WHEN I REMINDED Charlie on Monday morning that the Suttons were coming for lunch—Miss Ruby had called the evening before to confirm, and when I offered to pick them up, she’d said Yvonne would drive—he was shaving in front of the sink in our bathroom, and I was standing in the doorway. “No can do,” he said. “I’ve got an eleven o’clock tee time with Zeke and Cliff.”

“Charlie, I told you about this over a week ago.”

“Lindy, we’re making the offer to the Reismans tomorrow. With eighty-four mill at stake, don’t you think it’d be wise for us to dot some I’s and cross some T’s?”

“That’s what you’ll be doing on the golf course?” I folded my arms in front of me. “Don’t make me be a nag.”

He chortled. “Whether you’re a nag is up to you, but I’ve got an eleven o’clock appointment, and it would be unprofessional to miss it.”

I watched as he brought the razor down his right cheek, his mouth twisted to the left, and I felt such an intimate kind of anger. Was this what marriage was, the slow process of getting to know another individual far better than was advisable? Sometimes Charlie’s gestures and inflections were so mercilessly familiar that it was as if he were an extension of me, an element of my own personality over which I had little control.

I said, “If you don’t want to participate in social situations, then don’t, but it’s embarrassing to me and rude to other people when you say you will and then flake out.”

When he glanced at me, I sensed that his mood had deflected my comments completely; my words were like pennies bouncing off him. He said, “But you don’t want to be a nag, huh?”

“I’d think you’d try to go out of your way to be respectful toward Miss Ruby.”

He held his razor under the faucet for a few seconds, then brought it back up to his face. “Who gave her the impression I’d be here? Wasn’t me, darlin’. If this is so important to you, reschedule—see if they can do it next weekend. All’s I know is I’m about to buy a baseball team.”

“We’ll be in Princeton next weekend.” I took a step backward, into our bedroom. I would go downstairs and prepare lunch, and I’d welcome the Suttons to our home, I’d do this even if Charlie wouldn’t deign to be there and his mother didn’t approve. But first, in a voice so snippy I hardly recognized it, I said, “Don’t leave your whiskers in the sink.”

JESSICA SUTTON HAD grown probably a foot since the last time I’d seen her, and I knew as soon as we greeted the Suttons at the front door that she was, if not an adult, no longer a child. Some sixth-graders are still children—boys more than girls—but in other kids that age, you can see a new, unsettled awareness of themselves and the world. In the best cases, the awareness is also a politeness. When you ask them how they are, they reciprocate the question, and this was exactly what Jessica did, and then she said, “Thanks for having us over, Mrs. Blackwell,” and I felt a small heartbreak for Ella, who was most definitely still a girl and would, I suspected, have difficulty keeping up with the poised, mature young woman Jessica had become. I realized that the default image of Jessica I’d been carrying in my head was from an Easter-egg hunt years before at Harold and Priscilla’s (contrary to what Priscilla had implied, Blackwells did sometimes socialize with their hired help, but it was on the Blackwells’ turf, under circumstances that highlighted their beneficence and largesse without implying that they spent time with these people because they actually enjoyed it). That Easter, Jessica had worn a red skirt with purple stars and a matching purple shirt with red stars, and even her barrettes had been color-coordinated. Her hair had been divided into little squares all over her head, each square gathered into a small ponytail, braided, and clipped with a red or purple plastic barrette; as she dashed about, accumulating eggs in her basket, the barrettes clicked together. Now Jessica was tall and serious, and she was pretty—she wore a pink tank top underneath a pink-and-white-striped dress shirt that she kept unbuttoned, and white slacks—but she was hardly girlish at all.

As soon as she, Miss Ruby, Yvonne, baby Antoine, Ella, and I were settled on the brick patio in our backyard, Ella said, “Can I show Jessica my pop bottle?” and I said, “Honey, they just got here.”

Jessica said, “No, I’d love to see it.” The pop bottle was a prize Ella had won at Biddle Academy’s Harvest Fest the previous fall, a glass Pepsi bottle whose neck had been heated and stretched into distortion before the bottle, emptied of cola, was filled with a toxic-looking blue liquid. Though Ella had acquired this eyesore over six months earlier, it remained a fresh source of pride—when she was seeking to impress, she clearly considered it the most powerful weapon in her arsenal.

“Come back down in ten minutes to eat,” I called after them as they headed inside, and when the girls were gone, I said, “I can’t believe how much Jessica has grown up. And Antoine”—I leaned toward him, widening my eyes and opening my mouth —“I think maybe you’re the sweetest baby ever.” He wore a pale blue sleeper and had large brown eyes, a head of curly brown hair, and that perfectly smooth baby skin.

Sounding amused, Yvonne said, “Alice, you’re welcome to hold him.”

“Mind his head,” Miss Ruby said gruffly as Yvonne passed him to me.

In my arms, Antoine was ridiculously light—at two months, he weighed perhaps ten or twelve pounds—and I found myself making all sorts of semi-involuntary coos and gasps and funny faces, no dispensation of dignity being too great for the reward of his tiny smile.

“Maybe you should have another, you ever think of that?” Yvonne said.

I laughed. “I’m too old.”

Yvonne made a skeptical expression. “Oh, I bet you and Charlie B. still got some juice.”

“Watch your mouth, Yvonne Patrice,” Miss Ruby said, and at this, both Yvonne and I laughed. Miss Ruby had on turquoise linen pants, a turquoise short-sleeved sweater with scalloped sleeves, and flat sandals with turquoise straps, and Yvonne wore a flowered T-shirt and a long denim skirt. While Miss Ruby was slim, Yvonne had wide hips and thick upper arms, large teeth and lips, short hair that she fluffed up off her head, and, I noticed now, swollen nursing breasts.

“I’m sorry that Charlie isn’t here today,” I said. “We got our signals crossed, and he ended up scheduling a business meeting.”

Yvonne waved away my apology. “Clyde’s working at the hospital, so I know all about that. The doctors and nurses still gotta eat on Memorial Day.”

“You and Clyde were married last summer?” I said.

“He’s a real good guy.” Yvonne leaned forward, to where I held Antoine on my lap. “Isn’t that right, Baby A?” she cooed. “Papa’s a good man.” To me, she said, “Antoine looks just like his father, that’s for sure.”

“They always do at this age,” Miss Ruby said.

A few minutes later, when Ella and Jessica returned, I brought out the cold pasta salad I’d made, which had asparagus and chicken in it. With her mouth full, Ella said to all of us, “Want to hear what Jessica taught me?”

“Swallow, honey,” I said.

Ella had been sitting with one leg folded beneath her on a wrought-iron chair, and she stood, still holding her fork while she flung her arms in the air and twitched her hips:

“Basketball is what we do,
And we’ll cheer it just for you.
Shake it high and shake it low,
In the hoop the ball will go.”

“Impressive.” I clapped a little, and Yvonne and Jessica did, too, but Miss Ruby didn’t. I turned to Jessica. “Are you a cheerleader?”

“Nah, I just know that. Maybe in junior high, I’ll do cheer.”

“I hear from your grandmother that you’re quite an English student. What books did you read this year?”

Jessica shook her head, smiling. “Grandma just likes to brag on me. No, let’s see, we didn’t read too many books for English, we did more workbooks. The only real book we read is The Call of the Wild—you know that one?”

I nodded. “Of course, where Buck goes to the Yukon.” I turned to Ella. “It’s a book about a dog who helped pull sleds when men went looking for gold.”

Suddenly, and for the first time, Antoine began to cry, and Yvonne said to him in a singsong, “We’ll never send you to the Yukon. No, we won’t. So why are you crying, Baby A?”

“Pass him here,” Miss Ruby said. Yvonne rolled her eyes but obeyed her mother, and Miss Ruby walked him around the edge of the patio, gently patting his back. Within a minute, he was quiet.

“Most stuff I read isn’t for school, but I just like it,” Jessica was saying. “I’m into Agatha Christie, you ever read Agatha Christie?”

“Oh, sure, Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot. I haven’t read those for a long time, but I devoured them when I was a little older than you.”

“I just finished Murder on the Orient Express,” Jessica said. “Ooh, I loved that one! You ever hear of V. C. Andrews?”

“Oh, Jessica!” I couldn’t help voicing my disapproval, though I was laughing a little, too. “V. C. Andrews is so creepy.”

“Yeah, but you can’t put it down,” Jessica said. “Grandma, remember you came in one night at three in the morning, there I was in bed, I couldn’t stop reading. I just could not stop. Okay, Mrs. Blackwell, I bet you won’t like this, either, but you know the Harlequin romances? Some of those are good, they really are. The one that’s called Storm Above the Clouds, I’d say that’s my favorite because the lady goes to Rome, Italy.”

“You know I don’t mean to pick on you, Jessica,” I said. “It’s great you read so much.”

“My dad and me just finished The BFG,” Ella announced, and Yvonne indulgently asked, “Now, what does BFG stand for?”

“He only eats snozzcumbers, but he doesn’t like them,” Ella said, and I said, “Ella, maybe you should try eating things you don’t like.” To Yvonne, I said, “It stands for Big Friendly Giant—it’s by Roald Dahl.”

“Mommy, can Jessica go to the pool with us?” Ella asked.

“Oh, that water is way too cold,” Jessica said. “I dipped my pinkie finger in one time, and I pulled it right back out!”

“Can she?” Ella persisted, and I hoped, with great uneasiness, that it was not evident to anyone else that Jessica was talking about the pool at Harold and Priscilla’s—now that my parents-in-law were in Washington, they left the cover on it year-round—while Ella was talking about the pool at the Maronee Country Club. It wasn’t that black people were officially barred from the club, at least not as far as I knew, but even in 1988, there were no black members; club trustees would have said it was because none applied, because so few blacks lived in Maronee. Even the staff, the waiters and waitresses and bartenders, the lifeguards and the trainers in the weight room, were all white, with the exception of one housekeeper who looked to be Latina. Perhaps twice a summer, you’d see a black person at the pool—it was usually a child who’d been invited to a class birthday party—and around the pool’s perimeter, among the various swimmers and sunbathers, it was possible to feel a discomfited alertness; whether the discomfiture came from shame at the exclusivity of our club or outrage that the gates had been breached no doubt depended on the individual.

“And they have milk shakes, too,” Ella was saying and Jessica said, “Grandma, you been making milk shakes for Ella Blackwell and not for me?”

“No, at the club,” Ella said, and I was already talking over her, saying, “I don’t think anyone will be swimming anywhere today.” It had been sunny when we’d sat, but the sky had grown overcast, a washed-out gray. “Who wants to head inside for rhubarb pie?” I asked.

The Suttons had brought this dessert, and I’d exclaimed over it at length when Jessica handed it to me, then I’d hurried to hide the butterscotch cookies Ella and I had made that morning. We ate dessert in the dining room, and when we’d finished, Ella presented the gifts she and I had picked out the day before: for Antoine, from Miss n’ Master, a yellow romper and a very silly pair of shoes, little red leather booties that had baseballs above the toes—an impractical present that Ella had insisted we buy. For Jessica (it was under the guise of a sixth-grade graduation present, though really I hadn’t wanted her to feel left out when there were presents for Antoine), we’d gone to Marshall Field’s at Mayfair Mall and selected a Swatch watch that had translucent pink plastic straps and a pink flower on the face. Jessica fastened it around her wrist and was holding out her arm for us to admire when I heard Charlie’s voice in the front hall.

“Well, well, well,” he said, and when we all turned to look at him, he was grinning. “Am I allowed to crash a ladies’ lunch?”

“Look what the cat dragged in,” Yvonne said. “We thought you were working, Charlie.”

“How could I stay away?” he said. He had on pale blue shorts—not such a different shade from Antoine’s sleeper—and a white polo shirt and white socks; he’d left his spiked golf shoes in the hall. If there was any doubt about where he’d come from, he still was carrying his clubs, and in that moment, he set the bag against one wall of the dining room. His hair and shirt were damp, I noticed, and when I looked out the window, I saw that it had started to rain. “And this must be the man of the hour,” Charlie continued. He walked toward the car seat on the floor, where Antoine had fallen asleep. Leaning in, Charlie said, “That’s a darn good-looking baby. Nice going, Yvonne. Put it here.” He held up his hand for her to give him five, but before she could, he caught sight of the pie and exclaimed, “Vittles!” It was then that I realized he’d been drinking. After cutting himself a large slice of pie, he proceeded to scoop it up with his fingers. Silently, I stood and passed him my plate and fork, both of which he accepted, although he didn’t use them.

“Charlie Blackwell, you don’t have the manners of a barnyard animal,” Miss Ruby said, which made Ella and Jessica titter.

Charlie, too, was smiling. “Yvonne, if I didn’t have such an exalted mother of my own, I would have stolen yours years ago.” He wiped his hands on someone else’s napkin, then set a palm on Miss Ruby’s shoulder. “Jessica, your grandmother is a national treasure,” he said, and I wondered whether Miss Ruby could smell the alcohol on his breath.

“Daddy, listen to this.” Ella, who, during the present-opening, had been standing close to Jessica in a self-appointed supervisory capacity, took a step back from the table, but when everyone was looking at her, she abruptly shifted modes, ducking her head to one side and looking at us from beneath her eyelashes. In a quiet voice, she said, “Never mind.” This was a new affectation—there was a girl in her class named Mindy Keppen who would freeze when called on by a teacher, and when I’d explained to Ella what shyness was, it had captured her imagination. (Oh, my drunk husband and my darling, disingenuous daughter.)

“You want to show him the cheer, right?” Jessica said. “How about if I do it with you?”

Ella looked up, smiling and nodding rapidly. Jessica stood, and more or less in unison, they raised their arms and swiveled their hips from side to side.

“Basketball is what we do,
And we’ll cheer it just for you.
Shake it high and shake it low,
In the hoop the ball will go.”

For shake it high they rattled imaginary pom-poms above their heads, and for shake it low they brought them down to their knees.

“Outstanding,” Charlie said when they were finished. “Superlative!” My heart sank as he walked around the table and took his place next to the girls, saying, “So it goes, Basketball is what we do . . .” Giggling, they taught him the words. Ella was purely ecstatic, possibly unable to imagine a better scenario—standing beside a cool older girl, teaching cheerleader cheers to her father, with an audience—whereas Jessica was a good-natured participant but was also, I suspected, analyzing the situation, trying to figure out Charlie’s motives. Jessica and Charlie had known each other for her whole life and probably never had a real conversation.

When he’d memorized the words, the three of them recited the cheer together, and at the end, Charlie shouted, “Go, Brewers!”

Ella laughed and clutched at his belt, saying, “Not baseball, Daddy, basketball.” He lifted her into his arms, something I could no longer do, and the two of them grinned together. Clearly, this was the climax of the afternoon, and the Suttons sensed it; they soon stood to set their exit in motion, gathering Antoine’s diaper bag and car seat, the presents and the pie dish. I put on a raincoat and walked out to the car with them. In the driveway, I said to Jessica, “Do you have plans for the summer?”

She was carrying Antoine, and she nodded down at him and said, “Here’s my plans right here—Baby A and V. C. Andrews. No, I’m teasing about V. C. Andrews, Mrs. Blackwell.”

“Well, we loved having you all here,” I said. I thought of Ella’s upcoming activities: swim team, the art camp she’d attend the last week in June, then in July, we’d be off to Halcyon.

When I reentered the house and closed the front door, Charlie was no longer in the dining room. I carried the plates and glasses into the kitchen, pushing back and forth through the swinging door, and I could hear the television in the den. As I loaded the dishwasher, I realized I had a headache. How large and empty our house abruptly felt.

I had squeezed the sponge a final time and set it in its spot next to the soap dish when Charlie came in and pulled a beer from the refrigerator. “That was one handsome Negro baby.” He grinned, and I couldn’t have said if he was trying to provoke me or if he was simply being himself.

We stood there facing each other, standing about five feet apart, and I thought of berating him, but I didn’t have the will. I had the energy for a disagreement perhaps once every few months, not twice in one day.

“You’re awfully quiet,” he said.

“I have a headache. I’m about to go upstairs and read.”

“Aren’t you curious how golf went with Cliff and Langenbacher?”

“I assumed it got called off because of the weather.” I could hear the rain outside, soft but steady.

“You wouldn’t believe how pumped Langenbacher is to have me on board. It was Cliff who suggested me, which means I’m eternally indebted to him. But Langenbacher couldn’t be happier with what I’m bringing to the table—I’m a huge fan, I don’t have to fake that one bit, but I also have the business expertise.” Charlie’s cheeks were flushed, either with pleasure or with alcohol. “You’re not mad because I missed lunch, are you?” he said. “I’d say by the end, they got their money’s worth of the old Chas Blackwell charm. Come to think of it, maybe you were in cahoots with the meteorologists today.”

“As a matter of fact, your showing up was awkward, because I’d told them you were at a meeting.”

“I was.”

“A real meeting.”

“I was. Jesus, Lindy!”

“Then I guess I’m surprised Zeke Langenbacher doesn’t mind people drinking so heavily on the job.”

Charlie scowled. “What’s your problem?” he said. “This is a professional dream come true, and I don’t know why you’re being such a god-damn killjoy.”

“Of course I’m happy for you.” As if balancing out his force and volume, I spoke more quietly than usual. I said, “But I told you I have a headache, and I don’t feel very celebratory. My grandmother did just die.”

I had almost felt that I shouldn’t mention this, that however true, it was cheap, and the reminder would make him contrite but humiliated. I should not have worried. It is fair, I believe, to say that in that moment, he was glaring at me. He said, “For Christ’s sake, Lindy, she was ninety years old. What’d you expect?”

AS WE’D PLANNED, I walked to Jadey and Arthur’s house that evening before dinner, and as soon as she and I were a safe distance onto the golf course, she said, “Arthur came sniffing around my campsite this morning, but I ignored him.”

“Jadey, maybe you should give him a break.”

“Whose side are you on?”

“Both of yours,” I said, but I wondered if I had it in me to have the conversation; I wondered if I should have canceled the walk. Since the Suttons had left our house a few hours earlier, I had been hovering between two possibilities: a torrent of tears or else—and I recognized this possibility as worse—a shutdown of all systems. It was the first time in over twenty years, the only time apart from Andrew Imhof’s death, that I had felt the pull toward nothingness, and I knew the impulse was far more dangerous now; I had the responsibilities of an adult and above all was in charge of Ella’s wellbeing. But how soothing it would be to give up, to sleepwalk—to quit trying with Charlie, or expecting him to try with me.

Jadey said, “You might disagree, but I think my husband needs to work a little harder to win back my affection.”

We both were quiet—the storm clouds were long gone, sun shone through the leaves of the trees, the blades of grass glistened, and the locusts buzzed extravagantly—and I said, “Do you really enjoy playing these games with him?”

“Listen, not all of us have your perfect marriage.”

“Are you being sarcastic?” This was a far sharper exchange than the ones Jadey and I usually had, and I think both of us were surprised that it was still gaining momentum.

Carefully—it was to Jadey’s credit that the exchange did then begin to lose force—she said, “I didn’t mean to step in a prickly patch. I just meant that you have it easier than some of us.”

And then I did it, I burst into tears, and Jadey said, “God almighty, what did I say? Oh, sweet Jesus.” I had stopped walking and brought my hands up to my face, and she patted my back. “Alice, you know I love you to pieces. Is this about your poor granny or what?”

I wiped my eyes. “You think I have it easy?”

“Your husband worships the ground you walk on. Yeah, so Chas probably does drink too much, but you’ve got to pick your poison. At least you’re still hopelessly in love.”

“Jadey, I’m—I’m thinking of leaving him. Our marriage is far from perfect.”

“Leaving him like divorce?”

“I don’t know. I don’t even know how it works. Would I move out of the house or would he?” Speaking these words aloud to Jadey marked the first moment I had truly, realistically considered ending my marriage. For months, I had heard whispers—separation, divorce—and though it had seemed that they were carried to me on the wind, they were really coming from inside my own head. Even so: They’d been abstract ideas, escapes of last resort. “Or facing Maj, think about that,” I added. (Though I did not, could not, call her Maj to her face, I was perfectly capable of using the nickname when discussing her with others. Not to would have been overly formal, drawing attention to myself.) “She’d be furious with me. I almost feel like she wouldn’t let it happen, you know what I mean?”

“She doesn’t control us,” Jadey said. “Yeah, I know exactly what you mean, but when you get down to it, there’s nothing she can do besides cut you out of her will.” Was I even in Priscilla’s will? I doubted it, though Jadey’s point did raise the question of what shape my finances might take. Would I receive alimony? Would I be able to afford a house in this area, even a modestone, and in any case, how many modest houses existed in Maronee? Did anyone a round here rent? I’d get a job, of course, and in some ways, that might be a good thing, but supporting myself and Ella (that I wouldn’t have primary custody of her was unimaginable) when both of us were used to a decidedly privileged way of life would be a far cry from supporting myself as a single woman in Madison.

“Okay, what if Chas gets treatment for his drinking?” Jadey said. “What’s that place in Minnesota called? He could go there.”

“He won’t do that.” Would living the rest of my life with Charlie’s moodiness be worse than splitting up? Divorce, when I thought it through, sounded dreadful—doable but dreadful. “We’re going to Princeton on Friday,” I said. “Maybe it’ll help to get away from here for a few days.”

“Oh, good God, you have Reunions?” Jadey looked horrified. “Alice, all anyone does there is drink. You know that. Don’t make any decisions while you’re there.”

I gestured in front of us. “Should we keep walking?”

As we headed forward on the asphalt path, Jadey said, “Wait, it’s his twentieth, isn’t it? God almighty, Arthur’s baby brother is twenty years out of college—when did we get so old?” Her voice contained the usual dose of Jadey hyperbole, but beneath it was a note of plaintive sincerity. Then she said, “Alice, you two can’t divorce, you just can’t.” When I didn’t respond, she said, “Because I don’t think I can be a Blackwell without you.”

ELLA AND I were in the kitchen when Charlie arrived home from work on Tuesday, and as soon as I heard him close the front door, I nudged her. “Go give Daddy a hug.” In the twenty-four hours since the Suttons’ departure, Charlie’s and my interactions had been guarded but not outright hostile. We hadn’t spoken on the phone during the day, which was unusual but not unprecedented; though he tended to call in the midafternoon, it was possible he’d been busy with the Brewers transaction. The thought had crossed my mind to do something festive for him, to make a cake in the shape of a baseball, perhaps, but I felt too stung by what had happened the day before to go to the trouble.

Ella took off at a gallop, shouting, “Oh, dearest Father, say hello to your wonderful and beautiful daughter.”

This was just as I’d hoped—that her exuberance might compensate for my lack of it. But when Charlie entered the kitchen, I knew before he spoke a word that the deal hadn’t gone through. “Lloyd Reisman’s a fucking weasel,” he said. He loosened his tie and took a seat, and Ella promptly sat on his lap and began pulling on his earlobes; she didn’t react to his swearing, which had lost its novelty years before.

Charlie brushed Ella’s hands away. “He’s reneging on what he told Langenbacher, pulling this crap about how much we have to pay up front. Bunch of bullshit.” Charlie shook his head. “I need a drink.”

“So what happens next?”

“I have half a mind to tell him he can go fuck himself. He thinks he’s getting another offer like this one, he’s sorely mistaken.”

“Do Zeke and Cliff agree?”

Charlie sneered. “Cliff is ready to bend over and spread his cheeks for Reisman. Langenbacher says we should wait a few days, starve him out, but I don’t like having this stuff unresolved. Sell us the goddamn team or don’t, but don’t keep us in limbo.”

“But Reisman’s not the one delaying things, is he? If he’s saying he wants you to pay more on signing, and Zeke Langenbacher is refusing to—”

Charlie waved a hand through the air, a signal I recognized to mean This discussion has concluded. “You want burgers for dinner?”

“Sure. I’ll light the grill?”

In a robot voice, Ella said, “I will not eat a burger, please, thank you.” She was still on Charlie’s lap, and she poked the end of his nose. Could she not tell what a wretchedly bad mood he was in, or was it that her father’s moods were beside the point, subordinate to her own? In moments like these, I envied her.

“Cut it out,” Charlie said, and Ella-as-robot replied, “Will not cut it out. Do not know what cut it out means. Our planet is made of cotton candy, and we wear shoes on our ears.”

Charlie looked at me. “Can you do something?”

“Ella, I need your help.” I extended my hand, and she slid off Charlie and took it. Even standing that close, I did not kiss or embrace him, he did not kiss or embrace me, and I felt the shadow of my conversation with Jadey pass over us like an airplane on a sunny day. To Ella, I said, “Will you set the table?”

I DROPPED ELLA off at school the next morning, and I easily could have parked and walked over to see Nancy Dwyer—the admissions and financial aid office was down the hall from Ella’s classroom—but I didn’t want to go in without an appointment. Back at home, Charlie had left for work (he hadn’t planned to tell Arthur, John, or the rest of his family about his plans with the Brewers until the deal was final, a decision that seemed smart now). I went upstairs and took a seat at my desk in the second-floor hallway. As I dialed Nancy’s number, the ropy branches of a weeping willow outside stirred in the breeze, an enlarged reflection of the papier-mâché Giving Tree on my desk, and when Nancy answered, I said, “It’s Alice Blackwell. Am I catching you at a bad time?” The next day would be the last of the school year, though I knew that people in more administrative jobs tended not to abide by the same schedule as the teachers and students.

“Not at all,” Nancy said. “What can I do for you?”

“I hope this won’t seem too odd, but I—we—have some family friends, and there’s a girl who’s just finishing sixth grade—her grandmother is very close to Charlie’s family—and she’s quite smart, clearly a strong student, and I’m wondering if there’d be any way of squeezing her into the seventh-grade class for this fall.”

“You mean this fall as in three months from now?” Nancy laughed, but not unkindly. She and I didn’t know each other well. We had met when Ella was applying to Biddle as a three-year-old, an application that was a bit ridiculous in that it mostly entailed our confirming that she was potty-trained and wouldn’t bite other children, and also in that John was head of the board of trustees. Charlie joked that Ella would have had to make a bowel movement on the floor of Nancy’s office not to be accepted, and even then they probably still would have taken her.

“I realize it’s a long shot,” I said.

Nancy said, “But not necessarily impossible.”

“There’s more,” I said. “I suspect she’d need full financial aid, or close to it.”

“Oh, jeez, Alice.”

“She’s African-American,” I added. “I’m imagining that might help? But really, she’s just incredibly bright and nice, a leader in her church’s youth group, she’s on student council, and she’s a voracious reader. She’s graduating from Harrison Elementary, and she’s supposed to enter Stevens, and, Nancy, between you and me, the thought of this really promising girl—”

“No, I know,” Nancy said. “It’s heartbreaking.” She exhaled a long breath. “Let me have a think and get back to you. What I can already see that we’ll run up against is the financial-aid factor. Even though the incoming seventh grade will be big, we can usually make room for another. But the aid was allotted months ago, and it’s tight as a drum.”

Biddle’s endowment, I knew, was five million dollars, and I understood why it would be unwise to start draining it, but it was hard to imagine that fifty-five hundred dollars—the tuition for seventh grade—would make a difference.

“We could make her a top-priority candidate for the fall of ’89,” Nancy was saying. “But if the chance we can come through with aid is so slim this year, I’m hesitant to set the application process in motion—I don’t want to get her to campus only to turn her away.”

“No, of course,” I said. “I appreciate you even considering the possibility.”

“Give me her name.” I could hear Nancy rustling through pieces of paper.

I said, “Jessica Sutton,” going slowly enough for Nancy to spell it out.

“Now, Alice, I don’t mean to be forward, but the obvious person to talk to about this is your brother-in-law John. Have you spoken with him?”

“I wanted to run the idea by you first.”

“I’ll be honest. On the one hand, I don’t feel hopeful, given the timing. On the other hand”—Nancy chuckled a little—“we at Biddle do love the Blackwell family.”

BIDDLE’S LAST DAY of school officially ended at noon, at which point the children in each class were loaded onto buses and shuttled off to their respective end-of-the-year parties. For the third-graders coming to our house, I’d gotten hamburger meat—not Blackwell brand—and a sheet cake that said HAVE A GREAT SUMMER! in unnatural-looking red icing, several tubs of ice cream, and balloons in maroon and navy, which were Biddle’s colors. When I went to the party store to pick up the balloons, the clerk told me I was the second person that morning to request this color combination. Back at home, I called Jadey, who was hosting the seventh-grade party for Winnie’s class, and said, “Did you also get blue and maroon balloons from Celebrations?”

She laughed. “As I was placing the order, I even thought of doubling it and giving half to you.”

Two other mothers, Joyce Sutter and Susan Levin, came over to help with the party, bringing chips and condiments and two-liters of pop, and we unrolled the Slip ’n Slide in the backyard. Joyce positioned the hose nearby as Susan scooped the ground beef into hamburger patties. I was a little surprised to discover that neither of them knew how to grill, so I doused the charcoal in lighter fluid and dropped in a match myself.

We all hurried to the front lawn when we heard the bus, and we found third-graders everywhere, boisterous and disheveled. One boy tore his shirt off, shouting, “I call first on the Slip ’n Slide.” Many of the children were already in their bathing suits, with towels around their necks; they tossed their bags and backpacks at will on the grass. “Everyone, please go around back,” I kept repeating in my loudest and most authoritative voice. “The party’s in the backyard.”

Ella bounded over to me. “Where’s my starfish towel?”

“It’s in the kitchen. Remember, Ella—”

“Mother, I know,” she interrupted. “I’ll be a very gracious hostess.”

When she’d disappeared, Susan Levin stage-whispered, “Isn’t she becoming a looker? Alice, she’s the spitting image of you and Charlie.”

In the backyard, I’d set the grill away from the patio but in a spot where I could still observe the children on the Slip ’n Slide: the running start, the belly flop onto the wet yellow plastic—Joyce Sutter stood there continuously spraying the hose for maximum slickness—and then the long skid forward, arms first. I desperately hoped that no one would knock out their front teeth on a root or rock.

Ella ate her burger standing next to me, shivering in her wet swimsuit, and I said, “Get your towel, ladybug,” but she shook her head.

“I’m going again.”

“Don’t get a tummyache.” I scanned the yard. “Honey, where’s Megan Thayer?”

Ella shrugged.

“Did she come to school today?”

Ella thought about the question, then nodded.

“Was she on the bus?”

Ella shrugged again. “After this, can I wear my Addams Family dress?”

“Not while guests are still here.” I nodded across the patio, where a girl named Stephanie Woo was sitting by herself. “Why don’t you see

if Stephanie wants to play a game of H-O-R-S-E?”

“I’m going back on the Slip ’n Slide.”

“One game,” I said. Ella was obviously about to protest, and I said, “I thought you wanted to wear the dress.”

I set the top on the grill, closed the valve, and approached Joyce, who was standing by the pop table; Susan had taken over hose duty. “Would you mind keeping an eye on the grill while I run inside?”

In the house, I did a quick circuit of the first floor, which was empty except for the living room, where two boys—Ryan Wichinski and Jason Goodwin—were goofing around on the piano. Seeing them there brought me pleasure: Ella had so loathed the lessons I’d signed her up for that we’d let her quit after a year, and neither Charlie nor I could play at all. “You two are talented musicians,” I said as I stepped into the front hall.

Upstairs, the doors to all the rooms were open, and in the last one, the master bedroom, Megan Thayer was sitting on the floor, impassively paging through an issue of Penthouse magazine. Several more issues were spread out around her, and before I was close enough to see what they were—oh, that she might have been perusing The New Yorker, or gleaning decorating tips from House and Garden!—I knew.

It seemed she had not found the magazines right away. First she had tried on a few pairs of my shoes, then a few pairs of Charlie’s (they were scattered across the bedroom rug), and she’d sprayed herself with my lily-of-the-valley perfume—on my bureau, the cap was off the bottle, and the smell hung in the air—and she’d also dumped a jar of change Charlie kept on a windowsill onto the bedspread and separated out the quarters.

She looked up, and I am tempted to say the look she gave me was knowing, adult even, but to claim such a thing would only be an attempt to absolve myself. She was not knowing, she was not adult. She was nine years old, looking at photographs of women opening their legs, insolently thrusting out their abundant breasts.

I strode forward, swooping in to pull the magazine from her lap—she didn’t resist—and I said, “Megan, honey, that’s not appropriate for you.”

She simply watched me, saying nothing, slumping there with her dark hair and her broad shoulders.

“Did you go in there?” I pointed to the bottom drawer of Charlie’s nightstand, which, though it had a lock, he had apparently left open. “These kinds of magazines are for grown-ups, not children,” I said. “They have pictures that can be very difficult to understand.” (After the party, I started to page through a magazine, feeling that it would be responsible to know exactly what Megan had seen. I got to a spread of what I suppose was meant to be a “classy” woman: In the first shot, she was emerging from a limousine, wearing a fur coat and heels and nothing else; in the next, she was standing inside some sort of ballroom with her back to the camera, her buttocks on display, looking archly over one shoulder and holding up a flute of champagne. That was enough for me—I couldn’t look at any more, and I shut the magazine. It was so silly, the model was so painted and plasticky, the magazine’s notion of elegance was so inelegant, but it also seemed deeply strange, a violation of this woman’s privacy that I should know what she looked like unclothed. I couldn’t imagine why anyone would expose herself in such a way unless she was in the most desperate financial circumstances.)

Megan pointed to a magazine on the floor. “That one has a naked lady bowling.”

What on earth was I supposed to say? When her mother came to pick her up, I would have to explain what had happened, and the idea of confessing to Carolyn Thayer that her daughter had stumbled on my husband’s porn stash was about as unappealing a scenario as I could imagine.

“If you have questions about those magazines, Megan, I suggest you talk to your mom. I wish you hadn’t looked through the drawers, because those are private, and they’re not yours. But I’m also sorry about what you saw. It isn’t meant for a nine-year-old.” I hesitated. “And not all grown-ups look at these magazines. Personally, I don’t care for them.”

“Then why do you have so many?”

I’d asked for it, hadn’t I? Stalling, I gathered the magazines into a stack and deposited them back in the nightstand; naturally, I didn’t know where the key was. From outside, we could hear the sound of the kids shouting and playing in the yard. When I turned around, she still was sitting there. “I hope you won’t discuss this with Ella or your other classmates, because it would make them uncomfortable. All right?” I gazed at her—I was a big believer in the power of eye contact, and not only with children.

“This is a stupid party,” she said. “You don’t even have a pool.”

I forced a smile. “Well, isn’t it lucky that you do?”

“Only at my mom’s house.”

“Why don’t you come downstairs with me?” I said. “I’m about to cut the cake, and I could use your help.”

She stood, adjusting her shorts. So she wasn’t that uncooperative after all, I thought, and then she said, “I bet Mr. Blackwell likes those magazines because the ladies in them are prettier than you.”

She was not a sociopath, as Jadey had claimed, but she was obviously a girl who made herself as hard to like as possible, and thinking this allowed me to feel sympathy for her rather than irritation. The likelihood was that she’d be fine, she’d grow up and have a normal life like anyone else, but what struck me as we stood in the bedroom was that middle school and even high school would probably be very rough for Megan.

I said, “Megan, our families are old friends, and that’s how I know this hasn’t been an easy year for you. But you’re a very good, special person, and I hope fourth grade will be better. Now, I know Ella and some other girls are playing H-O-R-S-E, if that sounds like more fun than cutting cake.”

We walked into the hall, and when we reached the top of the stairs, she said, “I made a three-point basket.”

“That’s terrific,” I said.

“It was in our driveway, and my brother doesn’t believe me, but I really did.”

I patted her shoulder. “I believe you.”

OVER THE PHONE, Charlie said, “Put on your dancing shoes. You’re talking to the new managing partner of the Milwaukee Brewers.”

“Congratulations. That’s amazing, honey.”

“I’m thinking dinner at the club. You want to make a reservation?”

“Charlie, this is great, but would you mind if we eat at home? I need to pack for Princeton, we had a big afternoon here with Ella’s class party—”

“When’s the last time I suggested a night out?” It was true. Besides attending baseball games, it must have been months. “It’s time to celebrate, woman,” Charlie said. “It’s gonna be all over the papers tomorrow, but you heard it here first.”

“I assume you’ve told your family?”

“Just got off the phone with Dad, and I’m about to break it to Arty and John. Ooh boy, but my brothers are gonna be jealous. Should we say seven-thirty?”

“I’m thrilled, sweetheart, I really am, but is there any way I can persuade you that we should eat here? I’m still cleaning up from the party, and—Well, there’s something I want to discuss with you.”

“What is it?”

“I’d prefer to wait until you’re home.” It had turned out that Carolyn Thayer hadn’t picked up Megan, that Megan had left in a carpool driven by Joyce Sutter, which meant I’d had to call Carolyn. The conversation had proceeded about as disastrously as it could have—“I’m shocked that you of all people would let this happen,” she’d said, and also, “I hope you know Megan won’t be returning to your house.” And that’s a threat? I’d thought, but I’d been profusely apologetic. While talking to her, I’d realized, not having previously considered it, what a tasty morsel this could be for everyone we knew in Maronee. I might or might not have been able to prevent Megan from repeating to her peers what she’d seen (I shuddered at the thought of kids taunting Ella at swim practice), but would it be naive to hope for Carolyn’s discretion? Perhaps, to protect Megan, she wouldn’t share the story, but I knew that the pull toward gossip was difficult to resist. When I’d hung up the phone after talking to Carolyn, I’d felt the claustrophobia of Maronee, its intermittent oppressiveness.

“Is it something serious?” Charlie was asking.

“I promise we’ll discuss it tonight.”

“Gimme a clue. How many syllables? Rhymes with—”

“At the party, Megan Thayer went upstairs and looked at your copies of Penthouse.”

I cannot say I was entirely surprised when Charlie exploded with laughter. Didn’t I want to be told it was no big deal, that in feeling remorseful, I was being silly? “You think she’s a bull dyke?” he said. “She is built like a linebacker.”

“Just so you know, I had a very unpleasant conversation with Carolyn this afternoon, and I hope this doesn’t turn into some rumor that gets—”

He cut me off. “What conversation with Carolyn Thayer isn’t unpleasant? And darlin’, if word gets out that I look at Penthouse, it won’t be a rumor. You know what? I don’t give a rat’s ass. You think half the men in Maronee don’t beat off to girlie magazines?”

“So if Jadey found out, or Nan—”

He laughed again. “Their husbands are the ones who introduced me to porn. Calm down, all right? And call the club and tell them we want a table for seven-thirty.”

I paused and then said, “No. I’m sorry, but no—we have a big weekend ahead of us, and I don’t want to be frantic catching the plane in the morning. I need a quiet night at home so I can get organized.”

“Lindy, I bought a fucking baseball team today!”

“Don’t swear at me, Charlie.”

“Then don’t be such a bitch.”

I held the receiver away from my ear, as if I’d received an electric shock. How had we devolved to this point? That Charlie was crude wasn’t a surprise, but that he was crude toward me—it had not always been so. I had once believed he had a sweeter and more tender way with me than with anyone else, and it made all his vulgarity almost flattering by contrast. But now I was down in the frat house basement with everyone else, expected to chug beer and laugh at off-color jokes while my back was slapped a little too hard.

I thought he might be as disturbed as I was by what he’d just said, but when he spoke again, his voice contained not remorse but annoyance—he was annoyed with me. He said, “You enjoy your quiet night at home, all right? And I’ll see if I can’t find some folks more in the mood to celebrate.”

WHEN THE PHONE rang again, I hoped it would be Charlie, having cooled off, but it was Joe Thayer who said, “I heard from Carolyn about what happened at the party, and I—”

“Joe, I’m mortified. I can’t tell you how sorry I am. I hope you and Carolyn know—”

I had interrupted him, and now he interrupted me. He said, “I knew you’d be chastising yourself, and I’m sure Carolyn gave you an earful, but Alice, please don’t worry. Take it from me, Caro’s filled with a lot of anger these days. Now, everyone would prefer that this hadn’t happened, you as much as us, but if that’s the worst Megan ever gets exposed to, she’ll be a lucky girl. It just flabbergasts me what’s on television these days—have you seen the program Married with Children?”

“I’ve heard of it. Joe, thank you for understanding, but I hope you know I really am sorry.”

“Surely the magazines aren’t yours, Alice.” In Joe’s voice was a note of humor that I realized then had been there all along.

“Well, no,” I said. “No, that’s not the kind of thing I read.”

“Don’t forget how long I’ve known your husband,” Joe said. “I remember when he was a kid up in Halcyon doing the old trick with the Indian girl on the Land O’Lakes package.” I couldn’t decide if it was cute or depressing that Charlie had shown this same trick to Ella just a few months before—cutting out the Indian maiden’s knees and placing them at her chest so if you lifted a flap, it appeared she was propping up her own ample breasts. Apparently, even after three decades, some things never got stale.

“The first thing I thought when Carolyn told me, I have to confess,” Joe was saying, “is, If I had a wife like Alice, I wouldn’t be resorting to those rags. Charlie is a man who doesn’t recognize what he has, and when we hang up, you tell him I said that.”

Joe’s tone was cheerful, and I tried to match it. I said, “You’re kind.”

“Much more important for our purposes,” he said, “is that after I saw you at the gas station, I booked a ticket to Princeton for Reunions. I’d been so hung up on how discouraging it would be to go alone, and then I thought, That’s silly. Being among friends could be just what the doctor ordered.”

“Joe, that’s wonderful. Bully for you. Now do they have you wearing some sort of crazy black-and-orange kimono?”

“I waited so long to register that I’m picking up the outfit on campus, and I can only imagine what it’ll be. Let’s make sure to look for each other at the P-rade, can we do that? I fear you might be the only other sane person there.”

“Oh, you overestimate my sanity. I’ve been practicing my locomotive.”

“You know, I could never get Carolyn to learn the cheers,” Joe said. “Do you think I ought to have seen that as a sign?”

AS SOON AS we’d hung up, the phone rang again, and when I answered, Jadey said, “Did Chas buy the Brewers?”

I hesitated. “Sort of.”

“When were you planning to tell me?”

“It wasn’t final until today, so I just found out myself. You know it’s not only Charlie, right? It’s a whole group of investors, and his contribution—Well, I’m sure it’s less than you’d think.” The irony was that with Jadey’s inherited money, she and Arthur probably would have been in a position to make a far more significant investment. Had it been only chance, Arthur’s decision not to attend the game on that Sunday, that had excluded him from the deal?

Jadey said, “Are you gonna get us the best box seats ever?”

I laughed. “The ones we already have aren’t so bad.”

“Call me the minute you get back from Princeton, okay? I swear it was a hundred and fifty degrees at Arthur’s twentieth, but we still had so much fun. And remember, Chas’ll probably tie one on this weekend, but cut him some slack, because so will everyone else.”

I thought of telling her about what had happened with Megan Thayer, and maybe also about Charlie calling me a bitch, but Jadey and I would have found ourselves in a forty-five-minute conversation and I had too much to do. Besides, I didn’t want Ella to overhear. “I’ll call you on Monday,” I said.

____

FOR ELLA’S DINNER, I made toast with melted mozzarella cheese—pizza toast, we called it, though there was no tomato sauce involved, and its resemblance to pizza was rather fleeting—and for myself, I reheated a leftover burger from the class party and dipped it in Dijon mustard; if Charlie was hungry when he came home, he could eat a burger, too. Because it wasn’t a school night, I let Ella watch The Cosby Show—she adored the character of Rudy, and Theo was her second favorite—and she lay on our bed in her ridiculous black dress while I packed, walking between her room and ours. I called to her, “I assume you want to bring Bear-Bear.”

“Don’t pack him yet!” she exclaimed. “I need him for tonight.” Bear-Bear wasn’t a conventional plush toy but more of a rag doll, covered in a patchwork of reddish fabrics. My mother had made him when Ella was born, and he was the only animal who still shared her bed every night.

A Different World came on after The Cosby Show, and after that Cheers, which I had never let Ella watch, and Charlie still wasn’t home. How many nights would play out like this, how many nights would I let play out? When the phone rang yet again, I assumed once more it would be Charlie, and once more I was surprised. “Mrs. Blackwell?” said a female voice I knew but couldn’t place immediately. The voice was not only female but also young and tentative. “It’s Shannon.”

“Of course,” I said to our babysitter. “How are you?”

“Um, I’m sorry to bother you, but—”

“Is something wrong?” I asked, and Ella looked over from the bed. The phone was cordless, and I carried it into the hall.

“The reason I’m calling is, um, I just saw Mr. Blackwell.” A spiral of anxiety began to uncoil inside me; it was like a warm, thin piece of wire. I thought what Shannon would say next was with his car rammed into a telephone pole, and what she actually said was not much more reassuring. She said, “Um, we were at Herman’s?”

“What’s Herman’s?”

“It’s a bar.”

“And you ran into Mr. Blackwell there?”

“No, I, um, I went there with him. He called I guess a couple hours ago, and he said was I free, could he pick me up because he wanted to talk to me. I thought—I don’t know, I just, um, assumed it was about Ella. And when I was in the car, he said did I want to, um, have a drink.”

“Where is this Herman’s place?”

“It’s on Wells, near campus. I guess the reason I’m calling is, um, he had a few drinks, do you know what I mean?”

The wire spiral inside me exploded; little pieces raced in my bloodstream. So the rammed-into-a-telephone-pole possibility still existed; his date with the babysitter could be in addition to, not instead of, an accident. And campus—she meant Marquette, where she was a sophomore—was four miles from where we lived. I tried to sound calm as I said, “About how many drinks did he have?”

“Um—” She paused. “Um, five, maybe? Or six? We were only there for like an hour. Sorry, Mrs. Blackwell, but I just thought you should know.”

“No, I appreciate your calling. When he left the bar, did he say if he was coming home?”

“I don’t know, sorry. He said he bought the Brewers, so that’s cool, I guess.” She laughed in a small, awkward way.

“Did he—” I could hardly speak the words, but it would be unfair to make her speak them, even more unfair to force her to keep his secret. “Did he come on to you?” I asked, and my voice sounded strangled.

Quickly, she said, “No, no, he was just chatting. He was talking about baseball and stuff. He was in a good mood, and then he dropped me off back here.”

He’d had five or six drinks in an hour, then gotten behind the wheel with Ella’s babysitter beside him and driven her home?

“Shannon, I can’t tell you how sorry I am. Mr. Blackwell acted very inappropriately, and you handled the situation exactly right.”

“I wasn’t, like, scared. I mean, I know Mr. Blackwell. I just hope he gets home okay.”

Even as she said it, I heard him in the driveway, the engine and then seven or eight honks in a row. He sometimes did this, an announcement of his arrival.

“I promise it won’t happen again,” I said.

WHEN I REPLACED the telephone receiver in its cradle, my heart was beating rapidly.

“Who was that?” Ella asked, and I said, “A friend of Mommy’s you don’t know.” A detergent commercial flashed on-screen, and downstairs, Charlie entered the house and then he was ascending the steps, singing. He was singing “When Johnny Comes Marching Home.”

“When Johnny comes marching home again

Hurrah! Hurrah!

We’ll give him a hearty welcome then

Hurrah! Hurrah!

The men will cheer and the boys will shout

The ladies they will all turn out

And we’ll all feel gay when Johnny comes marching home.”

He knew only the first verse, so he started it again as he entered the bedroom, leaning in to kiss me—my bitchiness had apparently been forgiven—and Ella leaped off the bed and proceeded to tackle him. He lifted her and turned her upside down, and when her dress fell over her head, he tickled her bare belly. She shrieked and writhed, clawing at him, and beneath the fabric, she, too, was attempting to sing: “ ‘The ladies they will all turn out . . . ’ ”

Charlie made the last line operatic, elongating it, and then he tossed Ella on the bed, and she scrambled around until her dress was righted and immediately attempted to climb back up him. When this didn’t work, she raised her arms, saying, “Lift me,” and Charlie said, “You’re breakin’ my back, Ellarina. What do you weigh now, a million pounds?” He pushed her onto the bed again, tickling her, saying, “Someone’s sure been eating a lot of hot-fudge sundaes! Someone’s been chowing down on extra-large pizzas!” She laughed so hard that tears streamed out of her eyes, laughed a gaspy, screaming, red-faced laughter that even as a child, I had never been seized by. Under my anger toward Charlie, I felt impressed in a distant way I’d felt many times before—it was undeniably a talent to be able to change a house from sparsely inhabited and sedate to loud and raucous just by entering it, to be your own party, your own parade. And they were so happy, my husband and my daughter, that I couldn’t reprimand him; I only watched as they goofed around. Charlie said, “Hey, Ella, you want to hear what I bought today?”

“A hot-air balloon!” she shouted.

“Even better.” Charlie grinned. He actually didn’t seem that drunk; cheerful, yes, but perfectly coherent. “I bought the Brewers baseball team,” he said. “You ready to go to lots and lots of ball games?”

“Yay!” Ella cried.

Charlie looked at me. “Nice to see that someone appreciates it.”

“Can Kioko Akatsu come?” Ella asked.

“Honey, Kioko would have to take a twelve-hour plane flight to get here,” I said.

Ella began clapping and then held Charlie’s hands with her own, trying to make him clap. In her imitation of an adult man, she intonated, “I am the best baseball player who ever lived. You are the stupidest person in the world.”

Charlie broke his hands free of her hold and pressed them against the sides of her head. “I am the champion of Milwaukee, Wisconsin,” he said. “You are the suckers with nine-to-five office jobs.”

WHEN I CLIMBED into bed, it was a quarter to twelve, and Charlie was lying on his back with his eyes shut. I sensed he wasn’t asleep, though, and I said, “I think we should pay for Jessica Sutton to go to Biddle.”

His eyes opened, then scrunched into a squint. He sounded confused rather than confrontational when he said, “What the hell are you talking about?”

“I can’t stand the idea of her being at Stevens. I called Nancy Dwyer in the admissions office to see if it’s too late for Jessica to start in the fall, and it sounds like they can fit her in to the seventh grade, but they’ve already allotted all the financial aid.”

“That just reminded me.” He rolled onto his side. “Guess who I saw tonight?”

“If you don’t mind, I’d like to focus on the conversation we’re having.”

“Just guess.” He grinned.

Coldly, I said, “I know who you saw, and I don’t think it’s funny at all.”

“You have no idea!” He still was jovial, pleased with himself.

“Charlie, Shannon called me as soon as you dropped her off, and she seemed very rattled, which I can’t blame her for. Do you have any idea how you must have come across? You’re twice her age, you’re her employer. I don’t know that we can ever ask her to sit for us again, and even if we do, I doubt she’ll say yes. I wouldn’t if I were her.”

“You’re nuts—she had a great time. She’s a solid person, real salt-of-the-earth. Did you know her dad’s a plumber?”

I was sitting up, leaning against the headboard of our bed, and I folded my arms in front of me. It was hard to know how to respond, hard to explain something so blazingly obvious. I took a deep breath. “She’s our sitter,” I said. “You’re forty-two years old, and you took her to a bar.”

“But it’s okay for you to take Miss Ruby to a play?” He smirked, and I understood: I’d been set up. He’d orchestrated his evening for the sole purpose of asking me this question. It was the reason he had picked Shannon, of all people—not because he’d enjoy her company but to teach me a lesson. And it was the same reason that since Shannon’s call, I had felt deeply troubled without feeling romantically threatened or betrayed as a wife. Charlie just wasn’t a philanderer. A flirt, yes, with men as well as women, but I couldn’t picture him embarking on a real affair, the subterfuge and logistical complications. Though he might mock or humiliate me, he would not be unfaithful.

I said, “You know what the difference is.”

He shrugged. “Housekeeper, babysitter—seems pretty similar to me.”

Our eyes met, and I wanted to slap his face or shove his chest. Instead, I pushed back the covers and stood. “What’s wrong with you? Can’t you see this isn’t a joke? And Shannon told me how much you drank—what if you’d been pulled over? What if you’d crashed your car and gotten yourself killed, or if you’d killed someone else?”

He rolled onto his back again, this time leaning on his elbows. Slowly, calmly, he said, “Alice, I’m not real sure you’re in a position to be lecturing me on driving.”

It was amazing—in the last few weeks, each time I thought Charlie had said the worst thing he possibly could, a few days would pass and he’d outdo himself. Furiously, I strode around the foot of the bed, and when I’d reached his nightstand, I yanked open the lower drawer, pulled out the issues of Penthouse, and flung them at him one after the other. “You’re awful!” I said, and I had a dim knowledge that I was shouting, and that Ella was asleep a few doors down, but I felt power-less to quiet myself. “You’re a spoiled brat, and you have no regard for anyone except yourself! You think that life is so amusing, so easy, and the only reason that’s true is that you’re insulated by being rich. You’ve always had people doing the dirty work for you, getting you in to schools, offering you a job at the family company, offering you a base-ball team, for God’s sake, and now you have me to smooth over all your odd, offensive behavior. But I’m tired of it, Charlie, do you understand? I’ve had enough. Just because you never get in trouble, it doesn’t mean you haven’t done anything wrong.”

There were no magazines left. Charlie was shielding his face with his hands, a gesture of self-protection, and in the space between his fingers, his expression was surprised but still not entirely serious. It seemed he was holding out hope that I was kidding. I turned on my heel, walking toward the door.

“Lindy—” he said. “Jesus, will you calm down—”

I went to the guest room and shut the door behind me, and I was shaking. How could Charlie and I possibly remain married? And then I heard footsteps in the hall, and I was glad he had come to fight it out, it seemed somehow adult of him, or at least this was what I thought until I heard a tiny voice say, “Mommy?” When I opened the door, Ella began to cry.

WE ALL WERE quiet on the flight to Newark, just as we’d been quiet at the house in the morning and quiet driving to the airport, and the quiet continued as we picked up the rental car and merged onto I-95 South. Charlie seemed to be waiting for a sign from me, and I did not provide it; I barely met his eyes. Ella, too, was unusually watchful, looking tentatively between us. In the kitchen that morning, Charlie had shown Ella the article in the Sentinel about the Capital Group’s purchase of the Brewers, and though his demonstration was subdued, I sensed that it was as much for my benefit as for hers. I didn’t read the article myself.

Waiting for our plane, I had wondered if we might run into Joe Thayer, but it appeared we were on a different flight. Instead, we saw Norm and Patty Setterlee—Norm was a Princeton graduate from the class of ’48, and he lightly punched Charlie’s bicep and said, “Just promise we’ll never let the White Sox win again.”

On the plane, with Ella in the seat between us, Charlie had said to me, “I’ve given it some thought, and I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if Jessica Sutton is eligible for a scholarship.”

Ella looked up from the book she was reading, which was Bunnicula. “What does eligible mean?” When neither Charlie nor I responded, she pulled on my sleeve and said, “Why is Jessica eligible?”

“It means qualified for,” I said. To Charlie, I said, “That’s what I was trying to explain. She probably would be, but they’ve given out all the financial aid for the upcoming school year.” I tried to sound matter-of-fact—calm and civil, not overheated, as I’d been the night before. If I was seriously thinking of leaving him, there was no reason to be anything but cordial.

Charlie said, “It’s an admirable thought on your part, there’s no doubt about that, but this isn’t the ideal time for us. I’m unloading a huge chunk of our assets for the purchase of the team, and I want to be prudent in other areas.”

I said—civilly, I hoped—“Do you know what the tuition for a seventh-grader at Biddle is?”

“Five grand? Six?”

My plan had backfired. “Fifty-five hundred,” I said. “But”—calmly, matter-of-factly—“that’s a fraction of the savings you’re using for the Brewers. It’s almost unnoticeable, isn’t it?” Why was I still arguing for this? Even if I could convince him now, if I told Charlie I was leaving, there wasn’t a chance he’d go through with it.

“We’re not just talking for one year, though,” Charlie said, and he, too, sounded like he was trying his utmost to be conciliatory. “Let’s say she enrolls for the fall, we pony up the fifty-five hundred, and then Nancy Dwyer says, ‘Whoops, clerical error, turns out there isn’t money for her in next year’s budget, either.’ At that point, we’re not going to yank Jessica out, are we? If we signed on, we’d have to assume we were signing on for the next six years.”

He wasn’t wrong, but still, he could spare what would amount to forty thousand dollars. It wasn’t nothing, but we—he—could do it. Besides, wasn’t part of the incentive of buying the Brewers the likelihood that eventually he and the other investors would make a profit? My impatience swelled; really, this conversation was only an opportunity for him to show his thoughtfulness. He’d ultimately reject the possibility, but he wanted credit for having examined it from all angles.

“I guess that’s true,” I said, and I went back to my New Yorker.

In the rental car, we hardly spoke until we were near campus. From the backseat, Ella said, “I’m hungry.”

I turned. “They’ll have food in the tent, but snack on these.” I pulled a plastic bag of pretzels from my purse.

“I don’t like pretzels.”

“Since when?”

“Since always.”

“That comes as news to me.”

Charlie, who was driving, said, “Then I guess you won’t mind if I have a few.” He reached toward my lap, wriggled his hand into the bag, scooped up most of the pretzels at once, and shoved them into his mouth. His cheeks bulged, and crumbs collected on his shirt as he chewed and, his mouth still full, he made the Cookie Monster noise: “Nom, nom, nom.” Ella giggled, and he grinned at her in the rearview mirror. Then he swallowed and glanced at me. “Hope you weren’t saving those, ’cause if you were, I can give ’em back.” He jerked forward and to the right, pretending to vomit: “Blegggggh.”

“That’s disgusting,” Ella cried—the performance clearly pleased her—and I said, “Will you watch the road?”

We parked behind the New New Quad and made our way to the twentieth-reunion tent. I had accompanied Charlie to his tenth reunion, in ’78, when we’d been married under a year, and to his fifteenth, in ’83, when Ella was four, and both times my reaction to the campus was similar to the one I had now: that it looked, in its perfection, more like a movie set of a college campus than a real campus; that you initially resisted its charms as you’d resist the advances of a handsome, charismatic man at a party, knowing that he probably flirted with everyone.

Its buildings were Tudor or Victorian Gothic, brick and marble and ashlar blocks, with many-paned Palladian windows, with crockets and finials and coats of ivy (I had not realized prior to my visit in ’78 that the ivy in the Ivy League was literal). There were towers and turrets and arches you walked under, arches that were shaded enchantingly, that smelled like learning and promise. There were the grassy quads bisected diagonally by walkways, and at the front of campus there was Nassau Hall, the first structure you saw upon entering FitzRandolph Gate, built of sandstone, grand and upright and sprawling; on either side of its front steps, bronze tigers whose coats were silvery-green from age and exposure sat guard. And then there were the students, the graduating seniors and also the underclassmen who’d stayed on to work at Reunions—among them our nephew Harry and our niece Liza—who were smart and sporty and privileged. Being at Princeton felt unfair in the way our lives in Milwaukee sometimes felt unfair, unfair in our favor. I could see Ella eyeing these nineteen- and twenty-year-olds, and I knew they were creating formative ideas for her of what it was to be a college student when, in fact, a student at Princeton University was as representative of a larger type as a thoroughbred racehorse or a Stradivarius violin.

The twentieth-reunion tent was in Holder Courtyard. Like the other reunion tents constructed at various locales around campus, it was massive—perhaps thirty by forty feet of white canvas supported by three interior poles—and at its entrance were black wooden signs with the class years in orange, and orange lightbulbs over the numbers: on top 1968, and below 1966, 1967, 1969, 1970. The tent held a wooden dance floor, a raised stage for the bands that would play that night and the next, a long buffet table covered in an orange paper tablecloth (I spotted some not terribly appetizing-looking turkey sandwiches as well as some cookies that were more tempting), and many round tables surrounded by folding chairs where, already, men in orange warm-up suits and floppy white hats sat drinking beer and laughing loudly. Besides the main tent, there were smaller tents where Bud and Bud Lite were free and on tap, along with water, all served up by student bartenders—at present, by a tanned, good-natured young man wearing an orange bandanna. Charlie had graduated from Princeton before it went coed, and a certain manly feeling pervaded the setting, despite the presence of wives in black-and-orange silk scarves, black or orange blouses or wraparound skirts, wives carrying purses made of woven orange grosgrain ribbons or, in one case, a wooden handbag, like a miniature picnic basket, on one side of which was painted Nassau Hall; I also saw two separate gold tiger pins with emeralds for eyes. The children wore university paraphernalia, and face-painting occurred in a corner of the tent, kids’ cheeks being adorned with black and orange stripes and whiskers.

We walked to the registration booth, where a very pretty girl who had a long blond ponytail and wore an orange T-shirt gave us our room assignment in a dorm called Campbell (I’d previously sent in the reservation form—staying in a dorm would be much more fun for Ella, I thought, than staying at the Nassau Inn). She then directed us toward the pickup line for linens, which was overseen by another girl, also pretty, who was hanging out a first-floor window of Holder, distributing sheets and towels.

Already Charlie had said hello to perhaps twenty men, some of whom I recognized, some on their own and some accompanied by their wives. There were many warm exclamations, bear hugs, backslaps, mild bawdiness: “You’re shitting me, right?” said a fellow named Dennis Goshen, grabbing the bottom hem of Charlie’s jacket. “You still fit into this thing?” Since we’d left Milwaukee, Charlie had had on the socalled beer jacket from the year he graduated: a cotton jacket featuring an illustration of a tiger lying passed out atop an hourglass, its feet splayed, its curving tail forming a 6 and the top and bottom of the hourglass forming the 8; a mug of beer was slipping from its paw.

In greeting, Charlie’s classmates would lean in and kiss me on the cheek, and to Ella, they’d make a pseudo-outrageous proclamation about Charlie. Tapping Charlie’s shoulder with a pointer finger, Toby McKee said, “Spring of ’68, for nothing but a cold six-pack, this guy got me to type his entire thesis. A hundred and twenty pages, and I even corrected his lousy spelling!” Or, courtesy of Kip Spencer: “Don’t even get me started on the time your old man talked me into stealing the clapper from the bell on top of Nassau Hall!”

There’d be inquiries into our lives in Milwaukee, and eventually, I realized Charlie was prompting them, asking his classmates if they were still practicing medicine in Stamford, or still at that ad agency in New York. When they turned the question around, Charlie would say, “Matter of fact, I’ve got a new gig—just went in with a group of fellows to buy the Milwaukee Brewers.”

“The baseball team?” a classmate might say in response. “Not bad!” Or “Holy smokes!” Or, in the case of a guy named Richard Gibbons, “Oh, man, I’m so fucking jealous!” Then Richard glanced at Ella and mouthed to me, Sorry. The more enthusiastic the reaction Charlie had elicited, the more modest he’d become. He’d say, “I was lucky to be in the right place at the right time” or “If you look at the ups and downs of our last few seasons, you know I’ve got my work cut out for me.” Only one person called him on his false modesty. Theo Sheldon said, “Come off it, Blackwell, you’ll be in pig heaven! When you’re out there playing catch with Paul Molitor, you think of schmucks like me filing briefs, and that ought to alleviate your pain.” I wondered again if Charlie had arranged the baseball deal in time to crow about it here, but it was hard to imagine he’d had that much control; it truly seemed, as events in Charlie’s life often did, to be serendipitous.

We went to drop our suitcases in the dorm room, which was actually a suite and perfectly serviceable except that the bathroom was a floor below us, and though we’d been gone only a few minutes, the tent seemed twice as crowded on our return. I helped Ella get food. Kip Spencer and his wife, Abigail, had a daughter Ella’s age named Becky, and the girls soon paired off and were racing around. They reappeared with their faces painted, then they appeared again with the paint smudged, and by that point they were part of a gang of ten or more children, and Ella seemed to be having a ball.

I was surprised to be able to relax, settling in to the afternoon. All around me the men in their ridiculous orange-and-black garb seemed to be getting drunk and jolly, Charlie himself was in high spirits, and the other wives and I would exchange indulgent smiles. By four P.M., the idea of ending my marriage seemed less a definite plan than a fragment of a dream. The tension between Charlie and me had dissolved, and though I was on the periphery of most conversations, this had never been a dynamic I minded; I’d always liked to be around loud, laughing, friendly people. When the men broke into a locomotive, or when they referred to Princeton as “the best damn place of all,” which was a line from a school song, they seemed terribly sweet to me. And Charlie was solicitous in a way he rarely was anymore, asking whenever he went to get a refill of beer if I’d like one, too. (Everybody drank out of plastic cups whose tiger icon was different, depending on which tent you were in.)

Dinner was a pleasantly mediocre buffet in the tent, chicken and scalloped potatoes and salad and brownies, and then a Motown band got started, and they were terrific: seven black men in matching pale blue suits and one black woman in a white tank dress who sang “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” and “(Love Is Like a) Heat Wave” and “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg.”

The kids were the first to start dancing, Ella and Becky and the other children, mostly arhythmically but quite happily, punching the air and jumping up and down, and soon the adults had joined in. Charlie was a wonderful dancer; I hadn’t discovered this until a few months into our marriage, when we attended his brother John’s thirty-fifth birthday party, a black-tie gathering at the country club. It wasn’t that Charlie was necessarily the best dancer in any setting, though he was good. But what made him so much fun to watch and to dance with was how uninhibited he was, how thoroughly he seemed to enjoy himself, how he was both confident and extremely silly at the same time. For “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” he shimmied several feet away, turned his back to me, bumped out his rear end, looked grinningly over his shoulder, and hopped backward, one hop for each line—“Ain’t no mountain high enough / Ain’t no valley low enough / Ain’t no river wide enough.” He soon was sweating profusely, and then he was dancing with Pam Sheldon, the wife of his classmate Theo, and I was dancing with Theo, and then Charlie was dancing with Theo, and Pam and I were standing there laughing. Around his peers, it was striking to me how fit and young-looking Charlie still was—many of them were bald or heavy or just seemed worn out beneath their cheer, but Charlie was as handsome as when we’d married. Really, his appearance had hardly changed.

Around nine-thirty, to Ella’s delight, our nephew Harry and our niece Liza showed up, Harry in the beer jacket for that year’s graduating class, and they both were festive and, I suspected, inebriated, Harry more so than Liza. Liza and Charlie danced while Harry and Ella danced, then Harry danced with me—like his uncle, Harry was deft on his feet (I’d have to tell Ed and Ginger that forcing him to attend dancing school had paid off ), and he was flirtatious in the meaningless, endearing way that rich, handsome, self-assured twenty-two-year-old men can be. He would be spending the summer in Alaska, the bulk of it working at a hatchery (this was something else I hadn’t been exposed to before marrying into the Blackwell family, the inclination to travel great distances and invest substantial amounts of money in order to do strenuous and possibly grubby work that subsequently would make for excellent storytelling: my nephew Tommy, Harry’s brother, had spent a summer in high school in a program that built roads in Greece; Liza had volunteered at an orphanage in Honduras; and several of them had participated in Outward Bound or NOLS trips). After the hatchery, Harry would be met by his two brothers and Ed, and the four of them would go on a two-week chartered fishing expedition in northern Alaska; on their return, Harry would start a job as a researcher at Merrill Lynch in Manhattan. Given all this, of course the world looked to my nephew like a joyful and inviting place, of course he was drunk and happy on the eve of his Princeton graduation.

After Harry and Liza moved on, I was surprised to look at my watch and see that it was after eleven. I scanned the tent for Ella—she and a little boy were doing their nine-year-olds’ approximation of a tango—and I told Charlie I was taking her to the dorm to go to bed. I felt a little negligent that it was as late as it was and tried to absolve myself by recalling that in Wisconsin, it would be an hour earlier.

“After you get her settled, come back out.” Charlie almost had to yell to make himself audible above the music. “It’s completely safe, you know that, right?”

I shook my head. “I’d rather not leave her alone, but stay out and enjoy yourself.” I was sure this was what he’d do anyway, without my encouragement, but I wanted to be generous toward him for a change, to give his pleasure my blessings. I’d heard some of the men talking about heading over to the eating clubs—Charlie had belonged to one called Cottage—and I was just as happy to miss this portion of the evening. The eating clubs seemed to me like nothing more than pretentious fraternities (as the place where upperclassmen ate their meals and held parties, they occupied a row of mansions on Prospect Avenue, and to join, a student “bickered,” a process that appeared negligibly different from rushing), but the clubs inspired such passionate feelings that surely I was missing something. As an undergraduate, Charlie had served as Cottage’s bicker chair, and all this time later, the only bill in which he took real interest—he’d make a point of asking if I’d paid it—was the club’s annual dues, then eighty-five dollars. Cottage had started admitting women in 1986, following a lawsuit filed by a female student, and while Charlie was disdainful of this woman’s “strident feminism,” he didn’t seem to mind that Cottage had gone coed.

Standing beneath the twentieth-reunion tent while the band played “Dancing in the Street,” Charlie said, “You sure you don’t want to come back out? It’ll be more fun with you around.”

It was such a kind, plain statement that I felt my breath catch. I did not see myself as fun anymore, certainly not from Charlie’s perspective. I stepped forward and kissed him on the lips. “I wish I could. Don’t forget to pace yourself—there’ll be a lot going on tomorrow, too.”

He gave a salute. “Bring Ella over here to say good night.”

Eventually, after I’d pried Ella from her new friends and she’d kissed Charlie on the cheek, we walked back to the dorm. As we went down a flight of stairs and under an arch, she said dreamily, “I love Princeton.”

THE P-RADE—the heart and soul of Reunions—started around two on Saturday. Thousands of us had lined up by class year on Cannon Green, and as we waited, there was much rowdiness, much drinking of beer (Princetonians are the only people I’ve ever encountered who can drink as much as Wisconsonians and still remain agreeable and upright), and classmates were constantly running into one another and exchanging excited greetings. It was a sunny day in the high seventies—the weather was always of great interest beforehand, whether it would be brutally hot or torrentially rainy—and by the time the parade finally started, the energy of the crowd was uncontainable. Leading the parade were members of the class of ’63, who were celebrating their twenty-fifth reunion—the year considered to be a pinnacle of sorts, though really, I thought, these men were only forty-seven! I looked for Joe Thayer; amid the chaos of bodies and noise and sunshine, I didn’t find him. Next came the oldest graduate who’d made it back—in this case, a gentleman named Edwin Parrish, from the class of 1910—who had the honor of holding a particular silver cane; Mr. Parrish rode in a golf cart driven by a current student, and as he passed, people roared their approval. After the oldest graduate, the order continued chronologically, oldest first, and each class was announced with a class-year banner that ran between poles, the fabric black with orange trim, the numbers orange. For the older classes, known as the Old Guard, the banners were carried by undergraduates or alumni’s grandchildren; for the subsequent classes, they’d be carried by the alumni themselves. Many of the Old Guard were ferried by golf cart, and in some cases, it was not the men but their widows who rode, a sight that I was scarcely the only one to find poignant; I noticed people all around me tearing up. When a member of an older class was walking—a remarkably spry fellow from the class of 1916, who had to be well into his nineties, was practically tap-dancing—the crowd would cheer at a deafening level. In every direction, as far as you looked, there were orange warm-up suits, orange and black blazers and pants and T-shirts, baseball caps, straw boaters encircled by orange and black ribbons, children and adults alike wearing furry tiger tails. Some graduates drove antique cars that they honked jovially, and in celebration of themselves, the major reunion classes had arranged for special performers—brass bands from local high schools, a belly dancer, even a fire-eater—who preceded the class. Charlie leaned over, grinning, and said, “Rich people are bizarre, huh?” This was, of course, my drunken comment to him at Halcyon, and as he squeezed my hand then dropped it to applaud for the class of 1943, I thought that at least in one way, I had not been wrong when I agreed to marry him: He had made my life more colorful.

We waited, and waited some more, and then the class of ’65 passed by, the class of ’66, the class of ’67—they were to our left, they’d been beside us all this time—and at last it was our turn. We fell into step behind them, and Ella got Charlie to start up a ’68 locomotive: Hip! Hip! Rah! Rah! Rah! . . . All the classes younger than Charlie’s cheered as we walked by, and we waved as if we were dignitaries. The parade route ended on the baseball field, where we stayed—Ella insisted, so that we could see Harry—until the last class, the graduating seniors, sprinted out and were officially decreed by the university president to be Princeton alumni. “When I go to Princeton, I want to live above Blair Arch,” Ella said.

“Then you better get a good draw time,” Charlie replied.

“And you better work hard in school,” I added.

BECAUSE I TRIED to be an organized person, I had always appreciated organization in others, and I must say this: Princeton reunions were spectacularly well executed. All those tents and temporary fences and folding chairs and tables, the beer kegs and matching outfits, the academic talks and the a cappella groups performing around campus at thoughtfully scheduled intervals! The planning that went into the weekend boggled the mind, yet it all proceeded beautifully, seamlessly. For kids, two movies were being screened that night in McCosh 10, Back to the Future and Splash, while a Beatles cover band played in our tent for the adults. As we ate dinner—tonight it was barbecued pork, potato salad, corn on the cob, and corn bread—Charlie was both fidgety and extremely affectionate. I ended up in a long conversation with a classmate’s wife, Mimi Bryce, whom I’d first met at the tenth reunion and who was a fourth-grade teacher at a private girls’ school outside Boston; we spoke for probably forty minutes, during which Charlie approached me three separate times, saying, “Come on and shake your groove thing, Lindy” or “Charlie Blackwell waits for no one, and he won’t wait for you.” Finally, he just tugged at my hand, and I apologized to Mimi as I let him pull me toward the dance floor.

“I was enjoying talking to her,” I said.

“They’re playing ‘Can’t Buy Me Love,’ and you’d rather discuss a fourth-grade curriculum?”

The band was actually near the end of “Can’t Buy Me Love,” and they segued into “Twist and Shout,” which Charlie knew all the words to and animatedly serenaded me with, pointing at me, contorting his face into soulful expressions: “You know you twist so fine (twist so fine) / Come on and twist a little closer, now (twist a little closer)—” He beckoned with one finger, and when I stepped forward, he twirled me. For the “shake it up” part at the end, he raised his arms above his head and really shook them—he wore the orange warm-up pants and a white polo shirt, and there were large sweat spots beneath his arms. At the conclusion to the song, he pulled me to him, grabbing my rear end, kissing me hard on the mouth, and he said, “You want to go fuck in the dorm really fast before Ella gets back?”

“Charlie.”

He grinned. “Why not? Won’t take long, I promise.” And then he reached up and squeezed my left breast. “It’ll be fun.” I took a step backward. The dance floor was crowded, the whole tent was crowded, and no one seemed to be paying attention to us, but still, I was stunned.

“Charlie, we’re not animals,” I said. “You can’t do that in public.”

“Maybe you’re not an animal. I’m a tiger, baby.” His face was flushed.

“I hope you won’t drink anymore.”

He smirked. “Why don’t you go talk to Mimi again? I hear she has some fascinating insights on Dr. Seuss.”

I took a deep breath. “I’ll try not to ruin tonight for you if you try not to ruin it for me.”

He still was smirking. “Lindy, you couldn’t ruin it for me if you wanted to.”

At that moment, a classmate of his named Wilbur Morgan approached us and jabbed his thumb toward Charlie—he seemed unaware we’d been arguing—and said to me, “Word on the street is that this guy just bought a major league baseball team.” He turned to Charlie. “All right, Mr. Hotshot, true or false?”

“Morgy, I’m hoping you’ll play shortstop.” Charlie patted Wilbur’s gut. “You need to start training, buddy.”

“No fair!” Wilbur shook his head, smiling widely. “It is no fair that you ended up with the best freakin’ job in the world. I’d give my left nut!”

“Funny, I never thought you had a left nut,” Charlie said, and Wilbur said to me, “Has he changed one iota?”

I smiled wanly. “If you’ll excuse me.” I headed toward the water tent and had just accepted a plastic cup when I turned and found Holly Goshen, Dennis Goshen’s wife, beside me. “You’ve got to stay hydrated on a night like this, huh?” she said. Dennis and Holly lived in New York, where Dennis was a trader on Wall Street and Holly was an aerobics instructor. We had been at their wedding in the early eighties, at the Rainbow Room, and Holly was, as one might predict of an aerobics instructor, thin and attractive, with wavy blond hair. We stood there sipping, observing the activity. To make conversation, I said, “I assume you two are headed back to New York in the morning?”

She nodded. “This is awful to say, but Alice, I’m so glad I’m not the only one here whose husband still does blow. You’re such a nice, normal person that seeing you is really reassuring.”

“Whose husband still what?” I repeated.

“I didn’t mean it like—” She laughed nervously, and I could tell she thought she’d offended me. “Boys will be boys, that’s all I meant. Some of the guys Dennis works with, they’re freebasing every night of the week, and he can’t do that anymore, thank God. He’s forty-two!”

“Are you telling me that Dennis and Charlie used cocaine tonight?”

“I thought—” She seemed increasingly uneasy. “I saw them headed off together before dinner, so I just assumed—I’ve put my foot in my mouth, haven’t I? Can we forget I said anything?”

I felt a strong desire to say, Charlie wouldn’t use cocaine, but as soon as I thought it, I also thought of his odd behavior this evening, his physical forwardness.

And it wasn’t Holly’s fault, she had nothing to do with it, really, but I’d been drained of the energy necessary to smooth over this moment. I set down my plastic cup. “I have to go.”

THOUGH I NEARLY collided with Joe Thayer outside the tent, I didn’t recognize that it was him for several seconds, until after he’d said, “You’re just the person I was looking for. I caught sight of you in the P-rade, but I was being carried along with the current and I didn’t—Are you all right? Alice, my goodness, what’s wrong?”

I’d been trying very hard not to cry, but I didn’t succeed. It was the sympathetic expression on Joe’s face, the kindness of his features. People were steadily entering and leaving the tent, and I probably knew many of them. Though a few tears had escaped already, I pressed my lips together and shook my head.

“How about humoring me by making me think I can help in some way?” Joe said. “Shall we stroll for a bit?”

I nodded, still unable to speak, and he set one hand lightly at my elbow, guiding me down the stairs and through the arch that led to the dorm where we were staying, except that in front of Campbell, we veered left, heading toward Nassau Hall. The campus was dark, the night air warm; it smelled like early summer. A good ten minutes must have elapsed before either of us spoke. Early on in the silence, I felt that I needed to pull myself together and say something, but I realized at some point that Joe wasn’t waiting for an explanation—it was more that he was offering his presence, his company. I had stopped crying well before we reached Firestone Library when I said, “Have you ever tried cocaine?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I realize it’s trendy in certain places, but I just—I never thought—” Back in our twenties, Dena had told me that she’d done it a few times during her years as a flight attendant, but she and possibly her sister Marjorie were the only people I knew who had.

“Would it be forward of me to ask why this has come up?” Joe said.

We were between the library and the chapel, an imposing Gothic cathedral that looked a bit haunted in the dark, and I pointed at its steps. “Should we sit?” We took seats side by side. The moon was half full, the stars tiny and far above us. I said, “I think Charlie may be high right now, that he may have—You say snorted, that’s the terminology, isn’t it?”

“I believe it depends on the form of cocaine, but sure.” If Joe was startled by what I’d told him, he didn’t show it.

“You don’t think he’s in danger healthwise?” I said. “He isn’t about to have a heart attack, I shouldn’t call a doctor?”

“I’m out of my depth here, too, I admit.” Joe crossed his ankles. “But as far as I know, the real threat is overdosing, and if he’s upright and able to carry on a conversation—”

“He makes me feel so silly,” I said, and Joe did not immediately respond.

After a while, he said, “I don’t think you’re silly for being concerned. Is this a habit with him?”

“I wish I knew. I found out about tonight a few minutes ago, and he wasn’t the one who told me. I don’t think—forgive me, Joe, for saying this to you of all people—but I don’t think I can stay with him. Every day, every few hours, I go back and forth, as if everything he says or does is proof that I should either stick it out or leave. It’s starting to make me fear for my sanity.”

Again, Joe was quiet for over a minute before saying, “You never know the nature of another couple’s marriage, do you? I’ve always thought the two of you seem wonderfully complementary. But I’ll tell you what else—that weekend you and Charlie got engaged, we were stunned. My extended family, I mean. We heard about it, and we were only just getting to know you, but we thought, That sweet, sweet girl is marrying Charlie?”

Simultaneously, I felt my lips curve up and my eyes flood. With the back of my hand, I wiped my nose. “The engagement didn’t happen in Halcyon,” I said. “We were already engaged, but we didn’t tell people right away.”

“I met you down on their dock, remember that?” Joe said. “I came back from fishing with Ed and John, we puttered up, and you were standing there in a yellow dress”—(he was right, that yellow knit dress with the collar, I had forgotten all about it)—“and I thought—I suppose I’m only admitting this because it was so long ago and because I’ve consumed more than my share of Bud Light tonight—but I thought, Who’s that gorgeous girl? I was dumbstruck. Then Charlie took your hand.”

The truth was that I didn’t remember meeting Joe. I remembered meeting Charlie’s parents that day, and Jadey later that night, when I’d foolishly allowed myself to get drunk, and I remembered knowing Joe later on, talking politely to him, when he seemed handsome and reserved and maybe the slightest bit dull, when it never occurred to me that I registered with him more than anyone else’s wife. Did I register with him more than other wives?

“That was an overwhelming visit,” I said. “God bless the Blackwells, but—I’m sure you understand. That’s what’s so nice about talking to you, Joe, that I don’t have to explain.”

Joe shook his head. “Look at us,” he said. “Do you think we should find some undergraduates and warn them to be careful whom they pick to spend their lives with?”

“As if they’d listen.”

We sat there on the steps in companionable silence; we could hear the distant songs of a few bands playing at once in different tents. “I suppose I’ve always nursed a small crush on you,” Joe said. “In light of both our circumstances, it’s made me stay away. Not literally, I don’t mean, but to keep myself at a distance.” When I didn’t reply, he said, “I hope I’m not making you uncomfortable.”

“Joe, I’m honored.” I patted his knee in what I meant to be a friendly way, though as soon as I’d done it, I realized it might have seemed flirtatious, and in fact it may have been flirtatious. I had lost my bearings—I had started losing them before, at some indeterminate point, and now they were gone entirely.

“I won’t try to advise you on what’s happening with Charlie,” Joe said. “That’s none of my business. But if there was ever a chance, and I know, with Halcyon and my family and his family, I know we’d be opening a can of worms, I’m well aware, but if you ever thought the two of us—”

I cut him off by kissing him. I leaned forward abruptly—gracelessly, I suspect—and I pressed my mouth against his, and we kissed hungrily, and at first it was all-consuming, it was forbidden and wrong and exciting, but very little time had passed before I became aware of an unflattering comparison between the way he kissed and the way Charlie did. Joe was not as adept. It had been so long since I’d kissed anyone besides my husband that I’d forgotten there could be variations on it, or skill involved, but Joe—I felt cruel noticing this—drooled a bit, there was an excess of saliva that accompanied his tongue and lips. I pulled away and quickly stood. I brought a hand to my chest. “Joe, I—I don’t—I need to find Ella.”

He stared at me with passion.

At a loss as to what else to do or say, I made a gesture that was not unlike curtsying. “Forgive me,” I said, and I hurried away. I did not even have the excuse of attributing my behavior to alcohol: Joe, by his own admission, had been tipsy, but I’d been perfectly sober.

BACK IN THE dorm, once Ella was asleep, I packed—our flight out of Newark was at one on Sunday—and the questions that sprang up in my head felt clichéd and overwrought, as if perhaps I’d heard them asked by a naive wife in a movie, or a public service announcement on TV about drug addiction: How many times before and how often and why? Maybe when I said why to Charlie, my voice would quaver, and that would reveal just how betrayed I felt.

But no—I did not want to be that wife, did not want to have that conversation. It was beneath me; it would give his worst behavior an attention it didn’t deserve.

He returned to the dorm earlier than I expected, before midnight. More matter-of-factly than angrily, he said, “I didn’t know where you’d gone,” and I brought my finger to my lips, indicating Ella, now asleep. He lowered his voice. “Kind of a crappy band, if you ask me. Just the idea of a cover band is pathetic when you think about it, living off someone else’s glory.”

Did he have any idea? He had no idea. What other conclusion was there to draw? I was folding a pair of his pants, and I set them in our suitcase.

He stepped close to me, half whispering. “You’re not pissed about before, are you?” So he had some idea, but such a narrow, watered-down one—it was close enough to having no idea. “You know how being around these goons gets me riled up.” He leaned in to kiss me. “Brings out my inner eighteen-year-old.” He grinned, and I felt both astonishment—how could our experiences of our relationship be so grossly different?—and also a relief at having chosen not to confront him. It was the right choice.

He kissed me some more, my cheeks and neck, he set his hands on my hips, and I realized he wanted us to have sex. I pointed to the wall and said, “Ella’s on the other side.”

“We can keep it down. Well, you might not be able to.” He pulled the peach-colored blouse I was wearing (a nod to orange without being the real, aggressive thing) out of my white pants and stuck his hands beneath it. He reached around and unfastened my bra.

I acquiesced. It was easier than talking, it would be a balm to the discord of the weekend. The mattress springs were squeaky, which I found distracting, but I was distracted anyway. Lying on top of me, pumping in and out, Charlie gazed down and said, “You look beautiful, Lindy.” He smelled of sweat and beer and some essential Charlieness, the smell of himself, that I was very accustomed to.

I thought with shame of kissing Joe Thayer. Already, I believed that I had kissed him less out of attraction than pity—I’d meant the kiss as a consolation prize, a way to spare him the embarrassment of having confessed to feelings that were one-sided. Under different circumstances, I’d meant to imply, and even if the implication was a lie, it seemed a decorous one, an extreme version of being a polite and considerate person. But perhaps this was only a convenient story. Perhaps I’d kissed him for more selfish reasons—simply because I wanted to—and when the experience was not as pleasurable as I’d anticipated, I’d changed my mind.

Charlie’s breathing thickened, his mouth was next to my ear so I couldn’t see his face, and then his movements slowed, and he moaned softly. He collapsed against me, and I held him. “You want me to . . .?” he murmured (he always offered when I didn’t come during penetration, he meant with his hand), and silently, I shook my head. I felt at once as if I were protecting him from and steeling myself for the destruction he didn’t yet know that I would cause.

I WOULD GO to Riley, I had decided, and I would take Ella with me, but there was one errand I needed to run before leaving Milwaukee, and it entailed stopping by my favorite bookstore in the world, which was called Thea’s. The owner, Thea Dengler, was about my age, a heavyset woman who paired loose black pants and sweaters with gauzy scarves or chunky turquoise necklaces, and her store was located in Mequon, two floors, with such tall shelves that even though it wasn’t large, you always felt like you could browse in private. Plus, there was an excellent selection, Thea read constantly (there was rarely a book I picked up that wasn’t on her radar), and if you wanted something she didn’t have, she’d enthusiastically order it, as curious herself for it to arrive as you were. She also sold periodicals, but none of that clutter that seems mandatory in bookstores today: mugs and picture frames and greeting cards, magnets, calendars, fancy chocolates.

I’d planned to buy three books for Jessica Sutton, but as I stood in the young-adult section, stacking them in the crook of my arm, I decided five would be acceptable, and soon I was holding more than a dozen, balanced so precariously that I had to steady them with my chin. I propped them one by one, face out, on the shelves so I could more easily cull: To Kill a Mockingbird (that was definite, no question); Deenie ( Jessica was twelve—how could I not give her a Judy Blume book, and this was less controversial than some of the others); Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry; A Wrinkle in Time; Anastasia Krupnik, or else Lois Lowry’s Autumn Street, which I also thought was quite wonderful; The Westing Game (I imagined she’d like this, since she liked Agatha Christie); The Outsiders; I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings; Homecoming; and then I’d grabbed the two others from the Tillerman series, Dicey’s Song and A Solitary Blue; The Diary of Anne Frank; and last, Locked in Time (I’d read Lois Duncan’s older novels during my librarian days, but this new one looked intriguing). Besides the fact that this was nine more books than I’d intended to purchase, there was already one—Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca—that I knew I wanted to get her from the grown-up section, and I’d also considered Pride and Prejudice. I stood there trying to decide, and I eventually set back the Cynthia Voigt books; I also decided to forgo Pride and Prejudice and Autumn Street (maybe those could be saved for Christmas?). Was Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry too young for Jessica? But it was so good! Then I realized I’d neglected to pull A Tree Grows in Brooklyn off the shelf, which was a must. I ended up carrying twelve books to the cash register. Eyeing them, Thea said, “That’s some ambitious summer reading for Ella.”

“No, no, they’re for a family friend who’s going into seventh grade.”

“You want them wrapped?”

I declined, and she stacked the books in a large brown paper bag with string handles. When I left the store, I sat in the parking lot peeling off the price stickers—a useless act, given that the price was also printed on the back of the books, but decorum demanded it—and then I drove to the Suttons’ house. It was Jessica who answered the door, holding Antoine. She stepped aside to let me in, and I said, “No, I’m just dropping something off. Jessica, as a former librarian, I feel compelled to introduce you to some writers other than V. C. Andrews. These are for you, but I promise you don’t have to write any book reports.” I extended the bag, holding it open to show her, and because Antoine was in her arms, I set it inside the house on the rug.

“Who is it, Jessie?” I heard Yvonne call, and Jessica called back, “It’s Ella’s mom.” To me, she said, “Those are all for me?”

“We’re so proud of how well you’re doing in school. Now, I’d love to talk about any of these books with you, but again, you’re not obligated to read them. Just if you want to, I think they might be fun.”

“That’s real nice.” Jessica appeared confused but curious. “You want to come in?”

“I’ve got to run errands.” I reached out my hand and rubbed Antoine’s calf, which was bare; he had on a yellow terry-cloth onesie. “Say hi to your mom and grandma for me.”

Walking back down the concrete steps to the car, I noticed two men sitting on the porch of the house across the street—young men, closer to Jessica’s age than mine. One wore a black mesh tank shirt and the other, who had cornrows, wore no shirt at all. They watched me, and I nodded once without saying anything as I walked toward my car, my shiny suburban white-lady Volvo. As I drove away, the automatic locks clicked on, and I felt an uncomfortable relief.

I WAITED THAT night in the den while Charlie tucked Ella in, holding on my lap a copy of The Economist that I was too preoccupied to read. When he reentered the room, he said, “Do we have any ice cream? I’ve got a sweet tooth tonight.”

“There’s some caramel left,” I said, but as he turned to go into the kitchen, I said, “Wait. Sit down.” My voice had sounded more serious than I’d meant it to, except that this was serious—possibly the most serious conversation we’d ever had. He looked expectant as he perched on an arm of the couch.

My heart pounded. When had I last felt nervous with Charlie? Not about what he’d do, how he might transgress in front of other people and I might clean up after him, but nervous about how he’d react to me. “I want us to separate,” I said.

“You what?”

Had he not heard or not understood? “A trial separation,” I said. “Not a legal one—well, not yet.”

“You want a divorce? Are you fucking kidding me?” He looked disbelieving, but this was the thing about Charlie—he also looked the tiniest, tiniest bit amused. I don’t think he was, but he had such a mischievous face and such a tendency to revert to humor, whether or not it was appropriate, that I couldn’t be sure.

“That’s not what I said. I want us to live apart. I love you, Charlie, and I hope you’ll always know that, but I can’t live like this anymore.”

There was a certain disintegration occurring in my chest, an increasing shakiness.

“I thought we were having a perfectly nice night.”

“It’s not—Tonight was fine.” I had the strange impulse to stand and go to where he sat, to comfort him. Surely this would have been unwise? “I know you used cocaine in Princeton with Dennis Goshen,” I said. “Holly told me. Or taking Shannon to a bar last week—I just—There are decisions you make that I can’t live with. I can’t be responsible for you, and if I’m your wife, I feel responsible. I’m terrified that you’re going to hurt someone, either yourself or someone else, and it’s going to destroy our lives. I know what that’s like, and it’s awful, and the worst part is that you’ll make a mistake that can be prevented. That sickens me—the thought of you drinking a bunch of whiskey and getting in your car, it literally makes me nauseated, Charlie. I don’t want to be around it, and I don’t want Ella to, either.”

“So you’re not just leaving me, you’re taking our daughter with you?”

“I thought initially—” Was he going to fight me on this? “I’m going to my mother’s tomorrow,” I said. “I thought Ella could come. It seems reasonable with your work schedule.”

“I’m about to have a lot more flexibility.”

I swallowed. “If I take Ella to my mother’s, it can be like a trip, a vacation. We won’t have to tell her anything yet. I don’t want to unnecessarily disrupt her life or make her feel as if things are unstable. But you and I need to spend some time apart. Isn’t that obvious to you, too?”

Charlie was silent, and then he said, “You ever hear of a warning signal?” I could sense his anger gathering force. “That’s how it works in school, right? Teacher puts your name on the board, you get a check mark by it, then you get sent out in the hall. You don’t get booted to the principal’s office the first time you goof off.”

“But Charlie—” Tears filled my eyes, and they were tears not of sadness but of frustration. I blinked them back. “That’s just it,” I said. “That’s my point. I’m not your teacher. And I have told you that I don’t like when you don’t show up after you’ve said you’ll be there, I don’t like when you drink so much, I don’t like when you insult me. If you’ve listened at all, I don’t see how this could be a surprise.”

“Sure, we fight, but you never mentioned separating.”

“I’m mentioning it now.”

“Before the other night, I hadn’t done coke in years,” Charlie said. “Goshen offered me some, I did a couple lines, and honestly, Lindy, if you weren’t so freaking uptight, you might know that’s really nothing. It wasn’t going to kill me, it wasn’t going to hurt anyone else, and I’m not planning to use it again anytime soon, all right?”

“It’s not just the cocaine. It’s everything. When Megan Thayer found those magazines, I didn’t have the sense that you cared at all.”

“So now it’s my fault if I don’t worry as much as you about what other people think?”

“It’s no secret that we have different dispositions, Charlie.” I wasn’t yelling—though it was tempting to give in to rancor, no good would come of it. “For a long time, I’ve gotten a kick out of that. You have a lot of wonderful qualities, obviously, and if I didn’t think that, I wouldn’t have married you in the first place. But the whole rascally, naughty Charlie persona—I can’t stand it anymore. It’s not cute. We’re forty-two years old, and I don’t want to have to beg you to wear a tie.”

“You think I don’t respect you, is that what this is?”

I shrugged.

“There’s nobody I respect more than you.” Then he said, “I love you, Lindy,” and his voice cracked.

Again, it was difficult not to stand and comfort him. I said, “I love you, too.”

“I know I’ve tested your patience, but for Christ’s sake, we’re a family. You think Ella’ll do better coming from a broken home—”

I cut him off. “A trial separation, Charlie, that’s all I want. I want to see what it’s like to not—”

“Who’ve you told about this? Have you told Jadey?”

I hesitated. “Not really.”

“You want us to go to a shrink, we can go to a shrink. I’ll get a referral.”

“I appreciate the offer, and that’s something we can consider in the future,” I said. “For now, what I want is space.”

“Where does that leave me?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But I’ve become very unhappy.” Then I began to cry—is it embarrassing to admit that I was moved by the simple truth of my own statement? My sobs were gulpy and undignified.

A minute passed, and when I looked at him again, he was watching me with an expression so strange that at first I had difficulty identifying it. Then I realized: He was frightened.

He said, “Fine, take Ella, but you have to promise to come back. I’ll fix what’s wrong, Lindy. I know you don’t believe me right now, but I will.”

I wiped my eyes, nodding without speaking. About this, he was right—I did not believe him.

ON OUR SECOND day in Riley, Lars drove Ella and me out to Fassbinder’s, where ten or twelve years earlier, the factory founder’s house had been converted into a cheese museum. The house was situated on the opposite side of the parking lot from the factory proper, and visitors to the museum could look through large windows and watch employees tending to vats of milk or cheese curd. You also got to sample the curds, still warm, and in the gift shop, you could buy various types of cheese as well as jellies, sausages, crackers, and little white porcelain thimbles with the Fassbinder’s logo on them. I was examining a thimble when Ella nudged up against me and whispered, “This is boring.” I shot her a look.

“I’ll bet Dorothy will enjoy this with her morning toast,” Lars said, and he held up a jar of gooseberry jam.

Beside me, Ella whined, “You said we could go swimming.” I had indeed made this promise the day before, as we were driving into town, but at breakfast, when Lars proposed a visit to the cheese factory, I hadn’t had the heart to turn him down.

I’d called my mother on Tuesday, prior to my conversation with Charlie, to ask if we might come stay with them for a couple weeks, though I hadn’t told her the real reason. I’d said, “Charlie has a lot going on with the baseball team, and I think Ella is finally old enough to appreciate Riley’s charms.”

On Wednesday, we drove out around noon. I’d announced the plan to Ella only a few hours before, allowing enough time for her to pack and then for me to cajole her into repacking more realistically—two swimsuits instead of four, seven pairs of socks instead of one, no black dress. She seemed not particularly surprised by the abrupt announcement that we were leaving town, and even excited at the prospect. She said, “Will Papa Lars make me an egg with a top hat?” This was a breakfast that involved Lars placing a glass upside down on a slice of bread in order to cut out a perfect circle, toasting both the bread and the circle, preparing a fried egg, setting the toast over the fried egg with the yolky center peeking out the hole, and setting the toasted circle over the yolk—the top hat. I said, “If you ask him nicely, I bet he will.”

When we arrived, my mother had made peanut-butter fudge, which Ella and I dipped into while Lars carried our suitcases upstairs. It wasn’t until I made it to the second floor that I realized Lars had put Ella in my old room and me in my grandmother’s. My heart clutched—it was one of those moments when you feel time is a rug that’s been yanked out from under you; everything around you has changed so gradually that it is only all at once you look up and realize how different your life has become. There was my grandmother’s single bed, though the spread on it was different—this one was striped. My mother had cleared the surfaces of my grandmother’s bureau and night-stand of the cosmetics and perfume bottles, the ashtrays and cartons of tissue; she also had emptied the bureau’s drawers, I saw when I opened them. But the Nefertiti bust was still there, set at an angle, and the bookshelves still were full. I ran a finger over the spines—the books were not alphabetized by author, as mine were, or in any other order that I could discern. The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Group and Gone with the Wind, Frankenstein and Presumed Innocent and The Counte of Monte Cristo and The Golden Notebook, In Cold Blood, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, The Great Santini, The Maltese Falcon, Native Son—all those worlds, all the versions of myself I had been when I’d read these very copies, and all the versions of herself she had been. I pulled down The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington (the title and author’s name appeared in engraved gold on an otherwise blank cover of navy leather), and I opened to a random page, page 172, and smelled it, pressing my nose against the binding, but it smelled only like old paper, like an old house, and not like my grandmother.

At Fassbinder’s, Lars said to Ella, “Did you hear the cheese squeak?”

“So what if it squeaks?” Ella said, and I said, “That’s impolite, Ella.”

Genially, over Ella’s head—she was leaning against me, pulling on my blouse—Lars said, “I sense that someone’s ready for a nap.”

“I don’t take naps anymore,” Ella said.

This was not entirely true, but I simply said to her, “Do you think Grandma will like the jam Papa Lars picked out?” She didn’t respond, and I flashed an apologetic smile at Lars. “We’ll meet you in the car.”

CHARLIE CALLED THAT night around eleven, when I was the only one awake. I was lying in bed reading The Old Forest by Peter Taylor, and as soon as I heard the phone—there was the extension in the room my mother and Lars shared, and the extension downstairs in the kitchen—I knew that it was Charlie, but there wasn’t much I could do. I wasn’t about to barge in on my mother and Lars, and there was no way I could get to the kitchen in time. Then my mother knocked on the door. She was wearing a beige rayon nightgown with a scalloped yoke and sleeves that ended just below her elbows, and her hair was askew. “Sweetheart, it’s Charlie—”

I stood. “I’m so sorry, Mom. I’ll take it downstairs.”

In the kitchen, when I’d heard the click of the second-floor extension, I said, “Charlie, do you know what time it is?” and he said, “Just come home. Please. I’m begging you.”

“You can’t call like this,” I said.

“I’m losing my fucking mind. You know I can’t stay by myself. Want to know where I spent the night last night? At the Wauwatosa Ramada. The fucking Ramada, okay? You’ve called my bluff. I’m a lousy husband. But I need you, Lindy.”

This is, almost without fail, a powerful thing to hear a person say. I sighed. “Charlie, if I came back, I can’t see how anything would be different.”

“I’ll quit being an immature dick, that’s how. Yeah, I do know what you were talking about—I’ve been selfish lately. But things have changed for me, this baseball stuff is really gonna be good, and I’m ready to turn over a new leaf.”

“Are you going to keep drinking?” I could tell he’d been drinking in the last few hours. He wasn’t slurring, but his voice had that looseness.

“Is that what this is about?”

“I don’t know. Sometimes I hope it’s the alcohol, but I’m not sure it is.”

He was quiet, and then he said, “When did you turn against me?”

“That’s not fair.”

“May? January? Two years ago?”

I said, “I know you’ve struggled with getting older, your fortieth birthday, your twentieth college reunion, but I wish you hadn’t been as—I guess what I’m trying to say is that there’s such a thing as suffering quietly.”

He laughed then, a dark chuckle. “Yeah, and apparently, you’ve cornered the market on it.”

“I’m going to sleep,” I said. “Everyone here is in bed, and I don’t want to disturb them. If you’d like, we can talk tomorrow.”

“Listen to yourself. You’re a fucking ice queen.”

“Please don’t insult me.”

“What do you want? What am I supposed to do?”

“I told you—I want space.”

“Alice, you know I can’t stay in this house alone. Come back here, that’s all I’m asking, and we’ll figure things out. I won’t, you know, molest you at night—hell, I’ll sleep in a different room. But this house gives me the fucking creeps.”

“I thought you were at the Ramada Inn.”

“That place gave me the creeps, too. I had to check out.”

“So you’re at home right now?”

“Where else would I be?”

“Our house isn’t creepy, Charlie, and we live in a very safe area. Did you close the living room and dining room curtains?”

“What if I drive out there?”

I was sitting at the kitchen table, and I closed my eyes. “Why don’t you call Arthur and Jadey? You should call soon, though, because I’m sure they’re about to go to bed if they haven’t already.”

“Yeah, and then I can be humped by Lucky all night long.”

“You could call John and Nan, or Ginger—”

“I don’t want to stay with any of my brothers! I don’t care to broadcast my personal business. I want to sleep at my own house, with my wife next to me, and my daughter down the hall. And you know what? Most people wouldn’t think that’s a whole hell of a lot to ask.”

I said nothing, and for a while, he said nothing, either. At last, in a less combative tone, he said, “Is Ella asking about me?”

“She misses you. If you’d like to call during the day tomorrow, I’m sure she’d love to talk.”

After a pause, he said, “Just so you know, you’ve sliced open my chest, you’ve pulled out my heart, and now you’re squeezing it with your bare hands, so I hope this exercise in marital introspection, or whatever the fuck you’re doing, I hope it’s worth it.”

“I’m going to bed, Charlie. I sincerely hope you can figure out a sleeping arrangement that makes you comfortable.”

“Don’t hang up on me.”

“I’m not hanging up. I’m saying good night. Good night, okay? Good night. Are you going to say it back to me?”

“Does our marriage mean nothing to you?”

“Charlie, I’m not hanging up on you, but if you don’t say good night back to me, I am going to hang up the phone. So for the last time, good night.”

“Fuck you,” he said, and then he was the one who ended the connection.

WE WERE AT Pine Lake when I heard the child crying—a girl, it sounded like, somewhere behind me—and I’d been aware of the crying for over a minute when I realized with a start that the child was Ella. I was sitting on a towel on the sand, my mother next to me in a folding chair, wearing not a bathing suit but slacks and a short-sleeved blouse; her one concession to the setting was that she was barefoot, holding her flats. She’d been telling me about the controversy over the location for Riley’s proposed statue to honor Korean War veterans—there was great disagreement about whether it ought to be on the shore of the Riley River or downtown on Commerce Street—and I turned, glancing over my shoulder, then jumped to my feet. “Mom, wait,” I said. “I’ll be back.”

Pine Lake’s beach wasn’t large—perhaps a hundred yards across—and though this had not been the case in my youth, there were a lifeguard and ropes indicating the sanctioned area for swimming. The beach was part of Pine Park, and in the grassy area near the sand were picnic tables and grills. The beach’s parking lot was gravel, and one corner was occupied by a frozen-custard truck whose side was a sliding window. Just outside this truck stood my daughter, wearing flip-flops and a bathing suit, her long hair wet and tangled, her face twisted and red as she sobbed hysterically. When I approached, she lunged toward me—she wailed, “Mommy!” and it was a heart-wrenching thing to hear—but her movement was stopped by a teenage boy who wore a white apron and was holding on to her wrist. Several people in the area, some snacking on candy bars or hamburgers, had stopped to watch.

“He’s hurting me,” Ella cried, and I said to the boy, “I’m her mother. What’s going on here?”

“She stole an ice-cream cone!” The boy was irate. He was about five feet six and pale, with fair close-cropped hair and a wispy mustache.

I set my hand on Ella’s wrist and nudged the boy’s hand away—firmly but not aggressively, I hoped. “I’ll take her,” I said, and to my relief, he released her. Immediately, Ella buried her face against my waist. “If you’ll tell me what happened, I’m sure we can solve the problem,” I said.

“She stole!” he repeated, and he pointed to the gravel, where a melting blob of vanilla ice cream was loosely joined to a cake cone. “She tried to take it without paying.”

Ella was mumbling against my stomach, protesting.

“What, sweetie?”

She pulled her head back, and her face remained tear-stained and flushed. “He wouldn’t let me sign for it!” She quickly hid her face again.

I said to the boy, “There’s been a misunderstanding. We don’t live in Riley, and where we live, we pay by—” It wasn’t worth it; explaining the rules of a country club could only be more damning. “If you can wait, I’ll get my wallet,” I said. “Did she have anything besides the ice cream?”

Ella lifted her head. “I didn’t even have the ice cream! He took it back!”

“You licked it,” the boy retorted, and I said, “How much was it?”

“A dollar seventy-five.”

“My wallet is in the car, which is over there.” I pointed. “The blue Volvo station wagon, do you see it? You can watch me walk there, and then I’ll come right back. Ella, will you come with me?” I smiled at the boy and at the other people who were observing us, then detached Ella from my torso and took her hand. As we headed in the direction of the car, she let her hair hang in front of her face. “I hate it here,” she said softly.

WHEN WE GOT back to the house, Jadey had called three times; Lars had dutifully noted the time of each call, down to the minute, on the pad of paper by the kitchen phone.

I went upstairs to return the call; I didn’t particularly want to talk to her, because I didn’t know what there was to say about the situation, but if I didn’t, it seemed clear she would keep trying, which would presumably increase my mother’s suspicion. And my mother had to suspect already—it could only be her midwestern reticence that was preventing her from asking me outright why we had descended so abruptly on her household.

“So you did it,” Jadey said. In the background, I could hear Lucky barking, and Jadey said to someone, “Put him in the yard.” I heard Winnie protesting, and Jadey said, “I’m not asking your brother, I’m asking you.” To me, she said, “Chas showed up here close to midnight last night.”

“How did he seem?”

“I only saw him for about a minute, and he took off early this morning, but he told Arthur you’re pissed at him. You didn’t file for divorce, did you?”

“No,” I said quickly. “No, we’re just—Ella and I are spending some time here for a while.”

“Alice, this is me you’re talking to. I won’t repeat what you say, especially to Chas, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

I was more worried that she’d repeat it to Billy Torks or to one of her female friends.

“Were Reunions a disaster?” she said. “Remember what I told you—these guys set foot on campus and they go crazy. They get so caught up in the moment.”

“It wasn’t that,” I said. “Not completely, anyway. Jadey, I appreciate your concern, I really do, but I just need some distance.”

“No, do what you have to.” She lowered her voice—perhaps Winnie had returned to the room. “When you’re ready to come back, we’ll be waiting for you.”

THAT NIGHT, ELLA and Lars went to bed around the same time, and my mother and I watched Knots Landing together. I had assumed we’d be chatting while the show played, but to my surprise, I could tell from her body language that she’d become quite a devoted viewer, so I remained quiet except during commercials. When the program finished, she turned toward me, smiling in a shy way, and said, “I suppose it’s a bit pulpy.”

“Pulp has its charms.”

“I’m so sorry about poor Ella at the beach today. Do you know, I believe that was Tim Ziemniak who scolded her. I peeked over at the ice-cream truck as we were leaving.”

“Roy and Patty’s son?” Roy had been my classmate all through school, and his father had been my dentist; Patty had also attended Benton County Central High but graduated a few years after us.

“I’m sure he didn’t mean anything by it,” my mother said. “He couldn’t be but fourteen or fifteen, and I’ll bet he takes his responsibilities awfully seriously.”

“Ella will be all right,” I said.

“Having her here, it makes me think of you at that age.”

“Oh, Ella’s a lot spunkier than I was,” I said. “She’s a real ball of energy.”

“Well—” My mother paused, and her tone was reflective in that way that is inevitably sad, because the past is sad. “What I remember,” she said, “is that you were always such a dear little girl.”

I felt a great surge of affection for her in this moment; I had been so lucky to be raised, to be loved, by a calm, uncomplicated mother. I often had not appreciated her, I thought, overshadowed as she was by my more showy and entertaining grandmother. But really, the older I got, the more I observed the cruelties family members inflicted on one another, out of jealousy or ignorance or private despair, and sometimes for sport—people could be so savage in such banal, daily ways. This was what I didn’t want for Ella: for nothing but chance, the chance of her birth, to put her at the mercy of Charlie’s selfishness and immaturity. To be around an adult who acted thoughtlessly and impulsively and then to watch it go unchecked, unpunished—I felt that could give a child a misunderstanding of the world, hindering her ability to see logical patterns. I did not care if Ella went to Princeton, if she was exceptionally pretty, if she grew up to marry a rich man, or really, if she married at all—there were many incarnations of her I felt confident I could embrace, a hippie or a housewife or a career woman. But what I did care about, what I wanted most fervently, was for her to understand that hard work paid off, that decency begat decency, that humility was not a raincoat you occasionally pulled on when you thought conditions called for it, but rather a constant way of existing in the world, knowing that good and bad luck touched everyone and none of us was fully responsible for our fortunes or tragedies. Above all, I wanted my daughter to understand that many people were guided by bitterness and that it was best to avoid these individuals—their moods and behavior were a hornet’s nest you had no possible reason to do anything other than bypass and ignore. And I loved Ella, I loved her immeasurably, but I wondered if she wasn’t already being influenced by what was worst in Charlie and by my indulgence of his shortcomings. She would mimic us—surely she would, all children did—and would it be his entitled sulkiness or my martyrish passivity that she’d emulate? I didn’t want her growing up thinking that I endorsed his choices; at the same time, I didn’t know how to give voice to my dissent except by leaving him.

Beside me on the living room sofa, my mother said, “Will Charlie be calling again tonight, do you think? If he will, I might as well unplug the phone in our room.”

“I hate to inconvenience you,” I said, but she’d already stood.

“It won’t take a minute.”

In her absence, I looked around the living room, which still contained the broad square couch and chairs my parents had purchased in the early fifties, the maroon-spined Encyclopaedia Britannicas, Lars’s recliner, the painting over the fireplace—a knockoff of Picasso’s Le Guitariste that my grandmother had given them one Christmas and which I am pretty sure neither my mother nor my father had ever liked.

When my mother returned, I said, “I hope you weren’t up for long after Charlie’s call last night.”

“Don’t give it a thought. Will he be joining you here? Even if he’d just like to come for dinner, we’d be delighted to have him. Lars is very keen to give his suggestions for the baseball team.”

“So I hear.” We exchanged smiles. “Charlie has a lot keeping him busy in Milwaukee, so I don’t know that he’ll make it out, but that’s kind.” A little hesitantly, I said, “You and Dad never really quarreled, did you? You always seemed very compatible.”

“Oh, heavens, all couples quarrel.” My mother had sat again, and as she spoke, she picked up her needlepoint canvas, which had been resting since the previous night on the shelf beneath the coffee table. She was making a throw pillow cover with a rose on it.

“But you and Dad never had serious fights, did you? Where you considered ending the marriage?”

“That was much more unusual then.” My mother was threading the needle, not looking at me, and her tone remained even. Still, I’m sure she understood exactly what we were talking about. “It’s not so uncommon to get a divorce now, but years ago, I didn’t know anyone who’d done it. I suppose the Conners were the first couple I knew—do you remember Hazel and William? People said he had a gambling problem. She was a nice lady, though.” My mother turned the canvas over, peering at a particular stitch. “There were times when your father made me mad, but I can’t say the thought of leaving him ever crossed my mind. I suppose I made a decision—” She paused. “There was a good deal of conflict in my family growing up, and it wasn’t pleasant to be around. It only causes more of the same—once people work themselves up, it hardly matters what the disagreement was about, does it? After I married, I decided if ever your father and I had a cross word, I’d meet him with kindness. I decided, if I think he’s wrong or if I think he’s right, I won’t try to prove it. I’ll remind him that I care for him in the hope it reminds him he cares for me, too. I was fortunate, because your father had a gentle nature.” She looked up, offering a willfully bland smile. “Not every man does.”

I’m not encouraging you to divorce Charlie, but if you do, I’ll understand—wasn’t that what she was saying, more or less?

She had turned the canvas over again, she was stitching steadily, and I leaned in to look at it more closely. I said, “That’s going to be a beautiful pillow.”

AFTER I’D CHANGED into my nightgown and brushed my teeth, I returned to the kitchen with The Old Forest, waiting for the phone to ring. It was ten-thirty, then five after eleven, eleven-twenty, eleven-thirty, and I felt a growing irritation, thinking how inconsiderate it was for Charlie to call so late. By twenty to one, I knew he wasn’t calling at all. My mother’s house was very quiet, no cars passed outside on Amity Lane, and my irritation changed abruptly to a lonely disappointment.

WHEN THE PHONE rang in the morning, we were finishing breakfast, and Ella answered. After listening for a few seconds, she said, “Mommy’s taking me ice-skating, and I know how to skate back-wards.” It was Charlie, wasn’t it? “In the mall,” Ella said. Then, practically shouting, “In the mall! Yeah, she’s right here.” Ella held out the receiver. “It’s Grandmaj.”

Without preamble, Priscilla said, “For crying out loud, Alice, get in your car and go back to Milwaukee. Chas sounds like a mess.”

I might have been tongue-tied anyway, but with Ella, Lars, and my mother right there at the table, I couldn’t think of a way to respond. Finally, I said, “If you wouldn’t mind holding on for just a moment, Priscilla, I’ll switch phones.”

Upstairs, the phone was still unplugged from the night before, and I got on my knees to stick the cord back into the jack, then lifted the receiver. As I sat on the edge of the double bed, I heard the phone downstairs being hung up, and I said, “Hello?”

“This is simply nonsense,” Priscilla said. “You knew he was a booze-hound when you married him. Now pull up your socks and fix things.”

“Priscilla, I don’t see Charlie’s drinking as a personality quirk. It might be less obvious from Washington than it is living in the same house with him, but he’s—” I hesitated, and then I went ahead and said it. “He’s drunk almost every night of the week. He’s an alcoholic.”

Priscilla did not react as if I’d offered a revelation. She said, “Whose fault do you think that is?”

“If you’re implying that I’m responsible for Charlie’s drinking, I have to object. He’s a grown—”

“Let me ask you this. What’s your job?”

“I don’t follow.”

“Indeed you don’t. You’re a housewife, my dear. It is your duty to ensure that your house runs smoothly. Just whose income do you imagine it is that allows you the luxury of staying home?”

“Priscilla, it’s not as if I’m sitting around eating bonbons and watching soap operas. But if I’ve disappointed you, I’m sorry.”

“Oh, I’m not surprised,” Priscilla said. “Great heavens, I’ve been waiting for this day for over a decade. Everyone knew you’d married down.”

I couldn’t resist the grim satisfaction of correcting her. I said, “You mean that Charlie married down.”

“Oh no, Chas married up. Why, Alice, he was a thirty-one-year-old wastrel, making that preposterous congressional run, no less, and he was dating waitresses. We couldn’t imagine what you saw in him!” She chortled, and as I sat there on my mother’s bed, bewilderment seized me.

“But—didn’t you think I had somehow tricked him into marrying me? You said as much when we announced our engagement.”

“I said nothing of the sort.”

“You came up to me, and you told me how clever I was.”

“You’d been so coy.” Priscilla sounded—it was bizarre—almost admiring. “Here you’d been in Halcyon all weekend without giving a clue that you and Chas were engaged, and at just the right moment, you pulled a rabbit from your hat. It was a flawless piece of theater.”

“I thought—” Had I misjudged her all these years? Or was she lying now? Or was it neither—perhaps it wasn’t so much that she’d ever had a high opinion of me, only that she’d had, or still had, a low opinion of Charlie. “I thought you thought—” I began, but again I sputtered out.

Overriding me, Priscilla said, “What mystifies me is your timing, why you’ve chosen now to throw your little tantrum when Chas has just made the best move of his life. He’ll be splendid with the Brewers, and Lord knows he’s never been fit for anything else. Here he was running our company into the ground for years, Harold’s intervention was the only thing that kept his brothers from firing him, and now that Zeke Langenbacher has done us all a great favor, the only thing for you and Chas to do is sit on your derrieres and clap for home runs. Surely you can manage that?”

My head was spinning: Did all the Blackwells think Charlie was incompetent and foolish? Did everyone? (The Thayers did, as I’d recently learned from Joe.) And was I, by extension, incompetent and foolish for having married him? In this moment, I felt defensive on Charlie’s behalf—if he had a tendency toward swagger and raunch, Arthur did, too. Charlie wasn’t the runt of the litter, he wasn’t an idiot.

“It’s neither here nor there why you want to abandon your marriage,” Priscilla was saying. “I can imagine a dozen reasons, and frankly, none of them is very interesting. Nobody will dispute for a second that you’re smarter and more refined than Chas, but you were smarter and more refined than him the day you met. At this point, that’s your problem. It’s not his, and it sure isn’t mine. But you have a home together, and more important, you have a daughter. If you couldn’t give her siblings, the least you can give her is two parents.”

It was unclear to me if this had been the most illuminating conversation of my life, the most insulting, both, or neither. I took a deep breath—in general, the reason I tried to be diplomatic was that you might occasionally regret your diplomacy, but you’d more frequently regret having been snippy—and then I said to my mother-in-law, “Well, Priscilla, I have a lot to think about.”

THE WAY WE’D decided to go to the skating rink at the Riley mall was process of elimination: Ella refused to return to Pine Lake, and we’d already visited Fassbinder’s. Plus, she’d long wanted to try the skating rink at home, at the Mayfair Mall, and I’d never taken her; here, there wasn’t much disincentive. Because summer was still new, because it was not yet horribly hot, the rink was mostly empty, and the pop music that blasted from enormous speakers just below the roof seemed aggressive. The last time I’d skated had been up in Halcyon one winter, before Ella was born, and it had never been a great talent of mine. We slipped and skidded along, and I watched her watching two other girls, sisters, it seemed, a few years older than Ella, who were quite skillful and who often called out to each other, arguing and laughing. “Do you want to go play with them?” I asked. When Ella vigorously shook her head, guilt billowed inside me. After we’d unlaced and returned our skates, we ate chicken tenders in the mall’s food court, and in a store of cheap jewelry and accessories, I bought her a bracelet with a dolphin charm.

Walking down the mall’s wide pink marble corridors (why did a mall in Riley, Wisconsin, need a marble floor?), I couldn’t help wondering what I was doing to us. How long could Ella and I last in this town? Because it was easy to drive back and forth between Milwaukee and Riley in a single day, this was already the longest visit I’d made here in years, and while I had imagined it as a respite, what Ella had said in Fassbinder’s had not been wrong: It was boring. I was of this place, and gratefully so, but each day here seemed three times as long as a day in Maronee. And yet if we went home, wouldn’t it all be exactly the same? Charlie might be on his best behavior for a few weeks, a few months at most, and even that could be wishful thinking—he was as likely to be resentful as remorseful.

That afternoon, I called Jadey. (Looking back, this is what I most remember of that strange period in Riley—being on the phone. If my mother and Lars found the frequency with which I sequestered myself to call people or wait for calls to be reminiscent of a moody, inconsiderate teenager, I hardly could have blamed them.)

When Jadey answered, she said, “Please tell me you’re calling to say you’re home and you want to know if I can go for a walk, because the answer is yes. I’ve already gained four pounds from missing you—well, missing you, getting no exercise, and eating a tray of double fudge brownies.”

“Does everyone in the family think Charlie is some sort of dimwit?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Maj called earlier today—she’s none too pleased with me, as you can imagine—and she was implying—It was very strange. Have Arthur and John been wanting to fire Charlie?”

Jadey didn’t reply immediately, which was an answer, and not the one I’d hoped for. Then she said, “He plays tennis in the middle of the day, I think that’s the main thing. They don’t know where he is a lot of the time, and if there’s a distributor who’s come in for a meeting that Chas set up . . .”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“We can’t babysit them, right? Don’t be mad. Are you mad? Alice, he’s always been like this. Nobody thinks he’s stupid. He’s just—maybe he’s not the hardest-working guy ever, let’s put it that way. But you know who the hardest-working guy ever is? Ed, and who’d want to be married to him?”

It was like the optical illusion of the hag and the elegant young woman—from this angle, my life was privileged and boisterous, containing its problems, certainly, but they were minor compared to its gifts; and from that angle, my marriage was a sham, my husband a laughingstock. I had long known how thin the line was that divided happiness and tragedy, tranquillity and chaos, but it had been many years since I’d walked it. “When you see him tonight, will you ask him to call me?” I said.

“Oh, Chas isn’t staying with us anymore,” Jadey said. “He was only here for the one night.”

“Where’s he staying?”

“I assume he decided to put on his big-boy underpants and go home.”

I felt a prickly alertness, the sort that precedes goose bumps. He was not staying at home; I felt sure of it.

“Are you still there?” Jadey asked. “Say something.”

I sighed. “I’m still here.”

THAT SUNDAY, ELLA and I went to church with my mother and Lars, and Ella squirmed through the service, no doubt thinking longingly of Bonnie, the prosthetic-eye-removing Sunday-school teacher at Christ the Redeemer in Milwaukee. Back at the house, after lunch, Lars and I started a five-hundred-piece jigsaw puzzle of a train in the Swiss Alps—he’d set up the card table for this purpose—and in the front yard, my mother filled a clear glass salad bowl with water and a few squirts of Windex so that Ella could take Barbie swimming; if my mother or Lars had an opinion about Barbie’s skin color, neither of them ever expressed it. After a while, my mother came inside, saying, “It wouldn’t take five minutes for me to make a little towel for Barbie.”

I looked up from the puzzle. “Or you could relax for a change.”

But already, she had that musing, preoccupied look on her face: a project. She disappeared upstairs, where her sewing machine was in my old room.

Through the window screen, I occasionally could hear Ella talking to Barbie—“Now it’s time to do backstroke”—and then she was quiet. When I went outside to check on her, she was squatting by the bowl of blue liquid. “Ladybug, how are—” I started to say, and when she looked up, I saw that she was wearing a glittery purple tiara and matching purple droplet earrings. “Oh my,” I said. “Where did you get those?”

“From the lady.” She pointed to the house directly across the street from ours, which was the Janaszewskis’.

“She gave them to you?” I said.

Ella nodded.

“Did she help you put them on?”

Ella nodded again. The plastic tiara was tucked behind her ears, the gaudy curlicues on either side of the front band rising to meet an over-size fake amethyst in the center, and above it, a sparkly star. The earrings were clip-ons, the amethyst droplets nickel-size and encrusted with ersatz diamonds. Immediately, I knew who would get a kick out of these types of accessories, but of course I couldn’t be certain, and even if I were, I had even less idea of the gift’s meaning. Was it a casual unanalyzed kindness to amuse a little girl, a playful peace offering, or was it the opposite, a mocking criticism with a pointed subtext: Your daughter is a princess.

“Did the lady say her name?” I asked.

Ella shrugged. “Grandma’s making Barbie a towel.”

“I know she is, and please be sure to thank her. Ella, did the lady who gave you this jewelry—did she know your name?”

Ella squinted, trying to remember. “I think so.”

“What did she look like?”

“Mommy, she went right there. You can go see her yourself.”

“Did she look closer to my age or Grandma’s?”

Briefly, Ella scrutinized my face, and then she said, “She looked old, but like you.”

I glanced again at the Janaszewskis’ front porch. Was this an invitation, a challenge, or both? Or was it merely a toy Dena’s mother had picked up at the drugstore and thought Ella would like?

I took a seat on the stoop, waiting to see if anyone would reemerge from their house, and soon my mother joined us—she’d even stitched a red B onto the miniature towel, which was clearly snipped from a worn-out full-size one—but she didn’t ask about the origins of the tiara or earrings; she must have imagined they’d come from me. When we all went inside close to an hour later, we’d seen no other activity at the Janaszewskis’.

I’D TRIED CALLING our house in Maronee several times, at different hours of the day and evening, and Charlie had never answered; however, when I finally left a message, he called back within a few hours. We arranged that Ella and I would meet him the next day for a picnic lunch at a park off I-94, between Riley and Milwaukee. The picnic was my idea, and I thought it was better than a restaurant, in case he lost his temper and began to yell; also, it would allow him and Ella to run around. Our phone conversation was brief and not explicitly hostile—it wasn’t emotional in one direction or the other—but it was definitely strained.

Ella and I made chicken-salad sandwiches, and my mother insisted on baking blondies, and Ella and I were about to leave the house when Arthur called. He said, “No one was hurt, Chas is fine, but he got a DUI last night, and he asked me to call to say he can’t meet you. He knows you’ll be furious, but Alice, I just saw him, and trust me, there’s nothing you could say to him right now that he hasn’t already thought of. A few hours in jail gives a man time for soul-searching, you know?”

“Is he—” Once again, I was in the kitchen, meaning I couldn’t speak freely. “Is he still incapacitated, is that why he’s not calling himself?”

“He’s not still in the slammer, no—he’s over at our lawyer’s office. He’s pretty frantic to keep this under wraps because it wouldn’t look good to Zeke Langenbacher, so Dad and Ed are working the phones. Chas told me to see if tomorrow for lunch works for you instead, but maybe you can call him yourself later today? Not that I don’t love being his secretary and all.”

“When did—” But there was no question I could ask that would not include a word that would sound alarming to Ella and my mother: injury or accident or lawyer or jail. And then (it was oddly liberating), I thought, He can clean it up. I didn’t need to intervene. If his car was totaled, if the newspaper caught wind of it, if he was kicking himself for risking his new job before it had even started—those were his problems. Arthur had said that no one was hurt, and that was all I cared about. I said, “Thank you for calling, but about tomorrow, the answer is no.”

“Alice, he really feels bad for—”

“The answer is no,” I said. “That’s all you need to tell him.”

When I’d hung up, I said brightly to Ella, “It turns out Daddy has a meeting for the baseball team today, and he can’t get away. But he’s so disappointed about not seeing you that he had an idea, and I’m only agreeing to it because you’ve been such a good girl. He wants me to buy you a tape of Dirty Dancing.”

Ella had been watching me suspiciously—I dared not even look at my mother—but when the words Dirty Dancing left my mouth, Ella squealed and threw her arms in the air. “Now?” she said. Her eyes were wide.

“Why don’t we have our picnic in the backyard?” I said. “Mom, you should join us—there’s an extra sandwich.” I did look at her then, and her expression was optimistic in a guarded way; she didn’t want to know the truth any more than I wanted to tell it. I said to Ella, “After lunch, ladybug, you and I will drive over to the mall.”

My mother said, “Alice, we don’t have a—What do they call the machines?”

“No, Charlie thought of that, too.” I was smiling maniacally. “He’s so appreciative for your hospitality to us that he asked me to buy you and Lars a VCR.”

OVER THE NEXT two weeks, involuntarily, I memorized every line of Dirty Dancing. It was a different movie than I’d imagined—it was more nuanced, and it wasn’t as risqué as I’d feared, though there was a scene in which, for under a second, the camera showed Patrick Swayze climbing naked out of bed after implied sex. To my surprise, there was also an abortion plotline that Ella seemed not to pick up on; mostly, she was focused on the dancing, which really was wonderful. It was set in 1963, and the main character was a year older than I’d been then, meaning many of the songs and references were evocative. I wouldn’t necessarily have chosen to watch this same movie a dozen times, and we eventually started renting others, but I did, to my surprise, quite like Dirty Dancing.

During these days, sitting in the living room in front of the television, I felt as if I were waiting for something, but what? I did not call Charlie, and he did not call me. The start of Ella’s art camp was approaching, and then it arrived; that morning, I phoned to let the director know she wouldn’t be attending. There were decisions I needed to make, plans I needed to set in motion (how I wished that my grandmother were still there to advise me), but instead, I just kept stalling.

ON THE PHONE, Jadey said, “I don’t know if I should tell you this or not,” which is a preamble that surely has never been followed by the speaker not proceeding to share the information in question. “Chas has befriended some minister named Reverend Randy,” she continued. “Nobody knows how they met, because if you ask, Chas deflects the question. Nan told me she and John saw them at dinner in the sports room last night, and I think he was with Chas at a baseball game, too.”

“Who is he?”

“That’s the thing—no one knows. No one has ever heard of him, although supposedly, he has some church over in Cudahy. Little Rose? Heavenly Flower? I’m probably making this sound more alarming than it is.”

“How does Charlie seem?”

“Well, we invited him over for dinner, but I think he’s afraid if he comes, I’ll chew him out.”

“Jadey, please don’t.”

“Believe me, Arthur has already given me the whole spiel about how you leaving and the DUI are punishment enough, blah blah blah.”

This wasn’t quite what I thought. It wasn’t that I felt protective of Charlie as much as that I knew a lecture from Jadey would be wholly ineffective and only create a wedge between them. At the same time, as the days passed, I could feel the yielding of my own anger. I missed Charlie—I missed talking to him and sitting next to him, loading the dishwasher in the kitchen at night and knowing he was watching baseball in the den, joking around in bed after we’d turned out the lights and before we fell asleep. I missed his off-color remarks and the way that when he made damning comments about people we knew, it meant I didn’t have to; I got to be the good guy and defend them.

To Jadey, I said, “I still don’t get who this Reverend Randy person is.”

“You and me both,” she said.

____

AND THEN HE called; he called the next night, by which point we’d been in Riley for three and a half weeks. It was nine, and Lars and I had moved on to a puzzle of the Sydney Opera House. Charlie said, “It’s all worked out. Jessica’s enrolled for this coming year at Biddle, full ride—full ride from us, I mean, but none of the Suttons will know, because I assumed you’d think that’s better. How’s Ella?”

“You arranged for Jessica Sutton to go to Biddle?”

“Nancy Dwyer called the family, invited them to visit campus, she said the school had heard about Jessica from us—I figured Yvonne and Miss Ruby would have to be morons not to know we were involved, so why not ’fess up partway?—and Jessica passed all the tests today. It’s a done deal. I’ll write her tuition checks at the same time I write Ella’s.”

“Charlie, that’s amazing. I’m not sure what to say. Thank you.”

“You were right.” He sounded better than he had in a long time, more energetic and upbeat, and he also didn’t sound like he’d been drinking, or at least not much. “This is an opportunity for us to do a good thing, and who are we gonna open the coffers for if not Miss Ruby, you know? I’m glad you pushed me on it. All’s well in Riley?”

It was as though Ella and I really were on vacation without him, as if Charlie and I were any married couple catching up at the end of a day apart. “We’re fine.” I lowered my voice—I was in the kitchen, and my mother and Lars were in the living room. “I think she’s a little bored, to be honest.”

Charlie chuckled. “Probably good for her.”

“You sound great,” I said. “You really—You sound wonderful.”

“I’ve started running. You know, I made fun of John for wearing those faggoty spandex, but man, Lindy, the endorphins are something else. It’s different from other sports.”

“How long have you—”

“Just the last ten days or so, but I’m a new man. Getting up at six, heading over to the track in Cudahy, at the high school. A bit of a drive, but it’s invigorating.”

Charlie was getting up at six to drive to the south side and run on the track at a public high school?

“Listen,” he said. “I don’t want to keep you. Let me sign off, and I’ll call Ella tomorrow from work.”

“Where are you right now?” I asked.

“Just watching the game on TV—the Brewers are playing in Anaheim tonight. Hey, my new office at the stadium is great. You’ll have to come see it.” His tone was as friendly and unfraught as if I were a neighbor of whom he was genuinely fond. “Have a good night, Lindy,” he said. “Love to you and El.”

I had been on the cusp of asking again where exactly he was staying—at home, it seemed, except that I just couldn’t believe it—and also who Reverend Randy was, but the conversation had gone so unexpectedly well that I gave in to its rhythms, its imminent conclusion. “Love to you, too,” I said.

THE FOLLOWING NIGHT, Ella and I read a chapter of Fantastic Mr. Fox together before she went to bed, and after I’d stood to turn out the light, she said, “Mom, who’s Andrew Christopher Imhof?”

I froze. Trying to keep my voice steady, I said, “Did someone mention him to you?” Could Dena have, when and if she’d given Ella the tiara? We’d also run into an old classmate of mine, Mary Hafliger, on Commerce Street, but surely Mary wouldn’t have said anything about Andrew. And even if she had, or if someone else had, I’d have heard it.

From the nightstand, Ella lifted a large navy blue hardcover book. It was my high school yearbook, I quickly realized, seeing the embossed silver cursive on the cover: The Zenith 1964. “He’s in here,” she said, and she opened it, flipping the pages. Then she held out the “In Memoriam” page with Andrew’s full name, his photo in black and white, his fair hair and long eyelashes, his heartbreakingly sweet smile. Beneath the photo were the dates of his birth and death: 1946–1963. They both seemed terribly long ago. The forties, that had been the decade of World War II and Sugar Ray Robinson and Rita Hayworth, but even the sixties, the early sixties especially, seemed very distant: a time when Jackie Kennedy wore a pillbox hat and chimps were sent into space.

Ella pointed to the dates and said, “Does that mean he died?”

I stepped toward the bed. “Andrew was a boy in my class, and he did die, when we were seniors in high school. It was very, very sad.”

“How did he die?”

My heart had enlarged in my chest and was blocking my throat, making it difficult to speak or breathe. Was Ella old enough? She’d been in kindergarten when she asked where babies came from, and I had told her, simply and briefly but clearly; I’d used the words vagina and penis, which, when I repeated the story to her, Jadey couldn’t believe—Drew was then twelve, and at their house, they all still called them hoo-hoos and winkies. But I believed that dodging children’s questions wasn’t necessarily good for them or you.

I took a deep breath. “He was in a car accident,” I said.

“Was he wearing his seat belt?”

“A lot of cars back then didn’t have them,” I said. “They weren’t as safe.”

“Did you cry when he died?”

“Yes,” I said. “I cried a lot.” Then—I was not sure this wasn’t an error in judgment, but I wasn’t sure that staying quiet wouldn’t be an error, too—I said, “I was involved in Andrew’s accident. I was driving one car, and he was driving another car, and my car hit his.”

Ella’s eyes grew huge. “Did you go to the hospital?”

“Yes, I did, but I wasn’t seriously hurt. I was lucky, and Andrew was unlucky. He was a wonderful person, and I liked him very much. I’d known him since both of us were younger than you. When he died, it was the saddest thing I had ever been through.”

“Sadder than when your dad died and when Granny died?”

“It was different. When someone dies young—it doesn’t happen often, and it’s not something that will happen to you, although that’s why you wear your seat belt, or it’s why you look both ways before crossing the street, because you need to be careful—but when a young person dies, it’s different from an older person dying. People are supposed to grow up and get married and have children, and when they don’t, it feels like a mistake.”

“Like Jesus?” Ella was possibly the most serious I had ever seen her—entirely focused, listening to every word I said.

“Well, Jesus was an adult when he died. But you’re right that he didn’t get married or have children, and his death was sad, too.”

Ella was silent, pondering. “Do you think Andrew Christopher Imhof and Granny are together now?”

I smiled. “He was just called Andrew, or Andrew Imhof. You don’t have to say his middle name. You know, he and Granny did know each other a little—as you’ve probably noticed, Riley is so small that everyone knows everyone else. When Andrew and I were a year younger than you are now, Granny and I ran into him and his mother at the grocery store, and Granny thought Andrew was a girl. His hair was a little bit long and curly then.”

“She thought he was a girl?” Ella seemed both appalled and excited.

“I don’t think he was too offended.”

Beneath the sheets, Ella had propped her legs into a tent, the open yearbook resting against her thighs. She scrutinized the photo. “Did you love Andrew?”

“Yes,” I said. “I did.” In a way, it was nice to be able to talk about him—these were questions no one had ever asked me, questions no one besides a child would have dared—but it also was striking to think, standing there in my old bedroom, how far behind I had left him. I still dreamed of Andrew regularly, but in the dreams, a certain blurriness, an elasticity of facts, kept us peers, allowing me to ignore what was in this moment starkly obvious: I was twenty-five years older than he had been when he’d died; I had lived longer, by a significant margin, since the accident than he had lived before it; Ella was much closer to the age he’d died than I was. Was it disgusting, was it unseemly, that as a woman of forty-two, I could remember so clearly the anticipation of kissing him for the first time, how tan and handsome he had looked in his football uniform, how warm his skin would have been to touch? And now I dyed the gray from my hair, I had lines at my eyes and mouth, and my face was weathered—not in a terrible way, I wasn’t someone greatly pained by my own aging, but no one would have thought I was any younger than I was. So much time had passed since Andrew’s death. That was what was hard to believe, that so much time had passed and that the accident was no easier to understand than it ever had been. I could find words to describe it so that it sounded awful and faraway, tragic but long ago, when, really, if I thought about it, it was as difficult to comprehend as it had been in 1963. How could I have driven my car into Andrew’s, and how could that have killed him?

Ella said, “Did you love him more than Daddy?”

I blinked. “Oh, sweetie, it’s not like that. It’s not—Andrew wasn’t my boyfriend. We were friends, and I think we kept track of each other over the years, but we never dated. Because we came from the same place and were in the same grade, you could say we knew each other well, but that doesn’t compare to the way you know someone when you live with them. We know almost everything about Daddy, don’t we? What his snores sound like and which is his favorite shirt and how many ice cubes he likes in his glass of water at dinner.”

Ella laughed—Charlie’s snoring was a source of unfailing amusement to her.

“Just like I know almost everything about you,” I said. “It’s because I’m your mother and I love you and you’re my favorite girl in the whole world.” I leaned forward and kissed the top of her head, and as I did, I thought of what Charlie had said to me in the early morning after our wedding night, when I’d awakened from my dream of Andrew: I want to be the love of your life. He had gotten his way, hadn’t he? Even with the two of us staying in different places, my moods were defined by him, by the latest thoughts I’d had about the hope or futility of our future together. Kissing Joe Thayer, however briefly and clumsily, had given me a glimpse of an idea that came back to me now—that I could not in my lifetime love another man. Not so much due to my loyalty to Charlie as due to a sort of weariness, a lack of interest in starting anew. I loved my husband out of affection and also out of habit, I loved him with my wife’s heart, and with my secret heart, my dream heart, I loved Andrew Imhof. I had no other love to spare, not of the romantic variety. If I went through with divorcing Charlie, I wouldn’t remarry; I simply couldn’t envision it, and I found myself wondering then if living alone, being single again, would be harder than putting up with him. Even putting up with him might be easier than not putting up with him—being the beleaguered wife, propelled forward, given a sense of purpose, by my troublesome husband. Whereas if I were single, I would struggle financially, I would have to delicately navigate interacting with the Blackwells and with Charlie himself, and there would be acrimony of an explicit rather than a suppressed kind.

What I wanted to know (it was useless, and adolescent as well) was if I had left the house a little earlier or a little later that September night in 1963, or if Fred Zurbrugg’s party had been called off, or if I hadn’t argued with Dena and driven alone, or if our argument had left me so despondent I’d decided to skip the party altogether—if the accident had been prevented, would Andrew and I have become a couple, and if we’d become a couple would we have remained one, and would we eventually have married? This had long been the story I’d told myself, and if it was a fiction, it had nevertheless felt true—it had felt like the sort of truth you don’t need to defend because, in spite of all arguments against it, it cannot be diminished. But now I was doubtful. I was sick of Riley after less than a month; I was ready to go home, because home wasn’t here. If I had married Andrew, would I have been content to lead a smaller life, to stay forever in a place like this? Was it venturing into the world that had sharpened my appetite for what the world offered? Or if I’d stayed here, a farmer’s wife, would I have felt stifled no matter what?

“I’m praying right now for Andrew Imhof,” Ella said.

I switched off the light. “That’s sweet of you, ladybug.”

IN RILEY, THE Protestant cemetery and the Catholic cemetery were side by side, about a mile southwest of the river, and in the morning, I drove first to St. Mary’s, the Catholic one. At Buhler’s florist, I’d bought two bouquets of white tulips, and I placed one on Andrew’s gravestone, which was a flat gray granite rectangle set into the grass. It was a beautiful late June morning, about seventy degrees with a light breeze, and no other visitors were in the cemetery, though a man on a riding lawn mower was cutting the grass in the distance. Looking for Andrew’s grave, I had passed some headstones marked by dried flowers, fake flowers, whirligigs, or wind socks, though most, like his, were undecorated. I stood there looking down at his name and the dates. I hadn’t attended his funeral, nor had I ever been to his grave—I probably wouldn’t have come on this trip, if not for my conversation with Ella—and it was jarring to see. I would say that it was like proof of something, except that there was nothing left to prove.

I wished in this moment for greater faith, for a prayer to recite that would feel sincere, but none came to me. I crouched, touching the cool stone as I had never really touched Andrew, and I thought, I hope you’re at peace. I’m so sorry. The only answer that came back was the buzz of the lawn mower, but I hadn’t expected otherwise.

I returned to where I’d parked and drove to Grace Cemetery, the Protestant one; it was probably half a mile from one entrance to another, and I could have gone on foot, but the roads here didn’t have sidewalks, and it would be too darkly ironic to get hit crossing between two graveyards. In Grace, I knew where my father’s and grandmother’s headstones were: Unlike Andrew’s, they were upright, my father’s gray and slightly curved at the top like a headboard, my grandmother’s similar in shape but a polished gray-mottled pink. PHILLIP WARREN LINDGREN, 1923–1976, BELOVED SON, HUSBAND, AND FATHER. And for my grandmother, EMILIE WARREN LINDGREN, 1896–1988. For my grandmother, my mother had selected a back-ground that was like an open book with blank pages—generally meant to evoke a Bible, I assumed, but my mother had said to me, “Since Granny liked to read,” and I knew she hadn’t meant religious texts. The soil at my grandmother’s grave was still dark and moist; she had been buried just over a month before, and I continued to feel that I was due to see her again shortly. I set the flowers between their headstones. Although I didn’t know what I believed about souls or an afterlife, it comforted me that now they had each other for company. My grandmother had outlived her son, her only child, by twelve years, and I imagined outliving Ella; it was an unbearable thought.

I would not have asked my father, had he been alive, what I ought to do about my marriage; he wouldn’t have liked such an intimate question. But I could guess what his advice would have been. As for my grandmother, no guesswork was necessary—she had told me straight out. And here in Grace Cemetery, it seemed shameful that I had ever considered otherwise, that I still was acting as if there was a choice to be made. Perhaps it was living around rich people—perhaps it was becoming a rich person myself—that had caused me to forget that life was hard work. Or perhaps it was the decade, the culture; it didn’t matter. The fact was that I had forgotten. But almost eleven years earlier, I’d taken a vow, made a public promise. I thought of my father’s motto—Whatever you are, be a good one—and though once my identity had been defined by being Phillip and Dorothy Lindgren’s daughter, Emilie Lindgren’s granddaughter, now I was Charlie Blackwell’s wife, Ella Blackwell’s mother. All of these people, each in a different way, would be deeply disappointed if I let my marriage fail. What choice did I have, really, except to go back—to try, as my mother had once made the decision to do with my father, to meet my husband with kindness?

BACK ON AMITY Lane, my mother passed me a note with Lars’s handwriting on it: Call Yvonne Sutton as soon as possible, and then a seven-digit number. When I called, I could hear Antoine crying in the background. “Alice, we’re thrilled about Jessica going to Ella’s school,” Yvonne said. “I don’t know what you did to get them to give her that scholarship, but bless you.”

“Don’t think of Biddle as Ella’s school—it’s Jessica’s now, too, and, Yvonne, she’s the one who got herself in. We’re so excited. If you have any questions about any of it, please feel free to call.”

“That’s real generous of you, and I almost forgot, thanks for the books, too—I don’t think Jessie’s looked up once since you dropped them off.” I started to respond, but Yvonne continued, her tone changing. “Now, unfortunately, there’s another reason I’m calling. Alice, Mama won’t tell you herself, so I’ve got to be the one to say it—she can’t stay another night in Maronee. God knows I don’t mean to stick my nose in you two’s personal business, but it just isn’t right for a sixty-three-year-old lady to be babysitting a grown man.”

“You mean that Miss Ruby—” I hesitated. “I’m embarrassed to say I’m not quite sure what’s going on. Has Charlie asked Miss Ruby to stay with him at our house?”

“Not at your house—at Mr. and Mrs. Blackwell’s. Alice, Mama would do anything for Charlie, he’s had her wrapped around his little finger since way back, but she’s too old for this. She needs to sleep in her own bed.”

Of course—of course Charlie wasn’t staying on Maronee Drive. He was staying at his parents’, and Miss Ruby was staying with him in her room off the kitchen. She was probably also cooking him breakfast and dinner.

“You’re absolutely right,” I said. “I’m sorry, and I’m glad you called. I’m not sure if your mother has ever mentioned that Charlie—This will sound very silly, but he’s afraid of the dark.”

“Oh, I know.” Yvonne laughed. “Believe me, we know all about the monsters under Charlie B’s bed.”

“I won’t deny that he’s unusual,” I said.

“I try not to judge.” Yvonne’s tone implied that she wasn’t succeeding, at least in this case. “I’m just concerned about Mama. Now, when I talked to Jadey, she said she doesn’t know when you’re coming home, but she’s fine having Charlie there, so if you want to call him, or you want me to call him, either way. He’d probably listen more to you, but if—”

“I promise that I’ll take care of it,” I said. “Everyone will sleep in their own beds tonight.”

BACK IN MARONEE, I dropped Ella at Jadey’s—Jadey shrieked with joy when she saw me, and agreed to take the girls to the pool if I promised to go on a walk with her that evening—and then I went to our house to sort the mail and listen to the phone messages, to throw out the rotting food from the refrigerator and empty the trash and make our bed from what was, I presumed, the one night Charlie had slept, or tried to sleep, in it. Then I drove to Harold and Priscilla’s, where Miss Ruby was watching The People’s Court on the small television in the kitchen. I told her to go home and take the next week off—I would speak with Priscilla—and I collected Charlie’s belongings. He had been sleeping not in an upstairs bedroom but on the couch in his father’s study, which was nearer to Miss Ruby’s room off the kitchen, and she had obviously been tidying his possessions. I took the alarm clock off the coffee table, folded the sleeping bag, which was from our house, and retrieved his toothbrush and toothpaste from the sink in the powder room under the stairs. I surveyed the second floor, but Charlie seemed to have been showering elsewhere—either at the country club or back at our house.

By this point, it was after four in the afternoon, and I drove to County Stadium. Finding an unlocked entrance, a non-game entrance, took some time, but eventually I saw a maintenance man leaving through nondescript metal double doors. He led me back in, and inside, I ran into another man, an older fellow who may have been the third-base coach, and that gentleman directed me to a third man, this one in a short-sleeved shirt and gray slacks, and after I’d explained separately to all of them who I was and asked where I might find my husband, at last I reached Charlie’s office. It was smaller than I’d imagined, with windows onto the hallway but not to the outside; it was about the same size as the principal’s anteroom, where the secretary sat, in the lower school of Biddle. Charlie had hung nothing on the walls, and the surface of his desk was mostly empty, with a few stacks of paper. He was sitting with his legs up on the desk and his ankles crossed—he wore black wing tips—and he held open a manila file folder and was reading.

The door was open, but I knocked on the aluminum frame. I said, “Am I interrupting?”

When he looked up, his expression was one of surprised pleasure, and also of wariness. He didn’t stand, but he pulled his legs from the desk and set them on the floor. “This is unexpected.”

Given how breezy he’d been when we’d spoken on the phone, the thought had crossed my mind that maybe he’d changed his mind about wanting us—wanting me—to return. I said, “How are you doing?” Before he could answer, I added, “I think it’s time for Ella and me to come home. Do you agree?”

He bowed his head. Was he considering the question? A nervousness came over me. When almost a minute had passed in silence, I said, “Charlie?”

He lifted his head at last, and he seemed choked up. “You’ve caught me off guard, is all,” he said. “Of course you should come home, absolutely. Lindy, I owe you a tremendous apology. I’ve behaved dishonorably as a husband.”

“What? I—No, Charlie, that’s not what I’m saying. Obviously, we both know that things can improve, but . . .” I trailed off; he was shaking his head.

“The Holy Spirit was working through you, Lindy. The Lord caused you to leave so that I’d see my sins and repent, and there’s no doubt about it, I have sinned. But I’m a new man. I’ve been reborn, and if God can forgive me, I hope you can, too. I want you to know I haven’t had a drop to drink in eight days.”

I half expected him to smirk, to lapse into laughter, saying, Just kidding—you fucking believed me! Admit it, you believed me! Except that he didn’t say it, and he wasn’t kidding.

“Is this—” I paused. “Jadey told me you’ve been spending time with someone named Reverend Randy?”

“He’s an extraordinary man, Lindy. You’ll be very impressed when you meet him. He’s thought long and hard about these issues, and he knows the struggle, he understands how hard it is not to sin, but boy, it’s inspiring to hear him talk about the rewards of accepting Jesus as your Savior.”

“How do you know him?”

“Funny thing, but it’s Miss Ruby who introduced us.”

“Oh, is he—is he black?”

Charlie grinned. “You ought to see the look on your face. No, Miss Racially Enlightened, he’s not black.”

“I didn’t say it’s bad if he is, I was just wondering. I assume, from the way you’re talking, that he’s a born-again Christian?”

Charlie looked amused. “Nothing wrong with glorifying God, sweetheart. When you’re around Reverend Randy, you really feel the presence of Christ.”

There were several possible ways Charlie might have reacted to my appearance at the ballpark, several moods I might have found him in—conciliatory or sulky, warm or blasé—but nothing, nothing in all the years I had known him, had prepared me for this. Charlie, my Charlie, had found religion? I knew it could happen to people, but he was the last one I’d have imagined. And yet if it was keeping him from drinking, if it was encouraging him to take responsibility for his own behavior . . . I do not deny that I felt a strong skepticism that afternoon, but I suppressed it, chalking it up to nothing more than my own snobbishness. Most people I knew attended church; no one I knew then was born-again. But hadn’t I learned, over and over, that the world was larger and more complex than I’d once imagined, and wasn’t this lesson an essentially positive one?

I said, “It wouldn’t be a sin for a wife to kiss her husband right now, would it?” The question had hardly left my mouth when Charlie stood to embrace me. To have him back in my arms, that body I knew, the height, the scent, the skin and hair and clothes—what a great relief, how aligned my life felt for the first time not just in weeks but in years. Against my ear, Charlie whispered, “You have no idea how much I missed you.”

I tilted my head back so we were looking at each other. I said, “Ella’s swimming at the club with Winnie and Jadey. I don’t suppose you could duck out early.”

Charlie grinned. “Let me ask the managing partner.” He cocked one ear, pretending to listen—there was no sound except, in the distance, the whirring of a very large fan—and then he nodded. “He says for a woman as good-looking as you, it’d be a crime to stay.” Charlie gathered some of the papers from his desk, set them in his briefcase, and fastened the lock. Before we walked out, he took my hand.

Forty minutes later, we lay naked in our bed, I on my back and he on top, and just before he entered me, he paused—at this point, I was ready to take him in, more than ready—and he said seriously, “From now on, I’m going to be the man you deserve.”

I nodded; I was breathless and flushed. I said, “Hurry.”

ALL THESE YEARS later, they say I told him, “It’s Jack Daniel’s or me.” Or in some versions, “It’s Jim Beam or me.” These ultimatums sound catchy, I suppose, but I didn’t say them. I didn’t even say, in a less pithy manner, that I’d leave him if he wouldn’t stop drinking. I did leave him briefly, and he did stop drinking, and the events are connected, but not as cleanly or directly as anyone might imagine from the outside.

His critics are more fond of this false anecdote than his supporters, and what they think it illustrates, I gather, is that it’s my fault—his election is my fault, his presidency is my fault, his war is my fault. Why couldn’t I just have let him be an alcoholic? Plenty of wives put up with it every day!

But these accusations presuppose a consensus on the kind of president Charlie has been; a dreadful one, is what his critics believe. Do I think he has been a dreadful president? I think the story is always more complicated than people realize.

The accusations also presuppose that I knew, that any of us did. But I could not have imagined in 1988 how rapidly our lives would change, and if someone had told me, I’d have thought the prediction was as plausible as that of a man standing on a street corner, holding a sign that warns of the apocalypse. Your husband will be president; the end is near. I’d have smiled coolly and kept walking.

THE WEEKEND AFTER my return to Maronee, our friends the Laufs had an anniversary party that Joe Thayer also attended, and he approached me as I was walking toward the buffet dinner. I could tell from his posture, even before he spoke, that he was worked up—impassioned, I suppose. He said, “It’s not my intent to pressure you, Alice, but have you given thought to what I said at Princeton?”

Surely he couldn’t mean his suggestion that he and I embark on some type of long-term relationship, surely that had just been the alcohol speaking. But yes, clearly, that was what he meant. He gazed at me with such a fierce ardor that I might have laughed, if not for the very slightly threatening undercurrent that such ardor is always accompanied by.

In what I hoped was a firm but not unkind way, I said, “Joe, I’m not leaving my marriage.”

“But in Princeton—”

I shook my head. “I ought to have been more discreet.”

“Alice, you kissed me. I don’t imagine you just kiss odd men all over the place! Or maybe I’m wrong, maybe you do!” He was as agitated as I’d ever seen him—perhaps he had the idea that he’d persuade me if not by flattery then by insistence and if not by insistence then by defamatory insinuation. I had the fleeting thought then that we are each of us pathetic in one way or another, and the trick is to marry a person whose patheticness you can tolerate; I never could have tolerated his. It occurred to me that Carolyn Thayer’s behavior may not have been so egregious after all.

“It can’t be,” I said, and for the benefit of his ego, I tried to strike a note of regret. It may have been an ironic twist that it was Charlie who unwittingly saved me; he appeared at my elbow, setting a hand on my back and saying, “Joey T., when are you gonna come to a ball game with us? You pick the night, and we’ve got a ticket with your name on it.”

Joe seemed to be gasping for air. He sounded accusatory as he said, “Aren’t you generous.”

“Heck, we ought to make it a men’s night.” Charlie nodded toward me. “This one is gonna be sitting through more games than she ever imagined in her wildest dreams, so we’ll let her off the hook for once. But give your brother a jingle, see how everyone’s schedule best coordinates, and we’ll nail down a plan.” Charlie leaned in, speaking more quietly. “Now, I don’t know if you’ve taken the plunge back into the dating pool yet, but Zeke Langenbacher has a very attractive young lady working as his assistant, a super girl who comes from a real nice family in Louisville, and I’d love to set the two of you up. Alice, cover your ears.” I didn’t—he’d known that I wouldn’t—and he said, “Not a bad rack on this gal, either.”

“Charlie!” I swatted him, though I loved my husband very much in this moment. I was reminded of how, Joe’s sarcasm aside, Charlie could be truly generous and kind. Joe glowered—I’m sure he currently despised Charlie as much as I adored him—and from then on, for the rest of our time in Maronee, Joe avoided me. He did it in such a way that I would notice, catching my eye when we found ourselves in the same place, then violently looking away and not talking to me. As far as I know, he and Charlie never attended a game together.

____

JADEY HADN’T TOLD me until my return to Milwaukee that my departure to Riley had greatly rattled Arthur; that the afternoon following Charlie’s one ill-fated night at their house, Arthur had come home from work in the middle of the day, weeping, telling Jadey that if she ever left him, he would be completely lost and would rather be dead; that they had then proceeded to have stupendous sex; and that ever since, he had doted on her and had even, on two occasions, brought her flowers for no reason. (“One bouquet had carnations in it,” she said, “but he’s trying.”) She revealed to him neither how hurt she had been by his comment about her weight nor with what enthusiasm she had considered an affair; she told me she’d decided to let sleeping dogs lie. She said, “Maybe you should skip town a little more often, because Arthur finds it to be a powerful aphrodisiac.”

“I’m glad I could help,” I said.

FOR CHARLIE AND Ella and me, the next five or six years were, I think, our happiest ones as a family. As everyone had anticipated, Charlie was perfectly suited to his new role with the Brewers. He attended just about all the home games and some of the away ones, and Ella and I attended quite a lot of them with him, though as she made her way through adolescence, the idea of spending an evening watching baseball with the two of us struck her as less and less appealing. But I remember all those weeknights and Saturday nights and Sunday afternoons with real nostalgia—the times it was windy and sunny, the times it was unbearably hot and we’d come home burned, the times we crouched together in raincoats, waiting for the umpires to call the game. We ate hot dogs and french fries, we chatted with the people in the seats around us, sometimes we even sat in mediocre seats for the purpose of Charlie mingling and signing autographs, which he loved being asked to do, taking particular delight in being asked to sign baseballs (I assumed at the time that sitting in the upper deck was something Zeke Langenbacher had suggested, but I later discovered Hank Ucker had), and I became genuinely invested in the team’s wins and losses. Construction on the new stadium was completed in 1992, built on the same grounds as the old one, which was demolished; the new one has, among other features, luxury boxes and a retractable roof. I cannot say the fact that both stadiums turned out to be in Ed Blackwell’s congressional district surprised me. Because the new stadium was publicly financed, a degree of controversy accompanied it, and I honestly believe that Charlie confronted the challenges with restraint and reason. He’d never worked harder in his life than he did during those years, and at the opening game in the new stadium, I was very proud of him.

It was in 1993 that Charlie made the decision to run for governor—at Hank Ucker’s urging, needless to say—and he was elected in 1994. That, too, was a great turning point in our lives, though eventually dwarfed by the turning point that occurred in 2000.

We couldn’t have guessed then what an asset Charlie’s religiosity would turn out to be. Best of all was his sincerity. This, I suspect, has been a large part of Charlie’s appeal to voters—if he can be petulant or sophomoric, he is never less than sincere. Even when called upon to act stately, he demonstrates, sincerely, that he’s acting: He winks, he makes faces or at least conveys that he wishes he could. Often during his first presidential campaign, he’d say on the trail, when trying to contrast himself with the outgoing president, who was widely viewed as a slick panderer, “What you see is what you get.” He’d grin impishly. I sometimes long to remind voters of this now; neither to them nor to me did Charlie ever conceal who he is.

Back before his gubernatorial bid, before our already not exactly average lives became as far-fetched as a fairy tale, his family thought it a hoot that he’d been born again. If Arthur said over dinner, about a recent Packers game, “It was a goddamm rout,” Charlie might say, with jovial sternness, “You know I don’t care for that kind of language,” and Arthur would reply, “Jesus fucking Christ, Chas, get off your high horse.” Or perhaps “Holy shit, you’ve lost your sense of humor!” (In fact, Charlie still enjoyed secular bawdiness and cursing—it was only people taking the Lord’s name in vain that bothered him.) He also stopped purchasing pornography, which pleased me, though because I had a hunch he’d miss it, I bought him an artsy coffee table book of black-and-white photos of female nudes. Presumably, it was a poor substitute.

Charlie had joined a men’s prayer group that met once a week, sometimes in our living room. Reverend Randy—now that he is director of the Multifaith Council, the public knows him as Randall Kniss—became a fixture in our lives. We never missed a Sunday at Heavenly Rose, we said grace before all meals (Charlie even said it at restaurants or dinner parties, which I found a tad ostentatious, but I bit my tongue), and Charlie read the Bible every night before bed.

That summer of 1988, we didn’t end up spending much time in Halcyon, driving up just for a few weekends, both because Charlie was busy with the Brewers and because he feared that being around his brothers, particularly Arthur, would make it harder not to drink. Once, about a month after I’d returned from Riley, I awakened past midnight and found that Charlie was not beside me, though we’d gone to bed together almost two hours before. Thinking I heard voices downstairs, I walked into the hall and stood at the top of the steps; there definitely were people talking—chanting, it sounded like—in the den. It wasn’t until I’d gone downstairs that I could hear clearly what they were saying, that I knew who it was, though I stopped short of entering the room. Through the doorway, I saw my husband and beefy, ruddy Reverend Randy on their knees, side by side, holding hands, their eyes shut, and Charlie weeping; over and over, they were reciting the sinner’s prayer. I backed away.

He’d felt tempted to have a glass of whiskey, Charlie told me the next morning, so tempted he’d been unable to sleep. He had called Reverend Randy because Randy understood these desires, and they’d prayed together, and the urge had passed; Satan had gone elsewhere to do his bidding. This happened again, Reverend Randy’s late-night appearances, but I never got out of bed for another one. I’m not proud to say that what I saw that night, looking into the den—it bothered me. It wasn’t Reverend Randy as a person so much as the prayer as an experience, the fervor I would never share. Charlie had traveled outside my reach to a place I couldn’t follow.

But I should note, for all my resistance to organized religion, that I don’t believe Charlie could have quit drinking without it. It provided him with a way to structure his behavior, and a way to explain that behavior, both past and present, to himself. Perhaps fiction has, for me, served a similar purpose—what is a narrative arc if not the imposition of order on disparate events?—and perhaps it is my avid reading that has been my faith all along.

It wasn’t until years later, until quite recently, in fact, that I learned exactly how Miss Ruby had managed to introduce Charlie and Reverend Randy: She had found the reverend by looking in the Yellow Pages under churches. Herself a faithful parishioner at Lord’s Baptist in Harambee, Miss Ruby sensed that Charlie would benefit from spiritual uplift, and when she’d reached Reverend Randy on the phone, she’d requested that he make a house call. Jessica Sutton was the one who told me this, and I said, “But why didn’t Miss Ruby ask her own minister to talk to Charlie?”

Jessica is thirty-one now, a tall, poised, whip-smart woman, a graduate of Yale and the Kennedy School at Harvard, and my chief of staff; during Charlie’s first term in the White House, she was my deputy chief of staff, and at the start of his second term, when her predecessor left, I promoted her. I’m almost sure that Jessica is also a Democrat, though there are certain topics we do not broach. She laughed at my question, and though her words were damning, her tone was warm, as if she were teasing. She said, “Grandma thought he’d never listen to a black man.”