery, assuming she didn’t suffer a stroke on the operating table, was significant. Years, they were talking, maybe a decade. “That idiot must think I’m enjoying my life, if he imagines I want another decade,” she told Griffin when they were alone. He tried to speak, but couldn’t. “That’s that, then,” she said after a moment’s silence, meeting his eye with what looked for all the world like satisfaction, as if this were the very news he’d been hoping for.

“It’s okay,” he said now, trying to help Joy out. “I knew what you meant.”

“Where’s…?”

“In the trunk,” Griffin admitted, feeling himself flush.

Only when Joy regarded him as if he’d lost his mind did he realize she wasn’t asking about the whereabouts of his mother’s ashes. “Oh, you mean… sorry,” he said, flushing even deeper now. “She’s back at the inn.”

“You could’ve brought her to the dinner, Jack.”

And, incredibly, he again thought she was talking about his mother. Jesus! Was it going to be like this all night? Would he misread everything anybody said? “She thought it’d be easier on everybody if she skipped the rehearsal.”

Joy regarded him doubtfully. “Are you going to be all right?”

“Sure,” he said, feeling anything but.

“A couple of things, before we go in,” she said.

“Okay.”

“Daddy’s in a wheelchair now.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“He fell last month. He says it’s temporary, but Dot says no.”

“Dot?”

“Jack. He remarried. You know that.”

“I forgot, I guess.” Though it all came back to him now. Joy’s sisters had been furious. Marriage? At their father’s advanced age? It was beyond ridiculous. Joy had had to talk them out of boycotting the wedding.

“Also, he doesn’t make sense all the time.”

“That’s okay, neither do I,” Griffin said. Obviously.

“He does all right in familiar surroundings, but-”

“I’ll be aware.”

“Just so you know-regarding us?-I’ve warned everybody to be on their best behavior. They’ve all agreed to be civil.”

Back in the fall, when Joy’s family found out they’d separated and were probably headed for divorce, emotions had run high. Her twin brothers, Jared and Jason, had promised to do Griffin bodily harm when next they met. One of them (their voices, too, were identical) had somehow gotten his cell number and called him up, drunk, in the middle of the night. “I always knew you were a fucking asshole,” he said without bothering to identify himself.

“Jeez,” said Griffin, who at three in the morning was watching an old movie. By this time he wasn’t living with Tommy anymore but rather in his own tiny efficiency apartment. Most nights he didn’t even pull the bed out of the sofa. “Always? I wish you’d said something.”

“You better hope I never see you again,” the caller continued, music and barroom laughter in the background.

Griffin knew it had to be either Jared or Jason, but which? “Oh, I do, Jason,” he said, taking a flier.

“It’s not Jason, it’s Jared.”

“Yeah, but same deal.”

The other man was quiet for a minute. “What did my sister ever do to you? Why are you treating her like this?”

“Listen, Jared-”

“Because you don’t fucking deserve her.”

“I agree.”

“Yeah, well… you just better hope I never see you again,” he repeated. Griffin ’s ready concurrence had apparently thrown him off track, and he was now trying to get back on as best he could.

“Where are you these days? Just so I know where not to go.”

“I’m stationed in Honolulu.”

“Okay, then. That’s easy enough.”

“I got a leave coming up, though. How about I fly to L.A. and kick your ass?”

“I’m going to hang up now, Jared.”

“You’re probably thinking I don’t know where you live, but I can find out. Don’t think I can’t.”

“I live on Bellwood Terrace. The Caprice. Apartment E- 217.”

“I have my ways.”

“Good night, Jared.”

He hadn’t heard from either twin since, but was happy to hear they’d agreed to a truce during the wedding.

“I told them if they didn’t chill, they couldn’t come, and they both promised,” Joy went on. “I just hope you can tell them apart when you see them, because it pisses them both off when people get it wrong. Especially now that Jason’s out of the service and has some hair.”

“I’ll try to remember.”

“There’ll be lots of kids. Try not to look like you hate them.”

Yes, by all means, his mother chimed in, startling him. Pretend.

Shut up, Mom.

“And you know about the ceremony, right? That there’s a minister? Nothing in your face, but God will be invoked.”

“Which?”

The Protestant one. The god of gated communities and domino theories. Jesus. With a J, like the rest of them.

Best to ignore her, Griffin decided. Telling her to shut up had never worked in life, either. “You don’t have to worry about me, Joy. I’ll behave.”

“I know you will,” she said. “I just…”

“What?”

“Well, I guess I wish we could’ve found a way to…”

“Keep it together one more year?”

“But we didn’t, did we?”

“My fault, not yours.”

She looked off into the distance, her eyes filling, then gathered herself. “There’s one question I have to ask.”

“Shoot.”

She took his hand lightly. “Are you going to be able to write these checks? Tonight and tomorrow?”

“I said I would.” Though in truth he was a little worried. He’d taken twenty-five K out of his retirement, hoping that would do the trick and trying not to panic as the guest list grew. Last week he’d taken out another ten just to be sure.

“You also said you weren’t working.”

What he’d actually said was that writing assignments had been few and far between since he and Tommy had been fired off the cable picture, and of course there was his mother. After the first heart attack, he’d returned to Indiana several times, trying to make his visits coincide with her major transitions-from the hospital to a rehab facility, then back home with hospice volunteers and, finally, to the hospice wing of the hospital and full nursing care.

In January he’d picked up a couple of film-school classes, adjunct status, so the pay was for shit, but it was something. He had a new agent, Tommy’s, but all she’d come up with was a quickie dialogue rewrite. This he’d done on his own. Since he’d moved out of Tommy’s place, they’d seen little of each other. They occasionally met for a drink, but Tommy always made some excuse to call it an early night. Griffin knew his old friend was at a loss to understand why Griffin didn’t just tuck his tail between his legs and go home and beg Joy’s forgiveness, as husbands in his circumstance invariably did, if they had any brains. “You want to end up alone?” he asked one night. “Is that it?” No, it wasn’t, but Griffin was hard-pressed to articulate what it was, exactly.

“I just don’t want any embarrassment for Laura,” Joy was saying. “I can help if-”

“No, I should be fine,” he told her. “Mom actually left some money.” Though this wasn’t true, either, really. Her insurance had just about covered the hospital and nursing-home expenses, the cost of cremation. He’d sold a few of her books and given the rest away. Her laptop and printer and a few pieces of furniture had netted a couple grand. His father had left the world in about the same financial condition. Not much to show for a life, he couldn’t help thinking, though Thoreau would have been pleased. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity.

“Were you able to get Dad’s ashes from my office?”

“Yes, but can we do that later?”

“Of course.”

Laura was waiting for them in the hotel foyer, her eyes full, Andy at her side. The expression on the young man’s face was frank puzzlement, and Griffin couldn’t imagine why until it dawned on him that halfway across the parking lot, without realizing it, he’d taken Joy’s hand.

“Daddy,” his daughter said, choking on the word, and Griffin was glad he could think of nothing to say because he was incapable of the slightest utterance.

“I don’t have a doubt in the world about that boy,” Laura assured him as they entered the maze.

She and Andy had just parted as if it would be an eternity before they saw each other again, and she now turned to wave goodbye one last time before her fiancé and her mother disappeared from sight. His daughter’s idea that the two of them go for a stroll in the maze seemed to surprise neither Joy nor Andy, and that made Griffin apprehensive. Had they all thought further about Griffin ’s presence at the wedding and decided against it? Did Laura plan to explain this to him among the tall yews, far from witnesses, in case he objected or broke down in tears? But of course he knew better than that, so he took a deep breath and told himself to relax. Laura’s need for a private, father-daughter moment wasn’t about him or the myriad ways he’d failed her and her mother since Kelsey’s wedding. She was just a bride, and fatherly reassurance was part of the program. Enjoy it. Who knew how long it would be before his presence was deemed necessary again?

“Andy’s terrific, darlin’,” he said, putting his arm around her shoulder and feeling a wave of gratitude when she allowed herself to be drawn toward him. “It’s hard to imagine anyone more smitten, except for your old man, of course.” He meant this to elicit a smile, but it seemed to make his daughter even more thoughtful, and for a time they were quiet, turning first left, then right, then left again among the hedges, until he was good and lost.

“I guess the one I worry about is me,” she finally said. “What if I end up hurting him?”

“Why would you do that?” he said, feeling another wave of guilt. Would his daughter have harbored such self-doubt this time last year, or was it his doing?

A park bench had been thoughtfully placed near what Griffin guessed must be the far end, and here they took a seat. It was darker in the maze, very little of the remaining daylight penetrating its black branches, and Griffin was visited by a childish, irrational fear that they wouldn’t be able to find their way out. Laura would miss her wedding and that, too, would be his doing. He took her hand, unsure whether he meant to dispense comfort or receive it.

“Do you ever feel like you’re not who people think you are?” she said. “Like you’re pretending to be this person that people like? And the worst part is they all believe you?”

“Only every day,” he admitted. “Unless I’m mistaken, that feeling’s what people mean by original sin. Only sociopaths are spared. Trouble is, if you take it to heart you’ll never do anything, never pursue any happiness, for fear of hurting people.”

“I should ignore it?”

“Everybody else does.”

She seemed only partially convinced. “I’ve been thinking a lot about Grandma lately,” she said.

That surprised him, and he paused before responding, half expecting his mother, who was, after all, right over the hedge, in easy shouting distance, to offer her own two cents’ worth. Perhaps the maze had confounded her. “Any idea why?”

She shrugged. “Seeing her like that last December, I guess. All the tubes and the oxygen. She looked so tiny and all wasted away.”

How well he remembered. It had been December when she visited, just a couple weeks from the end. By then, mentally and emotionally exhausted, Griffin had checked into an extended-stay motel near the hospital. The doctors had warned him that patients like his mother sometimes lived on for months after being put on morphine, but it seemed to him that his mother was dying as she’d lived, on the academic calendar. He doubted she’d begin another semester.

The day of Laura’s unexpected visit had been a particularly difficult one. Several times during the night his mother had been awakened by nurses taking her vitals and talking noisily in the corridor outside her room. As a result she’d been irritable all morning, convinced she’d not been given her morphine, though both the duty nurse and her chart testified otherwise. At midday Griffin had gone back to his motel to shower and eat something. When he returned, he discovered that his mother had a visitor, her first, not counting himself. A woman was sitting on the edge of the narrow bed, her back to the doorway, holding his mother’s hand. Joy, he thought, and felt some ice dam in his heart break apart at the possibility. Back in November she’d called him in L.A. to say she had to fly to Sacramento the following week. She could stop in Indiana going or coming back if he needed her to. He’d wanted desperately to say yes, but he heard himself say no, he had things under control. When he asked if everything was okay in California, she said yes, that it was just some family stuff she had to attend to. And not his family anymore, was her clear implication, which he had to admit he had coming.

His first thought was she’d decided to come anyway, but of course this couldn’t be Joy. His mother never would have allowed her daughter-in-law to hold her hand. “Look who’s here,” she said. Only when Laura turned to face him did Griffin recognize her. “Would you mind absenting yourself from felicity awhile?” his mother said after he and his daughter had embraced. “My granddaughter has come a long way to see me, and she can only stay an hour.”

“It’s okay, Daddy,” Laura told him when he tried to object.

“Yes, do run along,” his mother said triumphantly, pleased, he could tell, both by his reluctance and the fact that he would have prevented this visit if he could’ve.

They’d had very little contact when Laura was a child. His mother had visited a couple months after Laura was born, “to help out,” but when Joy handed her the baby, she’d grasped her as gingerly as you would something unclean. Laura had regarded her grandmother with interest, smiled, then projected a stream of sour yellow milk onto her. Quickly handing the baby back to Joy, his mother had spent the next fifteen minutes at the sink, scrubbing her blouse with a dishcloth. She’d planned to stay for a week, but after two days, during which she never changed a single diaper, she made a flimsy excuse and flew back to Indiana. “Who changed your diapers, I wonder?” Joy said, finding the whole episode amusing, whereas Griffin had been homicidal.

The two thousand miles separating them had been an adequate buffer during Laura’s childhood, but even after they moved to Connecticut, things didn’t change much. Only when Laura was a junior in high school and thinking about where to apply to college did her grandmother begin to show much interest. She thought Laura should go to Yale, of course, and turned up her nose at the small liberal arts colleges her granddaughter was most keen on, the same ones where she and Griffin ’s father had once hoped to secure jobs. “Safety schools” was how she now regarded them. “Dear God, not Williams,” she told Laura. “Do you know the kind of people who send their progeny to Williams? Rich. Privileged. White. Republican. Or, even worse, people who aspire to all that.” Not so unlike your other grandparents, she meant. “Their kids aren’t smart enough to get into an Ivy but have to go somewhere, so God created Williams.” Griffin couldn’t imagine why, but Laura actually seemed to enjoy talking about all this with her grandmother (who called it brainstorming), and sometimes their phone conversations went on for forty-five minutes or an hour. It probably served him right that these all took place behind the closed door of his daughter’s bedroom. “Your grandmother has a lot of opinions,” Griffin told her. “That doesn’t mean they should carry much weight.” What he was doing, of course, was fishing, curious as to just how many and which opinions she was sharing with his daughter. “Oh, I don’t know,” Laura had responded noncommittally “She has some good ideas.” But she didn’t say what they were.

Joy warned him not to press the issue. Laura was old and smart enough to sift ideas, and his mother needn’t be treated like a venomous snake. He’d reluctantly given in, but when his mother suggested she be the one to accompany Laura on the Yale-Columbia-Cornell swing of what they all referred to as the Great American College Tour, he put his foot down. “I’m sorry, Mom,” he said, managing, with great effort, not to raise his voice, but failing to keep the anger out of it, “but you don’t get to infect my daughter with your snobbery and bitterness. All that ends here, with me.”

It had been a horrible thing to say, full of the very bitterness he was accusing her of. He regretted the words as soon as they were spoken, but there was no taking them back, nor could he quite bring himself to apologize.

“You have to call her back,” Joy said when he confessed what he’d done.

But he hadn’t. Nor did he soften and allow her to take Laura on that trip, managing it all by himself. They never referred to the matter again, but he knew his mother too well to imagine she’d forgotten. She no doubt saw her granddaughter’s hospital visit as a kind of revenge, or so it had seemed to him, banished to the nurses’ lounge, where he willed the big clock on the wall to move, damn it. At the end of the hour, Laura seemed fine, and he felt relieved that nothing too terrible had transpired, but as soon as they were in the car Laura broke down and sobbed all the way to the airport. Though it probably shouldn’t have, the intensity of her grief had surprised Griffin. No doubt she was coming to terms with the likelihood that she’d never see her grandmother again, but there seemed to be more to it, as if she was also mourning that someone who should’ve been important to her had remained a stranger. And whose fault was that? His mother’s, for being completely disinterested until so late in the game? It was tempting to lay the full blame on her, but deep down Griffin knew that if she’d shown interest in Laura any earlier, he would have just stepped between them that much sooner. He’d behaved as if she were a serpent because, God help him, he believed her to be one.

“I thought she’d want to know all about the man I was going to marry,” Laura told him now, her eyes filling at the memory of that hour in the hospital, indeed their last visit, “but when I tried to tell her about him…”

Griffin waited, but when his daughter seemed unable to continue, he completed her thought. “She wasn’t very curious?”

“I don’t know,” she admitted, wiping her eyes on her wrist. “When I talk about Andy, all my friends say their gag reflex kicks in. They say we’re nauseatingly in love.”

“Happiness sucks as a spectator sport, darlin’.”

“I guess. Anyway, after I told Grandma a few things about Andy, she interrupted, saying, ‘You need to get tougher.’ When I asked her why, she said marriage is combat. Somebody hurts, somebody gets hurt. One does, the other gets done to.”

“You know she was on morphine, right?”

“It wasn’t so much what she said that got under my skin. It was the funny way she was looking at me, like she could see deep down and knew I had it in me to be cruel. That if somebody had to get hurt, it’d be Andy, not me.”

“Sweetie, you say she was looking at you, looking into you, but I doubt it. Your grandmother was a narcissist, and they don’t really look outward. To them the world just reflects their own inner reality. She saw love as a trap. Therefore, you should, too.”

She sat up straight now. “All I know is I don’t ever want to break his heart.”

“You won’t.”

“Promise?”

“Absolutely.”

Had he been writing this scene in a script, the conversation wouldn’t have ended there. His fictional daughter would have asked the obvious questions. How could he possibly promise that she wouldn’t do the very thing he was doing? Wasn’t she his daughter? But it wasn’t a script, and his real-life daughter was too kind to say what she was thinking, maybe even too kind to think it.

“What I’ve been wondering is whether you’ll ever forgive me.”

“Oh, I already have,” she said, shouldering him hard but playfully, then getting to her feet. Apparently the father-daughter segment of the program was drawing to a close. “I’m still pretty mad at you, though,” she admitted.

“I know,” he said, rising as well. “Me too.”

When they emerged from the maze, she said, “Grandma told me one other thing, actually. About you.”

“What’s that?” he asked, though he wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

“She said you’d never admit it, but you’re just like her.”

Damn right you are, his mother said, agreeing with herself.

Everyone did seem to be on their best behavior, just as Joy had promised. He’d no sooner gotten himself a glass of wine than Jared-at least he was pretty sure it was Jared, given the shaved skull-came over and extended his hand, which Griffin saw no reason not to take. Whichever brother he was shaking hands with looked like what he was, a career marine: lantern jawed, thick necked, improbably muscled. “So,” he said, pumping Griffin ’s hand in his crushing grip, “no hard feelings?”

Jared, then. Note to self: Jared, skull; Jason, hair. Griffin said no, there were no hard feelings.

The twins were a family enigma, born nearly a decade after Joy (Jane and June were older, the girls all spaced in two-year intervals) and completely different in temperament. As boys they’d worried Harve and Jill by fighting constantly and ferociously, neither ever seeking parental redress or justice. They fought until they bled, then fought some more. But suddenly all of that was over. Instead of wanting to kill each other, they had each other’s backs. With the leftover energy they took to bodybuilding and making gentle, sometimes not so gentle, fun of their father, first behind his back, later to his face. Neither had married. Now in their forties, they still liked heavy-metal music, strip clubs and the kind of women one met there.

“Two sides to every story, I guess,” Jared said, a worm squiggling under the skin of one temple, evidence how costly, for him, such magnanimity actually was. “Push comes to shove, I have to side with my sister, but…”

“I’m kind of on her side myself,” Griffin told him, because it was true, but also because it seemed like a good idea to suggest to Jared that pushing really needn’t come to shoving. Or punching, or stomping, or castration. All of which had apparently been on the table at one point. Brother Jason (not hair so much as stubble, really) was watching them from across the room, Griffin noticed, his expression, well, murderous was probably too strong a word. “I hear your brother left the service,” Griffin ventured, genuinely curious that either twin should do something so brazenly individualistic.

Jared snorted, glancing over his shoulder at his brother and raising his voice enough to be sure he could hear him. “Yeah, well, Jason always was a pussy.”

“We’ll see, J.J.,” his brother called back. This was short for Jared the Jarhead, the nickname he’d immediately picked up when he joined the marines. As if there weren’t enough J’s in the family already. “You wait.”

Joy’s father was indeed in a wheelchair along the far wall. A tall, angular woman who Griffin assumed must be Dot stood sentry at his elbow, and when he approached, she bent at the waist to whisper, like a handler to a pol, in Harve’s ear. To remind him who Griffin was? That he and Joy had separated?

“What?” Harve barked at her, and then, when she repeated whatever she’d told him, said, “Hell, I know who it is.” He extended a feeble, palsied hand, and Griffin felt an unexpected surge of pity. His father-in-law had always been a robust man, but no more. His pale blue eyes were watery, their lids outlined in bright red, as if with a cosmetic pencil.

“Jack,” he said, “are you keeping your head down?”

“Look up and all you’ll see is a bad shot,” Griffin replied. “It’s good to see you, Harve.”

The man nodded. “You know my wife died?”

“Yes,” said Griffin. He’d attended Jill’s funeral, of course, and thought about reminding Harve of this but decided not to. “Yes.”

“He knows,” said Dot, unhelpfully.

“Hell of a thing,” Harve said, unwilling to let go of the subject. “I hope you never have to go through it.”

“Me too,” Griffin said, realizing that despite Joy’s warning he’d given him far too much cognitive credit. If he knew about their separation, he’d clearly forgotten. Either that or someone had informed him that Griffin was bringing a guest to the wedding, and it was this woman he was hoping wouldn’t die on him.

“Hope you never have to walk into a room and find your wife in a heap on the floor.”

“ Harvey,” Dot said, “you’re going to upset yourself.”

“Because that’s no fun, let me tell you,” he went on, ignoring her completely. “No replacing a woman like that.”

Dot sighed and looked off into the middle distance. She’d clearly heard this sentiment expressed many times before.

“You probably didn’t know, but she was writing a pistolary when she died.”

Griffin glanced at Dot, who rolled her eyes. “A Western?” Griffin asked.

“No, a pistolary. You don’t know what that is?”

He confessed he didn’t.

“Well, she was writing one of those,” he said. “Your Joy’s a lot like her mother.”

Ah, Griffin thought, Joy was still his. At least as far as her demented father was concerned.

“All three girls take after their mother, of course, but Joy’s the most like Jilly Always was.”

“And Laura’s like her mother,” Griffin added, hoping he might take comfort in further feminine continuity.

But Harve just blinked at this, clearly unsure who this Laura might be.

“Laura’s the bride,” Dot informed him under her breath. “We’re here for her wedding.”

“Well of course we are,” Harve said. “You think I don’t know my own granddaughter?” Then, to Griffin, “She thinks I forget things, but I don’t. Like you. I remember perfectly well you could never keep your damn head down. You still don’t, I bet.”

“You’re right, Harve, I still look up.”

Harve nodded sadly, as if to admit that human beings were frail creatures indeed. Impossible to teach most of them the rudiments of anything, much less a complex activity like golf. “You look up,” he said, looking up, his watery blue eyes fixing on Griffin, “all you’ll ever see is a bad shot.”

Then he looked away again, and Griffin could tell he was following the errant shot’s trajectory in his mind as it sliced off into the dark woods, out of sight, where he could hear it thocking among the trees.

“I know this really isn’t the time or place,” said Brian Fynch, dean of admissions and Joy’s boss. The rehearsal dinner was over, and people had been encouraged to reconfigure over dessert. Griffin had been seated with Andy’s family, a smaller group, all of whom seemed a bit cowed by the size and sheer decibel level of Joy’s family (Jane and June were both shriekers). For his part, Griffin had been grateful to be seated with them.

Fynch was a tall man, and his suit was well tailored and expensive looking. He seemed comfortable in it, as men who wear suits every day often are. His haircut was early Beatles, sweeping bangs at the eyebrow line, ridiculous, Griffin couldn’t help thinking, for someone his age, a few years younger than Joy, and Griffin immediately dubbed him “Ringo.” Joy had introduced him as her “friend” (the very word Laura had used on the phone when she told him her mother would also be bringing someone to the wedding). “Jack” was how he himself had been introduced to Fynch, as in Jack, of whom you’ve often heard me speak and weep and curse. He chided himself: But come on, Griffin, get a grip. Joy had probably said nothing of the sort. In fact, be grateful. She’d have been well within her rights to introduce him as her soon-to-be ex, which would have been worse. He didn’t realize he’d been half hoping she’d introduce him as her husband (which he still was, after all) until she didn’t.

At any rate, he and this “friend” had been chatting amiably for the last ten minutes. Ringo claimed they’d actually been introduced last spring (“No reason for you to remember”) when he came on board. Came on board? his mother snorted. What is he, a pirate? (Silent when he and Laura were in the maze and also during dinner, she was feeling gabby again and seemed to have even less use for Brian Fynch than her son did. Normally her opinion wouldn’t have mattered, but she did know her academics.) Ringo loved the college, he went on, as if someone had been spreading vicious rumors to the contrary, and he hoped it would be the last stop on what he termed his “long academic journey.” Long and pointless, perhaps, but hardly academic. It was a wonderful opportunity, really, the kind that came along once in a lifetime. His “team” in admissions was first-rate, though its star, “just between us,” was Joy. (Oh, you smarmy bastard, both son and mother concluded in the same instant.) In fact, Ringo wished he had a half dozen more just like her. This fairly ambiguous remark he delivered with such convincing innocence that Griffin wondered if maybe he and Joy were just friends. He’d been attentive and solicitous to her all evening, but there was certainly nothing to suggest any intimacy between them, though of course she wouldn’t have permitted such a display at her daughter’s wedding.

“I wouldn’t bring it up, believe me, but Dean Zabian heard I was going to be seeing you this weekend, and I promised I’d ask if your situation for the coming academic year had clarified itself.”

It was possible, Griffin supposed, that things had come about just as Fynch claimed. The dean of faculty might well have asked him to inquire. But the far more likely scenario was that Fynch was a sly meddler, an insinuator who’d sought out the dean, not vice versa. Zabian could be forgiven for growing impatient for Griffin to make up his mind, but he more likely would have asked this favor of Joy rather than Ringo. And of course if he really wanted to know, the person to ask was Griffin himself.

“Of course everyone’s hoping you’ll be returning in the fall,” Fynch was saying, “but if you can’t-”

“I understand,” Griffin said. “Tell Carroll I won’t hang him up much longer.”

“It’s not like your replacement’s a washout or anything,” Fynch continued, oblivious that he’d been given full permission to discontinue this particular conversation. “The department could probably limp along for another semester or two, but as Dean Zabian put it, ‘She’s no Jack Griffin in the classroom.’”

Griffin smiled, now certain that he (and his mother) were right about Ringo’s character. The implied omniscience, the overfamiliarity, the flattery… what a putz. He thought of the elderly woman he’d spoken to in Truro this time last year who’d been looking for the right occasion to use fart-hammer. Well, here it was.

With relief, he noticed that a young man wearing a blazer with the hotel’s insignia on the pocket was conferring with Joy, who turned to point him out. “If you’ll excuse me,” he said, making a show of taking out his checkbook. At this Ringo turned on his heel and fled, apparently convinced he could provide no further service.

“Mr. Griffin?” said the young man, who appeared to be holding an invoice. “Maybe we should go someplace more private?”

He nodded agreeably and let the checkbook slide back into his jacket pocket. “What are we going to do?”

Turning bright purple, the fellow looked even younger and, Griffin realized too late, clearly gay.

By the time he’d settled up and returned to the private dining room, the mostly teenaged waitstaff was busy clearing away the last of the dessert dishes and tossing stained tablecloths into portable hampers with more energy and enthusiasm than they’d exhibited earlier in the evening. They probably had a party to go to, Griffin supposed. Hard to believe that Laura herself was past all that now, the anticipation of a young night and its many possibilities. The rehearsal guests had all gone out onto the porch, below which, on the lawn, a drunken game of volleyball was under way, with just enough light from the porch to play by. Andy’s family, many of whom had traveled a long way that day, had evidently decided to call it a night, so it was just Joy’s that remained.

Harve, looking tired and agitated, sat at the far end of the porch, near the top of the long, sloping wheelchair ramp. He’d nodded off during the later stages of the dinner, though he refused to admit it, even after snorting violently awake, which caused Jared and Jason to reenact the event for the edification of the children at the designated kids’ table, after which they were all snorting awake and falling out of their chairs. The old man was now struggling to get up out of his chair, apparently determined not to be wheeled down the ramp past the volleyballers. Griffin sympathized, though Dot apparently didn’t. With an assist from Joy’s sister Jane, she pushed him back into his seat and told him, unless Griffin was mistaken, to behave. Whatever Harve said back caused her to spin on her heel and head indoors in the general direction of the ladies’ restroom, leaving Jane to reason with her father.

Joy was at the far end of the porch, talking to her other sister, June, and June’s husband, but Griffin could tell she was monitoring the situation. According to Laura, the whole family-Harve and Dot, her mother, Jane and June and their families, Jason and Jared-was sharing the large cottage at the water’s edge apart from the main hotel. Its dark outline was visible against the night sky, its windows glowing warmly yellow. No doubt it would remind Joy of the house they’d rented when she was a girl. Jane and June had probably remembered to bring board games, and after Harve and the smaller children were put to bed, the rest of them would stay up late playing Monopoly and Clue, swapping all the old nostalgic family stories. Griffin, who’d heard these too many times, nevertheless felt a twinge of regret (admit it) at being suddenly outside the family circle. Would Ringo, ridiculous oaf that he was, be invited to the table tonight and given Griffin ’s Professor Plum game piece, his silver thimble? He’d made a point of telling Griffin that he was staying in the hotel proper, but that might just be for appearances. He now joined Joy and her sister and brother-in-law, and when Griffin saw him rest his hand lightly on the small of her back, it occurred to him that having just discharged his primary responsibility of the evening, he could slip away unnoticed and probably not be missed.

Why didn’t he want to? He was standing in the porch doorway trying to figure that out when his mother said, You know who you remind me of, don’t you? Which Griffin took to be a rhetorical question. I thought you told Laura I was just like you, he fired back, and the shot must have landed, because she shut up. Off to the right he noticed a small alcove from which he could see, without being observed himself, both the porch and the game on the lawn below. A coffee urn had been set up on a sideboard, and that, he decided, was probably a good idea before he drove back up the peninsula. He poured himself a cup and closed the door, lest someone notice him and decide he needed company.

With the exception of pregnant Kelsey, the whole wedding party, as well as some of the teenaged guests, had been recruited to play volleyball. The little kids wanted to play, too, and were running around with their arms up, though the game was taking place well above them. Laura and Andy were on the back line, and when they stopped to kiss, the ball landed right at their feet, causing their teammates to groan. Jared and Jason had positioned themselves on opposite sides of the net and were shoving each other back whenever one of them violated the neutral zone. “Coming right down your throat, J.J.,” Jason warned, and when the ball came over the net he spiked it hard, clearly aiming at his brother, but the shot careened away and narrowly missed Kelsey, who was watching, one hand under her belly, from what she’d wrongly imagined was a safe distance.

“Hey, hey, easy! Watch out for the little ones!” June called from the porch, and was promptly ignored.

I hope you aren’t going to tell me you enjoy these people, his mother said. He’d been hoping she’d been shut out when he closed the door behind him, but no such luck. You forget how well I know you, she continued. Pretend otherwise all you want, but you’ve always wanted to be done of these people, and now you are. This sentimental mood you’re in doesn’t become you.

I’m ignoring you, Mom, he told her, focusing his attention on a small boy who was acting out below. Furious at being ignored, he’d sat down right in the middle of the court, his lower lip sticking out, his face a thundercloud.

A little monster, that one, his mother observed.

No, Mom, he’s a child, Griffin said, though she might be right.

Andy, apparently fearing the boy might get trampled, picked him up and set him on his shoulders and, when the ball came over the net, managed to position himself so the kid could hit it. The ball went directly into the net, but his face was aglow with importance, and he raised his arms in triumph, as he’d clearly seen some athlete do on TV, and was given a round of applause.

You don’t like children, you don’t like volleyball and you don’t suffer fools gladly.

Maybe you don’t know me as well as you think, Mom.

Fine. Be that way.

Let’s talk about something else, shall we?

We can discuss whatever you like. The weather, if you prefer. Remember how it snowed that last two weeks?

Did he ever. Giant drifts of powder banked two-thirds of the way up the hospital window. Laura’s flight out had been one of the last before the airport closed, and it hadn’t reopened until Christmas Eve. Twice Griffin had to walk a good mile from the hospital to his motel, the roads impassable, his car plowed in.

In the days following Laura’s surprise visit, his mother became increasingly agitated. The morphine calmed her breathing, but something was clearly troubling her that had to do with her granddaughter, Griffin suspected, though he had no idea what. “She’s so…,” she began several times, her thought always trailing off, as if she were trying to articulate something just beyond her grasp. The oxygen made her mouth dry, so Griffin gave her some ice chips to suck on, thinking that might help, but they didn’t. “She’s so…”

“She’s so what, Mom?”

She fell asleep, still struggling, and Griffin drifted off as well, awaking to the sound of her voice.

“She’s so… kind, isn’t she?”

Kind? That was the word she’d been straining to locate? It was as if the concept were fabulously exotic, one she’d read about but hadn’t personally encountered until now. Either that or she’d done a quick genetic scan, looking for and not finding a familial antecedent.

“Yes,” he said, feeling his throat constrict with pride. “She is that.”

“She makes me almost”-she was struggling again now, and Griffin guessed that another unfamiliar concept was groping blindly toward articulation-“ashamed.”

The next day, however, she was more herself. “She’s not brilliant, though, is she?” she said, staring off into space. They’d been sitting quietly for the last hour, each in private thought. “I doubt she’ll go back to school.”

“Actually, she’s smart as hell,” Griffin told her, instantly angry. “More important, she’s happy, Mom. She’s going to marry someone she loves and who loves her.”

“Happy,” she repeated, catching his eyes and locking in. “Only very stupid people are happy.”

A few short hours, Griffin remembered thinking. That’s all it had taken for her to reflect upon kindness in general and her granddaughter’s in particular, then to discard it as a cardinal virtue.

They didn’t discuss Laura after that, but he continued to feel the ghostly residue of her visit, and unless he was mistaken, his mother did, too. Her decline seemed more rapid now, though over the long days that followed she rallied several more times, much as the doctors had predicted. The peaks weren’t nearly so high, however, and the valleys were lower. The morphine necessary for her breathing, in ever larger doses, made things weird, then weirder. Each time a dose was administered, her breathing became less labored and she was calmer, but not, somehow, any more at peace.

“She’s battling something,” one of the nurses remarked. “That’s not unusual at this stage. We may never know what it’s about.”

When she let him, he read to her or they watched television listlessly until the morphine took her under. He’d brought “The Summer of the Brownings” with him from L.A., and he worked on it while she slept. Something about his mother’s frail condition, together with the small, rhythmic sounds of the hospital room, made the story accessible in a way it hadn’t been the summer before on the Cape. At one point, though, his mother had awakened unexpectedly and asked what he was working on so intently. “Oh, them,” she sniffed when he told her, clearly disappointed by his choice of subject matter. Thinking it might please her, he said she’d been helpful. “You told me last June that it was asthma the little Browning girl suffered from, and about Peter eventually dying in Vietnam.” But she claimed to have no memory of the conversation. “How would I know what happened to those people?” she said when pressed. He couldn’t figure out what to make of it. His mother’s usual MO was to feign knowledge she didn’t have, not to confess ignorance.

As Christmas bore down on them, his exhaustion, fueled by sleepless nights and cafeteria food, began to take its toll, and Griffin felt his tenuous grip on reality begin to fray, as if he, too, were being dosed with morphine. He found himself sleeping when she did, dreaming fitfully, the Browning story in his lap. More than once he awoke with his mother’s eyes on him, an enigmatic smile playing on her lips. “You aren’t the only one with a story to tell, you know,” she said one afternoon.

“I’m sure that’s true,” he replied. He had exactly no desire to be the beneficiary of any morphine-fueled revelations, and the nurses had warned him to try to steer clear of upsetting topics. He hoped she’d let the subject drop, but a few minutes later, she said, “I bet you didn’t know your father and I were lovers right to the end.”

That, as it turned out, was the opening salvo, a warning shot across his bow, the beginning of what over the next few days he’d come to think of as his mother’s Morphine Narrative. Chronically short of breath now, she delivered it the only way she could, in short installments, like an old Saturday matinee serial. After each segment she closed her eyes and slept, or pretended to, leaving him to digest and puzzle over what she’d told him.

The real reason Claudia had abandoned his father, his mother now explained, was that she’d discovered they were still sexually involved. She’d visited him off and on that whole period, telling Bartleby-who was easy to lie to, since he preferred not knowing anyway-that she was attending conferences. She claimed Griffin himself had nearly found them out when he visited his father in Amherst. She’d meant to leave well before he arrived, but her car, parked in plain sight in the driveway, wouldn’t start. The engine had turned over just in the nick of time. They’d actually driven past each other on his father’s street, but he’d been off in his own world and hadn’t noticed her. The first installment had ended here, and when Griffin asked why she was telling him these things at such great cost, she said, “So you’ll know. You think you know all about your father and me, but you don’t.”

“Why is that so important?” he asked, but she just smiled, her eyes drooping toward sleep. Did she mean to imply that he was wasting his time writing about the Brownings when instead he could’ve been writing about them? That a writer with real imagination wouldn’t have been “off in his own world” when he could have been off in theirs?

The sex, she told him with a sly smile (of invention or memory?), was better than it had ever been when they were married. Cheating with rather than on each other had added another whole layer of excitement. Later, after his father and Claudia returned to the university, they’d just kept on. In the end the fat cow had given his father an ultimatum-herself or his ex-wife-never dreaming what his choice would be (that sly smile broadening now).

Each time she dozed, Griffin was certain she’d either forget the story she was telling him or, upon awakening, not have the strength to continue, but he was wrong. The tale seemed to satisfy some need as fundamental as breathing. “Let her tell it,” the nurse advised.

“But it’s not even true. She’s exhausting herself spinning a ridiculous yarn that neither one of us believes. It’s complete bullshit.”

Which got him a stern look. “Not to her. Your mother was a professor, right? She’s professing. She’ll stop when she’s ready, or when she can’t go on.”

Whenever she resumed the story, he felt his heart plunge, thinking, Here we go again, but gradually, as the snow outside drifted higher and higher up the hospital window, he became intrigued and eventually fascinated by the tale that struggled to be born even as its teller slipped away.

At some point one of Bartleby’s grown children had tumbled to what was going on between them, which explained why, when their father died, the siblings were united in their determination that she not inherit a farthing, the little shits. Not that she really cared. Bartleby never had anything she really wanted (yet another sly smile here, to let Griffin know she wasn’t just talking about worldly goods). She even claimed she’d continued to visit his father, though less frequently, at his subsequent academic postings. Indeed, they’d remained lovers for as long as he was physically able, and they hadn’t entirely broken off the relationship even then.

Could any of this be true? Griffin couldn’t decide. The story didn’t really track, or rather it tracked for a while, then jumped the tracks, then somehow climbed back on again. In an attempt to reconcile them, he made a mental point-by-point comparison of the Morphine Narrative and the earlier one. At least one detail of the morphine version was factually untrue. Griffin had never visited his father in Amherst, so either his mother was confused in her recollection of who’d almost caught them when her car wouldn’t start (Claudia, returning from Charleston?) or she’d invented the entire episode. The problem was there were relatively few flagrant discrepancies, and resolving the ones there were wasn’t terribly helpful. The skeleton of the two tales was pretty much the same, so it came down to plausibility, to each story’s interior logic.

Griffin hated to admit it, but in one respect the Morphine Narrative was marginally more credible. In the original, when his mother informed him, with great satisfaction, about his father’s disastrous year at Amherst, he-the veteran of a thousand sets of studio notes-had objected there was no way she could know everything she claimed to. His father was in one place and she in another, and even with a vast network of academic spies, the story she was pitching would have been, of necessity, a patchwork quilt of secondhand testimony. What his father had been thinking as he first outlined Claudia’s dissertation, and later as he composed an introduction and, finally, throwing caution to the wind, wrote the whole thing, was something only he could testify to, and he certainly wouldn’t have told her. But if there was any truth to the Morphine Narrative, then of course his mother had been there in Amherst, an off-and-on eyewitness. If they really were lovers, the story wasn’t secondhand but rather based on her own observations, however sporadic. His intimate revelations to her during this period therefore made a kind of sense. But if she’d been a regular visitor, his father couldn’t have been lonely; and if he wasn’t lonely, then missing Claudia hadn’t unhinged him; and if he wasn’t unhinged, why had he written her dissertation? Had he, in fact, written it?

In almost all respects, though, his mother’s original saga was far more credible. Its general thrust-Look how far your father has fallen without me to look after him-was completely in character. It wasn’t just how she would feel, but indeed any woman similarly horse-traded. Its logic was consistent, and the visual evidence corroborated it. Griffin hadn’t visited him during his year at Amherst, but he’d seen him shortly after his return and vividly recalled his physical and emotional state, his health ruined, his nervous system shattered. Emaciated, ill, exhausted, he’d looked like a desperately lonely man who’d come unglued. That’s what his mother’s gleeful account had prepared Griffin to see, granted, but still. If he credited the Morphine Narrative and his parents had instead been having the best sex of their lives, then his haggard, distraught appearance afterward was due to what, carpal fatigue? And if he and Griffin ’s mother were still passionately involved, why would he have surrendered a cushy full professorship for crappier jobs? And why keep such a secret from his son?

But that, of course, was the whole point of the latter version. You never knew us. You thought you did, but how wrong you were. Our lives were a glorious secret, even from you. And this was also the problem in a nutshell. The most compelling thing about the Morphine Narrative was his mother’s need to tell it. At a stage of life when most people wanted to unburden themselves, why had she so desperately needed to lie? With so little time left, why use your last ounce of strength to invent such an elaborate falsehood? What difference could it possibly make to her what he thought about their marriage? No, the whole thing was nonsense, and the clincher was this: if the Morphine Narrative was true, in whole or part, then why, before falling ill, had his mother been so adamant that his father’s ashes be scattered on one side of the Cape, her own on the other? If their lives were intertwined right to the end, wouldn’t she want their ashes to commingle?

Still, the nearer she got to the end-of her Morphine Narrative, of her life-the more he found himself wanting the story to be true, or if not true at least not completely false, not completely morphine. He kept hoping for a load-bearing detail strong enough to support the weight of its creaky structure, to fortify the too-often-chimerical motives of its characters. If she’d told him, for instance, that she’d been with his father when he died at that rest stop on the Mass Pike, that they’d decided to make one last trip to the Cape together, maybe hoping to find a little bungalow there, he’d have believed her, and not just because he’d never told her the details of how his father had been discovered in the passenger seat, never shared his suspicion that a woman had been with him. Okay, there’d still have been cause for doubt (if his mother was the mystery driver, why had she run off?), but also reason, at least a writer’s reason, to believe. Because in its own way that ending would have been perfect, symmetrical, implied in its beginning. A love story.

Perhaps the oddest thing of all was how satisfied his mother had been when she finally finished telling it. Whatever urgency had driven the story evaporated when she finally let her voice fall. She no longer seemed to care whether he believed her or not, and shortly thereafter she’d lapsed into virtual silence for the three days that remained to her. “When is Christmas?” she wondered at one point, and he had to think. He’d been measuring time by her narration and by the snow, which by then had nearly covered the window, darkening the room in the middle of the day.

“The day after tomorrow,” he told her.

“You’ll be going home then,” she said.

“No, I’ll be spending Christmas here,” he told her. “Did you really think I meant to leave you alone?”

“How,” she asked, matter-of-factly, “does having you sit there day after day make me any less alone?”

He then did think about leaving, going home, and he might have if he’d known where home was, but he didn’t, not anymore, and so he’d stayed. On Christmas morning she asked if he remembered how as a boy he liked to crawl under the tree and look up at the lights. And later that afternoon she said, “So… your marriage is ruined,” and he said yes, he supposed it was. After that, he remembered her saying only one other thing. “He’d be here,” she assured him, smiling, “if he wasn’t dead.”

Unlike so many of her smiles, this one was neither sly nor lewd. Beatific was more like it. And for that reason he said, “I know, Mom. I know.”

She was right about one thing: the fucking kid was a monster.

Tired of trying to play volleyball with a kid on his shoulders, Andy returned him to his oblivious mother, but the little brat was having none of that. He clearly enjoyed being the center of attention and liked the applause even more, so he followed Andy right back onto the court, his arms raised, demanding to be restored to Andy’s shoulders. By this time all the other kids had been coaxed away by parents who were calling it a night. Several of the little ones had fallen asleep, and others were rubbing their eyes.

Seeing the kid had followed him back into the fray, Andy took him by the wrist and tried to pull him gently back to the sideline, but no dice. Wrenching his hand free, the little bastard balled it into a fist and punched the groom in the groin.

Witnessing this, his mother, instead of marching onto the court and removing the brat by force, went down on one knee and entreated him. “Come on now, Justin, come to Mommy. Can’t you see you’re holding up the game? And you hurt that nice boy. Come on now, sweetie.” But Justin had other thoughts. His original strategy had worked before, and he saw no reason why it shouldn’t again. Ignoring his mother, he plopped down on the court and stuck out his lower lip.

Five bucks says she gives up, Griffin ’s mother said, which was precisely what the woman did, returning to her conversation. Tell me you wouldn’t like to blister his little behind.

I’m going home now, Mom, he told her. Why don’t you stay here, since you’re enjoying yourself so much.

The game resumed, rather tentatively now, the players trying as best they could to navigate around the pouting boy. Andy was taking deep breaths and leaning on his bride, who seemed to be inquiring, given these new developments, what their prospects now were for a successful prewedding night. By the time Griffin emerged onto the porch, parents were calling their teenagers off the court, and the game began to break up. His sulk pointless now, the brat got to his feet and ran crying toward his mother. Griffin saw what was going to happen next before it did. Stationary, the kid had been relatively safe, in full view of the players in the back line, as well as those dancing around the net. But now the ball was in the air, and the kid wasn’t where he was supposed to be. Jason, no doubt hoping for one last hard spike at his brother, lunged a step to his right and leapt, his knee catching the boy under the chin and snapping his head back. The next instant the kid lay flat on his back, motionless, and before Griffin could prevent her from weighing in, his mother said, Good. Or possibly, face it, the sentiment so succinctly expressed was his own.

Jane and June let out simultaneous, identical yelps, and everyone on the porch hurried down onto the lawn, where a circle formed around the fallen child, his mouth now open and working like a fish’s, though no sound came out. Griffin, alone on the porch and ashamed of himself (or his mother), caught a quick glimpse of the little shit’s bloody face. Finally able to catch his breath, he began to wail, and his mother, gathering him to her ample bosom, joined in. “Oh, poor sweetie! Poor, poor sweetie! What happened? Did the big people play too rough?”

Jason looked like he might object to this characterization, but being responsible for the kid’s injuries, he decided on a different tactic. “He’s all right, aren’t you, sport,” he said, tousling his hair. “He’s a tough guy.” Whereupon the brat broke free of his mother’s grasp and tried to punch Jason where he’d punched Andy. This time, though, he was trying to punch a marine, whose crack training allowed him to deftly parry assaults from even the most malicious seven-year-olds. But the kid’s intent couldn’t have been clearer, the groining strategy apparently his default mode.

“Justin!” his mother barked, taking him by the shoulders and spinning him around to face her. “What did Mommy say about hitting people there? Didn’t she tell you it’s not nice?” Whereupon he punched her in the same place.

It had been Griffin ’s intention to say a quick goodbye to Joy and Laura, but they were now at the center of the commotion on the lawn, and he decided against it. The entrance to the wheelchair ramp was close at hand, and with everyone distracted he’d be able to slip away unnoticed, using the yew hedge for cover all the way to the parking lot. Even as he planned this, something tugged at his short-term memory like a continuity problem in a movie (hadn’t the main character’s shirt been unbuttoned in the previous frame?), though only when he started down the incline and saw the splintered railing right where the ramp made a ninety-degree turn did he realize what it was: that just a few moments ago an impatient Harve had been sitting here.

When Griffin got close, he could hear him groaning. The railing was rotten-he could see that much-and had snapped on impact. Due to the severe slope of the lawn, the porch was at this point a good ten feet above it, the top of the hedge a couple feet below. The yew was still quivering when he peered over the side. “Harve?” Griffin said. “You okay?”

The voice that answered sounded more like a child’s than a grown man’s. “Won’t… go,” it said.

It wasn’t difficult to piece together what must have happened. His father-in-law, abandoned by his daughter when the brat got clobbered, and too impatient to wait for assistance, had tried to navigate the ramp on his own and lost control of his chair. He was now planted headfirst in the hedge, his chair on top of him, its wheels up and still spinning. Actually, no, that last part couldn’t be right. The wheels were turning, all right, but that was because Harve, invisible beneath the chair but apparently still in the saddle, was pushing on them like mad, trying to power himself out of this predicament, apparently unaware that he was capsized in the yew’s branches, suspended eight feet in the air.

Griffin kneeled, leaned over and reached down as far as he could; the nearest spinning wheel was just beyond his fingertips. From somewhere behind and above there came a shriek, and he didn’t have to turn to know that Dot had returned, no doubt expecting to find her husband where she’d left him. For a woman her age, she had a hell of a set of pipes on her. “Nooo!” she wailed. “Is he deaaad?”

“Harve,” he told his father-in-law, “stop spinning the damn wheels.” Poised as precariously as he was-a large man, with the additional weight of the chair on top of him-he easily could snap one of the branches, Griffin feared, and impale himself on it.

“Won’t… go, goddammit,” the unseen Harve grunted, still fully committed to his impossible exit strategy.

Now, in addition to Dot’s wailing, Griffin heard the thunder of feet pounding up the porch steps and then down the narrow ramp. “Daddy!” screamed a frantic voice that he first identified as Joy’s, then realized, no, it must be one of her sisters’.

He reluctantly rose to his feet. The chair, alas, was out of his reach, and it probably wasn’t a great idea to grab on to the wheels anyway. The thing to do-he should’ve realized this from the start-was to extract him from below. But the urge to peer over the side into the palsied hedge was irresistible, as the crowd now gathered at the busted railing attested.

Jared was among the first to arrive and immediately dropped to his knees and leaned forward to grab hold, though the chair was just beyond his reach as well.

“That’s not going to work,” Griffin said, placing a hand on his brother-in-law’s shoulder. “Maybe you and Jason and I can pull him out from below.”

For a moment Jared appeared to consider this suggestion. But then, getting to his feet, he seemed to really take in who’d just spoken to him, and his expression instantly morphed from thoughtfulness to rage. That would have been perplexing enough, even if Jason hadn’t been standing right next to him with the same identical fucking look on his face.

Honestly, Griffin ’s mother said. Would you look at these two morons?

It was as if they could hear her.

“You son of a bitch,” Jared said, that worm wriggling again beneath his temple, and before Griffin could object, a fist (Jared’s or Jason’s?), foreshortened, suddenly caught him flush on the cheekbone, and he felt himself lift off the ramp, his body describing a parabola in the air above the hedge. He could sense the ground coming up to meet him, but before it did he heard, or thought he heard, a loud splintering sound and a chorus of screams. What the…? he managed to think, but that was as far as he got.

Say good night, his mother advised, just as the screen went black.

10 Pistolary

The splintering sound Griffin heard as he went airborne was the wheelchair ramp collapsing under the weight of fifty well-fed celebrants. Those closest to the broken railing went into the yew, several landing on top of Harve and driving him deeper into its dark interior, where he bellowed piteously When Joy fell, the middle finger of her right hand got caught in the spokes of her father’s chair, the digit snapping like a twig. She should have been among the first to be rushed to the emergency room-most of the other injuries were only cuts and abrasions-but she refused to leave with her father still trapped in the hedge. The remaining guests gathered in a semicircle to watch Jason and Jared try to shake him loose. The hedge was far too thick, however, and its branches seemed naturally designed to funnel human victims straight down into its dark, dense center. Though they were slow to realize it, the twins’ efforts actually made matters worse by snapping some of the interior branches that were supporting their father, their fresh, sharp ends probing his soft flesh and making him howl in pain until he grew hoarse and then, finally, silent. The hotel manager urged patience while they looked for the head groundskeeper, who apparently had the only key to the locked shed where the chain saw was kept.

For a time nobody noticed Griffin, who lay unconscious beneath the hedge, with only his feet sticking out, or else they concluded he was conversing with Harve in the yew above. He came to in stages, as if from a long, luxurious nap, his senses returning one at a time, beginning with smell. He lay on his back, on soil that smelled richly of fertilizer, recently applied. His eyes were open, but there was nothing to see. Wait, that wasn’t quite true. What he was looking at, when he squinted, resembled a pen-and-ink drawing, except that its intricate lines wouldn’t stay still and were encased, at the edges, in dense fog. Wellfleet, he thought. Somehow he’d been transported back to the fog capital of the world, where no doubt he’d be expected to scatter his father’s ashes and this time do it right. But he didn’t have the ashes, Joy did, and had promised to give them back, though here he was in Wellfleet without them. Then, finally, there was a sound track, played through a crackling, blown speaker, nearby voices, lots of them, all talking and shouting at once. Why couldn’t he see who they belonged to? He was trying to sort out these complexities when he felt someone grab him by the ankles and pull him back into the world.

And what a world! For the next ten minutes he stood (swayed, actually) by himself, trying to make sense of it by going over in his mind what he believed to be true, allowing what he hoped were hard facts to surface, like gaseous bubbles through mud, into his wobbly consciousness. He wasn’t in Wellfleet, he was in Maine. He’d come here with a woman not his wife to attend his daughter’s wedding. To this same wedding his wife had also come, accompanied by a man who was not Griffin. His left eye was swollen tightly shut as a result of his being sucker punched (why?) by one of his brothers-in-law (which?). His father-in-law had, like a character in a fairy tale, got trapped in a tree. Highly improbable-all of it-and yet evidently true. It wasn’t someone’s opinion; no alternative theory had been advanced. He would have liked to talk it over with someone, but even his mother seemed to have abandoned him.

But hold on, he’d spoken to somebody after being yanked from under the hedge, hadn’t he? Who, though? And what had they talked about? It couldn’t have happened more than five minutes ago, but the memory was gone. He thought about joining the others over at the hedge where Harve was still imprisoned. Joy and Laura were over there, but so were Andy and Ringo, which made him super… what was the word? Unnecessary. The twins were there, too, and if he joined them without invitation, they might punch him again. He doubted this would actually happen, but couldn’t be sure. He still didn’t understand why they punched him the first time, and whatever their reason, it might still pertain. Super…?

Gradually, the dense Wellfleet fog in his brain began to lift, and then he noticed a woman sitting all by herself on a bench facing the ocean. Her scowl, together with how defiantly her arms were crossed over her chest, suggested that neither the hedge nor the crowd fixated on it was of the slightest interest to her. Griffin was aware he should know who this woman was, so he concentrated on her identity until it finally revealed itself. She was Dot, Harve’s second wife. Pleased with himself for recognizing her and anxious to test the coherence of his speech, he decided to join her. When he sat down, though, she said, “Go away,” without even glancing in his direction to see who it was.

Having only just arrived and feeling woozy from his journey, he was unwilling to depart quite yet, not until he’d discovered what she was doing all by herself, glowering at the unoffending ocean, when her husband had just been swallowed by a tree. An idea occurred to him that might explain it, so he said, “They can be tough…” He meant to go on but didn’t, his voice sounding remote in the echo chamber of his head.

She did turn to regard him now, her eyes narrowing. She seemed to be trying to decide if his sympathy was something she wanted, or if her misery was company enough. “That,” she said, pointing at his eye with her index finger, its tip sculpted to a frighteningly lethal point, “is what I feel like when I’m around those people. Like I’m being…pummeled. Bludgeoned. Battered. Cudgeled.”

That seemed to Griffin a tad overstated, but he knew what she meant, and having just struggled to construct a four-word sentence fragment, he envied her ability to summon so many impressive, violent synonyms. Clearly nobody’d punched her lights out recently. Together they swiveled on the bench to afford themselves a better view of what was transpiring at the hedge. People seemed to be taking turns talking to it. Had the bush been burning, the whole thing would have been biblical.

“All he ever talks about is that woman,” Dot said, as if she were able to see Harve at the center of the yew. “I want to scream, ‘She’s dead, she’s dead, she’s dead’.” When she said this, the volume in Griffin ’s head went down, back up, back down again, a wire loose somewhere.

“They were married a long time,” he ventured, benignly, he thought.

But she turned quickly and glared at him. “Then why marry me?” she demanded.

For the life of him Griffin couldn’t think of a reason for Harve or anyone else to marry her, and she must have seen this register on his face, because she was suddenly standing over him with her fists clenched. Good Lord, he thought, was she going to punch him, too? He barely knew her. “Superfluous,” he said, the word he’d needed earlier suddenly coming to him.

“Why don’t you just…”

When she paused, Griffin ’s mind raced ahead, supplying the words fuck off, though of course women in their late sixties didn’t say that.

“… fuck off,” she concluded, and strode away in the general direction of the parking lot.

He watched her go, then glanced at the spot where she’d been sitting, trying to decide if the woman had really been there, if the conversation had actually taken place. A couple minutes later his daughter, looking exhausted and despondent, sank down next to him on the bench and rested her head on his shoulder. Which was nice. “Where’s Andy?” he said, hoping that wherever he was he’d stay there for a while.

“He’s gone to get the car,” she told him, or at least that’s what he thought she said. She was sitting right next to him, but he could barely hear her. “You ready to go?”

“Where?”

She lifted her head to regard him. “The hospital?”

“Shouldn’t we wait until they extra… extratake…”

“Extricate?”

“… Harve from the hedge?”

“Dad,” she said, her mother’s sternness creeping into her voice, “we’ve already had this conversation.”

“When?”

“Ten minutes ago. You were supposed to wait for me by the tree.”

He was?

“Look at me,” she said, taking him by the chin. The sensation wasn’t nearly as pleasurable as having her rest her head on his shoulder. “Your eyes are dilated. Did you land on your head?”

He had no memory of landing at all, but the last thing he wanted was for her to be worried about him. “I’m fine,” he assured her. “People need to quit punching me and telling me to fuck off, but otherwise…” Unable to complete the sentence, he considered the word count impressive, nonetheless.

Behind them a chain saw roared to life, and its sheer volume reconnected something in Griffin ’s cranial circuitry. The world’s many varied sounds were again playing at their normal volume. Also, the earlier conversation with his daughter, the one in which he’d promised to wait by the tree, was suddenly there in its entirety. It was she and Andy who’d pulled him from beneath the hedge, he now recalled.

“I must be allergic to yew,” Laura said, scratching at her forearms.

“To me?”

She stopped scratching and looked at him.

“Oh. Yew. Gotcha.” Now that he looked at them, her arms were grotesquely swollen.

“You’re definitely coming to the hospital,” she said. “You’re concussed.”

“They’ll have Benadryl,” he assured her, still a beat behind but catching up fast.

“Yeah, right,” she said with a sweeping gesture that took in the whole resort. “Benadryl’s going to make all this fine.”

“Hey, it could’ve been worse,” he said.

She waited patiently for him to explain how, which took a minute. Then another. Among the crowd at the hedge was a pregnant young woman. He knew her, just not her name. Then suddenly that was there, too. “Kelsey could have fallen in with the others,” he said, pleased with himself for saying something that might, if closely examined, actually be valid. “The shock could’ve sent her into labor.”

“You know, I never thought of that,” his daughter said in a golly-gee voice. “Or a disgruntled hotel employee could’ve laced our dinners with arsenic, in which case we’d all be dead instead of just hideously maimed.”

“Sorry,” he said. “I was trying to cheer you up.”

Staring at her Popeye forearms, he finally realized she was weeping.

“Dad,” she said, “tomorrow’s my wedding day, and I’m going to be ugly.”

Over at the hedge, the chain saw sputtered and died. Taking advantage of the silence, he quietly said, “No, you’re going to be beautiful. Everything’s going to be fine.”

Andy pulled up then, and they climbed in, Laura next to her fiancé, Griffin into the back. The car was identical to his rental, right down to the color and features. It even had a copy of the same literary magazine on the dash. He patted his pants pocket, but felt no keys. Unless that was them dangling in the ignition. “So this is my car?” he asked, and they both turned around to stare at him.

“Yes, Dad. This is your car. You gave Andy the keys. You’re scaring me.”

Before driving off, they were treated to one last bizarre sight: Jared and Jason, shaking what remained of the mutilated hedge like madmen, until finally it surrendered from its dark center an elderly man in a wheelchair. Out Harve tumbled, somehow landing wheels down on the lawn, to wild cheers.

“He’s out,” Andy said, taking his bride’s hand. “See? Everything’s going to be fine.”

And she smiled, believing him, Griffin could tell. He’d just told her the same thing, but of course he was no longer the person from whom his daughter needed such reassurances. Which meant there was nothing to do but relax in the backseat, which was where you put people you don’t have to listen to, even when it’s their car.

The tiny regional hospital was really more of a clinic, and its usually sleepy, preseason emergency room had been overwhelmed by the first wave of injured wedding guests, not all of whom had been seen to by the time Laura, Andy and Griffin arrived, moments ahead of the ambulance bearing Joy and her father, which in turn was closely followed by a small flotilla of cars. Harve, finally pried loose from his chair, was wheeled in on a gurney Griffin caught a glimpse of him as he rolled by surrounded by EMTs. His cheeks were a grid of angry scratches, and a nasty-looking abrasion ran from his neck down his shoulder. Otherwise, he looked to be in reasonably good condition. He’d been wearing a baseball cap, and its bill had protected his eyes. Jane and June, on opposite sides of the gurney, having reluctantly given their father over to the professionals, now provided narration as they sped past the front desk: “See, Daddy? We’re at the hospital already. Look at all the nurses. You like nurses, remember? They’ll fix all your scratches…”

Harve was able to sum up his circumstance in a single, hoarse croak. “Hurt,” he said.

Curious to see how bad his own injuries were, Griffin located a men’s room off the main corridor. What he saw in the wall-length mirror shocked him. His swollen eye looked hideous, as if the eyeball had been removed from its socket, a tennis ball inserted in its place and the skin stretched over it and sewn shut. There was also a trail of dried blood beneath his left nostril, a deep scratch on his forehead and bits of hedge in his hair. Dear God, was he really going to walk his daughter down the aisle tomorrow looking like this? Would sunglasses, assuming he could find a pair, even fit over something that size? He could feel other urgent questions forming in his still-addled brain, but before he was able to resolve any of them the door to the men’s room swung open and one of the twins walked in. The stubbled one. Which was…

Unzipping, whichever twin it was stepped in front of the single wall urinal. “Okay,” he said, studying Griffin in the mirror, his urine hitting the porcelain with enough force to make Griffin envious. “Settle an argument. Jared says our family’s fucked up. I say no.”

Griffin, making a mental note that unless he was speaking of himself in the third person this was Jason, pointed to his grotesque, swollen eye.

“You shouldn’t have called us morons,” he said.

“I didn’t.” Hadn’t his mother offered that observation, in the privacy of his own brain?

“We both heard you. We were standing right there.”

“Huh,” Griffin said, reluctantly entertaining the possibility that a dead woman had, albeit briefly, taken control of his larynx.

“Also, we thought you’d pushed our father into the hedge.”

“Why would I do that, Jason?” Griffin said.

“You’ve never liked any of us,” he said, as if stating a well-known fact. “Plus you were the only one who could have done it. Standing just where he’d been with that shit-eating grin on your face. Same one you’ve got now.”

Griffin turned to examine his face in the mirror. What he saw there was a grimace, not a grin. A well-earned grimace, come to that.

“Like you were enjoying the whole thing,” Jason continued. “Jared thought the same thing.”

“Jason,” Griffin said, “you and your brother arriving at the same conclusion isn’t really a test of its validity. Seek some genetic variety would be my advice.” Griffin half expected this observation to provoke further hostility, but it didn’t.

“It’s true,” the other man chuckled. “We sort of share a brain, don’t we? Always did. No reason to call us morons, though.” Finished, he gave it a shake, zipped up and came over to the sink.

Griffin stepped aside so Jason could wash his hands. His forearms were striped with angry yew scratches, but they weren’t swollen like Laura’s. “I apologize if I called you a moron.”

“What do you mean if?”

“And I wasn’t enjoying it,” he told him, to set the record straight.

“I’m just saying it’s how you looked. Call it a misunderstanding, I guess. Anyway, nobody died, and tomorrow’s a new day,” he said, vigorously washing his hands of the old one and yanking a paper towel from the dispenser. “You think this wedding’s fucked up, you should try Iraq.”

“Yeah, sure, but New England weddings aren’t supposed to invite that kind of comparison,” Griffin said, pleased that he was again capable of making such subtle distinctions, more or less effortlessly.

“I’m only saying,” Jason shrugged, tossing his wadded-up towel into the bin. He apparently saw no need to elaborate further on what, exactly, he was only saying.

“Tell your brother all families are fucked up,” Griffin said. “It’s not an argument either of you can win.”

“That’s truly warped,” Jason said. “You know how you end up if you go through life thinking like that?”

“No, how?”

“You end up like you. One working eye, with twigs and shit in your hair.”

Griffin couldn’t help smiling, though it literally hurt to.

“I’m sorry I punched you, though,” Jason admitted thoughtfully. “I’ve been thinking about it, and I realize now it probably wasn’t just because you called me a name and pushed Pop into the hedge. The way I’m figuring it, subconsciously?” Here he pointed at his forehead, perhaps to suggest where such delicate, refined “figuring” took place. “Subconsciously, I was still pissed at you for being such a prick to my sister. You think that’s possible?”

Griffin did, consciously.

At the nurses’ station he was told his wife was in examination room 2B, where he was treated to an unexpected sight: Brian Fynch, glassy-eyed, being wheeled out of the room on a gurney On his forehead, a knot the size of an egg pushed up through his Ringo bangs. Griffin was pretty sure he hadn’t been one of those hurt when the ramp collapsed, so… what? He’d been injured at the hospital?

Inside the room, Joy, dressed for some reason in a pale blue Johnnie, was seated on the examination table, looking shell-shocked. “What happened to…” He’d been about to say Ringo, but caught himself.

His wife sighed deeply. “I warned him not to keep looking at it.” She showed him her finger, which lay at an almost anatomically impossible angle. “But I guess he couldn’t help it. He got really pale, and then…” She pointed at the wall, specifically at an indentation in the plaster that looked to be about the same size as a college dean’s forehead. Griffin had to look away lest she observe one of those vintage shit-eating grins Jason had accused him of wearing earlier. When he finally turned back, though, he saw that Joy herself was smiling. A grudging, guilty smile, but still definitely a smile. “You know the wet sound a ripe cantaloupe makes when you drop it on the kitchen floor? That’s what he sounded like.”

“Jesus,” Griffin said, feeling genuine sympathy for the man. His wife’s finger was a truly gruesome sight, enough to make a squeamish man light-headed, and he was, like his father before him, a squeamish man.

“Don’t you faint, too,” she said, slipping the hand under her Johnnie.

Back in the men’s room, after washing his face, Griffin had congratulated himself that the abstraction and confusion he’d felt after being pulled from under the hedge had mostly dissipated, but now, studying his wife, he wasn’t so sure. “I guess my question would be, why did you have to get undressed for them to set your finger?” Also, how in the world had she gotten undressed with her finger bent back like that?

“We discovered something else.” She pulled the Johnnie forward, exposing her left side and part of her breast, beneath which there was a three-inch gash. It hadn’t bled much, but it looked deep. “I’m going to need stitches.”

Okay, it had been a bizarre day, Griffin thought, with its mazes and man-eating hedges and collapsing wheelchair ramps and dead ventriloquist parents, but this had to be the strangest thing yet. Think about it. He’d spent most of his adult life with this woman. He’d forfeited the right to admire her body, though it was even now-admit it-capable of stirring lust. How perfectly, ludicrously insane not to be able to take this same woman in his arms and at least try to comfort her, comfort them both. Why shouldn’t he? What possible reason could there be? Well, he could think of a couple. For one, another woman was waiting patiently for him back at the B and B. Maybe he wasn’t in love with her, but he did feel-okay, admit this too-great fondness, which meant he should not be drawing his Johnnie-clad wife into his not entirely innocent embrace. And there was knot-headed Ringo, who would appreciate neither the comfort he meant to provide Joy with nor its accompanying erection.

“You might as well tell me what you think of him,” Joy said, as though she’d read his thought. Something in her tone suggested she had her own misgivings about the man, reservations his fainting had confirmed.

Griffin shrugged. “He seems amiable enough,” he said. “Bit of a booster, maybe.”

“That’s his job,” Joy said, and he knew immediately he’d said the exact wrong thing. “He sells the college. It helps to have an upbeat personality.”

“Nice change of pace, too,” he added, sounding more bitter than he meant to, more the “congenitally unhappy” man she’d accused him of being last summer.

“It has been, actually.”

Feeling the wind go out of his sails and his earlier wooziness return, Griffin slumped into a folding chair. “I know it’s crazy,” he said, “but I can’t shake the feeling that all this is my fault.” Meaning, he supposed, not just his behavior on the Cape last summer and their subsequent separation but also tonight’s fiasco, most of which-the rotten railing; Harve’s injuries, whatever they turned out to be; Joy’s broken finger; the grade-A jumbo egg on Ringo’s noggin; his daughter’s swollen Popeye forearms-no reasonable person could have held him responsible for. Nor did it stop there. Whatever happened from this point forward would be his fault as well. When a big string of dominoes falls, you don’t blame the ones in the middle.

From somewhere down the hall Harve, who’d apparently gotten his voice back, bellowed “No!” and a moment later, “No, goddammit!” as if he’d somehow been privy to his son-in-law’s confession and felt compelled, like a Greek chorus, to register strenuous objection. Griffin found himself smiling weakly, grateful for even the appearance of someone being on his side.

“In fact, it’s not that crazy,” Joy said.

“You think?” he said, genuinely surprised. He’d been willing, as an exercise in self-pity, to take full responsibility for the evening’s events, but he certainly hadn’t expected his wife to agree with him.

“Where’s Dot?” Harve shouted. “Where is she?”

“Our fault, I meant,” his wife clarified. “It wasn’t just you.”

“Well,” he said, “I guess it doesn’t do much good to say I’m sorry, but I am. And…” He paused, not sure he could say the next part, though simple justice demanded it be said.

“And?”

“And if this Brian Fynch makes you happy-”

“No!” Harve bellowed again, refusing to countenance any such suggestion. “I want Dot, damn it!”

Dot damn it?

Griffin looked over at Joy and saw that she, too, was on the verge of cracking up, and his heart leapt in recognition of the old mischievousness he’d so loved about her back when they were first married, all but extinguished now so many long years later. Could he himself be the one who’d put it out?

“Either of you seen Dot?” said a voice, startling both of them. Jared’s shaved head was framed in the doorway.

They told him they hadn’t.

“He wants Dot, damn it!” he said, his mimicry spot-on, as always. “So what’s this about, then?” Meaning, presumably, their being so intimately sequestered.

“Nothing,” they said in unison.

He nodded, registering their denial, but continued to study them curiously, his mouth open one notch on its hinge. It occurred to Griffin that as a military cop he had to ask people all sorts of questions-How much have you had to drink tonight? You the one that gave this young lady the shiner?-and this was the look he gave people he suspected weren’t being entirely candid in their responses. “Jason,” he called over his shoulder, and then there were two heads framed in the doorway, or rather the same head twice, the second stubbled. “They say there’s nothin’ going on in here. This look like nothin’ to you?”

Jason didn’t answer immediately, his jaw dropping that same single notch. “No.”

“Jared.” Joy sighed. “Jason.”

“It definitely looks like something,” Jason said, squinting, as if to bring the two of them into clearer focus.

“Yeah, but what?”

“Don’t know,” Jason said finally. “Don’t care. You guys seen Dot?”

“They haven’t,” Jared answered for them.

“He wants Dot, damn it.”

“They know that.”

“Then let’s go find the bitch.”

When the doorway was empty, Joy let her chin fall to her chest. “Does it make any sense that this whole year, whenever I’ve been with my family, that’s when I’ve missed you?”

“Not really,” he admitted. Why would she miss his snarky, all-too-predictable comments about her loved ones?

“Brian actually thinks they’re all terrific,” she told him, and for the life of him Griffin couldn’t tell whether this mitigated in the other man’s favor or not. “Last December,” she continued, “that’s when I missed you most.”

He tried hard to hear in this statement his wife’s undying affection but had to suspect she was trying to express something very different, maybe even the opposite. She was talking about when she’d needed him most. When he should have been there and wasn’t. “Back then you mentioned there was some family stuff going on.”

She nodded, looking down at her lap as if she could see her broken finger through the Johnnie. “It was horrible. Dot found them.”

Griffin waited for her to continue, not at all sure she would.

“She was helping Daddy go through some of Mom’s things. Getting annoyed with him because he didn’t want to get rid of anything. Anyway, there was a locked box.”

“Which she opened.”

“It held a bundle of letters.” She met Griffin ’s eyes now, her own spilling over.

“An affair?”

She nodded.

“And she showed the letters to Harve.”

“He called me up wanting to know what they meant.” She paused to wipe her eyes. “I told him they didn’t mean anything.”

“Good for you.”

“But he knew, Jack. He didn’t want to, but oh, God, he was sobbing. My father. The whole time I was growing up, I never saw him cry. He kept saying ‘Jilly-Billy,’ over and over. ‘Jilly-Billy.’ And it made me so… angry. I wanted to yell at him to stop, please, please stop calling her by that stupid, stupid name. There was my father, calling me up in the middle of the night, brokenhearted, wanting to cry on my shoulder, and all I wanted to do was to scream at him, to tell him whatever Mom did was his fault for being so… for being such a…” She stopped, unable to continue, until finally she said, “I was glad. Glad she found somebody.”

“And you had an urge to tell him.”

She shook her head, trying to rid it of the memory. “What kind of person…”

“Joy. Stop. It was a perfectly natural reaction.”

“You’ll never guess who saved the day. June. Princess Grace of Morocco. She told him Mom was writing an epistolary novel. That the letters were part of that. Her pistolary book, he calls it.”

“Ah,” Griffin said, now understanding the reference. “He mentioned it, actually.”

“You always said we were messed up. All of us.”

“Not you,” he corrected, but she wasn’t really listening.

“And now look. We’ve come together here and totaled our daughter’s wedding. The part we hadn’t already totaled.”

“It’s not totaled,” he told her.

“What would you call it-a fender bender?”

“Tomorrow will be fine.”

He said this with as much conviction as he could muster, but of course a more convincing argument to the contrary was his grotesque appearance, which she now seemed to be taking in for the first time. “You know what I’m doing?” she said. “I’m imagining the wedding pictures.”

“I’ve looked better? Is that what you’re saying?”

“You look like you’re about to drop.”

“I am,” he admitted, his limbs suddenly deadweight, his head impossibly heavy on his neck. But he didn’t want this conversation, this time, to end, not just yet.

“Are you going to get that eye looked at?”

“No, I just need some sleep. That and a handful of I-be-hurtin’s.” Their joke term for ibuprofen. It had slipped out naturally, unconsciously, like taking her hand earlier in the evening.

When he rose to leave, Joy said, “I guess I’m trying to say I owe you an apology.”

“What on earth for?”

“Your mother,” she said. “I never should’ve let you do that alone. I told myself it was the way you wanted it, that it was just you going back into that room of yours, the one where I’ve never been allowed, and closing the door behind you. I told myself I’d come if you asked, but not until. That was wrong. And, just so you know, you aren’t the only one your daughter’s mad at.”

“I’ll speak to her.”

“There’s no need. She loves us both. I think she tried not to for a while, but it didn’t work.”

“She’s her mother’s daughter.”

“Before you go,” she said, handing him her purse, “open that, will you?” When he did, she fished around with her good hand until she located her keys. “Your father’s urn is on the backseat. Just leave the keys in the cup holder.”

Griffin took them.

When he reached the door, she said, “You wanted to know if Brian makes me happy?”

He wasn’t sure he did, but nodded anyway.

She started to say something, then stopped, and when she finally spoke he had the distinct impression it wasn’t what she’d started to say. “He doesn’t make me unhappy.”

“Well,” he said, his heart sinking, “that’s something, I guess.”

Did she call after him as the door swung shut? He paused in the corridor but heard no further sound from inside the room. In fact, in that instant the whole world was still.

Down the hall Laura and Andy came out of another examination room and told him they didn’t want him driving anywhere, but he said he was fine, just exhausted, and offered to take them back to the Hedges, but Laura said they’d wait for her mother. Outside, he took the urn from Joy’s SUV and left the keys in the cup holder as instructed. After popping the trunk of his rental car, he paused, half expecting his mother to object, but it had been a long day and apparently even ghosts slept, so he slipped his father’s urn into the wheel well opposite hers. Then he got into the car, rolled the window down and just sat there. The magazine with “The Summer of the Brownings” was still on the dashboard. The evening hadn’t provided the right moment to give it to Joy, and he doubted tomorrow would either. He could leave it in her SUV, he supposed, but then decided not to. He was suddenly just too tired to walk back across the hospital lot.

The night air was rich with the sea, and he breathed it in deeply, thinking how good it would feel to fall asleep right here. Again it occurred to him how different Maine was from the Cape. What would’ve happened if he and Joy had honeymooned here, as she’d wanted to, instead of Truro? Would they have drawn up a different accord? He was nodding off when he heard shouts coming from the direction of the hospital. Lord, he thought, what now? But it was just the idiot twins, Jared and Jason, expanding the search for their stepmother. In the voice of the man they still imagined to be their father, they shouted in marine unison, “Dot! Where are you, dot damn it!”

By the time he got back to the B and B, the clock on the nightstand said 12:07. He undressed in the dark, as quietly as possible, and slipped between the sheets in stages so as not to wake the woman who now shared his bed. They’d been together for several months, but it still felt strange-and never more so than tonight-to be with a woman who wasn’t Joy. When she stirred he expected her to ask how things had gone at the rehearsal, if she’d missed anything good, but she didn’t and her breathing quickly became regular again. A minute later he was asleep himself.

Then he was wide awake again and listening, for what he wasn’t sure. According to the clock it was just after one. The window closest to the bed had been cracked open a couple inches, and in the unnaturally still Maine night he heard the thunk of a car trunk below. Someone stealing his urns was his first, lunatic thought.

Struggling out of bed, he padded barefoot over to the window and saw a taxi idling in the circular drive. Its driver pulled a suitcase from the trunk and handed it to his fare, a well-dressed young man who gave him some money. Apparently surprised by his generosity, the driver said, “Hey, thanks, pal,” and when the young man turned toward the inn, Griffin smiled, realizing it was Sunny Kim who’d just arrived.

There was stirring behind him now. “Jack? Is everything okay?” Her husky voice was low and intimate in the dark.

Yes, he told her. Everything was fine.

“Good,” said Marguerite.

11 Plumb Some

The night of his daughter’s wedding Griffin had a particularly vivid (no doubt alcohol-and anxiety-induced) dream in which he was driving over the Sagamore Bridge in a pouring rain that made the surface slick and treacherous. The bridge went on forever, and his was the only vehicle on it. Harve, for some reason, was in the backseat, instructing him. You’re never too old to learn to drive, he was saying, in the same tone of voice he used when telling Griffin how to play golf. You just have to keep both hands on the wheel and both eyes on the road.

Griffin explained that he already knew how to drive, but Harve paid no attention.

It’s not complicated, he went on. Just the two things to remember: hands on the wheel, eyes on the road. Hell, I taught my three daughters to drive, then both my sons. If those two can learn, so can you.

Harve, Griffin said, listen to me. I already-

Car! his father-in-law shouted, pointing in alarm, and Griffin hit the brake. Immediately the car’s rear end lost traction and came around, which meant, according to the dream’s curious logic, that he was now facing Harve, who was sitting in the backseat and saying, Both hands on the wheel. Griffin braced for impact against one of the bridge’s stone buttresses, but when it came, it was surprisingly gentle, like a boat nosing into a dock.

I just wanted to test your reflexes, Harve explained. Without good reflexes you’ re just an accident waiting to happen.

When Griffin got out to inspect the damage, he saw that the trunk had popped open and both his parents’ urns had ruptured. The trunk was full of their mingled ash, about a hundred urns’ worth, it looked like, and the rain was turning it all to mud.

Now you’ve done it, said Harve, who’d materialized at his elbow. How you going to figure out who’s who?

Rather than contemplate the problem, Griffin woke up.

It was raining out, less hard than in his dream but definitely coming down. The soft dream-collision had been occasioned in the real world by Marguerite getting out of bed. Not quite ready to face a new day, he closed his eyes and pretended to be asleep. Marguerite adored weddings and after yesterday’s she would be, he feared, in one of her best and brightest moods, and he wasn’t sure he could confront either it or her just yet. He sensed her standing there, observing him, probably suspicious, but eventually he heard the bathroom door open and close, and when the shower rumbled on moments later he realized he’d been holding his breath.

“Well, I think it was a lovely wedding,” she told him fifteen minutes later, her first words of the day, as if he’d expressed a contrarian view in his sleep. She was toweling off unself-consciously at the foot of the bed. It was amazing, really, how different she was from Joy, how confident and secure she was in her own naked, glistening skin. Even fully dressed, she always managed to convey that she was patiently waiting for someone to suggest a skinny-dip. Maybe her body wasn’t what it once was, but she remained confident there were men around who desired it and probably would be for quite some time. “Are you going to shower,” she said, “or did you have something else in mind?” That was the other thing. Marguerite loved sex, as fervently as you loved something you’d been denied when you were young and which you were now making up for.

“Shower,” he said, because they had a long drive ahead of them and a task at the end of it-the scattering, finally, of his parents’ ashes-that was unpleasant enough to have wormed its way into his dreams. “How about tonight?”

She was right, though, Griffin thought as he stepped under the burst of hot water. The wedding had been lovely-and, like all events that involved months of intricate planning, over surprisingly quickly. It had gone off without further melodrama, a well-earned blessing, all agreed, after the catastrophic rehearsal. Despite the scratches on her forearms, Laura had been, just as he’d promised her, a heartbreakingly beautiful bride. Drawing on some reserve of optimism that hadn’t been there the night before, she’d given herself over fully to richly deserved joy. Only once, just minutes before the ceremony was to commence, did she allow herself to express any fear. The bridesmaids and groomsmen were lining up at the end of the corridor for the procession, and she and Griffin were cloistered in a small anteroom. He’d told her how lovely she was and how proud he and Joy were of her, and she’d told him he looked very L.A. (he’d found a pair of very dark glasses to cover his still-hideous but not-quite-so-swollen left eye). But when Pachelbel’s Canon leaked into the room, she took a deep breath, looped her arm through his and said, “I don’t want you and Mom to get old.”

It was, of course, her familiar fear-that he and her mother would divorce-now mutated. Either that or, after yesterday, Harve and the various humiliations of old age were on her mind.

After much discussion her grandfather, battered but unbowed, had been allowed to attend the wedding. His doctors were understandably reluctant. Harve’s physical injuries were relatively minor, but the trauma he’d suffered in the hedge wasn’t insignificant, especially for someone his age. At the hospital he’d exhibited signs of confusion and agitation, though the former, according to his children, was normal and the latter occasioned by the possibility he wouldn’t get his way. The physicians finally gave in, on the condition that someone would attend him at all times.

That someone was the redoubtable Dot (damn it!), who’d finally been located down in Portland, where she’d checked into an airport motel with every intention of catching the first flight back to California in the morning. But the family, one sibling after another, had pleaded for her return, and then finally Harve himself got on the phone and told her that she was indispensable to the day’s proceedings, a fairly transparent lie, it seemed to Griffin, but apparently the very one she wanted to hear, and so the twins had been dispatched to Portland to fetch her back up the coast. At the ceremony she seemed to be in reasonably good spirits, and Griffin kept expecting her to come over and apologize for telling him to fuck off, especially since he was the only one in the family who’d showed her the slightest kindness or consideration during what he’d already come to think of as the Ordeal of the Hedge, but she rather pointedly kept her distance, as if to suggest that by correctly diagnosing and sympathizing with her plight he’d assumed responsibility for it.

The ceremony had been performed by a Unitarian minister, a friend of Andy’s family, and Joy needn’t have worried about there being too many religious overtones, because this fellow seemed utterly unencumbered by liturgical obligation. He clearly fancied himself a comedian, though, and used those parts of the service that might otherwise have been given over to prayer to relive the more memorable moments of the rehearsal dinner, which he himself had not attended but obviously had been briefed on. While the smattering of nervous laughter that his attempts at humor occasioned couldn’t have been terribly gratifying, he’d soldiered on, his faith in his own comic talent apparently as deep and unshakable as his belief in the Almighty. When he described for the edification of those who’d been present that the bride’s grandfather had had to be removed from a Venus-flytrap hedge by means of a chain saw, Harve, hearing himself alluded to, loudly asked, his voice still raspy from yesterday’s bellowing, “Who the hell is this guy?”

Griffin ’s fatherly duties kept him centered and focused during the ceremony itself, though the reception, which made fewer demands on his time, proved more of a challenge. Laura had chosen “Teach Your Children Well,” he hoped unironically, for their father-daughter dance. They were joined by Andy and his mother, who seemed not to have anticipated this tradition and were rigid with fear during its execution. Before long the floor was crowded with dancers, a statistically improbable percentage sporting gauzy bandages. As the wine began to flow and everyone began to relax and have a good time, Griffin felt increasingly adrift. He and Joy had agreed beforehand they wouldn’t dance together, fearing their daughter might break down at the sight of them. Joy, her middle finger made obscene by a large, gleaming metal splint, had already excused herself, saying the stitches in her side hurt, but Griffin suspected she felt it inappropriate to dance with Ringo at her daughter’s wedding. Perhaps there was more. Something about their body language was different today, and he wondered if they’d had words. That possibility would have cheered him had he not sensed there was a greater distance between Joy and him as well, as if their brief, unguarded intimacy at the emergency room had frightened her enough that she was determined not to risk it again.

That morning he’d suggested to Marguerite that they shouldn’t be too much of a couple, either. Knowing how much she loved to dance, he allowed that it would probably be okay if they boogied to a couple of fast numbers, but no slow, clingy stuff. If he worried about cramping her style, he needn’t have. Recognizing Sunny Kim from last year’s leftover table with a squeal of delight, she immediately dragged him out there and didn’t let him go until they’d hoofed it through three long tracks. After that she danced with Andy, with all of his groomsmen and even with Ringo, who sported an impressive hematoma on his forehead and moved, Griffin was pleased to see, like a man in a truss. When she’d exhausted all these partners, she set upon the Unitarian comic, whose expression suggested he’d become a man of the cloth as a hedge against precisely this sort of social necessity. On the dance floor he looked everywhere but at Marguerite’s chest, unintentionally providing the very comedy that had eluded him during the wedding ceremony. When she wasn’t dancing, Marguerite took refuge at the table presided over by Kelsey and her husband (“Aunt Rita? What’re you doing here?”), getting a recap of the couple’s first year of wedded bliss.

Her defection left Griffin -who had it coming, of course-too often alone at the long head table. Laura (he could tell) coerced her bridesmaids to dance with him, and out of a similar sense of duty he’d asked Andy’s mother, who said, no, no, she really couldn’t, as if the single dance ticket she’d been issued at the door had already been redeemed by her son. Joy’s sisters had their husbands to deal with and they didn’t like him besides, so he steered clear there. Joy herself was going from table to table, making sure people had what they needed and were enjoying themselves, a duty he begrudged her until it occurred to him that it was his as well, so he started at the other end of the room and did the same thing, as slowly as possible, lest he be forced to return to the nearly abandoned head table.

His sense that something wasn’t right intensified as the evening wore on, though he had no idea what the hell might be wrong. Everybody seemed to be having a good time, especially the young people, Laura and Andy’s college friends, which was as it should be. The only person more disconnected to the proceedings was poor Harve. After successfully lobbying to attend, he dozed through the exchange of vows and then much of the reception, though at one point he struggled to his feet and gyrated his hips with the prettiest of Laura’s bridesmaids, occasioning thunderous applause from everyone but Dot, who thrust him forcefully back into his chair. The boy who’d punched Andy (and his own mother) in the groin the night before-Griffin still had no idea who the little fucker was-recognized Jason and once again attempted his signature move, but the MP saw it coming and put the palm of his hand on the kid’s forehead and let him swing away, and this, too, everyone seemed to think was funny.

Gradually Griffin came to understand that he was waiting for another moment of grace, like the one at last year’s wedding when Laura pulled Sunny Kim onto the dance floor. The night before, in the emergency room with Joy, he’d sensed the proximity of just such a moment, but the twins had interrupted and it was lost, though at the time it hadn’t worried him. If he didn’t force it, he told himself, the moment would come of its own volition, probably at some point during the wedding. Maybe even heralded by that old Bon Jovi song. What was it called? “Livin’ on a Prayer”? He checked with the DJ, who said it was definitely on the playlist, but it didn’t play, and still didn’t, and when some of the guests with small children began to gather them up and bid farewell to the bride and groom, he realized it wasn’t going to.

Feeling his emotions come untethered and rise dangerously toward the surface, he left the wedding tent, whispering to Marguerite that he needed to visit the gents. Inside the hotel he found Sunny Kim sitting alone in the small, dark bar, drinking in the only place where the booze wasn’t free.

“Do you enjoy single-malt scotch?” he asked when Griffin slid onto the bar stool next to him.

Even in the dim light, he could see the young man’s eyes were full. “I do,” he admitted, although hard liquor was probably the last thing he needed right then.

Sunny ordered him a very expensive one. “I love fine scotch,” he said, “but I can’t drink it without remembering my father.” Was this, Griffin wondered, to explain his liquid eyes? “What would he have thought about such extravagance? He didn’t believe in excess.”

“Are you sure?” Griffin said. “Not being able to afford something isn’t the same as disapproving of it.”

“True,” Sunny admitted. “It’s also true that I never really knew him.”

“He’d have been proud of you,” Griffin assured him, because he hadn’t meant to suggest any such thing. “Hell, we’re not even related and I’m proud of you.”

Which clearly pleased the young man, though his smile vanished as quickly as it appeared, replaced by confusion. “Laura’s uncles? Jason and… Jared?”

Griffin chuckled. Back in the tent he’d noticed the twins had taken a shine to Sunny, introducing him to all the pretty girls, most of whom they hadn’t been introduced to themselves.

“They mock their father,” he said.

Sunny hadn’t been at the rehearsal, of course, but Griffin suspected that even if he’d witnessed the collapse of the wheelchair ramp and the ensuing Ordeal of the Hedge, none of that would’ve been as profoundly inexplicable and unsettling to him as their treatment of Harve. “It’s hard for them to express love,” he explained. “Being men. And idiots.”

Sunny nodded seriously.

“Otherwise they aren’t bad fellows,” Griffin said. “They’d be good to have on your side in a fight. Of course”-he pointed to his eye-“if you’re with them there’s a much better chance there’ll be a fight.”

“I made the mistake of telling them I don’t have to be back in Washington until Monday. They want me to go with them to Bar Harbor tomorrow. Do you think I shouldn’t?”

“No, I wouldn’t say that. Just remember they act first, think later, and then neither clearly nor deeply. Have you ever thought of getting a tattoo, Sunny?”

“I’m sorry?”

“I ask because if you go drinking with them, you could wake up with one.” And it would say Laura.

Sunny must have been thinking along these same lines, because after a moment, he said, “I’m getting married myself later this year.”

“No kidding? Congratulations.” They clumsily clinked glasses. “You want to tell me about her?”

“Yes.” But then, for a long moment, he didn’t. “She’s Korean,” he finally said. “From a fine family. She’s been very patient waiting for me to ask for her hand.”

“Will the wedding be here?”

“No, in Seoul. I’ve invited Laura and… Andrew, but of course I’ll understand if they can’t come. It’s a long trip and very expensive. I’m hoping we’ll get together later. Andrew’s never been to Washington.”

“You’ll live in the U.S., then?”

“Yes, of course. My mother’s here, my brothers, and my work’s important, too.”

“Yes, it is.”

He seemed pleased to be given this vote of confidence, but troubled, too. “Why does a rich country like ours blame people who have nothing for its problems?”

“Good question. It’s a problem that predates Lou Dobbs, and it’s probably not just us in the States.”

“No, but we’re not responsible for other countries.”

“Are we responsible for this one, as individuals? Isn’t that a lot to ask?”

“Yes. But I do believe we are responsible.”

Griffin nodded, surprised to discover that despite raising the question he agreed with Sunny’s response. Also that he’d finished his scotch.

“She’s very happy,” Sunny said, as if this leap from political and philosophical discussion to deeply personal were perfectly natural.

Love, Griffin thought, smiling. Only love made such a leap possible. Only love related one thing to all other things, putting all your eggs into a single basket-that dumbest yet most courageous and thrilling of economic and emotional strategies. “I think she is,” he said, almost apologetically. His daughter was happy and deserved to be. Yet, sitting here in the dark, quiet bar with Sunny Kim, Griffin couldn’t help wondering if the worm might already be in the apple. A decade from now, or a decade after that, would Laura suddenly see Sunny differently? Griffin knew no finer, truer heart than Laura’s, but even the best hearts, as her mother could testify, were notoriously unruly. Would some good, unexpected thing happen in his daughter’s life, something that caused her very soul to swell with pride and joy, whereupon she’d realize that the man she wanted to tell first and most wasn’t who she’d married today but the one who’d loved her since they were kids and who once, in the middle of the night, had trusted her enough to share his family’s shame? Would she understand that such trust and intimacy do not-indeed cannot-exist apart from consequence and obligation? Would she understand then what she didn’t yet suspect, that remembering Sunny Kim at the moment of her own great happiness at Kelsey’s wedding last year had been kind and generous, yes, of course, but also an unwitting acknowledgment of something yet hidden from her?

And what of Andy? Would he one day come upon his wife unawares, her good heart broken, and just know, as Griffin had, even though he’d tried not to, that there was someone else? Sensing the power of jealousy to wound deeply and maybe even destroy, would Andy bury that knowledge, as Griffin had, even before he knew for sure what it was? And later, after Laura at great cost had done all any woman could do to rule what was by nature unrulable, would her husband then resent her because the wound to his own heart, neither acknowledged nor treated, hadn’t healed?

Griffin did not want to believe that any of this would come to pass. In fact, he refused to.

“Thank you,” Sunny said, finishing his own scotch.

“What for?”

“For the honest conversation. A rare thing.”

“And thank you, for the drink. A rare scotch.”

“It’s not my business,” Sunny said, “but will you and Mrs. Griffin try again?”

Griffin could tell from Sunny’s worried, almost frightened expression that he wasn’t asking out of curiosity, or probably even affection, though of course these, too, were present. Until that moment, it hadn’t occurred to Griffin that his daughter wasn’t the only one who’d played an important part in Sunny’s life. He and Joy also had. Sure, Sunny’d gone to Stanford and then to Georgetown, but before that he’d crossed Shoreham Drive from his parents’ immigrant neighborhood to where the Griffins and Kelsey and her parents lived. Just a few blocks if you were talking real estate, but much farther in all other respects. Griffin could see him at thirteen, all dressed up for Laura’s party, waiting at the Shoreham Drive intersection for the light to change. And at their “lovely home,” he’d fallen in love (if he wasn’t already) with Laura, yes, but also with her parents, who didn’t unduly burden their child with obligations, who laughed and looked at each other in a way that his own parents never did. Was it Kelsey who’d observed back then that it was clear Laura’s parents still had sex? Sunny would’ve sensed that, too. Hell, he’d have seen it with his own hungry, adolescent eyes. Joy had never been more beautiful than she was then, in her late thirties, and when Sunny compared Laura’s parents with his rigid little mother and chronically ill father, he would’ve felt envy and shame in equal measure. He’d fallen in love with them, Griffin realized, much as Griffin had fallen in love with the Brownings on Cape Cod: thoroughly, uncritically. Had the nation itself been part of his seduction? America, like the Cape, that finer place, with its myriad implicit promises and gifts, chief among them the permission to dream? Who better than Sunny Kim to ask why America blamed its ills on the most recent of its dreamers, whether legal or illegal? By now, Griffin thought, Sunny must be coming to the reluctant understanding that such dreams embodied a paradox, that they, like love itself, were at once real and chimerical.

“I don’t know if we will or not,” he at last said, embarrassed by Sunny’s personal stake in their marriage and by the larger questions that any marriage-a public institution, after all-in fact begged, no matter the circumstances. And even more embarrassed by his own passivity. Having squandered last year’s moment of grace, he’d waited today for another and felt cheated when it didn’t come. “I don’t know if she wants to, or even how to ask her,” he said. “She’s done pretty well this year without me.”

“Do you mind if I ask if this is self-pity?”

“Almost certainly,” Griffin admitted, a little taken aback by Sunny’s forthrightness, though it was impossible to take offense when you were so well understood. “I’m prone to it. Not to mention nostalgia and some other bogus emotions.”

“Allow me to say that things will work out for the best.”

This made Griffin chuckle. “We’ve known each other a long time, Sunny,” he said, rising from his bar stool, “and that’s the first dumb thing I’ve ever heard you say.”

Hauling his and Marguerite’s bags out to their rental car and getting soaked in the process, Griffin discovered that yesterday’s inertia, which Sunny had correctly diagnosed as self-pity, had returned, along with a terrible understanding. Part of the reason he’d been so passive at his daughter’s wedding was his profound sense that something was supposed to happen there; all he had to do was be patient and recognize the moment when it arrived. Today, though, he knew better. The only things that were supposed to happen were things you made happen. The intimate, bittersweet moment he’d shared with Joy at the hospital had seemed to promise more, but he saw now that it was all he was going to get, probably because it was all he deserved. The events that had culminated in his daughter’s wedding and the eventual dissolution of his own marriage were on parallel tracks, both set in motion this time last year, and over the long months they’d gained sufficient momentum to be virtually unstoppable. Even the fiasco of the rehearsal dinner hadn’t derailed the wedding, and he was grateful for that, but apparently the sundering of marriage was subject to the same immutable law of motion. It was like the third act-the final twenty minutes-of a well-constructed screenplay, during which there was no more choosing, no more deciding, just the juggernaut of action and consequence.

Was Joy, too, feeling the same dispiriting sense of inevitability? Was that why she’d kept her distance at the reception? He wished he could ask her. Sliding in behind the wheel, Griffin again noticed the “Summer of the Brownings” magazine on the dashboard. He’d wanted her to see the story because he was proud of it, but also, he now realized, because it constituted evidence of-what? That he’d been trying for a long time to understand and resolve his almost pathological resentment toward his deceased parents? That perhaps he’d made some progress? The facts on the ground suggested rather the opposite. This time last year he was driving around with one parent in the trunk of his car, whereas now he had both. Far from resolving anything, the Browning story probably just explained how he’d come to be the husband and father he was instead of the one he meant to be. It was also possible he wanted to show Joy the story for even more selfish reasons. Tommy, puzzled by the story in its earlier incarnation, had been both surprised and impressed by the new version. “Jesus, Griff,” he said. “This is really… there’s fucking truth in here.” Maybe all he wanted from Joy was more praise.

He studied the cover, where his name was listed along with eight or ten other writers, none of them household names, and felt the smallness of his accomplishment. Sure, he could use the story as an excuse to drive back down to the Hedges. Once there, if he screwed up his courage, he could ask Joy if this really was the end, if that’s what she truly wanted, but he already knew the answer, didn’t he? She’d told him at the hospital that Brian Fynch didn’t make her unhappy, and for her, given the last few years of their marriage, this was probably a step in the right direction. Besides which, he thought, tossing the magazine onto the backseat, he’d have to explain to Marguerite why driving back down the peninsula made more sense than just mailing the issue once they got back to L.A.

But what the hell was taking her so long to check out, he wondered. He supposed he might go find out, but decided instead to stay where it was dry. After all, there wasn’t any hurry. No doubt the vague sense of urgency he was feeling was just residue from the wedding, which was now over. Laura and Andy were already in a limo headed for Boston, where they’d catch their flight to Paris. Had they agreed on that destination for their honeymoon? he wondered. Laura had spent her junior year in France and talked about returning ever since. But had Paris been Andy’s first choice, too, or had he been persuaded, the first tiny burr of resentment under the marriage saddle? Griffin banished the thought. They’d make their own marriage, not repeat his.

Lord, it was raining hard, he thought. Would it let up by the time they got to the Cape or would the deluge intensify, preventing the ash-scattering yet again? Was that what he was hoping for, another excuse? What did it mean that he had so little access to something as straightforward as what he really wanted? He considered turning the key in the ignition so he could at least use the wipers and the defroster, then decided to just sit there in his watery cave, rain streaming down the windows in solid sheets. When his cell phone rang and he saw HEDGES on the screen, he felt his heart leap, thinking it must be Joy calling to suggest he stop by for a quick debriefing, a well-by-golly-we-did-it-despite-difficult-circumstances moment, just the two of them, Ringo and Marguerite off someplace. They were owed that much, right?

Apparently not. It was only the manager calling to express his fond hope that the wedding had met or (yes!) even exceeded Mr. Griffin’s expectations. The resort had incurred a few additional expenses above and beyond the charges covered by the checks he’d already written (the mutilated yew?) but he didn’t feel it was right to pass these on. No, they were pleased to absorb any additional costs. He personally felt terrible about the collapse of the wheelchair ramp and the injuries it had caused. He hoped Mr. Griffin understood that such structures weren’t designed to accommodate so many people at once, all of them moving in the same direction, but still, he couldn’t help but feel responsible, if not in the legal sense, then in some other. “Moral?” Griffin helpfully suggested. Well, yes, something like that. Griffin told him that of course he couldn’t speak for the other guests, but he knew most of the people involved and doubted there’d be any litigation.

He hung up, and a moment later Marguerite thudded into the passenger seat beside him, soaked to the skin but otherwise as happy as a schoolgirl.

“What took so long?”

“I was saying goodbye to Sunny. He’s in the breakfast room. Do you want to go in? I think you should. It’ll only take a minute.”

“We said our goodbyes last night,” Griffin said. He liked Sunny a lot but had no desire to see him this morning, to yet again come face-to-face with his courage and optimism. He started the car, put the heater on defrost and waited for the windshield to clear, feeling Marguerite’s eyes on him. But when he finally turned to look at her, she was peering out the small patch of windshield that had defogged. “I think it’s going to clear,” she said.

Ambiguous pronoun reference, his mother piped up from the back, her first critical observation of the new day. Is she talking about the weather or the windshield?

“That’s not what the Weather Channel’s calling for,” Griffin said.

Marguerite leaned over and kissed his cheek. “It’s what I’m calling for.”

Oh, honestly, his mother said.

Griffin turned on the radio, which sometimes silenced her, just as a car careened into the drive and rocked to a halt in front of the B and B. Jared and Jason, oblivious to the downpour, leapt out and began chanting up at the second-floor windows, “Suh-nee, Suh-nee, Suh-nee!”

Griffin put the car in gear before they were noticed.

“Can you see?” Marguerite said.

“Well enough,” he told her.

Go! his mother urged him, as if they’d just robbed a bank and he was driving the getaway car. Go, go, go!

He turned up the radio.

His mother chattered to the rhythm of the wipers all the way to New Hampshire, where the rain stopped as abruptly as if a spigot had just been turned off. Twenty minutes later, when they crossed into Massachusetts, the skies cleared. “Voilà,” said Marguerite, as if she’d just performed a nifty parlor trick.

Oh, my, Griffin ’s mother said, she’s bilingual.

Having fled the twins earlier, he now almost wished they were around. Maybe he could get one of them to punch him in the head again and knock his mother out. And if he had to be knocked out himself, so be it.

Marguerite switched off the radio. “Okay,” she said, “tell me about your mother,” as if she’d also been listening to her running commentary all the way down the coast and decided it was high time to acknowledge the bitch. “I want to know all about your father, too.”

What she had in mind was to create personality profiles for each of them, so she’d know the right spot on the Cape when she saw it-a silly idea, Griffin thought, but he indulged her. After all, it wasn’t like he was wedded to a plan of his own. Moreover, when she’d proposed the idea the trunk fell silent, as if his mother (maybe his father, too?) was curious what he’d have to say about them. So, Marguerite began. What was her favorite color? Green. His? Blue. Where were they born? Buffalo (Dad). Rochester (Mom). And their favorite foods? Him, king crab legs; her, double-cut broiled lamb chops. Any hobbies? He collected P. G. Wodehouse first editions, vintage campaign buttons and Victorian pornography; she, after retiring from teaching, did thousand-piece monochromatic jigsaw puzzles and swore colorfully at the television whenever George W Bush appeared.

Marguerite’s curiosity was so benign and well meaning that Griffin gradually became more expansive. What were their favorite times of the day? Well, his father had been a morning person, he told her, up hours before he and his mother, especially on their vacations. He liked to go out for pastries and the newspaper. “You missed a great sunrise,” he’d inform his wife when she finally shuffled out onto the deck, midmorning, for a breakfast with Al Fresco. (“Al Fresco? Who was he?”) “Like hell I did,” she always replied. His mother’s favorite time of day was cocktail hour. She loved the sound of ice cubes in glasses, of jazz and gin-induced laughter, of lots of people talking all at once. So much better, to her way of thinking, than eavesdropping on smaller conversations where you could actually hear whatever stupid opinions people held. He told Marguerite about his father’s propensity for sudden, violent, rear-end collisions in parking lots, about his mother’s speech at her retirement dinner, even a little about the Morphine Narrative. And when she asked him, apropos of nothing, for a Christmas memory, he told her about their search, each December, for the perfect tree.

Though they professed to hate the season for its hypocrisy, for all that trumped-up seasonal “goodwill toward men” crap, his parents demanded big, full Christmas trees. Finding one that passed muster took days, sometimes weeks. They had to visit every lot within a ten-mile radius and carefully examine all trees over seven feet. The lot attendants went from smiling and helpful to frowning and exasperated and homicidal. Other tree shoppers queued up and then gave up while every tall tree on the lot was hauled out, stood up, vigorously shaken and twirled for a full inspection. Sometimes, just as it seemed a sale was imminent, Griffin ’s mother would sigh and say, “No, there’s a hole,” and his father would ask where, and she’d point and he’d cock his head and say, “Oh, right.” Most attendants, not knowing his parents, would sensibly suggest that the “hole” she saw might face in toward the wall, whereupon she’d sigh again and say, “Let’s keep looking.” Griffin remembered one old guy who said, after his parents had rejected a dozen trees, “Lady, maybe there’s something you don’t understand. Those holes you keep seeing’s the space between the goddamn branches. Wasn’t for the spaces, the tree would be solid fuckin’ wood.” He made a sweeping gesture that included the entire lot. “Every one of these trees got holes. It’s the holes that makes ’ em trees. Now, you want one or not?”

Other attendants, equally tired and frustrated, tried reason. “What kinda ceiling we looking at here?” Griffin remembered one asking, hoping at least to narrow the search. Of course his parents had no idea. A high ceiling was one of their requirements every year when they rented a new house or apartment, but as professional humanists it wouldn’t have occurred to them to actually measure. “Doesn’t matter,” his father would say. “We can cut a little off the top if we need to.” To which the man responded, “Look kind of funny, wouldn’t it?” At which point his mother might take the tip of a branch between her thumb and forefinger, give it a good tug and, if needles came off, complain, “When was this tree cut? Last August?”

Griffin came to understand that the perfect Christmas tree was a lot like the perfect house on the Cape, first because it didn’t exist in the real world, and second because all the imperfect trees fell into two categories. The first was the all-too-familiar Wouldn’t Have It As a Gift, and the second applied to just one tree: Well, I Guess It’ll Have to Do. He couldn’t remember ever voicing an opinion about the tree his parents finally agreed would have to do. The search over at last, his father would hand the lucky attendant a length of gray, weathered clothesline so the tree could be hoisted onto the roof of their car and secured through its open windows. Sometimes the clothesline would snap when they rounded a corner, sending the tree into the gutter. One year they didn’t even make it out of the lot. Griffin’s father, leaning forward so he could keep an eye on the tree strapped to the roof, backed into a parked pickup, and their tree leapt as if by wizardry into its bed.

Back home, they invariably discovered, by trying to stand the tree up, that it was indeed too tall, and with a curse his father would lay it back down on the floor. Some years the tree lay there in the middle of the living room for days while he canvassed his English department colleagues for a saw he could borrow. What he actually meant, they understood all too well, was a saw he could have, since he never once returned a tool. (The saw he’d borrowed the previous Christmas was no doubt hanging from a nail in the garage of last year’s rental.) Eventually, though, someone would come through, and that was when the real magic began.

The first cut never took quite enough off-here again, no measuring for the Griffins-and the second usually didn’t, either. The third would be off by a mere half inch, close enough if you forced matters (they always did), and the freshly cut top of the tree would leave a moist, six-inch, greenish-brown streak on the white ceiling, which no doubt puzzled the owners when they returned home from their sabbatical. The broken toaster oven, the missing eighth chair from the dining room set, the red wine stains on the shag carpet-these things could happen, but how on earth had the Griffins managed to scar the fucking ceiling? And of course the tree did look funny with its top sawed off. Their Christmas trees always looked to Griffin like they’d grown right through the ceiling, as if what you were looking at was just the bottom two-thirds, and if you went upstairs, the top third would be growing right out of the hardwood floor.

Once the tree was upright, Griffin ’s father would pick the lock on the closet where the owners stored the stuff they didn’t want ruined or broken, see what they had by way of Christmas decorations and berate their bad taste. His mother thought the prettiest trees were decorated all in white, with maybe a little silver for contrast, but Griffin himself liked all the blues and greens and reds and was grateful for other people’s lack of refinement. She claimed garlands were especially tacky, but he liked those, too. He was allowed to help decorate, of course, but he couldn’t remember ever hanging an ornament or icicle that his mother didn’t adjust later. Once the tree was finished, his favorite thing was to crawl beneath it, lie on his back and peer up through the branches, imagining other worlds, himself miniaturized and climbing ever upward, from branch to branch, among all the blinking lights and shiny ornaments, until the whole world lay below him.

One year-he must have been seven or eight-he’d crawled under the tree during his parents’ annual boozy Christmas party and watched the drunken kaleidoscopic proceedings from there. Over the course of the evening, two or three of their guests noticed him back there and asked his parents if he was okay, and they responded that yes, he was fine. He remembered feeling fine. His father had spiked the eggnog that afternoon, forgetting to reserve some for Griffin. His mother said he couldn’t have any of the spiked, but his father felt guilty about forgetting him and let him have a big glass before anyone arrived. During the party he kept wishing somebody would slide him a plate of Christmas cookies, but otherwise he felt warm and happy and tipsy tucked into his own private little corner. He’d fallen asleep there, staring up into the magical branches, and eventually one of his parents must have pulled him out because the next morning he woke up in his bed, the sheets full of pine needles. Which one of them had remembered him? he’d wondered at the time.

“It’s okay,” Marguerite said, taking his hand, and only then did he realize there were tears running down his cheeks. He was pretty sure he’d never told that story to anyone before, not even Joy. He might have expected all manner of comment from the trunk, but there wasn’t a peep.

After he’d gathered himself, he said, “Okay, enough about me. Tell me about your parents,” but Marguerite shook her head. “Let’s just say that if you knew them you’d understand how I ended up with a man like Harold.”

It was the first bitter thing he could remember hearing her say, and it begged an obvious question, one he didn’t want to ask but did anyway. “And a man like me?”

“Nobody’s ever been nicer to me than you,” she said, squeezing his hand. He appreciated the vote of confidence, he really did, until she added, “I’m going to miss that.”

He started to ask her what she meant when her cell rang. It was Beth, the woman she’d left in charge of the flower shop back in L.A., with a question about inventory. By the time Marguerite hung up, they were rumbling up onto the Sagamore Bridge. “What’s that you’re humming?” she wanted to know.

He’d been humming?

They scattered his father in a cove near Barnstable. It was serene there, with views of a marsh redolent of bluish-purple wildflowers and the sunrise. For his mother they chose a tidal inlet on the Atlantic side, mid-Cape. Across the water, a quarter mile away, sat a posh restaurant with a huge deck from which the breezes carried the sounds of moneyed voices and the occasional pop of a champagne cork and, when the wind shifted, the sound of surf. An older couple, strolling past when he was emptying his mother’s urn, saw what he was doing and came over to Marguerite, who was quietly weeping (as she’d done for his father), and offered her their condolences. “You take good care of her,” the woman told dry-eyed Griffin, as if she’d taken his measure at a glance and doubted he was up to the task.

Back in the car, Marguerite said, “Okay, I’ll tell you this much. My father hanged himself when I was a little girl.”

Now it was Griffin ’s turn to take her hand. “That’s terrible. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. I don’t really even remember that much about him. Only what my mother said to me.”

Griffin didn’t want to ask, but there was no way not to.

“She said, ‘There. Happy now?’”

When he suggested they splurge on a fancy restaurant in Chatham, Marguerite again scrunched up her shoulders and said, “I have a better idea. Let’s go back to that restaurant where we met.”

Griffin couldn’t imagine why she’d want to return to the Olde Cape Lounge-when he’d left her there with Harold last year, she’d been in tears-but if that’s what she wanted it was fine with him. Spending the evening around there made sense, making the morning’s drive to Logan and their flight back to L.A. that much easier.

Because he wasn’t sure he’d be able to find it again, they decided to look for the restaurant first, then book a room nearby. He meant to avoid the B and B where he and Joy had stayed, which he remembered (correctly) as being about half a mile down the road from the restaurant, but thought (incorrectly) there’d be someplace to turn back onto Route 28 before he got there. “Oooh, that looks nice,” Marguerite said when they passed the B and B, so Griffin, unwilling to explain why he’d have preferred anywhere else, turned around and went back. The same woman who’d checked him in last summer did so again, though if she recognized him as repeat business-no reason she should, given his massive dark glasses-she gave no sign. When she showed them to the same room he and Joy had occupied, he considered asking for a different one but decided not to. Late middle age, he was coming to understand, was a time of life when everything was predictable and yet somehow you failed to see any of it coming.

Exhausted by the day’s emotion and the long drive down from Maine, they took a nap before dinner. Marguerite awoke from hers refreshed and buoyant, while Griffin was slow and groggy, his already low spirits having ebbed even further. And why, for God’s sake? His daughter was successfully married and halfway to Paris by now. The checks he’d written weren’t going to bounce and, thanks to Marguerite, his parents were finally at rest. By rights he should’ve been ready to celebrate. Was he coming down with something? That would make sense. Like his parents before him, he often got sick whenever he could afford to, like at the end of the academic term. Back when he was writing movies with Tommy, he’d hand a just-finished script to their producer and sneeze in the same motion. So maybe.

In any event, for Marguerite’s sake, he meant to soldier through whatever this was. In the bathroom he swallowed a couple of ibuprofen (vowing not to call them I-be-hurtin’s anymore, even to himself) for the headache he felt gathering behind his eyes, and took a shower, hoping it might wake him up.

“Let’s dress up,” Marguerite suggested when he emerged.

“It’s not a very fancy place,” Griffin reminded her.

“Us,” she replied. “We’ll be fancy.”

And Griffin, knowing she was about to scrunch up her shoulders again, purposely looked away.

“Oh, good,” she said twenty minutes later when they slipped onto bar stools. “They’ve still got that funny sign.”

The Olde Cape Lounge was as mobbed as before, and the hostess had warned them it would be a good hour before they got a table. Marguerite seemed to enjoy being overdressed. Her outfit wasn’t one Griffin had seen before, but it was very Marguerite, showing plenty of skin, the kind designed to make Unitarian comedians perspire.

“How does it go again?” she said, squinting at the sign.

“Drink a couple of these and it’ll make sense,” the bartender said, setting down her cosmo and Griffin ’s martini. A communal joke, apparently, since this was a different bartender from the one last year. “You know there’s a law against spouse abuse in this state,” he told her and nodded at Griffin, who’d slid his dark glasses down his nose so he could look at the sign.

“But he’s not my husband,” she said.

“My mistake,” the man said. “In that case, do whatever you want.”

“I can’t remember how you’re supposed to read it,” Marguerite said when the bartender was gone.

At just such a juncture Griffin ’s mother would usually chime in, wanting to know where this bimbo had done her graduate work, but she was mum. In fact, now that he thought about it, she hadn’t voiced a single opinion since they’d left Chatham. Was it possible that by scattering her ashes they’d silenced her? Forever? That possibility, while remote, should have raised his spirits, but somehow it didn’t.

“Ignore the spaces,” he told her, putting his hand on the small of her back, where the skin was warm, almost feverish. “Let the words form themselves.” He was more determined than ever to show this generous woman the good time she’d earned. It wasn’t like she was hard to make happy. All she wanted was a little fun. “Where do you find such good-hearted women?” was how Tommy put it after they’d met, and he was right. Even after being married to Harold, Marguerite didn’t understand unkindness as an option, its myriad perverse satisfactions as foreign to her as the sign she was now laboriously translating (“Here… stop… and”) from English into, well, English. Next year, if they were still together and they were back at the Olde Cape Lounge, he’d have to teach her how to read the sign all over again, this despite the fact that the gist of it was her own personal philosophy of life in a nutshell.

But tomorrow she’d get him over the Sagamore Bridge and onto a plane and back to L.A. and… then what? When he tried imagining what would come next for them he couldn’t, though of course that had less to do with her than himself. It was his own future, with or without Marguerite, that refused to take shape. With the help of his new agent he could continue chasing low-end screenwriting assignments, teach a night class or two and cobble together a kind of living. But that hardly amounted to a future, or for that matter a life. The only good work he’d done in L.A. was “The Summer of the Brownings,” and he’d been paid for that in contributor’s copies. Not even a check there, never mind a future. Quit, he told himself. Stop thinking. Get through tonight without moping.

“Be… just… and… kind… and… devil…”

“And evil,” he corrected her.

“Oh, right,” she said, taking his hand and squeezing it. “Speak of no one.”

None, Griffin started to say, then stopped himself. “Words to live by.”

“And that old poop Harold said it didn’t mean anything.” She gave Griffin a kiss on the cheek, a kiss that might have been Harold’s, the gesture seemed to imply, if only he’d played his cards right. Marguerite enjoyed public displays of affection almost as much as the affection itself. Yet another contrast with Joy, who after their wedding had never kissed him except in private. He still recalled the keen disappointment he’d felt early in their marriage when it became obvious she wasn’t about to kiss or embrace him in front of her parents. Marguerite felt no such compunctions. She’d have kissed him (or Harold before him) in front of the pope, and the kiss would have been long and full of tongue. “Why do I feel guilty about being here and not calling him?”

“Harold? Now that is a mystery.”

She shrugged and went back to studying the sign, as if her translation had not unearthed all its secrets. “Imagine that boy figuring it out all by himself,” she said, then turned to face him. “It’s a shame he’s so in love with her.”

Griffin was pretty sure he’d never mentioned Sunny Kim’s lifelong devotion to Laura, which meant Marguerite had done some figuring out of her own. “He’ll be fine,” he said, draining the last of his martini and trying to sound more certain on this score than he felt. He considered telling her about Sunny’s own marriage plans but decided not to, afraid that in the telling he’d betray his own misgivings.

“I know. He’s smart and good-looking and he’s a lawyer,” she said. “It’s just a shame you can’t say yes to one person without saying no to another.”

She was talking about Laura, Griffin thought. Of course she was. Except that her expression was unfamiliar to him, a strange combination of sadness and foreknowledge that made him desperately want to change the subject and head off whatever she meant to say next. “I’ve been wondering what you meant earlier,” he said. “About how you were going to miss me being nice to you. Do you think I’m going to turn into that old poop Harold or something?”

“No,” she said. “I just meant I’m going to miss that when it’s over.”

“When what’s over?” But of course he knew, just as he knew that he hadn’t really changed the subject.

“Us,” she said, causing his heart to sink. “When you and I are over.” She scrunched her shoulders then, her signature gesture of delight, though he’d never before seen her do it in anticipation of anything but pleasure. “It’s okay,” she said, her eyes spilling over. “Really. I’ve known from the start.”

“No,” he said, shaking his head stubbornly like a child being told something he didn’t want to hear. Because if he accepted her conclusion, it meant that he’d failed yet again to accomplish a simple task, to get through the evening without making this woman cry and in so doing to outperform Harold. Was it possible to set the bar any lower? This was beyond demoralizing. Taking Marguerite’s face in his hands, he kissed her forehead, thinking as he did of that day so long ago, the first of the Browning summer, when he’d watched from the window under the eaves as his father drew his mother to him and told her that other women in his life meant nothing. Given their history of infidelity, Griffin had always assumed he was simply lying, but he saw now that in order to lie to his mother, he’d first had to lie to himself. How badly he must have wanted what he was telling her to be true. After all, his mother deserved that much, and if he could somehow make it true, that would prove he was a better man than he knew himself to be.

“Look,” he told Marguerite, another woman who deserved this much and more, “it’s been a rough trip. I couldn’t have done it without you. Any of it.” By which he meant not just today, not just yesterday, but indeed the long months since his mother’s death. “We’re going to have a nice time tonight, and tomorrow we’re going to get on a plane and fly back home to L.A. ”

Home to L.A. He’d meant to say something simple, clear and true, but a minor falsehood had somehow slipped in, because of course L.A. wasn’t home. “You and me, okay?” he continued, a nameless panic rising. “No discussion.”

Though here his voice faltered, because he knew as well as she did what came next, what words came next. If he could speak them, he might even convince her they were true, as his father had convinced his mother that Browning summer. It was the worst lie there was, imprisoning and ultimately embittering the hearer, playing upon her terrible need to believe. He could feel the I love you forming on his lips. Would he have said it if she hadn’t interrupted?

“See?” she said, wiping away her tears with the back of her hand and smearing her makeup. “Right there. That’s what I’m going to miss.”

He slept. It was after nine the next morning when he finally woke up, and perhaps because the last time he’d slept so long and so well it was in this same bed almost exactly a year ago, his first drowsy thought was that the preceding twelve months had been a dream. The door to the balcony was partly open, just as it had been the morning after Kelsey’s wedding, and on the other side of it a woman was talking on a cell phone, her voice low. Joy, he thought sleepily, talking to their daughter about her engagement to Andy, discussing the possibility of a wedding next spring. Later in the morning-there was no hurry-they’d drive to Truro and see if they could find the inn where they’d honeymooned. Which in turn meant that his mother was still alive in Indiana and that he’d not spent the last nine months in L.A. It meant he was a happily married man, that his wife had never accused him of being otherwise, that she’d never been other than happy herself. It was a fine narrative, plausible and coherent. He found himself smiling.

He heard her say goodbye outside, heard the cell phone’s cover slap shut, saw the door to the balcony swing inward. In another split second Joy would appear, and he’d beckon her back to their bed. But of course it was Marguerite who stepped into the room, trailing cruel reality in her wake. Sitting on the edge of the bed, she touched his forehead with the back of her fingers. “Your hair’s always funny after you sleep,” she informed him. He was about to ask whom she’d been talking to when she said, “Tommy says thanks for being so predictable.”

“Tommy,” he repeated. Why was it that every time a woman who was supposedly with him made a secret phone call, it was always to the same guy? “Predictable how?”

She was now running her fingers through his hair like a comb, apparently trying to make it look less ridiculous. “We had a friendly wager. I had this dumb idea we’d be stopping off in Vegas to get married. He bet you’d end up back with your wife.”

“What does he win?”

She smiled ruefully. “He gets to take me out to dinner. He said the way he looked at it, he’d come out of this with a good woman no matter what. He just wasn’t sure which one.”

“Tell him I said he doesn’t deserve a good woman.” As if any man ever did.

“I also called the airline and got them to change my flight.”

“Why?” Griffin said, suddenly alarmed. Had he hallucinated the proposal he’d reluctantly agreed to last night in the Olde Cape Lounge after it became clear that Marguerite’s mind was made up? They’d have a leisurely breakfast at the B and B, after which he’d drive her to Logan in plenty of time for her flight back to L.A. After that he’d drive down to Connecticut, to what had once been home and might be again. There, if possible, he’d reconcile with the woman he apparently still loved. If he failed, if it was too late to fix the mess he’d made, he still had his plane ticket.

“Well, the next few days are supposed to be beautiful here,” Marguerite explained, “and Beth says the store will survive a couple more days without me, so…”

“Uh-”

“Oh, don’t look so mortified. None of this involves you.”

“I don’t get it.”

“I made one other call, too.”

Griffin nodded, finally understanding. No need to ask who the other call was to.

“I better not hear you been mean to her,” Harold warned him an hour later. He was studying Griffin ’s still-swollen, now-yellow-green eye with interest. “If I do, I’ll make it so that’s your good eye.”

He’d pulled into the B and B’s driveway just as they emerged with their luggage.

“Harold,” Marguerite said, handing him her suitcase before Griffin could say a word in his own defense. “Quit. He wasn’t mean to me. Pay no attention,” she added to Griffin, who these days was paying close attention when anyone offered violence.

“Because this woman and I go back a long way,” Harold went on.

“On his worst day,” Marguerite elaborated, “he was nicer to me than you were on your best.”

“And when her mouth’s not running like a whip-poor-will’s ass, I have strong, serious feelings for her.”

“Go put the suitcase in the trunk, Harold, so we can say our goodbyes. Now, there’s a good man.”

He consulted his watch. “Will these goodbyes be concluded in a timely manner?”

“Are we on a schedule?”

“Yeah, after here, we’re driving down to Westerly,” he told her, forgetting Griffin entirely. “I’ve invested in a condo on the water there. Practically on the water. I thought you might like to see. There’s a couple of spots we could skinny-dip and nobody would mind. Take some dirty pictures with our cell phones. Plus they got good fried calamari with hot peppers.”

“Okay, fine, but go away for a minute.”

Harold reluctantly did as he was told, but, remembering Griffin, he stopped halfway to his car. “Did I mention I better not hear you were mean to her?”

“Ignore him,” Marguerite advised when Harold’s car door shut behind him. “It’s just how he is.” After she scrunched up her shoulders, they embraced one last time. “Write a movie with a girl like me in it sometime,” she suggested when they separated. “With Susan Sarandon. She’d make a good me.”

In Falmouth he gassed up at a 7-Eleven and he bought himself a sticky bun and a coffee for the road. He’d had no appetite back at the B and B, but after saying goodbye to Marguerite he was suddenly hungry and ate the pastry right there in the parking lot. It was ten-thirty, and normally it would’ve made the most sense to head straight up Route 28, cross the canal at the Bourne Bridge, then shoot across 195 to 95, but if he left now he’d almost certainly get home before Joy. The last of her family was flying out of Portland this morning, and there was no way she’d head back to Connecticut before they all were airborne. If he arrived before she did, he’d have an unpleasant decision to make: sit in his own driveway and wait for her or just use his key and go inside. The former would make him feel like the fool he was, but having walked away from that house last June he really had no right to enter it now without invitation.

He needed to kill an hour or two and was too antsy to just sit around. If he got going now and crossed the canal at the Sagamore instead of the Bourne, he could head up Route 3 toward Boston for a while, then loop back down I-95. The idea of crossing the bridge of his unhappy childhood one last time was appealing. Now that he’d finally scattered his parents’ ashes, he doubted he’d be returning to the Cape again. He felt finished with both the place and its false promises. Also, on the Sagamore he’d likely find out if his mother was really through haunting him or was just waiting for Marguerite, his guardian angel, to depart. When he knew for certain that she was at rest, he’d be able to think about what he’d say when he arrived home without fear of her sarcastic comments.

Wiping his fingers on a napkin, he adjusted the mirror, turned the key in the ignition and shifted into reverse. He’d have to apologize, of course, for everything he’d allowed to happen, but he knew it wasn’t really apologies Joy cared about. She’d been right all along that his parents, not hers, had intruded on their marriage with such disastrous consequences, which meant that he had to figure out how to convince her that all that was finally over, that they could begin again with a clean slate.

Clean slate. Those were the exact words in his head at the moment of impact. The sound was explosive: the initial boom, then the shattering of glass and the shriek of metal on metal, as the back of Griffin ’s head hit the padded rest. “Ow!” he said, rubbing his neck, just as he’d always done as a kid after one of his father’s rear-enders, all of which had occurred just like this one, completely without warning. Ow. A child’s word, and he’d spoken it in a child’s voice, full of grievance and resentment. He half expected to see a child’s startled, betrayed eyes, not his father’s knowing, sad ones, staring back at him from the rearview.

The driver of the other car, a teenaged boy with an acne-ravaged face, appeared at his window. “You okay?” he said.

Griffin couldn’t tell whether the boy was asking if he was hurt or why on earth he was laughing. Griffin rolled down his window and told him he was fine, just surprised.

“I don’t see what’s so funny,” the kid said tentatively, as if, given the difference in their ages, he wasn’t sure he was entitled to this opinion.

“Wait a few years,” Griffin told him, unlatching his seat belt and getting out.

The other vehicle was a late-model BMW. The boy had also been backing out. Griffin identified the parking space he’d just vacated, saw in his mind’s eye the perfect arc in space and time that had resulted in their violent meeting, each blind to the other’s existence until the instant of collision. Both trunks had sprung and were standing up at perfect right angles. Griffin tried to close his, but the lock mechanism wasn’t properly aligned anymore, and it popped right up again. Both sets of taillights were smashed, both bumpers crumpled. It was the kind of wreck that would’ve cost his father a few hundred bucks to repair, but today would run into thousands. Otherwise, the vehicles looked drivable. “I guess we should exchange insurance information,” he said.

At this the boy visibly wilted, as if the necessity were tantamount to admitting that, yes, they’d just had an accident, something he still hoped might be avoided.

Griffin got a pen and a piece of paper from the car and handed them to him.

The boy said, “Couldn’t we just…,” then lapsed into silence.

The cops would have to be called, of course, but when Griffin went back to the car he saw that the cup holder where his cell had been sitting was now empty. He finally located the phone on the floor under the rear seat. Its screen was black, and when he pressed the space bar it stayed black. He pressed several other keys and was about to give up when the screen suddenly leapt to life with a message: CALLING JOY. Before he could hit the button to disconnect, he heard his wife answer, her voice sounding tinny and far away.

“Joy,” he said. He was about to explain that he hadn’t meant to call when he realized that this might just be the moment of grace he’d been waiting for yesterday and had given up on. “Is this a bad time?”

“I’m in the car,” she admitted. “I’m surprised to hear your voice. I guess I thought you’d be halfway back to L.A. ”

He decided on a jaunty tone. “No, I’m on the Cape. I called to tell you it’s official. I’ve become my father. I just backed my rental car into a brand-new BMW. We scattered his ashes yesterday, and I think this might be his way of telling me I won’t be rid of him so easily.” When she didn’t immediately respond, he realized just how forced the jauntiness must have sounded. “We did Mom, too,” he continued more seriously. “Near Chatham. Her favorite part of the Cape.”

“Are you okay? Was anyone injured?”

“No.” To both questions.

Silence again. So why tell me about it? was what she must have been thinking.

“And here’s the really weird part,” he said, unsure whether he was just talking to keep her on the line or, in some roundabout fashion, finally coming to the point. “Since yesterday, maybe for a while before that, I’ve been wondering…” He stopped here, unsure how to continue, though what he’d been wondering couldn’t have been simpler. “I’ve been wondering if maybe I loved them. It’s crazy, I know, but… do you think that’s possible?”

“Oh, Jack,” Joy said, as if she would’ve liked to ask where in the world he’d done his graduate work. “Of course you did. What do you think I’ve been trying to tell you?”

In the rearview mirror Griffin could see the boy, pen in hand, staring blankly at the piece of paper, as if he’d forgotten his very identity.

“Jack?”

“I’m here,” he told her, then, a moment later, heard himself ask, “Is there anything left, Joy, or did I kill it all?”

She didn’t answer immediately, and he understood that the long, painful beat of silence was what he’d been dreading far more than the final verdict. “You came close,” she finally admitted, sniffling. “But no. You killed only the part that could be killed.”

They talked for another minute or two, though only about logistics. She offered to drive down to Falmouth, but he told her that wouldn’t be necessary. In a town this size he shouldn’t have any trouble finding a bungee cord to secure the trunk, his father’s time-honored solution and good enough for now. It’d probably take him an hour or so with the cops, after which, if the car was drivable, he’d be back on the road. They left it that they’d meet just over the Sagamore. They could have some lunch around there, call the rental-car company and find out what they wanted him to do with the wreck, then drive home together.

When he hung up, his mother said, There, was that so difficult?

Yeah, he told her, it was.

He expected a smart-assed retort but it didn’t come, and when it didn’t he became aware of an unfamiliar but extremely pleasurable feeling. How to describe it? Plumb. He was feeling plumb. Okay, maybe not completely, but no more than a half bubble off. Plumb some. As good as could be expected. He wondered if plumb might be another word for happy.

I think maybe I’m going to be okay, Mom, he ventured. Still no response. I guess what I’m saying is it’s okay for you to be dead now. Both of you. In fact, he added, afraid he’d given them too much leeway, I insist.

The boy was kicking impotently at the brightly colored shards of taillight glass when Griffin returned. He’d somehow written down all the necessary information, and his name was Tony Loveli. He was sixteen. “My father’s on his way,” he said. “He’s going to kill me. I just got my license last week.”

“Don’t worry, Tony,” Griffin said. “We’ll tell him it was my fault.”

The kid shook his head morosely. “You don’t understand. That’s not going to matter. He’s a divorce attorney. A complete and total fucking asshole.”

“Not complete,” Griffin said, though of course he’d never met the man, who might well be an asshole. “Not total.”

A fat gull circling overhead screeched a loud objection. Griffin watched it warily, but it was just a stupid bird, and after a moment, no harm done, it flew away.