PART III

402 Maronee Drive

BECAUSE WE HAD theater tickets for seven-thirty, Charlie had promised to be home by six-fifteen, and I’d made a chicken marsala we could eat with Ella before we left. But by six-forty, Charlie still wasn’t back, and our sitter, a college sophomore named Shannon whom Ella adored, had arrived. I called Charlie’s office, where his answering machine picked up, his secretary’s voice explaining that he was away or in a meeting. Had he forgotten about the play—it was Chekhov’s The Seagull—and gone to the country club to play squash or lift weights? Had he gone to a baseball game? It was a Wednesday in May, and though we had season tickets to the Marcus Center, we usually went to performances on Friday or Saturday nights.

I checked the paper, and the Brewers were indeed playing at home; they were playing the Detroit Tigers. That was the likeliest explanation for Charlie’s absence, but just in case, I called the country club, and the operator connected me to the athletic building, where Tony, the seventy-year-old who tended bar in the oak-paneled lounge between the men’s and women’s locker rooms, told me he hadn’t seen Charlie. This still could mean Charlie had entered the squash courts or the weight room through the side door, or it could mean he’d gone to his parents’ house, where he and Arthur liked to watch baseball games together in peace and quiet. Harold and Priscilla had moved to Washington, D.C., in 1986, two years earlier, when Harold was elected chair of the Republican National Committee, but the house was still fully furnished.

I called Jadey—she and Arthur also lived on Maronee Drive, a mile west of us—and their son Drew, who was fifteen, said, “Mom’s walking Lucky.”

“Is your dad home yet?” I asked.

“He’s working late.”

When I hung up, it was ten to seven, and it would take a solid twenty-five minutes to get downtown. Shannon and Ella sat at the kitchen table, Ella finishing her dinner. I crossed the kitchen and kissed Ella on her forehead. To both of the, I said, “Upstairs at eight-thirty, lights out at eight-forty-five, and no TV.”

“Mommy, your earrings look like thumbtacks,” Ella said.

I laughed. The earrings in question were gold, and they did look a little like thumbtacks. I also wore a pale pink suit—a skirt and jacket—and pink Ferragamo pumps. “Make sure to put away Barbie’s tea party,” I said to Ella, then looked at Shannon. “There’s some cooked steak in the fridge if you want to reheat it. We should be home by ten-thirty. I’m stopping by Mr. Blackwell’s parents’ house, because I think that’s where he is, but if he comes here, tell him to meet me downtown.”

He wasn’t at his parents’, though. At first, pulling into the driveway of their castlelike dwelling, I’d noticed lights in the kitchen and thought I’d found him, but when I approached the side door on foot, I saw through a window that it was Miss Ruby; she was cinching the belt of a tan raincoat.

She opened the door for me, and I said, “Charlie’s not here, is he?”

“You try the country club?”

“I don’t think he’s there, either.” I glanced at my watch. “We’re supposed to go to a play that starts at seven-thirty.”

Miss Ruby regarded me impassively. Over the years, I had observed the Blackwells competing for her opprobrium—if she scolded Arthur for, say, setting a glass on the living room table without a coaster, he’d treat it as a minor victory—but this was not a competition in which I wanted to participate. If Miss Ruby was grumpy, she was also an unfailingly hard worker, and on more than one holiday, I’d walked into the kitchen to find her scrubbing dishes at eleven P.M., then I’d returned to the house the following morning and found her setting out breakfast fixings by eight o’clock. Just a few years before, I’d learned she had a bedroom off the kitchen, as well as her own adjacent bathroom, but sleeping at the Blackwells’ rather than going home for the night seemed to me more a drawback than a perk of her job.

It was by this point exactly seven, which meant I’d likely miss the start of the play, which meant why bother? I nodded toward the back door. “You’re headed out, I take it?”

“Just making sure the house is ready for Mr. and Mrs.”

I had forgotten that Harold and Priscilla were coming to town for the weekend, and that in fact we all were due for dinner there Saturday night. I made a mental note to call Priscilla and ask what I could bring.

I gestured to Miss Ruby to walk out in front of me, and almost imperceptibly, she shook her head; I walked out first, and she followed. It was about sixty degrees, the late-May sky darkening, the Blackwells’ lawn canopied by trees thick with new leaves. As we crossed the gravel driveway, I realized my car was the only one parked, and I turned to Miss Ruby. “Can I offer you a ride?”

“No, ma’am, I take the bus.”

“Then at least let me drive you to your stop. It’s on Whitting, isn’t it?” A few times, in the late afternoon or early evening, I had driven past her waiting there.

“You don’t need to,” she said.

“No, I insist.” I laughed a little. “I’d like to do something worthwhile with my night.” When she climbed in the car, I had the distinct sense that she was humoring me.

We drove in silence—the NPR show I’d been listening to had come on with the ignition, and I’d switched it off in case it wasn’t to her liking (Charlie referred to the station as National “Pubic” Radio)—and as we were approaching the corner of Montrose Lane and Whitting Avenue, I said, “Would you be interested in going to the theater with me? Our tickets are for The Seagull, and they’ll go to waste otherwise. But please don’t feel like you have to—it’ll be a bit of a rush to get there.” She didn’t respond immediately, and I wondered if I should explain the play’s plot or author, or if it would be presumptuous to assume Miss Ruby hadn’t heard of Chekhov.

“I don’t know that I’m dressed right,” she finally said, and I looked over, worried that she would have on the black dress that was her uniform—I wouldn’t blame her for not wanting to go to a play in a maid’s uniform—but I saw that beneath her raincoat, she was wearing red slacks and a black sweater.

“No, you’re fine,” I said. “I’m a little overdressed, to tell the truth. Have you been to the Marcus Center?”

“Jessica went with her school to hear the Christmas carols.” Jessica was Miss Ruby’s granddaughter, the daughter of Yvonne, and I knew both of them lived with Miss Ruby; Jessica’s father was not in the picture. Yvonne had actually helped at a few parties Charlie and I gave early in our marriage, while she was in nursing school, and now she worked downtown in the ER at St. Mary’s. Yvonne was a sunnier woman than her mother, and I’d always liked her, and Ella was crazy about Jessica, who was a few years older. On the days Miss Ruby brought her granddaughter to the Blackwells’ house, if Jessica was out of school but Yvonne had to work, the two little girls would spend hours playing with Barbies in Priscilla’s kitchen. It struck me then that I hadn’t seen either Jessica or Yvonne for quite a while, not since before Harold and Priscilla had left for Washington. I said, “Is Jessica still at Harrison Elementary?”

“Yes, ma’am, she is.” A bit uncertainly, Miss Ruby added, “I suppose I could go to that play.”

I was shocked and delighted, but I intentionally remained low-key. I said, “Wonderful,” and then, as I accelerated, “Jessica was always so bright. Am I right in thinking she’s about to finish fifth grade?”

“She’s in the sixth grade with Mr. Armstrong,” Miss Ruby said. “Straight A’s on her report card, vice president of the student council, and she’s a leader in the youth group at Lord’s Baptist.”

“That’s fabulous,” I said. “Where will she go for junior high?”

“She’ll be at Stevens.”

I made a conscious effort not to react negatively. Stevens was, without a doubt, the worst junior high school in Milwaukee. We lived in the suburbs, and Ella went to private school, to Biddle Academy, but you didn’t have to be a faithful reader of The Milwaukee Sentinel to know what dire straits the city’s public schools were in, and Stevens was in the direst: The year before, a gun that a seventh-grader had brought to school somehow went off between classes, and within the last month, two ninth-graders had been expelled for selling crack. (Ninth-graders! And for God’s sake, crack. It reminded me why I’d taught younger kids, though I couldn’t have fathomed anything like that in the seventies.) “What’s Jessica’s favorite subject?” I asked.

“I guess it’s English, but she’s good at everything.” Miss Ruby pointed. “You want to save time, you should take Howland Boulevard.”

“That’s great she’s doing so well,” I said. “How’s Yvonne?”

“Not getting any sleep since the baby came. He sure does like to be held.”

“Oh my goodness, I didn’t realize Yvonne had had a baby. When was this?”

“Antoine Michael,” Miss Ruby said. “Turns two months old on the first of June.”

“Miss Ruby, that’s so exciting. I would love to see him.” I had thought my fondness for babies might be a thing I got out of my system after I had one myself, but it had never passed. I still was fascinated by their tiny fingernails and noses and earlobes, the perfect softness of their skin—they seemed magical, from another planet. When Ella became a toddler and then a child, I loved every new stage, she was always funny and charming and of course infuriating, but I admit that I mourned a little when she was no longer a newborn; that transition had been the hardest. “Maybe Ella and I could swing by some afternoon,” I said, and when Miss Ruby didn’t respond, I added, “Or let’s find a time for your family to come to our house. Would lunch a week from Sunday work? Or”—I didn’t know what time the Suttons finished church, so perhaps Sunday wasn’t ideal—“what about Monday? Next Monday is Memorial Day, isn’t it?”

“I suppose we could come.”

“Oh, Ella will be thrilled. Now, is Yvonne—is the baby’s father—”

“Clyde, he lives with us, too. He and Yvonne got married back last summer.”

“Miss Ruby, I had no idea so much was going on in your life! How did Yvonne and Clyde meet?”

“He’s at the hospital, too, down in the cafeteria.” Miss Ruby chuckled. “Sold Yvonne her pie and coffee, if that doesn’t beat all.”

“Good for them.”

When we reached the Marcus Center, we parked in a lot on Water Street and hurried inside. The ushers were closing the doors of the theater, but we were able to slip in and take our seats as the lights went down. I had never seen The Seagull, and I thought it was quite good—the actress playing Madame Arkadina was superb. It was not until the second act that I was overtaken by an uneasy feeling. Where was Charlie? Was it safe to assume he was at the baseball game, or could he be somewhere else entirely?

At intermission, I found a pay phone in the lobby, but again there was no answer at his office, and at home, Shannon said she hadn’t heard from him. I hovered between irritation and anxiety. The fact was, I had more reason to think he’d simply forgotten about the play, or even purposely avoided it, than I did to think something was wrong. In the last few months, Charlie had accompanied me to the theater increasingly grudgingly, and sometimes we skipped events altogether when I didn’t want to see a performance enough to try persuading him. The truth of our lives was that for close to two years, he had been in a bad mood; he was almost always restless and disagreeable.

To a certain extent, Charlie had been restless since I’d met him—he drummed his fingers on the table when he felt we’d stayed too long at a dinner party, he’d murmur to me, “I bet even God has fallen asleep” during sermons at church—but in the past, it had been a restlessness that was physical, situational, rather than existential. His bad mood was different. It wasn’t directed toward me, but it had become such a constant that the times when he wasn’t in its grip were the exceptions.

I’d tried to pinpoint when it had all started, and it seemed to have been around the time he turned forty, in March 1986. To my surprise, he had not wanted a party—he, Ella, and I had celebrated with hamburgers and carrot cake at home—and in the months before and after his birthday, Charlie talked often about his legacy. He’d say, “I just have to wonder what kind of mark I’ll make. By the time Granddad Blackwell was my age, he’d founded a company with three dozen employees, and by the time Dad was forty, he’d gone from being the state attorney general to being governor.” If I were to be completely candid, I would make the following admission: There were many things about Charlie that I knew other people might imagine I’d find irritating—his crudeness, his healthy ego, his general squirminess—and I didn’t. But his fixation with his legacy (I even grew to hate the word) I found intolerable. It seemed so indulgent, so silly, so male; I have never, ever heard a woman muse on her legacy, and I certainly have never heard a woman panic about it. I once, in the most delicate manner possible, expressed this observation about gender to Charlie, and he said, “It’s because you’re the ones who give birth.” I did not find this answer satisfying.

Whatever the source of Charlie’s discontent, in late 1986 and the first half of 1987, it had been exacerbated by three quarters in a row of declining profits at Blackwell Meats. There ensued a many-months-long debate about taking the company public, an idea Charlie favored, and his brother John, who was still the CEO, opposed. The five other members of the company’s board of directors were Arthur, Harold, Harold’s brother, the brother’s son, and Harold’s sister’s husband, and their votes were evenly split, with Harold siding with John. This meant the decision came down to Arthur, who, after much back-and-forth, voted with John and against Charlie. Charlie spared his father and Arthur and saved his anger for John, and the previous November, we’d all experienced a rather strained Thanksgiving, with Priscilla seating John and Charlie as far apart as possible. Although the chill seemed to have thawed in the six months since—John and Charlie saw each other every day at work, after all—Charlie still privately seethed about what he saw as John’s ignorance (a particularly sore spot for Charlie was that John had never attended business school), and the rancor was a vivid reminder that if someone else criticized a Blackwell, it wasn’t acceptable, but a Blackwell criticizing a Blackwell was just fine. Meanwhile, I had tried not to let the conflict affect my relationship with John’s wife, Nan—I invited her to lunch more often than usual, or I’d suggest we drive together to Junior League meetings—and Ella, with no idea that her father and uncle were sparring, was worshipful of her girl cousins: Liza, who had taught me string figures during my first visit to Halcyon, was now twenty and finishing her junior year at Princeton, and Margaret was seventeen and would enter Princeton in the fall.

But Charlie was less and less inclined to participate in family gatherings—he certainly didn’t initiate any—and he could be guaranteed to show up for a Blackwell brunch or dinner only if his parents were in town, which wasn’t more often than every six weeks. A month before, in April, John and Nan had bought a table for eight at a benefit for the art museum and invited us to sit with them, and Charlie hadn’t gone at the last minute; it was a Saturday evening, he’d been drinking heavily while watching a baseball game in the den, and when he came upstairs and saw that I’d hung his tuxedo on the back of our bedroom door, he said, “No way I’m putting on that monkey suit.”

“Charlie, it’s blacktie,” I said, and he said, “Tough titty. I’m wearing what I have on, or you can go without me.” I had thought at first that he was kidding, but he’d maintained his refusal to change clothes, which was the same as refusing to go. When I’d asked what I was supposed to tell John and Nan—I knew they’d paid a hundred dollars a plate—he shrugged. “Tell ’em the truth.” Instead, I said he’d come down with the stomach flu. When I got home that night, he was still watching television—some police drama—and he smiled impishly and said, “Do you forgive your scoundrel husband?” Because it wasn’t worth it not to, I did, but that Monday, I ordered pamphlets from two treatment facilities for alcoholics, one local and one in Chicago. When I showed the pamphlets to Charlie, he said angrily, “Because I didn’t want to change my clothes the other night? Are you kidding me? Lindy, get a fucking grip.”

At some point during the spring, Charlie’s malaise had expanded to include not just his brothers but also his upcoming twentieth reunion at Princeton, which would occur in early June. In advance of the event, he’d received a bonded leather book in which alumni provided updates about their professional and personal lives, and before bed, he’d taken to reading aloud from it in tones of scorn and disbelief: “ ‘Having made partner at Ellis, Hoblitz, and Carson was an achievement outmatched only by the indescribable pleasure of seeing the sunrise over Maui’s Haleakala Crater as Cynthia and I celebrated fifteen years of marriage . . . ’ I’m telling you, this guy didn’t know his asshole from his elbow in college. Oh, here’s a good one: ‘I find it humbling to think that my oncology research literally saves lives . . . ’ We all knew O’Brien was a homo.” I did not find these excerpts or Charlie’s editorializing enjoyable, mostly because I’d be trying to read my own book, and they were interruptions. We didn’t have to go to the reunion, I pointed out once, eliciting a snappish rebuttal: Of course we had to go! What kind of chump skipped Reunions? (That was what Princetonians called the event—not the reunion, just capital-R Reunions.) It was clear that the book had touched a nerve, that while working for a family-owned meat company sufficed in Maronee, at least on good days, Charlie questioned how impressive it sounded in a more national context. Though I tried to be sympathetic to his insecurities, I couldn’t shake the feeling that this was, on balance, a rather fortunate problem to have.

In recent weeks, he had been coming home from work later and later and rarely calling to say where he was. Sometimes, it would turn out, he’d been at the country club, sometimes he’d stopped at a bar for a drink (this bothered me most, because it seemed seedy—in Riley, husbands and fathers frequented bars, but they didn’t in Maronee), and sometimes he’d driven directly from the office to a Brewers game. The Blackwells had four season tickets, formerly Harold’s, which were shared among Charlie and his brothers but often went unused. On these nights, when I asked whom he’d gone with, once it was Cliff Hicken (he and Kathleen, the friends who’d held the backyard cookout where Charlie and I had met, had moved from Madison to Milwaukee three years after we had, when Cliff had taken a job as vice president of a financial advising company), and once Charlie had gone to a game with a younger fellow from work, but several times, it sounded like Charlie had gone alone. He’d arrive home as I was going to bed, and I’d feel simultaneously angry, distressed, and too tired for a confrontation. I’d postpone a real conversation until morning, by which point I didn’t have the heart to begin today with what was worst from yesterday. In any case, though he never said as much, I had the sense that on many of these mornings, Charlie was too hungover to do more than force himself out of bed and into the shower.

It had occurred to me that he could be having an affair, but I didn’t think he was. We still had sex regularly, if not with the frequency we’d enjoyed early on, and he was, in smaller ways, as affectionate as he’d ever been. In the middle of the night, he’d take my hand and hold it while we slept; the previous week, I’d awakened around three to find him rubbing his feet against mine. When we got up, I’d asked, “Were you playing footsie with me last night?” and he’d said, “Lindy, don’t pretend that footsie isn’t your favorite game.” His ongoing bad mood had not obliterated his usual personality; it was more that it accompanied it, like a sidecar on a motorcycle. And as for the possibility of him having an affair, really, he seemed more preoccupied than secretive.

AT THE END of intermission, I rejoined Miss Ruby in the theater and said, “What do you think?” and she said in a guarded way, “It’s interesting.” When the play was over and the lights went on, I was approached by several people Charlie and I knew, and when I introduced Miss Ruby to them (instead of calling her Miss Ruby, which felt peculiar in this context, I said, “This is Ruby Sutton”), I could tell some of them wondered who she was; the only person who seemed to recognize her was an older woman named Tottie Gagneaux, who squinted and said, “Aren’t you Priscilla’s helper?”

Quickly, I said, “Did you know they’ll be in town this weekend? They’re coming from Arizona, if I’m not mistaken, although it’s hard to keep track with how much they travel these days . . . ”

It was raining lightly as we left the theater, and Miss Ruby gave me directions to her house. She lived in Harambee, it turned out, in a modest one-story shingle house on a hill, with a steep concrete staircase leading to the door. As I let her out, I could see, at the edges of the curtain in the front window, the flickering blue light of a TV. A figure carrying a baby—Yvonne, obviously—lifted the curtain from one side and peered out the window at my car. “Thanks so much for keeping me company tonight,” I said, and Miss Ruby said, “Yes, ma’am.” Before she shut the car door, she added, “Good night, Alice.” I was nearly certain that in the eleven years since I had met her, it was the first time she’d ever used my name.

DRIVING HOME, I felt an odd, happy lightness. The evening had gone in a different direction than I’d expected, but it seemed like it had been a good direction—while Charlie would have been bored by The Seagull, I sensed that Miss Ruby had enjoyed it. When I pulled into our driveway, though, I felt a flicker of doubt. Shannon’s car was gone, and after I’d pressed the garage-door opener, I saw Charlie’s Jeep Cherokee. Had the baseball game been rained out?

I unlocked the front door, and as soon as I stepped inside, I heard the approach of heavy footsteps. Charlie met me in the hall. “I hope that was a damn good play.”

“Is Ella all right?”

“She’s fine. I sent Shannon home at nine, and I’ve been waiting for you ever since.”

“I called here and spoke to her at intermission, so you must have gotten in right after that.”

“Intermission, huh?” He folded his arms. Whenever he left for work in the morning, and whenever he came home at night, we always hugged and kissed, sometimes repeatedly. So far, we had done neither. In a sarcastic voice, he said, “You get your daily dose of the fine arts?”

I said nothing.

“You didn’t maybe wonder where I was?” he added. “Just for a minute or two, while you watched the actors recite their lines?”

“I assumed you were at the ball game. Charlie, I called the country club, I called Arthur and Jadey, I drove over to your parents’, and I’m sorry, but this isn’t the first time I’ve been left in the dark on your whereabouts.”

“So it didn’t cross your mind for even half a second that something might be wrong?”

“Is something wrong?”

“I don’t know. What do you think?” You’ve screwed up, his expression said, and I’ve got all the time in the world to wait for you to realize it.

Simultaneously, I felt a sincere fear, a bone-deep apprehension, and I felt a surge of resentment. If something was wrong, why was he toying with me? And if something wasn’t wrong, the question was the same—why was he toying with me?

“Don’t do this,” I said. We looked at each other for several seconds, and I did not smile a coddling smile, I did not smile at all. I was willing to coddle Charlie when he thought everyone else was plotting against him, but I wouldn’t do so when he acted as if I were plotting, too.

At last, in a surprisingly casual voice, he said, “The company’s royally fucked.” He turned and walked past the living room and into the back den, and I followed him. (Really, I was not so stern at all—I would follow, I would coddle, in exchange for the smallest amount of respect and sometimes in exchange for less than respect, for mere neutrality. Had anyone been watching, I probably would have seemed like a doormat, but I believed in picking my battles, and there was rarely anything I wanted more than I didn’t want to keep fighting.)

The TV was on, set to the game he apparently hadn’t gone to, and on the table in front of the TV were an open bag of Fritos, a half-empty bottle of whiskey, and an old-fashioned glass with an inch of amber liquid in it. Charlie took a seat in the center of the couch, in a spread-out posture that did not invite joining him. I sat in one of the two heavy armchairs on either side of the couch.

Gesturing at the Fritos, I said, “Did you see there’s chicken marsala?”

“I had a steak.”

He grabbed a throw pillow from beside him, a pillow covered in dark brown corduroy, and clutched it in a way that was so childish it might have been funny or sweet were he not seething. He was looking at the television screen as he said, “Eleven people in Indianapolis puked their guts out after a high school sports banquet Monday night, and what do you suppose was the banquet’s entrée? If you guessed chili made with Blackwell ground beef, then ding, ding, ding, you win first prize! Now the USDA has gotten involved, John has decided to do a recall—we’re talking, at a minimum, hundreds of thousands of pounds of chuck, maybe millions, in at least five states—and you want to know the best part? I bet you dollars to doughnuts it’s not our fault. For all we know, the dipshits in Indiana bought expired meat, but hey, if the big corporation up in Milwaukee can take the fall for it, why not?”

“Charlie, I’m sorry.”

He lifted his head. “You and me both. I spent an hour talking to some jackass from the Sentinel tonight when I don’t give a shit about any of this. I’ll grill meat, I’ll eat meat, end of story. I’m sick of pretending I care about the integrity of sausage—I didn’t go to business school to oversee quality control.”

“How are Arthur and John doing?”

“Arthur and John can go fuck themselves.”

As he spoke, a player for the Brewers struck out, ending the inning, and Charlie hurled the pillow he’d been holding at the TV. Then he leaned forward, setting his head in his hands, and I stood and went to sit by him. I placed my palm on his back, rubbing it over his white oxford shirt, saying nothing.

With his head still in his hands, he said, “I’m tired of this bullshit.”

“I know.” I kept rubbing his back. “I know you are.”

“I’m this close to quitting. I’ve had my fill.”

“It’s fine if you quit,” I said, “although I’m sure you’ll want to do it as diplomatically as possible.” Relatively early in our marriage, I’d had the strange realization that Charlie’s income didn’t affect our standard of living. It turned out that at the age of twenty-five, Charlie had inherited a trust of seven hundred thousand dollars, and though he’d spent twenty-seven thousand dollars of his own money on his congressional campaign in ’78 and a hundred and sixty-three thousand when we bought our house, he’d hardly touched it besides that, and he earned a good salary. With the exception of the precipitous stock-market drop in October 1987, our investments had done well, and there was now in various accounts over a million dollars. I still thought it was important that Charlie hold a job—important for his sense of himself, his ability to give an answer when people asked what he did, and I also couldn’t imagine anything more disastrous for our marriage than if we were both in the house all day—but it didn’t matter to me what his job was, and I agreed with him that he could probably find something he found more engaging than the meat industry.

Having quit my own job eight months after our wedding, I had contributed a negligible amount to the family pot, and I never lost sight of the fact that our money was not exactly ours; I was, however, the one who wrote the checks for all our bills, and I also kept files for the accounts. I sometimes thought back to that check I’d seen for twenty thousand dollars one of the first times I visited Charlie’s apartment, how bewildered I’d been by it. Certain things, I now knew, required checks with many zeroes: painting the outside of our house, making a respectable contribution to the annual giving fund at Biddle Academy, acquiring my Volvo station wagon outright, monthly payments being a phenomenon with which Charlie appeared to have little experience.

I suppose it was because the taxes we paid each April on dividends from our investments were greater, even accounting for inflation, than my salary as a teacher had ever been, that I felt it was all right to quietly, and without mentioning it to Charlie, make occasional donations to charities that I suspected would have appealed less to him than they did to me. The donations were in the amount of two or three or, at most, five hundred dollars: I’d read in the paper about an inner-city food pantry, a literacy program, an after-school drop-in center for teens that was in danger of closing, and I’d feel a swelling uneasiness—familiar to me by this point—as I sat in the den or kitchen of our five-bedroom house on Maronee Drive. I’d write a check, send it off, and the uneasiness would subside for a while, until the next time. Although Charlie looked over our finances only once a year, when taxes were due, I did not include my donations in the list of deductions I gave our accountant. Of course, after you make a donation, it seems you remain on an organization’s mailing list in perpetuity, and Charlie did once, when rifling through the mail, hold up an envelope from the food pantry and say, “Have you noticed that we get something from them every fucking month?”

In the den, Charlie sat up, and I took the opportunity to lean in and kiss his cheek. He turned his face and kissed me back on the lips, and as we hugged, a sideways sitting hug, the hostility of our encounter in the front hall evaporated. “If you leave the company, what do you think you might like to do instead?” I asked.

“Play first base for the Brewers.” He grinned.

“I know I’ve told you this before, but I’ve always thought you’d be a wonderful high school baseball coach. You’re so knowledgeable, you’d get to be outside, and I’ll bet anything the kids would find your enthusiasm infectious.”

His grin faded.

“Seriously,” I said. “High school positions are competitive, obviously, but if you started at the junior high level—we could even see if any spots are open at Biddle—and then you worked your way up, in a few years, you—”

“Alice, Jesus! Is that really what you think I’m worth?” I glanced down, and he said, “I’m not trying to hurt your feelings, but why don’t you try not to hurt mine? Christ almighty, a high school coach—”

I said, “Well, I found working in schools very gratifying.”

“Alice, I went to Princeton. I went to Wharton. I ran for Congress.”

I remained quiet.

“It’s not that I don’t have plenty of options. That isn’t the problem,” he said. “Dad would be thrilled to have me join him at the RNC, Ed would love it if I came on board as a policy adviser either here or in Washington. The question is, what would be meaningful to me? What would I find most rewarding?” Please don’t say it, I thought, and he said, “What’s the work I can do now that will create the kind of legacy I’ll be proud of?”

“I’ll fully support you working in Ed’s district office, but you know how I feel about moving to Washington.”

“Are you saying you won’t?”

I sighed. “I won’t do it happily. Washington’s a long way from Riley, and I just think, in this day and age, Ella’s so lucky to have her great-grandmother in her life.”

“But she’d get to see Maj and Dad all the time—six of one, half dozen of another, right?”

This was not at all how I saw it, but I said simply, “Your parents are able to travel a lot more easily than my grandmother.” My grandmother no longer left the house on Amity Lane, and my mother had had a stair lift installed so that my grandmother didn’t need to climb to the second floor. Its seat and back were beige Naugahyde, and sometimes while riding it, my grandmother would wave regally as she ascended, as if she were the queen of England. I had actually lobbied to name Ella after my grandmother, while Charlie had wanted to name her after his mother; we compromised by blending their names and, not for the first time, my mother was more or less ignored.

Charlie took a swallow of whiskey. “I thought my path would be clearer by now, you know? My destiny.” Oh, how I hated this talk—who besides seniors in high school reflected unironically on their destiny?

“Honey, I don’t know if such a thing as destiny exists, but I’m pretty sure that if it does, you won’t find yours in there.” I pointed to the whiskey bottle.

Charlie grinned. “How can we be sure before I’ve gotten to the bottom?”

I didn’t pursue the topic. Instead, I said, “If you want to stay at the company, we’ll figure out a way to make it better, and if you want to move on, I know you’ll find a position you enjoy. You have a good life, and we have a good life together—we have each other and Ella. Will you try to remember that?”

He was still grinning. “I’m only becoming a high school coach if you become the head cheerleader and you show me your pom-poms.”

I leaned in and kissed his cheek. “Don’t hold your breath.”

I WAS IDLING in the after-school pickup line of cars at Biddle, waiting to get Ella, when a woman knocked on the half-open passenger-side window of my Volvo. The woman was crouching down, and I realized it was Ella’s third-grade teacher, Ida Turnau. “Alice, can I talk to you for a sec?” she asked.

Mrs. Turnau was a petite, pink-skinned woman about my age who had a very kind face. (Although I called her Ida when I spoke to her, I always thought of her, and we referred to her at home, as Mrs. Turnau.) I’d gotten to know her because I’d chaperoned a bunch of the class field trips: At a pizza parlor in Menomonee Falls, the children were allowed in the kitchen to make their own individual pizzas; at Old World Wisconsin, they attended a faux temperance rally and watched a demonstration on flax processing, and I’m afraid to say I seemed to find both events considerably more interesting than Ella and her classmates did.

Mrs. Turnau said, “This is awkward, but I saw on the news last night about the beef recall, and I’m wondering, would it be all right if we avoid serving Blackwell hamburgers at the end-of-the-year party? I hate to do this, and I’m sure the problem will be all taken care of by then, but I just know I’ll have parents asking.” The third-grade party would be held at our house in two weeks.

“Oh, of course,” I said. I was tempted to repeat what Charlie had told me—it was unlikely that the contamination had been Blackwell Meats’ fault—but there probably wasn’t a point. “Absolutely.”

“Just so the other parents won’t worry,” Mrs. Turnau said. The line of cars moved forward a few feet, and she added, “I’ll let you go. Nice to see you, Alice.”

When she was gone, I realized that the car in front of me was the Volvo of Beverly Heit, whose son was a year ahead of Ella. (I’d heard that the teachers at Biddle called the parents the Volvo Mafia, a nick-name in which I personally was complicit. More than once, though, I’d felt the urge, never acted on, to say to Ella’s teachers, I’m one of you! I know I seem like one of them, but really, I’m one of you!) I honked very lightly, and when I could tell Beverly was looking at me in the rearview mirror, I waved. Beverly waved back, then held up her wrist, tapping her watch: This is taking forever. I nodded: I know!

As a product of public school, and as a former employee at two of them, I had initially felt a slight resistance to enrolling Ella at Biddle. It wasn’t that Charlie and I debated it, because we didn’t. Biddle, which started with a prekindergarten Montessori and ran through the twelfth grade, was where all of Ella’s cousins either went or had gone, where Charlie’s brother John was head of the board of trustees, where Charlie had attended second through eighth grade and Jadey had graduated from in 1967. (Until 1975, the boys’ and girls’ divisions of the school had been on opposite sides of the campus, now divided between the lower and upper schools.) Even though the public schools in Maronee were extremely well funded, and a far cry from those in the city of Milwaukee, Ella’s attendance at Biddle had been a foregone conclusion. Still, I had wondered if the students would be snobby, if the teachers would be overly pleased with themselves. As it turned out, I fell in love with Biddle’s white-wood lower school building with the colonnade in front, with its traditions—in third grade, everyone had a Japanese pen pal (Ella’s was named Kioko Akatsu), and in fourth grade, all the students, including the boys, cross-stitched a bookmark—and with its quietly hippieish leanings: The songs Ella learned in music class and came home singing were “If I Had a Hammer” and “One Tin Soldier” and “Imagine.” I could see how not having to follow a curriculum determined by the state allowed the teachers to be more creative, and I was especially looking forward to when Ella would be in fifth grade, and as part of a unit on colonial America, her class would get to dress up, the boys in tricorn hats and jabots and knickers, the girls in dresses that came with aprons and bonnets, and they’d all prepare a feast of stewed corn and apple cider and venison shot by someone’s father.

It was another five minutes before my car reached the entrance of the lower school, and as soon as it did, Ella flew into the front seat, her purple backpack falling off one shoulder, a bunch of loose papers in her hand; she thrust them at me before she’d closed her door. “You have to sign the permission slip saying I can go on the Slip ’n Slide even though the party’s at our house,” she said.

“I have to?” I repeated.

She turned and smiled at me—Ella had, without question, the best smile of anyone I had ever known, so lively and mischievous and affectionate—and she said, “I meant, will you please, pretty please, my pretty Mother? Did you bring me graham crackers?” Already, she had found the box between our two seats, and she opened it and began chomping, spilling crumbs down the front of her shirt. Mother was a new and ironic term for Ella, not that my nine-year-old daughter had the slightest idea what irony was. But calling me Mother instead of Mommy was something she’d borrowed from her friend Christine, who had worldly and irreverent older sisters. While I wasn’t crazy about it, I found it preferable to Ella calling Charlie and me by our first names, which she’d done for a brief time when she was about four, apparently having picked up on the way we addressed each other.

“Can I change the station?” she said, and before I could respond, she’d leaned forward and was twisting the radio dial from NPR to 101.8 FM, causing Bon Jovi’s “You Give Love a Bad Name” to erupt into the car. Ella sang loudly along with the chorus: “ ‘Shot through the heart / And you’re to blame . . . ’ ”

Oh, my daughter, my noisy, happy, strong-willed, irrepressible only child—I adored her. One of the things I had not anticipated about motherhood was how entertaining it would be. I’d known from my experience as a librarian that children were often amusing, sometimes outrageously so, but it was different, it was far more fun, when the amusing child was mine, when I spent hours and hours with her on a daily basis, knew her every expression and intonation, each appetite and anxiety and enthusiasm. Her current obsessions included stickers, hopscotch, nail polish (her Aunt Jadey had a much larger supply than I did), Nutter Butter cookies, and Uno, and her fondest wishes were to acquire a Pekingese, which was out of the question because she was allergic to dogs, and to see the movie Dirty Dancing, which I had told her I wouldn’t allow until she was in seventh grade because it was rated R.

Not infrequently, I was struck by how savvy Ella was, how much more pop-culturally aware than I had been at her age: She had requested a Jane Fonda exercise tape for Christmas (we hadn’t given it to her because I didn’t want her to become preoccupied with her weight—besides, she already played soccer, squash, and softball); she had encouraged me to “crimp” my hair, saying it would “jazz up” my appearance; and she had asked us at dinner the previous week if it was possible to get AIDS from a toilet seat. Charlie had said, “Not unless you’re using the bathroom at Billy Torks’s house.” This was a reference to Jadey’s interior-designer friend, whom Charlie had met only a few times. I’d shot Charlie a look and said to Ella, “You can’t, but you still should put toilet paper down before you go, because of other germs.”

In the car, Ella and Bon Jovi were still singing, and I said, “Ladybug, turn it down a bit.”

She leaned in, her long light brown hair falling forward. Of course my daughter had long hair, coming halfway down her back—I’d been wrong about the one maternal restriction I was sure I’d impose, and even as a very little girl, Ella had protested vehemently when I cut off over an inch or two. Although I’d spent more hours than I cared to think about untangling knots (and once removing grape-flavored gum), I recognized that Ella was very pretty: Along with my blue eyes, she had a dainty upturned nose sprinkled with golden freckles. I was relieved that so far, she appeared largely unaware of her prettiness. When she’d resisted my attempts to cut her hair, it had seemed more an assertion of free will than an act of vanity.

I knew that Ella was a little spoiled, and possibly more than a little. I suppose part of why I wasn’t good at saying no to her was that she’d inherited her father’s cajoling personality, but another part of it was that we hadn’t succeeded in having more children; I’d never been able to get pregnant after her. We’d considered fertility drugs or IVF—this was in the early days of the procedure—but I was wary, concluding that if my body was rejecting pregnancy, perhaps there was a reason, and I ought not to force the situation. I expressed this belief to Charlie, though what I didn’t express was a deeper sense that to push for a second child might be greedy, more than I deserved. There was a bitter-sweet symmetry in having had one abortion and one child; to try so hard for another might have been to press my luck. I’m sure Charlie was disappointed—an only-child family was, to him, an aberration—but beyond a few conversations, he did not insist, and he found as much joy in Ella as I did.

I turned left out of the parking lot, still behind Beverly Heit; the Heits lived about half a mile from us, and I’d probably be following her all the way home. “Ladybug, how was school?” I asked.

“Mrs. Turnau sent Megan to the principal because she wouldn’t quit asking people if they wanted a poop sandwich.”

“A what?” I said.

“A poop sandwich. Oh, I love this song!” “So Emotional” had come on the radio—a few months back, Ella had bought the new Whitney Houston cassette, the first music she’d ever purchased with her own money—and she leaned forward, turning it up. I reached out and turned off the radio altogether.

“Mommy!”

“Ella, you need to be respectful when someone is talking to you.” I glanced over at her. “Now, what on earth is a poop sandwich?”

Ella shrugged. Megan was Megan Thayer, the daughter of Joe and Carolyn, who were another Halcyon family. They had separated in the winter, and I’d heard from Jadey that Carolyn had recently filed for divorce; the rumor was that Carolyn had come into some family money and felt freed to end the marriage. Charlie and I weren’t extremely close to either Carolyn or Joe, but we ended up seeing a fair amount of Halcyon people in Milwaukee because, like us, they belonged to the Maronee Country Club, I was in Garden Club and Junior League with the wives, and our children all attended the same school. This meant that on a regular basis, Charlie and I would share a blanket with Carolyn and Joe at one of Ella and Megan’s soccer games, or chat with them at a fundraiser. When the news had broken that they were splitting up, I’d had the impression that most people were shocked, but I really wasn’t. Joe was a gentle, slightly dull man thought by many women in Maronee to be quite handsome in a classic way: He was tall and slim, with a long, dignified nose and a full head of gray hair with a wave in front. Meanwhile, Carolyn was a complicated and not particularly happy-seeming woman. The famous story about her was that once when they were hosting a dinner party, she’d brought out the main course, a duck cassoulet, and one of the guests, a fellow named Jerry Greinert who was a good friend of theirs, had said jokingly, “Not that again,” and Carolyn had proceeded to throw the serving dish on the floor, turn around, and storm out of the house.

“Can I turn the music back on?” Ella said.

“Not yet. Do people pick on Megan?”

“If you would like to know the answer to that, then you can only find out when I turn on the radio.”

“Be nice to her,” I said. “When you and Christine are playing at recess, see if she wants to join you.” Although Megan and Ella knew each other well—there were only forty-four students in the third grade, plus they spent a good deal of the summer mere houses apart—they had never been real friends. Megan was a tall, broad-shouldered, dark-haired girl, a strong athlete, but she had that overly watchful, overly eager quality that’s off-putting to adults and children alike; the previous summer, in Halcyon, she had asked me whether Ella would be having a slumber party for her next birthday, and if so, whether she, Megan, would be invited.

I said to Ella, “But if Megan offers you a poop sandwich, tell her no.”

With great exasperation, Ella said, “Mother, I already told her no.”

“Oh,” I said. “Good. But still be nice to her. You have such a big heart, ladybug.”

“Can I turn on the radio?”

We were a mile from our house. “Not too loud,” I said.

DESPITE THE ONGOING investigation by the USDA, it still wasn’t clear how the meat in Indianapolis had come to be contaminated. That evening, Charlie got home from work at a reasonable hour, and out of either habit or defiance he lit the grill. (He still insisted on using a charcoal one for flavor.) I had planned a quick walk with Jadey, and after I called her, we met halfway between our houses and cut onto the golf course’s cart path. On the weekend, this route had its risks—about five months before, by the seventh hole, a ball had hit Lily Jones in the shoulder—but I loved the green grass, the groves of pine trees, the spring sky at dusk. Golf balls aside, it was all incredibly calming.

Jadey was wearing white sweatpants, a red T-shirt, and a white sweatband that held back her blond hair; we both had shorter hair now, about chin-length, though hers was more layered than mine. We had just passed the duck pond when she said, “So I’ve figured out how to get back at Arthur. First I’ll lose weight, then I’ll have an affair. Want to go on a diet with me?”

“I hope you’re kidding.”

She lifted her left arm and pinched a bunch of flesh beneath her bicep. “Arthur’s right. I mean, who’d want to commit adultery with that?”

A few weeks earlier, Arthur had, according to Jadey, announced that she needed to lose weight; since then she’d refused to have sex with him. Although I sided with her, the story felt incomplete. As off-color as Arthur could be, he wasn’t cruel, and I couldn’t imagine he’d expressed the thought as bluntly as she claimed; I even wondered if he’d been answering a question she’d asked. In the time since I’d met Jadey, it was true she’d gained about thirty pounds, but she was still very pretty. She’d become softer, less girlish, but she wasn’t a girl, she was thirty-eight years old, and what was wrong with looking the age you were? I myself had gained probably ten pounds in the last decade, mostly weight that I’d never quite lost after Ella’s birth, and it seemed like a worthwhile trade-off. I said, “Do I dare ask who it is you’re planning to have an affair with?”

“Let’s just say all applications will be considered seriously.”

“This is a terrible idea, Jadey.”

“Oh, come on—don’t be the morality police.”

“Well, it is a terrible idea morally, but I was thinking logistically. Can you imagine getting a divorce, having to share custody and being apart from Drew and Winnie?” None of Charlie’s brothers and their wives had sent their children to boarding school, a precedent that greatly relieved me; I would have fought hard against sending Ella. “Or how about this,” I said. “Picture Arthur remarrying.”

Jadey shook her head. “I’d slit his throat first. Though wouldn’t it be fascinating to know who he’d pick? I’ve always thought he had a thing for Marilyn Granville.”

“She’s married.”

“So am I.”

“You’re much cuter than Marilyn,” I said.

“I am, aren’t I?” Jadey smiled at me sideways, mock-flirtatiously, but then she frowned. “Too bad Arthur doesn’t think so.”

“Does he know how upset you are?”

“It’s been almost a month since he visited the hospitality deck on the S.S. Jadey, so he should figure it out soon.”

“Has he initiated sex and you’ve refused?”

“Has he initiated it?” Jadey said. “Alice, is the pope Catholic?”

“And you’ve said no?”

“Sixteen-year-old virgins say no. I demur.”

“Jadey, I just worry. Sex is important in a marriage.”

“I don’t even miss it. It had gotten so predictable that I felt like we’d already done it before we started—I had to pinch myself to stay awake. I recently realized I’ve been married to Arthur for almost half my life. Can you believe that? Why didn’t someone tell me that twenty-one was way too young to commit to another person?”

“My doctor says you should have sex twice a week.”

“And you listen?”

“Well—” Generally, I was less forthcoming than Jadey about topics I considered private. There was no one I confided in more, but I also was aware that Jadey’s greatest asset and her most serious downfall was that she was a talker. Years before, for Christmas, Charlie had given her a pillow he’d found himself and been quite proud of, supposedly modeled on one owned by Alice Roosevelt Longworth. It had a white background and said in green print: IF YOU DON’T HAVE ANYTHING NICE TO SAY, COME SIT BY ME.

Jadey and I had gotten this far into the conversation, though, and it didn’t seem fair to be coy, so I said, “I try for once a week.”

“Do you enjoy it?”

“Sometimes I’m not in the mood beforehand, but I’m still glad after. It makes me feel close to him.”

“Do you always, you know, grab the brass ring?”

“Mostly,” I said. “Occasionally, I’m just too tired.”

“I only can if the kids are out of the house.”

“No wonder it’s not as fun. Maybe you should buy some books or movies or something.”

“You mean pornography? Is Alice Blackwell recommending pornography?” She adopted a prim tone. “As I live and breathe—”

“Jadey, come on.” I nudged her. Two men were about fifty feet away, cruising toward us in a golf cart, and there was a 90 percent chance—such was the Maronee Country Club—that we knew them.

“You two don’t use it, do you?” At least she’d lowered her voice a little.

“Charlie looks at magazines once in a while.”

“Doesn’t that bother you?”

I shrugged. “Men tend to be more visual than women.”

“Does he take matters into his own hands, so to speak?”

“I suppose.”

“You suppose? Well, where’s he when he’s looking at them, and where are you?”

“Sometimes if he can’t fall asleep, he goes into the bathroom.” Simultaneously, I felt that we had veered into territory that was none of Jadey’s business, and I also felt that being married to a man who every so often looked at pornography, or who masturbated, wasn’t a big deal. And yes, Charlie definitely masturbated, he did it to Penthouse—he didn’t subscribe, but he bought an issue every few months, and while we didn’t exactly talk about it, he also didn’t try to hide it. It would have horrified me if he left a magazine in the living room, or if Ella found one, but since he was discreet—he kept them in the locked bottom drawer of his nightstand—I didn’t mind.

I sometimes got the impression that because of my frequent reading, I was less easily shocked than the people around me, that I knew more factual information—about sex, yes, but also about typhoons or folk dancing or Zoroastrianism. In addition to reading a novel every week or two, I subscribed to Time, The Economist, The New Yorker, and House and Garden, and if I found an article particularly interesting, I’d see what I could track down about the subject at the Maronee public library.

Jadey was saying, “Don’t you feel like him looking at other women is an insult to you?”

“I just assume most men notice other women, and most women notice other men. You obviously do.”

She laughed. “That’s the problem—I can’t think of anyone to have an affair with.” The golf cart passed by us then, and one of the two men on it called out, “Ahoy, Blackwell ladies!” I recognized them as Sterling Walsh, who owned a real estate development company, and Bob Perkins, who was a good friend of Charlie’s brother Ed.

Jadey turned to me and nodded once meaningfully at the back of the golf cart. “Definitely not,” I said. “Arthur’s much more appealing than either one.”

“Are you at least going to support me on my diet? I can never stick to one when I do it by myself.”

“You don’t need to go on a diet. Just eat sensibly, and we’ll walk more often. We should walk in Halcyon, too.” Our families both were going for the month of July and into August; Charlie and Arthur would return at intervals to Milwaukee.

“Have you heard of the one where you eat half a grapefruit with every meal?”

“Oh, Jadey, girls in my sorority used to try that, and by the third day, they’d see a grapefruit and gag.” But I was struck in this moment by my immense fondness for Jadey. Though her upbringing had been more like Arthur’s and Charlie’s than like mine—her father had made a fortune as a cement supplier, and she’d been raised in a house as large as Harold and Priscilla’s—I still felt that as Blackwell in-laws, we were expats who’d found each other in a foreign country. I said then, “I want to ask you something. Have you ever thought that Charlie drinks too much?”

Jadey furrowed her brow. “The Blackwell boys know how to enjoy themselves—not Ed, but our boys do. But no. I mean, what would Chas do drunk that he wouldn’t do sober, right? Same with Arthur.”

“No, I agree.” It was such a relief to hear her say these things—they were almost identical to one side of the argument I’d been having with myself for the last few months. “How much does Arthur drink on an average night? For instance, if you’re all having dinner?”

“He has a few beers. Hell, I have a few beers. Hell, Drew has a few beers. I’m an awful mom, right?” She laughed. “No wonder everyone thinks people from Wisconsin are lushes.”

“So Arthur has, what, three beers? Or more?”

“Alice, let’s quit dancing around this. How much does Chas drink?”

Slowly, I said, “Well, it’s mostly whiskey these days, and I guess about a third of a bottle, but maybe a little less. It’s hard to say, because he buys the cases wholesale.”

“A third of a bottle every night?”

“I think so.”

“And does he act drunk?”

“Last week, he banged his forehead coming into the kitchen, like he’d misjudged the width of the doorway. But it’s more that he’s not in the best mood. He’s not mean, but he’s discouraged. Don’t repeat any of this to Arthur, obviously.”

“What, you mean while we’re making sweet love?”

“Charlie never plays squash in the morning anymore, he never takes Ella to school,” I said. “I don’t know if it’s because he’s hungover or just—I don’t know.”

“Have you asked him about it?”

“I tell him to go easy, but I wouldn’t say he listens.”

“Well, I’ll watch for anything unusual when we’re at Maj and Pee-Paw’s on Saturday.” Jadey made a face. “Although I guess these aren’t normal circumstances with the brouhaha in Indianapolis—if this reassures you at all, Arthur was in the foulest humor when he got home last night.”

“Charlie’s grilling steaks for dinner as we speak,” I said. “Would you eat Blackwell meat right now?”

She nodded. “It wasn’t Blackwell. More people would have gotten sick by now, and you can bet we’ve got guys talking to every ER in the region. The poor people at that sports banquet, huh?” We both were quiet, surrounded by the country club’s smooth green grass, a spring breeze rising and carrying with it the smell of soil. Jadey said, “That’s the problem with being married to them. We’re forced to see how the sausage gets made.”

AT DINNER, I did manage to eat the steak, though I wouldn’t have said I enjoyed it. Without consulting Charlie, I fixed Ella a peanut-butter sandwich instead—it would have made me far tenser for her to consume Blackwell meat than for me to—and Charlie either didn’t notice or chose not to comment. After dinner, Ella took a bath and I washed her hair, a request I was sadly aware that she’d stop making of me in the near future, and then I climbed into bed with her and read aloud from The Trumpet of the Swan; for me, this was the sweetest part of every day. Before I turned out the light, Ella summoned Charlie—she shrieked, “Daddy! Daddy, it’s time for me to be tucked in!”—and he came as called. About half the time, he’d rile her up more than settle her down, tickling her, dancing, making such outrageous noises or faces that she’d be squealing and jumping on the mattress, but on this night, he was so subdued that she whispered after he’d left, “Is Daddy mad at me?”

I ran my hand over her hair, smoothing it out against the pillowcase. Ella had a ridiculously girlish bedroom, all pink and white (we’d let her pick it out), and she had a double bed, which seemed indulgent for a third-grader, but it was actually the bed I’d had before I married Charlie. “Daddy’s not mad,” I said. The phone rang then, and I heard Charlie answer it.

“Can I rent Dirty Dancing this weekend?” Ella asked.

“You can rent Dirty Dancing when you’re in seventh grade.”

“Mommy, it’s not really dirty just because that’s what it’s called.”

I leaned in and kissed her forehead. “Time to go to sleep, sweetheart.”

WHEN I ENTERED the den, I was startled to find Hank Ucker sitting in an armchair, watching the ball game with Charlie. Without standing, Hank bowed in his seat. “The maternal glow positively emanates from you, Alice,” he said. “You call to mind a Renaissance Madonna.”

“I see her more like the trampy singer Madonna,” Charlie said, and grinned. “Come here, baby.” When I stood beside him, he affectionately patted my rear.

“Hank, I didn’t realize we’d have the pleasure of your company tonight,” I said. “May I offer you something to eat or drink?” It was almost nine o’clock, so I wondered how long he planned to stay. As far as I knew, Hank still lived in Madison. Though I hadn’t seen him for a few years, I’d heard he’d left his position as chief of staff for the minority leader of the Wisconsin State Senate to help run the U.S. Senate campaign of a Republican from Fond du Lac, a man who initially hadn’t seemed to have much of a shot but in recent weeks had pulled ahead of the incumbent in several polls.

“A glass of ice water would be superb,” Hank said.

Charlie, who was drinking whiskey, chuckled. “Still living life in the fast lane, I see.”

Hank smiled his slow, untrustworthy smile. “As ever.”

I slipped away to the kitchen, filled a glass for Hank, and when I returned to the den, they were talking about Sharon Olson, the incumbent against whom Hank’s candidate was running. “A shame that had to come out about her taste for men of the Negro persuasion,” Charlie said, grinning. Hank’s candidate’s polling numbers had no doubt been bolstered by the recent revelation—this did not seem revelatory to me, but revelation was the word the local news programs used—that Olson, who was a white Democrat, had had a brief and childless first marriage to a black man in the late sixties. Olson was now remarried to a white lawyer with whom she had two teenage sons and a daughter, and I didn’t see how her earlier marriage had much bearing on anything (the first husband had long since moved to Seattle, where he, too, was an attorney), but a series of ads was running that showed her and the groom holding hands at her first wedding, accompanied by ominous music and concluding with a question posed in stark red letters against a dark screen: IF SHARON OLSON HAS BEEN LYING TO US ABOUT THIS . . . WHAT ELSE HAS SHE BEEN LYING ABOUT?

Hank smirked. “A shame indeed. That poor gal.”

I passed the water glass to Hank and said, “If you’ll excuse me, I have some reading to do. Hank, nice to see you.”

Over an hour later, after I’d heard the front door open and close and a car engine start, I returned to the first floor. “Are you thinking of running for office?”

“Jeepers creepers, woman, calm down.” Charlie’s voice was a little loose, and the whiskey bottle was, I noted, down to the dregs, but I couldn’t remember how full it had been before.

“Given that it’s almost June, what race could you realistically enter?”

“Seriously,” Charlie said, “calm down.”

“You know I’ve never trusted Hank.”

“And anyone who runs for elected office is a pompous shyster—right, baby?”

“You’re putting words in my mouth.”

He leered. “I can think of something I’d like to put in your mouth.”

“Can’t you just give me a straight answer about why Hank was here?”

We faced each other, him still sitting on the couch, me standing a few feet away, and he said, “I got a call from Arthur before Ucker arrived—turns out I was right that we weren’t to blame for the contamination. It wasn’t the store the sports-banquet folks got the chuck from that had the problems, it was the basement fridge where one of the athlete’s moms was storing it. Seems that a rat had gnawed the power cord.” Charlie raised his glass. “Bon appétit.”

“That poor woman—she must feel terrible.”

“I’m just glad we recalled one-point-two million pounds of meat. Good thing the Upper Midwest region is safe tonight from the scourge of Blackwell beef.”

“You did the right thing.”

Charlie gestured toward the TV. “You just missed John on Channel Twelve news. He said, ‘Our meat is not a crook.’ ” Charlie leaned back, chuckling at his own joke.

“I’m glad everything is cleared up.” I took a seat and leaned forward to pull the latest issue of The New Yorker off the coffee table. “Did you know Yvonne Sutton had a baby?”

“Who’s Yvonne Sutton?”

“Miss Ruby’s daughter.”

Charlie shook his head wonderingly. “You can’t say those people aren’t fertile.”

“Charlie, Yvonne has two children. She’s not exactly contributing to overpopulation.”

“I assume it’s a different father from Jessica’s?”

“It’s her husband, and he also works at St. Mary’s.” I closed the magazine, which I wasn’t reading anyway. “I invited them over for lunch on Memorial Day.”

“Wasn’t that egalitarian of you? Maybe they can show our daughter how to grow dreadlocks.” Several years before, for Ella’s fifth birthday, she had requested a Barbie doll. We’d bought one for her—Dreamtime Barbie, who came with her own miniature peach-colored teddy bear—but when Ella unwrapped the box, she burst into tears. She wanted a Barbie “like Jessica’s,” she kept insisting, and eventually, I figured out she meant a black Barbie. I ended up exchanging Dreamtime Barbie for Day-to-Night Barbie, who came with a pink business suit and a pink dress that had a sparkly top and a sheer skirt, whose skin was dark brown, and whose hair was black. I felt almost proud of Ella, and I think Charlie was amused, though he did say, “Show that to Maj, and you and Ella will both be excommunicated.” The irony was that while Charlie regularly remarked on his mother’s racism, he made offensive comments more often than she did. That he made them with a wink, he seemed to think, meant he was less culpable and not more so, and although I disagreed and particularly disliked when he used slurs in front of Ella, I’d long ago given up trying to edit him.

In our den, I said, “Jessica is going to Stevens next year for junior high, which really makes me worry.”

“I’m sure she’ll be fine.”

“It sounds like she’s a great student and does lots of extracurricular activities.”

“Did you run into her recently?”

“I saw Miss Ruby last night—when I was looking for you, I went by your parents’ house.” Mentioning that Miss Ruby had accompanied me to the play seemed unnecessary. I added, “I bet Jessica would thrive at a place like Biddle.”

“Sounds like she’s thriving already.”

“Do you know which school Stevens is?”

Charlie grinned. “Where do you think I go to replenish my crack supply?” Then he said, “I’m not running for anything, okay? Hank came over so we could think about options for the future, but you’re right—it’s too late for this election year.”

“Good,” I said.

He extended one leg so his sock-encased foot was balanced on my knee. “I sure do love you, Lindy, even if you’re a narrow-minded liberal who thinks I’m a conniving Republican.”

I set my hand on top of his foot. “Sweetheart, if I were narrow-minded, I wouldn’t love you back.”

WHEN THE PHONE rang on Friday afternoon, it was one o’clock, and I was scrubbing the tiles in our master-bathroom shower (I had never hired a maid or housekeeper, which I knew Priscilla and my sisters-in-law considered odd, but I actually found it soothing to clean). I pulled the yellow rubber glove off my right hand as I walked into our bedroom, and after I’d lifted the receiver, I heard Lars Enderstraisse say, “Alice, I’m awful sorry to be the one calling you—”

Immediately, my heart stopped, it hung there unmoving inside my chest, and then, squeaking out the words, I said, “My mother?” and he said, “No, no, not Dorothy. It’s Emilie. I’m afraid she took a spill, and there’s been some internal bleeding, some bleeding in the brain, so we’re over at Lutheran Hospital.” This was the same hospital where I’d been born, the hospital where both Andrew Imhof and I had been taken that horrible night in September 1963.

“But she’s not—” I paused. “She’s alive?”

“She isn’t conscious, but I know the doctors are working hard. Your mother’s talking to one of them. Me and her are here outside the ICU, and we’re hoping they’ll let us see—”

“Granny’s in the ICU?”

“Being that she’s up there in years, they’re taking every precaution.”

“I’ll get there as soon as I can,” I said.

IT HAD HAPPENED late that morning, and not for any obvious reason—she had been walking from the dining room into the living room and had somehow landed on the floor, unconscious—and what the doctors were trying to figure out was whether the bleeding in my grandmother’s brain had caused the fall or the fall had caused the bleeding. My mother had heard a thud, but not even a loud one, “like the mail dropping,” she said, and she’d hurried out and seen my grandmother lying there. My mother tried unsuccessfully to revive her, and then she called an ambulance.

At the hospital, my mother kept apologizing, as if it were her fault, saying, “I’m just so sorry you had to come rushing out here.”

“Mom, of course I came.”

At some point late in the afternoon, Lars walked across the street to a convenience store and bought boxed cookies, which neither my mother nor I ate; he then offered them to the other people in the waiting room. A television sat in one corner, playing soap operas and then talk shows, and though no one seemed to be watching it, it appeared that everyone was too diffident to turn it off. The commercials, with their relentlessly zippy announcers and upbeat jingles, felt like a particular affront.

On the waitingroom pay phone, I had called Charlie, then I’d called Jadey to see if she could pick up Ella after school, and a few hours later, I’d called Jadey’s house to talk to Ella, to explain what was happening. I’d hoped that hearing my voice would let her know I was fine and so was she, but instead, it was her voice that upset me; I so wanted to be beside Ella, holding her, that I had to blink back tears. In her serious, girlish voice, she said, “Is Granny going to die?” Granny was what Ella called my grandmother, just as I did; she called my mother Grandma, and she referred to Lars (he and my mother had quietly married in 1981) as Papa Lars.

I said, “I hope not, ladybug.”

Around five, I called Charlie again at the office. “I’m still here, and there’s no real news,” I said. “Can you go get Ella?”

“You think Jadey would mind watching her a little while longer? I’m scheduled for a five-thirty squash match with Stuey Patrickson.”

From the pay phone in the corner, I surveyed the room: a young husband sitting with one hand over his eyes, either resting or weeping; a small child running a truck along the carpet; my mother reading a months-old McCall’s while Lars Enderstraisse sat beside her eating another cookie. (My stepfather was never how I thought of Lars. Not that I disliked him, I actually had developed a great deal of affection for him, and to my surprise, so had my grandmother; she had taught him to play Scrabble, and he’d become particularly knowledgeable about the tricky two-letter words, which meant he was a considerably more challenging opponent to my grandmother than my mother was. But still, I did not think of Lars as a father figure; he was simply my mother’s husband, her companion.)

“Alice?” Charlie said, and I said, “I’d prefer for you to pick up Ella now. I don’t want her to feel unsettled.”

“Is she upset?”

“Well, I’m leaning toward staying at my mom’s tonight. We haven’t been allowed to see Granny, and I’m reluctant to come back to Milwaukee when everything is up in the air.”

“You don’t even have a toothbrush, do you?” he said.

“I can buy one.”

“If you come home, you can jump in the car if you need to get back to Riley. It’s, what, thirty-five minutes?”

The way Charlie drove, perhaps, but not the way I did. Besides, I knew that Charlie’s eagerness to have me return to Milwaukee stemmed less from a particular wish to see me than from—it persisted—his fear of the dark; my husband was afraid to spend the night in our house without me. Depending on the circumstances, I found this phobia either cute or irritating. “How about this?” I said. “I’ll call Jadey, and you and Ella can stay there.”

“Remember how that fucking dog of theirs barked and slobbered in my face all night last time?”

“Charlie, my grandmother is in the intensive-care unit. Your options are to stay at home, go to Arthur and Jadey’s, or you’re welcome to drive out here with Ella and stay at my mom’s. Why don’t I give you a few minutes to make a decision, and I’ll call back?”

He was quiet, and then he said, “No, you’re right, you’re right. I’ll get Ella now, and if you wouldn’t mind calling Jadey, I can cancel with Stuey. How’re your mom and Lars?”

“They’re fine.”

“How are you?”

“I’m fine, too,” I said, though at this moment, being asked, I felt a sadness overtake me.

Then Charlie said, “I know you think I hate spending the night apart because of not wanting to be in the house alone, but it’s also because I miss you, Lindy.”

“Do you and Ella want to come out here?” I realized this was unlikely. On his first visit to my family’s house in Riley, Charlie had managed to conceal what I believe in retrospect was astonishment at how small the place was. In the years since, he’d become significantly less diplomatic. He’d say, “Sharing a bathroom with Lars is cruel and unusual punishment.” Even on the holidays we spent there, we almost never stayed the night, and Charlie regularly lobbied for my mother, grandmother, and Lars to come to his parents’ house for Easter or Christmas; they’d done so a few times early in our marriage, and I don’t think any of them had felt particularly comfortable. I was pretty sure that neither Priscilla nor Harold Blackwell knew Lars had been a postal employee—he had retired in 1980—and while I wouldn’t have denied it, I’d never made a point of telling them. The irony was that marrying Lars had no doubt made my mother far more financially secure. Since the episode with Pete Imhof, she had never mentioned money to me, and she and Lars had even gone on trips together to Myrtle Beach and Albuquerque.

“Honestly, it’d probably be better if we go to Jadey and Arthur’s,” Charlie was saying. “Ella and I would be underfoot at your mom’s. Call me if you need anything, and call either way before you go to bed.”

“Ella is supposed to go to Christine’s house tomorrow, so make sure she’s ready to be picked up by ten. Also, have her take her vitamin after breakfast.”

“You’ll be back in time for dinner at Maj and Dad’s, won’t you?”

I hesitated. “Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it.”

I could tell that Charlie was restraining himself from saying how important my attendance was, which it really wasn’t except for the fact that the Blackwells took particular pride in their all-hands-on-deck dinners.

I said, “Charlie, I’m sure your family will understand.”

AT SIX THAT evening, the ICU’s last visiting hour, my mother and I were finally buzzed through the double doors to see my grandmother. Because only two people at a time were permitted, Lars remained in the waiting room.

She still was not conscious. She lay beneath a sheet in a white hospital gown with a pattern of small teal and navy snowflakes, and she was hooked up to several monitors, one of them beeping. A tube was taped to the crook of her arm, and two more emerged from her nostrils. “She’s so little,” my mother murmured. I had been thinking exactly the same thing. Against the backdrop of the oversize bed, my grandmother looked heartbreakingly old and heartbreakingly tiny.

I walked toward her, saying in a cheerful voice, “Hi, Granny. It’s Alice and Mom—”

“It’s Dorothy,” my mother cut in. “Granny, boy, are we happy to see you. You gave us quite a scare today.”

“You probably want to rest, so we won’t stay long,” I said. “But the doctor said you’re stable now, which is wonderful news.” It was impossible to know if she could hear us; the overwhelming likelihood was that she couldn’t. “I don’t know if you remember, but you fell this morning, so you’re in the hospital. Now you’re recovering”—this was my own wishful diagnosis, not the doctor’s; he had used no word more encouraging than stable—“and the doctors and nurses are taking very good care of you.” This also was optimistic inference; I didn’t have much idea of what had transpired behind the closed double doors. Dr. Furnish, who was the attending physician, had explained a few minutes before to Lars, my mother, and me that my grandmother had had what was called a lobar intracerebral hemorrhage and they’d given her several blood transfusions so far but were hesitant to perform surgery, given her age and general frailness; he also warned that she might have brain damage. Dr. Furnish was not particularly warm, but he did seem competent. As he spoke, I took notes on the back of a receipt I’d found in my purse.

“Granny, I don’t think the waiting room here would be much to your liking,” my mother said. “The chairs are covered in an orange fabric you’d find very tacky.”

“And Lars bought stale-looking cookies, which Mom and I were smart enough not to eat, but everyone else gobbled them up.” I tried to sound jaunty and humorous.

“Emilie, you have to get better and come home in time for the season finale of Murder, She Wrote,” my mother said.

I added, “But if you get me out of dinner at Priscilla and Harold Blackwell’s tomorrow night, I’ll be in your debt.”

“Alice!” my mother said.

“I’m teasing,” I said. “Granny knows that.”

We continued in this fashion, half talking to my grandmother and half talking to each other for the allotted thirty minutes, and the only response we got was the beeping of the monitor. As soon as we walked out the double doors leading back to the waiting room, my mother pulled a tissue from her pocket and dabbed at her eyes. “I know Granny’s had a long life, and it’s not for me to question God’s plan,” she said. “But, Alice, I’m not ready.”

AND THEN, MIRACULOUSLY, my grandmother was awake. I called the hospital around seven the next morning, as soon as I’d gotten out of the shower, and they said she’d regained consciousness during the night. She was dozing again, a nurse said, and although she’d be woozy from the sedatives, she’d almost definitely be able to talk to us when we went in at nine o’clock.

My mother stopped in the gift shop on the lobby level to buy a balloon—flowers weren’t allowed in the ICU—and so I entered my grandmother’s room alone. Her eyes were closed, but when I said, “Knock, knock,” she opened them immediately. “Granny, welcome back!” I said. “We missed you!” When I was beside her bed, I leaned in and kissed her cheek.

She blinked a few times, then said, “They’ve been feeding me very spicy chicken, and it’s made my throat dry.”

Did she even realize who I was? I said, “Can I give you some water?” A white plastic pitcher sat on the table beside her bed, and next to it was an avocado-colored plastic cup with a straw in it. I brought the straw to my grandmother’s lips, and when she sucked on it, a tiny clear trickle dribbled out of the corner of her mouth. Though she was receiving fluids through an IV, I was certain my grandmother had eaten nothing, spicy chicken or otherwise, since her arrival at the hospital.

When she’d finished drinking and leaned her head back on the pillow, she said, “They’re gambling on the roof, you know.”

I hesitated. “Who?”

She nodded sagely. “They are.”

I held my hand over my heart. “It’s Alice, Granny. You’re in the hospital, but you’re getting better, and I’ve come to visit you.”

She made an appalled expression. “Do you think I don’t know who you are? I’m not senile.” She pointed at me. “Why are you wearing Dorothy’s blouse? It makes you look frumpy.”

I smiled. “I unexpectedly spent the night in Riley, so Mom let me borrow this.”

“You should wear clothes more suited to your age.”

“Granny, how do you feel? Be sure to let me know if you need to rest.”

She didn’t respond right away but looked around the room and then said, “I’ve been thinking of your father.”

I felt a flare of anxiety. Although I wasn’t at all sure I believed in heaven, it was hard not to imagine that by thinking of, she may have meant communing with or even being beckoned by. All I said, though, was “Oh?”

“He was very devoted to Dorothy,” my grandmother said. “I had the opportunity to observe your parents’ marriage closely over a number of years, and I saw how fond of each other they were.” She peered at me. “What’s your husband’s name?”

I swallowed. “Charlie. Charlie Blackwell.”

“That’s right, the governor’s son. You two are very devoted to each other as well.”

I tried to smile. “Well, I hope so.”

She regarded me shrewdly. “That sounded tepid.”

“No, I didn’t mean—I just—Lately, he’s been drinking more than I think he should,” I finally managed to say.

She made a pooh-poohing gesture, or tried to, though because of the IV inside her elbow, she didn’t have full mobility. “Don’t keep a tight leash on him, my dear. That always backfires.”

“Oh, I don’t—if anything, the opposite.”

“You’re not strict with him?”

I shook my head.

“Maybe that’s the problem, then, that he’d like you to be stricter.”

I hesitated—was this really the time or place to unburden myself?—but my grandmother had always enjoyed talking about people, and she did seem genuinely engaged. “This will sound ridiculous to you, but I think he’s having some kind of midlife crisis. His twentieth college reunion is in a couple weeks, and he’s obviously worried about not measuring up to his classmates.”

“He went to Harvard University,” my grandmother said, and her tone was strange—it was as if she were boasting to me about someone other than my own husband.

“You’re right that he went to school on the East Coast, but it was Princeton. Anyway, I guess he had the idea that he’d have accomplished more by now. He comes from a line of successful men, his grandfather and father, and I’m sure you remember his brother Ed is a congressman.” I wasn’t at all sure she remembered, though she did nod as I spoke. “But I just don’t think Charlie is meant to be a business titan or a politician. Not that I mind—I didn’t marry him assuming he would be. He’s so funny and lively, he has loads of friends, he’s a terrific father, and I just—I don’t understand why that’s not enough, why our life isn’t enough. It’s enough for me, and I don’t understand why it isn’t enough for him.”

“His ambitions exceed his talent.”

I tried not to take offense. “I don’t know if I’d go that far. He’s very smart. And maybe it’s me, it’s that he finds me boring—” It was actually painful to remember the afternoon when Charlie and I had first said we loved each other—it had been the same day he’d met my mother and grandmother and Lars—and to remember how he’d prefaced it by saying he thought he’d always find me interesting. The reason it was painful was that I wondered with increasing frequency if it had remained true. What a wonderful compliment that had been, how unexpected, how recognized I had felt. I wasn’t just a cute brunette to Charlie; he understood that I was a person who thought about things, who read and had opinions, even if I held them quietly, and all of these were qualities that made him value me. But did he ever wish, in retrospect, that he’d married someone more exciting, someone whose idea of a pleasant Saturday night wasn’t eating dinner with our nine-year-old daughter and then reading forty pages of Eudora Welty before bed? Even the absence of real acrimony in our marriage, maybe that was disappointing—no opportunities for shouting or slamming doors, none of the delicious ugliness of rage, no fraught sexy reunions.

My grandmother said, “Everyone is boring some of the time. The most fascinating person I ever knew was a woman named Gladys Wycomb. Did I ever introduce you to my friend Gladys?”

I nodded.

“She was the eighth woman in the state of Wisconsin to earn her medical degree, truly a brilliant gal. But I’d go to visit her, and sure enough, within a few days, we’d both be reading a book at the dinner table. It didn’t bother me a whit. What greater happiness is there than the privilege of being bored together?”

“I agree, but I’m not sure that Charlie would.”

“Does he know you have doubts about him?”

“It’s not me doubting him, it’s him having doubts about his job and the path he’s taken in life, which—” I broke off. Wasn’t I lying, however inadvertently? It was me doubting him. I glanced at the floor, which was covered in white linoleum tiles. When I looked up again, I said, “I know you were impressed with Charlie when you first met, but are you still?” What was I doing asking this of my drugged grandmother, as if she were some sort of medium of marital wisdom? Or was I bold enough only because she was drugged? Even with Jadey, I was not quite this frank.

“I was impressed by him because I could tell he adored you, and you deserve to be adored,” my grandmother said. “Frankly, what you’re describing sounds like much ado about nothing. Go home, put on a pretty dress, some heels, and some lipstick, flirt with him, flatter him, and never forget how insecure men are. It’s because they take themselves far too seriously.”

In this moment, her instructions felt like a lifeline—so simple, so easily executed. What an immense relief to have someone tell me what to do! Then she said, “Get me some water, will you? They’ve been feeding me spicy chicken, and I don’t care for the taste of it.”

“Your cup is right here.” I helped her sip again, and when she’d finished, I held up the book I’d brought in my bag. “I have your copy of Anna Karenina. Would you like me to read from it?”

“That would be lovely.”

“From the section where she and Vronsky meet, or from the beginning?”

“When they meet.”

As I opened the book, I said, “I hope I haven’t made you think badly of Charlie. I’m sure you’re right that I’m blowing things out of proportion.”

She had already closed her eyes, and she shook her head. “Chapter Eighteen,” I began, and I cleared my throat. “ ‘Vronsky followed the guard to the carriage, and had to stop at the entrance of the compartment to let a lady pass . . . ’ ” When my mother arrived a few minutes later with the balloon, my grandmother had fallen back to sleep.

ON MY RETURN to Milwaukee, I stopped at a gas station. I’d already paid and was replacing the gas nozzle in the pump when a man’s voice said, “Alice, what a coincidence.”

I looked up, and just a few feet away, standing by a caron the opposite side of the concrete island, Joe Thayer held up a hand in greeting. He wore a yellow polo shirt tucked into madras shorts, and he looked characteristically handsome, but he also looked like he had recently lost weight he hadn’t needed to lose: His cheekbones were more pronounced, and though he was well over six feet, there was a scrawniness to his shoulders. Not that I looked so hot myself—as my grandmother had observed, I had on my mother’s “frumpy” blouse. Plus, because I hadn’t brought the mousse that I used, my hair was a bit frizzy. I still was a good fifteen minutes from Maronee, and I hadn’t expected to run into anybody I knew.

“Joe, how are you?” I glanced toward his car and, thinking I saw his son, said, “And is that Ben in the—Oh my goodness, that’s Pancake!” Pancake was a black Lab famous in Halcyon for being able to stand on her hind legs and slow-dance with seventy-two-year-old Walt Thayer, Joe’s father; this routine had never seemed entirely consensual to me, so I had trouble mustering the enthusiasm for it that everyone else demonstrated. “You must be gearing up for Princeton,” I said. “Tell me what ludicrous uniform they have you wearing.” Joe had graduated from Princeton in ’63, five years before Charlie, which meant their major reunions were always on the same schedule.

Joe shook his head. “I’ll be sitting this one out. Not quite the right time, if you get my meaning.”

“I’m sure you’ll be missed,” I said.

“I tell you, Alice, I never thought I’d be a person who got a divorce.”

“Oh—” I wasn’t sure how to respond. Lamely, I said, “Well, it does happen.”

“May I be candid?” he said.

“Of course.”

“I find myself curious about how much of our family’s trouble is out on the grapevine, if you will. I wouldn’t want people to think—It seems that it’s more commonly the husband leaving the wife in these situations, but that isn’t what happened. I won’t say Carolyn and I haven’t had our problems, but I really was blindsided.”

I feigned ignorance. “Joe, I’m so sorry. That sounds very difficult.”

We looked at each other, and the thought crossed my mind that he might cry. He didn’t have tears in his eyes, but it seemed he was holding his chin firm, possibly clenching his teeth. He and I had never spoken anywhere close to this personally. Between Milwaukee and Halcyon, I had been in his presence perhaps a hundred times—after our wedding, Priscilla and Harold had thrown an enormous cocktail party at the country club for all the family friends who hadn’t been invited to the wedding, and I was pretty sure Joe had even been at that—but in eleven years he and I hadn’t talked about anything more provocative than the new roundabout on Solveson Avenue, or the temperature of Lake Michigan.

I said, “Joe, I hope you realize that all families have problems, even in Maronee. You aren’t the only ones. And I think everyone knows there’s only so much we can control even in our own lives.” I suspect it was less what I was saying than the mere fact of my continuing to talk that allowed Joe to pull himself back from the precipice of tears; already, he looked significantly less shaky.

“I appreciate that.” His gas pump made a clicking noise, and he withdrew the nozzle. Gesturing to his car, he said, “I’m headed to Madison to spend the day with Martha.” This was his younger sister, whom I knew from Halcyon. “I used to really crave free time,” he continued, “and now I have more than I ever could have wanted. The weekends have become just brutal. Be careful what you wish for, I suppose.”

“Well, you’re welcome at our house anytime. If you’d like to come over and watch the ball game with Charlie, we’d be delighted to have you.” This was probably not a wise offer—would Joe dropping by make Charlie even crankier?—but he seemed so despondent, and I didn’t know what else to say. And really, the fact was that Joe and Charlie had known each other their entire lives; they were more like cousins than friends.

Joe pointed toward the interior of the gas station and said, “I’d better pay. It was good to see you, Alice. Thanks for listening to a sad sack.”

I said, “You know, maybe you should go to Reunions. A change of scenery?”

“I’ll think about it.” He waved. “Give Chas my best.”

WHEN CHARLIE, ELLA, and I arrived at Priscilla and Harold’s for dinner, the house was alive with Blackwell energy. Our nephews Geoff and Drew were out on the front lawn playing ring toss, and Charlie couldn’t resist stopping to join them, so Ella and I continued inside without him. It was hard to believe that Ella was the last of this generation of Blackwells; the next babies would be the children of her cousins. Harry, who was Ed and Ginger’s oldest son, was now twenty-one and would graduate from Princeton a few days after Charlie’s reunion; Liza, who was John and Nan’s older daughter, was finishing up her junior year at Princeton and would be spending the summer interning at a fashion magazine in Manhattan; and Tommy, Ed and Ginger’s middle son, was finishing his sophomore year but at Dartmouth rather than Princeton, which gave rise to much teasing about Dartmouth’s general inferiority and the lack of activity in “Hangover,” New Hampshire.

In the front hall, Ella hugged her grandparents, then immediately vanished with her cousin Winnie, presumably to the basement, which was where the cousins who still lived at home convened around a pool table, the older ones sharing various urban legends—after one such dinner, Ella had become briefly fixated on the idea of spontaneous human combustion—and also teaching the younger cousins dirty words. While riding back to our house at Thanksgiving, Ella had proudly announced, “I know what penis balls are.”

Near the staircase where Charlie and I had married, I exchanged kisses on the cheek with my father-in-law, who said, “Alice, I’m terribly sorry to hear about your grandmother,” and I said, “I’m happy to report she’s much better today.” I leaned in to greet Priscilla, who didn’t so much air-kiss as not kiss at all; she simultaneously brought her chin toward you and angled it off to the side, never even puckering her lips, but I couldn’t take it personally because she did it to everyone. This time, however, as I approached, she gripped my wrist, keeping me close. Against my ear, she murmured, “I’d like a word with you.”

Harold went off to fix drinks just as Jadey emerged from the dining room carrying a marble tray of food, saying, “Maj, if I were a cheese knife, where would I be? Ooh, that scarf looks great, Alice. How’s your grandma?” Jadey had picked out the scarf for me during a shopping expedition a few weeks before; it was from Marshall Field’s and had a turquoise background with gold paisley.

“Jadey, surely you don’t plan to put out all that cheese at once,” Priscilla said. “You’ll spoil everyone’s appetite.”

Breezily, Jadey said, “Oh, we’ll save what doesn’t get eaten, and the sirloins look super, so worry not, those’ll be devoured in half a second.” Over the years, Jadey had served as an example of how to behave with Priscilla—to be chipper and oblique, to sidestep questions without necessarily answering them, and to never directly challenge or contradict.

“My grandmother’s had an amazing turnaround,” I said. “She’s almost her normal self.”

“Oh, thank God,” Jadey said. “Not that Chas and Ella aren’t welcome at our house any time—I swear, having other people around makes us behave slightly better—but what a relief for you. Now, Maj, as for the cheese knives . . . ”

“Second drawer to the right of the oven,” Priscilla said, and I was surprised at how quickly she’d conceded. Then she said, “Jadey, I was under the impression you were watching your figure.” She smiled. “I’d think these sorts of hors d’oeuvres would be very tempting.” Nan and Ginger had entered the hall from the living room by this point, distracting somewhat from the unpleasantness of Priscilla’s remark. Nan said, “Oh, Alice, we’ve been praying for your grandmother,” and Jadey said, “No, she’s on the mend,” and Ginger said, “I love your scarf, Alice. Maj, tell us what we can do to help.”

“You can get those barbarian sons of yours to quit tearing up my lawn.” Priscilla laughed throatily. “At this rate, my foxgloves and irises won’t live to see June.”

A brief silence ensued, and Ginger said, “I’m sure the boys are ready to come in anyway.” As she scurried out the front door, Jadey rolled her eyes at me before returning to the kitchen.

Priscilla said to Nan, “I’ll steal Alice for a moment, if you don’t mind.”

I followed my mother-in-law to a little alcove on the far side of the powder room beneath the front staircase. Standing in the hall, I’d caught sight of Charlie’s brothers congregated in the living room, and I’d thought that, recent tensions be damned, an evening of family boisterousness might be just the thing for both Charlie and me.

In the alcove, Priscilla said, “You had no business taking Ruby to the Marcus Center.”

I blinked. What had I imagined Priscilla wanted to talk to me about? The strife among her sons, perhaps? Or something far more banal: that she needed me to fill the bird feeders while she and Harold were in Washington.

“It was extremely inappropriate,” she was saying, and her voice was neither loud nor excited; it was merely frosty. “My household help is my concern.”

“I didn’t—” I hesitated. “I didn’t realize it would offend you. I certainly didn’t mean for it to.” I would stop short of telling her I was sorry, I thought, because I wasn’t. Miss Ruby was an adult, and so was I—both of us had the right to attend a play with whomever we pleased.

“You must imagine you’re providing some sort of cultural edification for her, is that it?”

“Priscilla, it was a spur-of-the-moment invitation. I had no ulterior motive.”

“Ruby has been in our employ for over forty-five years, and we’ve taken superb care of her during that time. Do you think she’d stay with us decade after decade if we hadn’t? There are a number of things I’m quite sure you don’t know about her, including that Harold and I helped her leave an unscrupulous husband. Is that something you were aware of?” Priscilla was almost six feet tall, but as she’d spoken, she’d leaned down so that mere inches separated our faces. I became aware of the fine lines around her lips, her mauve lipstick, her teeth, which, this close up, were smaller and a bit browner than I remembered; in addition, her crooked upper-left canine was prominent.

I opened my mouth to speak, but it was hard to know what to say.

“In the future, I’ll thank you for not interfering,” Priscilla said. “Have I made myself clear?”

“I hope you won’t scold Miss Ruby,” I said. “The outing was definitely my idea, not hers.” Then—I couldn’t help it—I added, “But with all due respect, I guess I still don’t understand what you object to.”

“Oh, Alice.” Priscilla took a step back, chuckling. “I’m embarrassed for you that you’d have to ask.”

I HAD A glass of wine before dinner, and for the meal, I managed to sit between Harold, benign as always, and John, who, despite the friction with Charlie, had never said an unkind word to me. As usual, Priscilla had designated seat assignments, but she’d essentially ignored me after our conversation behind the staircase. By dessert, my surprise over our exchange had subsided, and I was able to relax into the table’s banter; at the outset, Priscilla had placed a moratorium on any discussion of Blackwell Meats, a wise move on her part. As we finished our butterhorn cookies and vanilla ice cream, Arthur, who, like most people present, seemed to have had quite a bit to drink, was giving Ed grief for his recent cosponsorship of a congressional bill with Judith Pigliozzi, a Democratic representative from northern California who was best known for her support of a failed medical marijuana bill. “Next thing you know, Eddie and Judith’ll be smoking reefer in the Capitol,” Arthur crowed, and Ginger, Ed’s wife, said, “You know, some studies indicate that marijuana can be very helpful for migraine sufferers”—meek, mirthless Ginger, herself a migraine sufferer, said this, and it was so out of character that everyone exploded with laughter. “So that’s how you can stand being married to Ed,” Charlie said. “We always wondered.” At the same time, John said, “Nothing like a hit of Mary Jane in the afternoon, eh, Ging?” Ginger was protesting, saying, “I didn’t mean that I’ve tried it, no, it’s just something I read about—” and Arthur and Charlie were miming inhaling joints. “Truly, I’ve never smoked marijuana,” Ginger said, and she seemed very flustered. “It was in a magazine article.”

“Alice, you ever smoked up?” Arthur asked, and Jadey said, “Don’t put her on the spot,” and Arthur said, “Then let’s go around the table. Dad, it’s safe to assume you’re a no?”

Harold, with a weary smile on his face, shook his head. By this point, all the kids were back in the basement, and I gave thanks that Ella wasn’t present; I wasn’t in the mood to explain pot.

“We already have Ginger proclaiming her innocence,” Arthur said. “Me, hell, yes. Nan?”

Nan wrinkled her nose. “I don’t know if I like this game,” she said, and Arthur said, “I’ll take that as another yes. Ed?”

“I was too old,” Ed said. “You have to remember that by the summer of love, I was already an associate at Holubasch and Whistler.”

Arthur continued around the table. “Maj, I’m thinking no, but you’re a sly one, so you want to confirm or deny?”

“Absolutely not,” Priscilla said.

Arthur pointed at Charlie. “Chas, for you, the only mystery is, did you buy or sell more?”

Charlie grinned. “Hey, we all have to be good at something.”

“You never dealt drugs, did you?” I said, and John said lightly, “Alice, don’t ask questions you don’t want to hear the answers to.”

“Jadey, I know you’re a yes, because I was there,” Arthur said, and Jadey protested, “I was a teenager! That doesn’t count!”

“If you were a teenager, then you must be almost twenty-five by now.” Arthur smirked at his wife. (Were they really not having sex? They were so playful, or maybe there was more hostility in this exchange than I recognized.)

“John?” Arthur said.

“I gave it a whirl, sure, but it never did a heck of a lot for me.”

“And now back to fair Alice.” Arthur was across the table from me, between Ginger and Nan. “You’re kind of the dark horse here. Chas, you want to place a bet on your better half?”

Charlie narrowed his eyes, scrutinizing me, and finally said, “Put me down for yes. Lindy’s got more of an adventurous streak than you’d think.”

I blushed—the comment seemed to have sexual undertones—and Arthur said, “Moment of truth, Alice.”

“Just once,” I said. “I think I’m in the same category as John, where it didn’t do much for me.” I thought of sitting in my grandmother’s bedroom in the summer of 1968 with her and Dena Janaszewski, and then I thought of my grandmother in the hospital, and I did a mental finger-crossing that her condition would continue to improve.

“Alice, clearly, you didn’t give it a chance,” Arthur said. “Where’s your stick-to-itiveness?” He was grinning the Blackwell grin, and he said to Charlie, “Why is your wife such a quitter?”

“Is it wrong that this conversation is starting to make me crave a joint?” Jadey said. “And I swear it’s been about two decades.”

Arthur raised his eyebrows at Charlie. “Chas, are you thinking what I’m thinking? But who do we know that—?”

Charlie tilted his head right, toward the swinging door that led to the kitchen. He said, “How about Leroy?” Dread seized me. Leroy was Miss Ruby’s son, older than Yvonne. I had never met him, but I knew he’d had a few run-ins with the law.

“Brilliant!” Arthur reached over and lifted the small white porcelain bell Priscilla rang whenever she wanted to summon Miss Ruby. Right away, Priscilla snatched it back, and I was greatly relieved. “You will not implicate Ruby in your high jinks,” she said.

“Don’t try to tell me Big Leroy Sutton wouldn’t know where in this city to find good herb,” Arthur said, and John said, “Oh, I think he’s well beyond that. Herb is child’s play for a guy like him.” (Did it occur to them Miss Ruby might be able to hear every word they were saying? It seemed not.)

“I believe this is when Ginger and I will make our graceful exit,” Ed said, but he was smiling as he pushed his chair back. “Maj, Dad, thanks for a tremendous meal, as always.”

“Stick in the mud, stick in the mud!” Arthur cried.

“Oh, it’d be most unsuitable for the representative from the Ninth District to get caught smoking weed five short months before he’s up for reelection,” Charlie said. “And in the home of the former governor, no less. Someone call The Washington Post!”

Wryly, Ed said to Ginger, “Come along, dear, and let’s round up Geoff.”

As Ginger rose from the table, Nan said, “I’m ready to call it a night as well.” I saw her eye John meaningfully; they both stood, following Ed and Ginger.

When the four of them had disappeared, Harold cleared his throat, and we all turned toward him. “Allow me a bit of unsolicited advice,” he said. “Nostalgia aside, this is an atrocious idea.” He stood. “Would anyone care to join me in the living room for coffee?”

The table broke up then, the idea of buying marijuana either through Leroy Sutton or another source seeming to lose momentum—thank goodness, as far as I was concerned—and as the men accompanied Harold into the living room and the women cleared plates, Jadey whispered to me, “Now Maj probably thinks I’m a pig and a druggie.” She did not seem terribly bothered.

When we all stood, Miss Ruby had magically appeared, along with a man named Bruce who helped serve and clear and acted as a bartender when the Blackwells held larger parties. Though I’d seen Miss Ruby several times over the course of the night, I had been able to greet her only briefly; she’d been busy preparing the meal, and other people had been in the vicinity. It was after the coffee was served, when Priscilla was in the living room, that I found an opportunity alone with Miss Ruby; she was setting silverware in the dishwasher. I said, “Has Mrs. Blackwell spoken to you about the play?”

Miss Ruby was hardly looking at me. She said, “That’s fine.”

“I want to apologize if I’ve created an awkward situation for you,” I said.

We both were silent, and steam rose from the water gushing out of the faucet.

“Obviously, you didn’t do anything wrong,” I added. “I hope you all are still planning on lunch at our house a week from Monday. We’re very excited about seeing Yvonne’s baby.”

Miss Ruby raised her eyebrows. “You told Mrs. about it?”

“I haven’t, and if it’s uncomfortable for you to come, I understand. But I hope you know we’d be delighted to have you. It’d just be Charlie and Ella and me.” I paused. “We’ll assume you’ll be there, but should something come up, give me a call.” Was I making a great mess of things, was I putting Miss Ruby’s job at risk? But it seemed far more offensive to me to capitulate to Priscilla’s whims than to defy them, and besides, she and Harold were returning to Washington in a few days. Bad enough that she should try to control our behavior while she was here, but it was simply absurd for her to attempt it long-distance.

Before I left the kitchen, I said, “Thank you for dinner. Everything was delicious.”

ON THE CAR ride home—it was after ten when we left, and I drove—Charlie said, “There’s a rumor going around that you socialized the other night with a Negress.”

“Charlie, you know I don’t like to make trouble, but for your mother to suggest that it’s wrong to—”

“Don’t blame me.” He sounded amused. “You and Miss Ruby can prick your fingers and become blood sisters, for all I care. I’m just hoping I get good tickets for the Lindy-Maj showdown.” He took on a sports announcer’s tone. “In this corner, weighing one-thirty and wearing a pink tennis skirt . . . ” Noticing that I hadn’t laughed, he said, “Come on, this is good stuff. So you drove all the way into the core, huh? You’re a brave lady.”

The core was a derogatory name for Milwaukee’s inner city, and not a term I used. I ignored Charlie, and from the backseat, Ella said, “Mommy, how many days left till we go to Princeton?”

Ella was excited about the reunion for the spectacle—Charlie had been teaching her the school’s various fight songs and cheers, and I had done my best to describe the orange-and-black outfits, the bands in tents at night, the beauty of the campus (while Ella had gone with us to Charlie’s fifteenth reunion in 1983, she’d been so young she had little memory of it)—and she also was excited because the trip would be an opportunity to see her cousins Harry and Liza. I said, “If today is May twenty-first, and we leave on June third, how many days is that? Do you remember how many days there are in May?”

“Thirty days hath September . . . ” Ella began. She counted on her fingers. “Fourteen days?”

“Close,” I said. “Thirteen.”

“And that means my class party’s in twelve days?”

“Exactly.”

“Daddy?” Ella said.

Charlie turned to face the backseat.

“Your epidermis is showing,” she said.

“Oh, yeah?” Charlie replied. “Well, there’s life on Uranus.”

Ella giggled. “Well, boys go to Jupiter to get more stupider.”

“I remember my time on Jupiter fondly,” Charlie said. “Your mother thought I was stupid to begin with, but when I came back, I’d even forgotten how to pick my nose.” Then he said, “There’s been a request for the world-famous opera singer Ella Blackwell to perform. The fans are clamoring. Will she disappoint, or will she rise to the occasion? Three, two, one, and hit it, Ella!” He was actually the one who began to sing: “ ‘Ohh, Princeton was Princeton when Eli was a pup . . . .’ ”

Ella replied in her own high, sweet voice: “ ‘And Princeton will be Princeton when Eli’s days are up . . . ’ ”

Together, rising in volume, they sang the last two lines, the ones I was not at all sure were appropriate for a nine-year-old: “So any Yalie son of a bitch who thinks he has the brass / Can pucker up his rosy red lips and kiss the Tiger’s ass!’ ”

This was only one small piece of the Princeton propaganda my husband had pressed upon our daughter. There was also the outfit he’d been sent in advance of the reunion, which all the members of his class would wear for the campus parade and which, so far, Ella had tried on and Charlie hadn’t: an orange warm-up suit with a black stripe running down the side of the pants and the jacket’s zipper, and a floppy white hat with 68 printed in orange and black in a circle above the brim. (The outfit’s theme was supposed to be tennis, or “Over-40 Love.”) Then there was Ella’s favorite cheer, known as a locomotive. At any moment—at dinner, or just as Ella was about to go to bed—Charlie would cry out, “Sixty-eight locomotive,” and then they’d both chant, “Hip! Hip! Rah! Rah! Rah! Tiger! Tiger! Tiger! Sis! Sis! Sis! Boom! Boom! Boom! Bah! Sixty-eight! Sixty-eight! Sixty-eight!” Then they’d yell and clap and even dance; sometimes I found their routine charming and sometimes I found it exasperating. A Princeton reunion reminded me of an academic, institutional version of the Blackwell family, simultaneously impressive and self-regarding, overwhelming and intoxicating and marvelous and repugnant. This time around, I felt a particular concern about how much Charlie would drink; his fifteenth reunion had been the only time I’d seen him consume so much beer he vomited, and that had been in the days when he was drinking considerably less than he did now.

Charlie switched to a different song: “ ‘Tune every heart and every voice, / Bid every care withdraw—’ ” This was a song I liked, even though it concluded with a gesture that was uncomfortably close to the Nazi salute. But we were in the car, our little family, and I joined in, too: “ ‘Her sons shall give while we shall live / Three cheers for Old Nassau.’ ” And then, because we were a family, because in families you do the same things over and over, we sang the song a second time, a third, a fourth, and by the end of the fifth, we’d arrived home.

THE BREWERS WERE playing the Toronto Blue Jays that Sunday, and the game started at one-fifteen. The original plan was for Arthur and their son Drew to go with Charlie and Ella, but Arthur called that morning to say he’d been thinking it could look bad if, this soon after the meat scandal, he and Charlie showed up on TV, enjoying themselves at the ballpark (the Blackwells’ seats were eight rows above the Brewers’ dugout, between third base and home plate). “We were exonerated!” Charlie protested, but apparently, Arthur couldn’t be dissuaded. When Charlie hung up, he said, “I smell John all over this.”

I’d planned to spend the afternoon preparing for the upcoming week—the next day, I’d return to Riley to help my mother bring my grandmother home from the hospital, and on Tuesday, for a Garden Club luncheon at Sally Gilman’s house, I was responsible for making potato salad for thirty—but I quickly agreed to go in Arthur’s stead. We called Harold to see if he’d like to join us, but their flight back to Washington was at four.

I didn’t really mind the change of plan; even before Charlie and I had Ella, attending baseball games was probably our best shared activity. I liked how you were part of a crowd, but an orderly crowd—there were seats and rows and sections so that even with tens of thousands of people, it wasn’t chaotic, and if a fan became drunk and unruly, he was usually escorted away. I liked how the park was a setting where you could but didn’t have to carry on a conversation, I liked the people-watching (the fans like us, families with children, and the adolescent or middle-aged couples on dates, the groups of friends in their late twenties or early thirties, the men who came alone, about whom there was something very moving to me, or at least there had been before Charlie became one of those men, at what I felt was my own and Ella’s expense). But I liked the wholesome cheers and the corny traditions and the familiar songs and the basic tastiness of eating a hot dog and drinking a beer on a sunny afternoon or evening. The one part of a baseball game I didn’t like was when a foul ball or a home run flew into the stands and people scrambled over it—when only one person got what so many wanted. But in general, baseball games kept Charlie sufficiently occupied, not bored, while also being calm enough for me. As for Ella, she liked games for her own reasons—her Japanese pen pal was a tremendous fan of the sport, which had increased Ella’s interest in it, and she also loved that the frozen custard came in a small plastic Brewers cap that you could take home—but the important part was that she liked them, that we all did.

By the fourth inning, the score was 4–1 in the Brewers’ favor, and Charlie seemed to have forgotten that he was freshly peeved with his brothers. This was when Zeke Langenbacher sidled up to us. Zeke was a man about twenty years older than Charlie and me, rumored to be the richest person in Milwaukee and possibly in Wisconsin—he was a high school dropout who’d started as a milk delivery boy and owned his own dairy by the age of twenty-five before diversifying into auto insurance, radio stations, and motels. I had met him a number of times, but I always imagined he wouldn’t remember my name, and I was always pleasantly surprised when he did. He and Charlie occasionally played tennis together—on the court, Zeke was known to be both excellent and quite aggressive—and I think these matches, even losing them, gave Charlie a frisson of pride. “Zeke’s a big fucking deal,” he told me after one. “He’s a captain of industry.”

After greeting me and being introduced to Ella, Zeke gestured to the empty chair next to Charlie. “Anyone sitting here?”

Charlie patted the seat. “We were holding it open for you.” Zeke had his own season tickets a few rows in front of ours—County Stadium never had luxury boxes, which to me was part of its charm—and earlier in the game, I’d noticed him down there with two other men.

Ella was sitting between Charlie and me, and Zeke was on Charlie’s other side, so I couldn’t hear what they were saying. I was surprised that he stayed into the seventh inning, by which point the Brewers had scored three more runs. I took Ella to the bathroom, then waited in line with her for french fries, and we were making our way back to our section when Ella and a little boy about her age collided. Almost half of Ella’s french fries spilled from the paper cup onto the floor, and in a scolding tone, she said to the boy, “Look what you just did!”

The boy appeared frightened, and I said, “Ella, sweetie, it was an accident. It wasn’t his fault any more than it was yours.” The boy was accompanied by a man, and when I glanced up, anticipating an exchange of apologetic smiles, I saw that the man was Simon Törnkvist. I believe that we mutually considered pretending not to recognize each other—his glasses were different, with larger lenses, and he no longer had a beard, but his floppy blond hair was the same, his drooping left eye—and then I said, “My goodness, it’s a small world, isn’t it?” I set a hand on Ella’s shoulder. “This is my daughter, Ella.”

“My son, Kyle.”

“It’s sure a nice day for a ball game,” I said.

“We live up in Oshkosh now, but we’re here visiting some friends.” Simon’s tone was warmer than I would have anticipated.

“Isn’t Oshkosh where you’re from?” I said, and he said, “Good memory.”

Good memory? I thought. We dated for a year!

“You might be surprised to know I ended up in the education field, too,” he said. “I’m a high school history teacher.”

“That’s wonderful,” I said. It seemed that he was waiting for me to provide a comparable update—I’m still plugging away in the library—and I found that I did not want to share with Simon that I no longer held a job. I realized I’d been wondering if he’d know whom I’d married, or at least know that it was one of the sons of the former governor, and I was glad he appeared to have no idea. How disapproving Simon Törnkvist would probably be, how pathetically bourgeois my life would seem to him. “We’ll let you two get back to the game,” I said. “It’s good to see you.”

“Maybe our families can get together when we’re next down here,” he said, and I smiled, banking on the fact that he’d never be able to track me down.

“Absolutely.”

Back at our seats, Zeke Langenbacher was gone, and I said to Charlie, “You’ll never believe who Ella and I just ran into—Simon Törnkvist.”

“You mean Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme?” This was the nickname that Charlie had made up for Simon years earlier, based on my brief descriptions. The two of them had never met, but Charlie had somehow gotten the impression that Simon was a long-haired guitar-strumming antiwar protestor; really, this said less about Charlie’s idea of Simon than his idea of me. “He was with his son,” I said, and Ella said, “He made me spill my fries!”

“Not all of them, by the looks of it,” Charlie said, and reached out to take several. Indignantly, Ella hit his forearm.

“I thought old Parsley didn’t want kids,” Charlie said. “Isn’t that why you broke up?”

It was my turn to feel surprised, pleasantly so, by someone else’s ability to remember the past. “I guess people change,” I said. I was aware that perhaps I should take Kyle’s mere existence as an insult, and who knew whether Simon had other children? He probably did. But in fact, I felt an almost giddy gratitude that I was married to Charlie instead of Simon. How stiff and unaffectionate Simon had been when we were dating, how tedious, really, and I’d realized it only afterward; Charlie, even with his many flaws, was infinitely preferable. I reached over Ella to rub the back of Charlie’s neck. “What did Zeke Langenbacher have to say?”

Charlie shrugged. “Just shooting the breeze.”

The Brewers won 7–1, and we all were contentedly sun-saturated and tired driving home. As we pulled into the driveway, I glanced in the backseat. “Ladybug, I want you to pick up your toys by dinner-time.”

“In case you’re wondering where Barbie is, she’s buck-naked and spread-eagle on the floor in the den,” Charlie said. “Looks like she had a rough night.”

“Charlie.” I frowned at him.

“What does spread-eagle mean?” Ella asked.

“I’m just telling the truth,” Charlie said.

To Ella, I said, “It means spread out. Why don’t you put some clothes on her so she doesn’t get cold?”

The phone was ringing as we entered the house, and my first impulse was to let the machine get it, but then I decided to answer because I thought it might be Jadey wanting to go for a walk.

“Hello?” I said. There was no immediate reply, then I heard the sound of a person sniffling, a sniffle I recognized, and my mother said, “Oh, Alice, I hate to have to tell you, but Granny has passed away.”

I HAD NEVER bought Ella black clothing before. In fact, I’d told her it wasn’t appropriate for little girls, a line she accusingly repeated back to me as I sat on a bench in the dressing room at Miss n’ Master, Maronee’s overpriced children’s clothing boutique, and she wriggled into a gauzy black dress with ruffled sleeves and a sash across the mid-section. She peered at herself in the mirror and said with unexpected pleasure, “I look like the girl from The Addams Family. For Granny’s funeral, will you do my hair in braids?”

“Try this one.” From a hanger, I removed a navy blue dress with a white Peter Pan collar. When Ella had pulled it over her head, she frowned at her reflection, and I said, “That’s adorable. Why don’t you like it?”

“I like the other one.”

It was four o’clock on Thursday, four days since I’d received the call from my mother, and the funeral would be at eleven the next morning. I sighed. “Fine, we’ll get the black one.”

“Can I wear it for Christmas?”

“Christmas is in seven months, sweetheart.”

“Can I wear it at Princeton?”

“We’ll discuss it later. Turn around and let me unzip you.”

At the cash register, Ella announced to the middle-aged woman ringing up the dress, “It’s for my great-grandmother’s funeral because she died of blood in her head.”

The woman looked startled. “I’m sorry to hear that,” she said.

IT WAS A strange thing to be in Riley without my grandmother. In the past, I’d been there when she was in Chicago with Gladys Wycomb, or I’d arrived for a visit when she was napping, but those times I had felt the force of her even in her absence, and now she was nowhere at all. Or who was I to say, what did I really know about the mysteries of the afterlife, and maybe she was right next to me, watching as I turned around to greet the people sitting in the pews behind the front one at Calvary Lutheran Church. A constricting band of sadness, like a belt that was too tight, was ever-present, but I also felt the tug toward social pleasantries that always surprised me at funerals—how the focused, mournful moments were the exception, the moments when you truly thought of the person who had died instead of being dimly aware of yourself in a church, part of a crowd, reciting prayers or talking to others. Perhaps sixty people had shown up for the service, primarily our neighbors as well as Ernie LeClef, who was now manager of Riley’s branch of Wisconsin State Bank & Trust, and this turnout was higher than I’d expected, given that my grandmother had few close friends and had outlasted most of her peers and a fair number of people a generation younger, including, of course, my father.

The pastor was a man I hardly knew, Gordon Kluting, who opened the service by saying, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the source of all mercy and the God of all consolations.” After his greeting, we sang “Jesus, Lead Thou On,” then there was the Litany and the Twenty-third Psalm, my mother reading from the book of Revelation (she was largely inaudible), and then it was my turn to read from the Beatitudes in Matthew 5: Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are they that mourn: for they will be comforted . . . I was glad to have been assigned this reading instead of my mother’s, because of its tone of compassion rather than faith; after all these years, my faith remained decidedly shaky. That the world was miraculous, frequently in inexplicable ways, I would not argue. That these miracles had any relationship to the buildings we called churches, to the sequences of words we called prayers—that I was less sure of. Mostly, I found a place among believers, whether in Calvary Lutheran or at Christ the Redeemer, which was the Episcopal church we attended in Milwaukee, through isolated lines from the Bible, sometimes out of context. From the Letter of Paul to the Philippians, for example: For I have learned in whatever state I am, to be content in it. I know how to be humbled, and I know also how to abound. In everything and in all things I have learned the secret both to be filled and to be hungry, both to abound and to be in need . . . In simple ideas or graceful language, I felt a resonance that was absent when I took Communion or said most prayers. (The Nicene Creed, with its exclusionary, aggressive certainty, made me particularly uncomfortable, and sometimes, if I thought I could do so inconspicuously, I refrained from saying it; but if, for instance, it was Christmas Eve and I was in the pew next to Priscilla Blackwell, that simply wasn’t a stand worth taking.) I considered it important to raise Ella in the church, if for no other reason than that years in the future, should she wish to take solace in religion, she would have a foundation for doing so; she would not need to seek it out as a stranger. The irony, then, was that on most weekends, I was the one who made sure we attended Christ the Redeemer. Early on in our time in Milwaukee, Charlie had been enthusiastic, but I think that had been related more to establishing us as a married couple in the community than to his faith, which was of the default variety. In Charlie’s mind, of course there was a God; of course we ought to pray to Him, especially at Christmas and Easter and in times of unrest; and no, it was not wrong to impose on Him even with our smallest concerns (that was what, like a concierge at a fancy hotel, He was there for). In recent years, Charlie had become less diligent about going each Sunday to Christ the Redeemer, and sometimes Ella and I went without him; she attended Sunday school, which she loved because the teacher was a nineteen-year-old named Bonnie who had a prosthetic eye, and at the end of classes during which the children had behaved, she would remove it for them. Bonnie had lost the eye, Ella somberly informed me, when she was three and her older brother shot a rubber band at her, but Bonnie had long since forgiven her brother because, as Ella reminded me, quoting Jesus, “If you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will forgive you.”

It was as I was concluding my reading of the Beatitudes that I looked out and caught sight of Harold Blackwell, sitting in the church’s second-to-last occupied row. This was when I first felt tears well in my eyes. Even Jadey had not come—I had told her she didn’t need to, and I’d had the sense she was relieved. Harold had made a special trip back to Wisconsin, I realized. And while my grandmother herself had been wary of Harold’s political leanings, I was very moved. When I returned to my seat in the first pew, sliding past Lars and my mother into the space between Ella and Charlie, Charlie squeezed my hand and whispered, “Nice job.”

After the homily, Pastor Kluting delivered a eulogy that I didn’t think captured my grandmother—among other things, he referred to her as a pillar of the Riley community—and following the Apostle’s Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Prayer of Commendation, the final hymn we sang was “Lift High the Cross.” Again I became choked up. It wasn’t that anything in the song reflected my grandmother, but it was a song I had heard and sung since I was a child, and as the organ played and the church was filled, or partially filled, by the voices of people who knew my family, there reared up in me a terrible sadness. Oh, how different my life would have been had I not grown up in the same house with my grandmother, how much narrower and blander! She was the reason I was a reader, and being a reader was what had made me most myself; it had given me the gifts of curiosity and sympathy, an awareness of the world as an odd and vibrant and contradictory place, and it had made me unafraid of its oddness and vibrancy and contradictions. And would I have married Charlie if not for my grandmother? Surely not, less because of her high opinion of him on their first meeting than because of the qualities they shared, the traits I valued in him because I’d valued them first in her: mischief and humor and irreverence, an implied intelligence rather than an asserted one. He stood beside me now, I could see his gray suit in my peripheral vision, and I thought, hadn’t my grandmother been right about everything else? From fashion to education to helping me end my mistaken pregnancy, when had she not looked out for me, what had she ever misguessed? And must not she have been right, therefore, about him, too?

Her casket was on wheels, and the pallbearers were men from the funeral director’s office. During the last verse of the song, they walked down the aisle first, then the pastor, then the family members, and I could tell that my mother was smiling at people hostess-style and also crying. In the car en route to the cemetery—we had not rented a limousine, even then, people in Riley didn’t do such things—Ella leaned into the front seat and tapped my shoulder; Charlie was driving, and I was sitting in the passenger seat. When I turned, Ella seemed earnest, as if she’d been giving the subject serious thought. She said, “I think Granny would like my dress.”

AT THE RECEPTION afterward, which was at our house on Amity Lane, I had just set a dish of Jell-O salad on the dining room table when Charlie slipped up behind me and said, “You think you’ll want to linger here awhile or get on the road?” He was chewing the last of something—it appeared to be the cold bacon-cheese dip, served with potato chips, that I had only ever seen at funerals—and he swallowed and wiped his hands on a cocktail napkin.

“Are you in a hurry?” I asked.

“I don’t want to make you feel pressed, so if you’re trying to tie up loose ends here, maybe Ella and I should catch a ride back with Dad. Just a thought.”

Nearly everyone from the funeral was sprinkled in the living room and dining room. The graveside ceremony had been short, and we’d arrived back at the house fifteen minutes earlier. Harold approached us then, standing between Charlie and me and setting a hand on each of our backs. (Since our arrival at the house, I’d sensed the other guests noticing Harold’s presence, nudging one another and whispering—I think that’s Governor Blackwell. But Harold either didn’t realize it or was so accustomed to it, he paid no attention.) He said, “Alice, on behalf of the extended family, all of us are holding you and your grandmother in our hearts today.”

“It was very good of you to come,” I said.

“Where could I be that would be more important? I’m only sorry I have to take off now, but I’m due in San Diego for a speech this evening. As you can imagine, Priscilla was terribly sorry to miss being here.”

I nodded. “Of course.”

“We just couldn’t love you one bit more,” he said, and as we hugged, I thought how there was nothing else in the world as endearing to me as Harold Blackwell’s sentimental streak. It was enough to make me wonder if there were other elected officials I was as wrong about as I’d been about him. Were there men (and it would be primarily men) who, instead of creating personas that were fakely righteous and honorable, were the opposite: fakely cruel, fakely callous? Men who, through the distortion of the media or a perceived pressure to act a certain way, sublimated, at least in public, their own decency and kindness?

When our embrace was finished, Harold patted Charlie on the shoulder. “Look after her, son,” he said, and Charlie said, “Think you’ve got room in your Batmobile for two more?”

“Sweetheart, you can stay,” I said. “You really won’t be in the way.”

Charlie didn’t make eye contact with me as he said, “Yeah, see, I’ve got kind of a work thing that came up. Kind of a major thing, actually, otherwise you know I’d postpone it.”

“Your brothers understand that you need to be with Alice today,” Harold said, and I said, “What is it?”

Charlie hesitated. “I’d prefer not to get too specific. Word of honor, I’ll tell you both the minute I can. Lindy, you’re thinking you’ll be home, what, around five or five-thirty?”

“Are you sure you can’t say what it is?”

His lips stretched into an apologetic wince. “Give me a couple days, can you do that? It’s come up all of a sudden, and I want to hold off on talking about it until it’s more of a done deal.” To his father, he said, “I’ll collect Ella and meet you out front?” He leaned in and kissed me. “See you tonight by dinnertime?”

When Charlie was gone, I felt that Harold and I were implicated in a shared embarrassment—we were, after all, Charlie’s father and wife. In a tone of feigned lightheartedness, I said, “I fully expect you to get it out of him on the ride home and report back to me!” I expected no such thing.

“All very cloak-and-dagger, isn’t it?” Harold shook his head. “Let us know if there’s anything we can do.”

ONE OF THE last people to leave the reception was Lillian Janaszewski, Dena’s mother. I had already started carrying plates and glasses into the kitchen when she stopped me, saying, “Alice, you haven’t sat still all afternoon. You’re just like Dorothy.”

“Thank you for coming,” I said. “It’s so nice to see you.” I had repeated these words, or slight variations on them, so many times that day that they’d become automatic, as had the micro-update I provided on my life, as had the fleeting remembrances of my grandmother: Yes, Charlie and I are still in Milwaukee. Ella’s nine now, she’s finishing up third grade. She’s over there, yes, that’s her with the long hair. Or, She just left—I know, I’m sorry you missed her. Charlie and I are very lucky. Or, I know, my grandmother was wonderful, wasn’t she? This part of the funerary proceedings also seemed to have far less to do with my grandmother as a person than with decorum, to the extent that, as I listened to myself chatter, I felt pangs of disloyalty. But what was the alternative? How could I bear to vividly and realistically remember her with everyone? She found Riley somewhat dull. She was an excellent bridge player. She never lifted a finger to cook or clean, even when she was younger and more spry and easily could have done so, and she smoked constantly, including around her granddaughter. She liked Anna Karenina because she loved the characters, but she thought War and Peace was tediously political, and she stayed abreast of current fashion into her nineties, despairing of the trend toward wearing exercise clothes at all hours of the day; she also claimed Laura Ashley dresses looked like they were meant for peasants. She had a longtime love affair with another woman, which none of us really talked about, and then they broke up, and we hardly talked about that, either. There was a way in which my grandmother’s true self was not these guests’ business; no one’s true self was the business of more than a very small number of family members or close friends. In any case, I told myself, making superficial remarks didn’t have the power to eclipse or insult the dead any more than missing them had the power to bring them back.

Mrs. Janaszewski took my hand, gripping it in hers, and her skin was unexpectedly cool, given that it was a warm May afternoon. “It just breaks my heart about you and Dena,” she said. “She’s living back here, you know.”

“Is she not involved with D’s anymore?”

Mrs. Janaszewski said ruefully, “Clothing stores are a difficult business, Alice. Customers are fickle, and in Madison, there’s all the turnover with the students.”

This surprised me, because D’s had always been buzzing whenever I’d been by. Then I realized that my most recent visit to the store had been over a decade earlier; though I occasionally went back to Madison—to have lunch with Rita Alwin, my old friend from Liess, or to see an exhibit at the Elvehjem Museum—I avoided State Street because it made me sad.

“Dena’s a hostess over at the steak house in the new mall, but the real news is she has a steady beau,” Mrs. Janaszewski said. “You probably know him—Pete Imhof.” I suppose an expression of alarm appeared on my face, because Mrs. Janaszewski brought her hand to her mouth, saying, “Oh, Alice, he’s the brother—Oh, I’d forgotten all about—Forgive me.”

“No, no, that was such a long time ago,” I said, and I might have then felt the same disloyalty toward Andrew that I’d been feeling toward my grandmother—I will minimize my grief for social pleasantries; this moment of small talk matters more than our history, your memory—except that I was so disturbed by Mrs. Janaszewski’s news. Dena was dating Pete? But Pete was awful! Dena was fun and cute and hardworking, and Pete was a dishonest layabout; he was a jerk. I even wondered, was she supporting him? How had they reconnected? Was it at all possible—for her sake, I hoped so—that he had changed since he’d swindled my mother? And then I thought, if Dena and Pete were dating, surely she’d have told him about my abortion. And my God, for him to find out all this time later that I’d been pregnant—would he be furious at me? Disgusted, or disappointed, or maybe just relieved I’d taken care of it? I said to Mrs. Janaszewski, “How long have they been together?”

“Oh, close to a year now. She says, ‘Ma, quit asking when we’re getting married. If I have something to tell you, you’ll know.’ ”

So if Pete were going to track me down, to confront me, wouldn’t he have done so months ago? Had Dena not told him, could it be that she didn’t remember? This seemed unlikely but not impossible. After all these years, Dena and Charlie were still the only people whom I’d told; confiding in Jadey felt too risky.

I said, “That must be great for you, having Dena nearby.”

“She just lives down on Colway Avenue,” Mrs. Janaszewski said. “Now, I may not know the full story of what happened between you girls, but if I know Dena, I’m sure she’d love to hear from you. I’ll give you her number, and she doesn’t go into work until five—why, I’ll bet she’s home right now.”

“Unfortunately, I’m headed back to Milwaukee shortly.” I grimaced, as if I didn’t yearn to return to my usual life, my own house and bed and kitchen and habits. “Ella and Charlie have taken off already. But I’m glad to hear Dena is doing well.”

“You and I both know she can be stubborn, but you girls were so close. I used to think, Alice is like the fourth sister, if only my own daughters were half as well behaved.”

I was surprised that Dena hadn’t told her mother why our friendship had ended. But if she had, would Mrs. Janaszewski have treated me as warmly? I’d never felt that I was as much at fault as Dena had believed, but I also had never considered myself blameless; the flourishing of my relationship with Charlie at the expense of my friendship with Dena wasn’t a subject I chose to recall with any frequency. Now, knowing she was dating Pete Imhof, I tried not to wonder whether, apart from the abortion, they’d ever compared notes on me.

I attempted to strike a regretful note as I said to Mrs. Janaszewski, “Maybe on another trip.”

WHEN EVERYONE WAS gone, Lars and my mother and I sat in the living room, my mother sideways on the couch, her legs in black slacks extending in front of her and her feet, clad in sheer black stockings, on Lars’s lap, where he was absently rubbing them. I found the intimacy of the tableau both unsettling and sweet; certainly I had never felt Lars’s presence more reassuring than on this day, knowing that when I drove back to Milwaukee, he would remain.

“I don’t mean to be unkind, but did you see the nacho casserole that Helen Martin brought?” my mother said. “I’ve never heard of such a thing!” My mother was in a surprisingly upbeat mood; I suspect she was relieved that the guests had left.

“No, it was quite tasty,” Lars said. “It had some kick to it, but not too much.”

“It just sounds so funny.” My mother looked across the room, where I sat in a recliner that had been one of Lars’s few additions to the household when he moved in. “Did you try it, honey?” my mother asked.

I shook my head. “But I had more than my share of Mrs. Noffke’s chocolate-chip cookies.” The phone rang—my mother had finally replaced her black rotary ones with cream-colored push-button versions—and as I walked to the kitchen to answer it, I said, “I think she put walnuts in them. Hello?”

“You’re still there?” Charlie said.

I looked at my watch. “It’s not even five-thirty.”

“Are you about to leave, or you think it’ll be a while?”

“Charlie, I told you I’d be home by dinnertime.”

“You happen to have Shannon’s number on you? I’m gonna call and see if she can sit for Ella.”

“I doubt she’ll be free on such short notice.”

My mother appeared in the doorway of the kitchen, frowning inquisitively. I set my hand over the receiver and shook my head. “Nothing’s wrong. It’s just Charlie.”

“Just Charlie, huh?” Charlie said as my mother walked back out of the room.

“You know what I meant.” A pause ensued, and I said, “I really wish you’d tell me what your mystery errand is.”

He sighed. “You know how I was talking to Zeke Langenbacher at the game Sunday? Well, he’s invited me to have a drink. This could be a huge opportunity—I can’t say more right now, but trust me, it’s big.”

“Are you going to work for his company?”

“Not exactly. Listen, do you have Shannon’s number? I promise I’ll explain everything.”

“Look on the fridge. No, you know what, don’t call her. I’ll get in the car now. What time are you and Zeke meeting?” I glanced at my watch; it was twenty past five, and it would take me fifty minutes to drive to Maronee.

“Six-thirty,” Charlie said.

“Then that’s fine—”

“No, but not at the country club, at Langenbacher’s office downtown.”

“Well, please don’t leave Ella at home by herself. If you need to leave and I’m not back yet, take her to Jadey and Arthur’s.”

“I owe you,” Charlie said. “Hey, how are things there?”

“They’re fine.”

“Are you mad?”

“I need to go.”

“Drive fast, okay?” he said. “I’m not trying to be a total asshole, but this is important.”

“I’ll be there as quickly as I can.” I could hear the tightness, almost a sarcasm, in my own voice, but this time Charlie did not remark on it.

I found my purse where I’d set it on a kitchen chair and carried it to the living room. “I think I’ll be on my way,” I said, and Lars said, “All’s well on the home front?”

“Charlie wanted to know if I could smuggle the leftover nacho casserole back to Milwaukee,” I said. “He claimed you two would never notice.” Though Lars chuckled, my mother seemed somber; the mood of the room had changed while I was in the kitchen. “You all right, Mom?” I said.

My mother tilted her head to one side. “I keep thinking she’s gone upstairs to read.”

I understood perfectly; now that the distractions of planning for and enduring the funeral were finished, there was only the long future without my grandmother. Would Lars be enough to fill the house, to keep my mother company, after all?

With more confidence, more optimism, than I actually felt, I said, “Maybe she has.”

OUR HOUSE IN Maronee was a 1922 Georgian colonial, the clapboard painted pale yellow—it had been white when we’d bought it, but we’d redone it about five years before, and I thought the yellow was softer—and on either side of the front door, two extremely tall Ionic columns supported a second-story pediment that was purely decorative. On most days, when I turned in to the driveway, our house struck me as ordinary, merely our house; but sometimes when I’d been away, especially when, as on this evening, I was returning from Riley, I realized again how large it was, especially for only three people. The house sat on an acre of zoysia grass (mowed on a weekly basis, except in winter, by Glienke & Sons landscapers), and tall oak and elm and poplar trees stood at irregular intervals, providing shade and a kind of buffer from the road. Our driveway was smoothly paved asphalt, our three-car garage freestanding and also yellow; though we had only two cars, we had managed to fill the extra space with bicycles, rakes, a stepladder, and an assortment of other domestic clutter. On this night, as I approached our property, I saw Charlie and Ella throwing a Frisbee in the front yard; Ella was barefoot but still wearing her dress from the funeral. As I pulled into the driveway, Charlie held up his left arm in a gesture that was half-wave, half-halt sign, and Ella began a dance that, as far as I knew, she’d made up: She set her hands on her head, index fingers up like antennae, and moved sideways in little hops. The early-evening sunlight through the trees was dappled gold, and in spite of my irritation with Charlie, I found myself thinking how lucky we were; really, I was not sure it was fair to be this lucky.

I set my foot on the brake and rolled down my window, and Ella called out, “Daddy threw me a bear claw, and I caught it!”

“Ladybug, your dress will last much longer if you don’t play in it,” I said. “Let’s go inside and have you change.”

“Thanks for coming back,” Charlie said. “You’re a lifesaver, Lindy.”

“You’re a Tootsie Roll, Lindy,” Ella said, and Charlie laughed and swiped his hand against the top of her head.

To me, he said, “Mind if I take your car?” He opened the driver’s-side door, extending his arm with an exaggerated flourish and saying, “Madame.” I started to turn the car off, and he said, “Just leave the keys in the ignition.”

When I stepped out, he very quickly kissed me on the lips, then slid into my seat. “Adios, amiga,” he said to Ella, and to me, he said, “I should be home by ten.” He was already backing up when I shouted, “My purse!” He reached over and tossed it out the window; improbably, I caught it, and he said, “Hey there, Johnny Bench.” Then he reversed out of the driveway and disappeared down the street.

“Don’t ever do that,” I said to Ella.

“Drive fast?”

“That, too, but I meant don’t throw Mommy’s purse.”

We went inside for her to put on shorts, then headed back out because she still wanted to play with the Frisbee. After we’d tossed it a few times, she said matter-of-factly, “You’re not as good as Daddy.”

“I haven’t had as much practice,” I replied.

When she’d tired herself out, we went in, and I ran a bath for her, and when it was time to wash her hair, she summoned me. For all that I had believed before the fact that I didn’t want my daughter to have long hair, this was one of my favorite rituals. I still used Johnson’s baby shampoo on her, with the pink droplet on the label that said no more tears. Soon enough, I suspected, she’d take note of this label and be perturbed by the word baby, but so far she hadn’t said anything. She sat naked and cross-legged with her back against the side of the tub, her head tilted forward, and I massaged her scalp in amiable silence; she occasionally flicked the surface of the water with her thumb and middle finger. I rinsed the shampoo out with the shower nozzle, and when she stepped from the tub, I was sitting on the toilet lid holding up a towel; she walked into it, and I wrapped her, holding her tight in my arms. “Mommy,” she said.

“What?”

“I can lift a pencil with my toes.”

I kept hugging her. “Since when?”

“Christine taught me. Want to see?”

“You can show me after you put on your pajamas.”

The book I read to her that night, not for the first time, was The Giving Tree. We were at the part where the boy gathers the tree’s apples to sell when I sensed that Ella had fallen asleep—both of us were leaning against the headboard of her bed—and after a few more pages, I shifted so I could look down at her eyes. They were indeed closed. I ought to have shut the book and turned out the light then, but I kept reading; I read until I’d reached the end.

IT WAS, I saw on the digital clock on my nightstand, after one when Charlie climbed into bed beside me. Groggily, I mumbled, “Did you have a flat tire?”

“Shh,” he whispered. “Go back to sleep.”

But as we lay there in the dark, instead of drifting off again, I became more alert. My mind pulled itself into focus, and I thought, Where on earth could Charlie have been? Surely this had been the longest day of my life.

When I spoke, it was in a normal volume. I said, “You need to tell me now.”

Immediately, he rolled over and placed his arms around me, and when he spoke, his breath was warm against my face. I could tell he was excited. He said, “No, no, everything’s good. Everything’s great.” His happiness filled our darkened bedroom. He said, “I’m buying the Brewers.”

THE COUNTRY CLUB pool opened that Saturday—it was Memorial Day weekend—and Ella insisted that we arrive right at nine o’clock. First, though, we picked up Jadey and Winnie. As they emerged from their house, a mammoth Tudor, I saw that Winnie was wearing a red bikini, the cups of it flat against her twelve-year-old chest, and Ella said to me from the backseat, “You said bikinis are inappropriate before you’re sixteen!”

“Every family has its own rules.”

“But Winnie is our family!”

“We’ll talk about this later,” I said, because Jadey and Winnie were almost to our car. Jadey, for all her talk about needing to lose weight, was wearing a bikini, too—Bully for her, I thought—which I could see under her sheer white linen cover-up. She also had sunglasses set on her head, pushing back her blond hair, and over one shoulder she carried a huge canvas bag with navy straps and a navy monogram. When they opened the car doors, I noticed that she and Winnie wore matching red toenail polish.

The girls immediately started talking in the back (Winnie was very sweet with Ella, very inclusive, which was part of how I knew Jadey and Arthur were good parents) and next to me, Jadey said, “How was the funeral? As funerals go, I mean.”

“Not bad.”

“Your grandma seems like she must have been such a cool lady.” Jadey pulled a can of Diet Coke from her bag and popped it open. “I wish I’d gotten to know her better.” As I turned out of their driveway onto Maronee Drive, Jadey rolled down the window on her side, then faced the backseat. “Ella, I hear you’re joining the swim team this year. You will love Coach Missy. You girls are gonna have the best summer ever.” Although we’d be spending July and part of August in Halcyon, missing half the swim season was considered acceptable because so many families who belonged to the country club also went away to vacation homes.

We weren’t the only ones who’d come right on time for the pool’s opening, and the lower parking lot was a chaos of children, mothers, a few fathers, and teenagers. The Maronee Country Club, really, was its own small nation, one of those tiny, slightly absurd kingdoms—Liechtenstein, perhaps. It took up sixty acres, most of this land occupied by the eighteen-hole golf course. The clubhouse was an extremely long rectangle of white stucco—it always reminded me of a wedding cake—with a front porch full of oversize white rocking chairs and an American flag flying from the cupola. A valet took your car, though I always felt a little silly and would just as soon have parked myself. The main dining room was on the first floor, and this was where wedding receptions and debutante parties were held and where the tables and chairs were cleared out on alternating Fridays in the fall and winter for dancing school, which was open to children in sixth and seventh grade. On the lower level was a casual dining area known as the sports room, where, before my parents-in-law had moved east, Harold and Ella and I had met sometimes for a Saturday lunch of BLTs or Monte Cristos. In a building adjacent to the clubhouse were the weight room, squash courts, locker rooms, and lounge, and in the lounge, you were as likely to see a foursome of seventy-year-old matrons playing bridge as you were to see two male college students at the bar, outfitted in white, sweaty from a squash match (in the nation of the Maronee Country Club, a drinking age did not exist). The tennis courts sat between the clubhouse and the road, more than a dozen courts with a tennis shop in the middle where the pro had a desk and where one could get a cup of water, have one’s racquet restrung, buy apparel, or argue about whether or not Björn Borg was the greatest player of all time (a comparable golf house existed, and there was a special section of the parking lot reserved for the fleet of golf carts). The tennis courts formed a barrier between the road and the clubhouse; the sandy green courts were enclosed by twenty-five-foot-high chain-link fences, and as you approached, you’d hear the hollow rubbery thwack of balls being hit.

Of course, the main attraction that morning was the pool—the enormous, majestic, glittery blue-tinted pool, which, between Memorial Day weekend and Labor Day weekend, exerted a magical pull not just for the children but for the adults as well. It was located behind the clubhouse, and six years earlier, at the wedding reception of Polly Blackwell (Polly was Charlie’s first cousin), at dusk on a June evening, I’d looked out the window of the dining room, and it had been like gazing upon a lake in a fairy tale. The pool was Olympic-sized, with dark blue floating lane dividers, a deep end at the northwest corner, and a shallow end at the southeast (the shallow end was not the same as the baby pool, which was its own entity; predictably, its relative warmth was a source of endless jokes). One entered the pool area through a black-painted iron gate at the southeast tip; on the north side was a lawn of grass where the swim teams congregated during meets and where the rest of the time teenage girls sunned themselves; on the south side was the baby pool and the sign-in desk, which was also where you got towels (no one brought their own), and the concrete steps leading to the men’s and women’s locker rooms—every summer, a confused child would wander into the wrong one—and the snack bar. (Surely there are no smells and sounds more evocative for me than that particular combination of fried food being consumed under a midday sun, with a backdrop of splashing water and children’s cries. To think of it now—normal life—fills me with nostalgia.) At neither the snack bar nor the clubhouse dining room nor the sports room nor the golf nor tennis stores nor anywhere on club grounds did you use cash. Rather, you were given a half-length forest-green pencil with no eraser that said MARONEE COUNTRY CLUB along the side, and you signed a bill that had a piece of carbon paper attached beneath it; I’d write Mrs. Charles V. Blackwell. At the end of the month, an itemized tab was sent to our house.

Either the best or worst part about the country club, depending upon how social I felt on a particular day, was that we knew nearly everyone who belonged; going for dinner there was like going to a restaurant where every face happened to be familiar. For the most part, this was comforting, giving me a stronger sense of community than I’d had even growing up in Riley. Sometimes, however, when I was in a hurry—if Ella had attended a friend’s birthday party at the pool and I just wanted to pick her up quickly—it would not have been my preference to greet seven people, to have to say to Joannie Sacks, “Was France wonderful?” or to have Sandra Mahlberg announce, “Your sister-in-law made the most fabulous horseradish trout the other night!” And at rare moments, the insularity was downright unbearable—it made me ashamed of myself and everyone else at the club, ashamed of our wealth, our unthinking claims to privilege. The previous summer, I had brought that day’s Sentinel with me to the pool, and I was sitting with Jadey on the flagstone terrace behind the diving boards when I read an article about a man living in the Walnut Hill area of the city who had hepatitis C and cirrhosis and who couldn’t afford medication. And then I looked up and saw fifteen-year-old Melissa Pagenkopf rubbing oil on her belly, I heard a woman a few feet away say, “We never fly United if we can help it,” and I felt a terrible sense of culpability. In this case, I couldn’t simply write a check—there was no organization mentioned in the article, he was just an individual, and wouldn’t he need medication for years to come? To send two hundred dollars would be a drop in the bucket. And I already knew I was not bold enough to seek him out (his name was Otis Donovan) without a charity acting as intermediary; I wouldn’t want to write him a check that had my address on it, wouldn’t want him to have a way of finding me.

At such moments, I felt that we were like the people in California who live in enormous houses on the sides of cliffs, that our lives were beautiful but precarious, their foundations vulnerable. And then I’d think, was it adolescent to become preoccupied with other people’s problems, or to feel, while reading the newspaper or watching the local news, that if you didn’t consciously will yourself not to, you might cry? Life was so hard for so many people, the odds were stacked so precipitously against them. The other adults I knew did not seem overly distressed about these imbalances, and certainly not surprised by them, whereas to me they were constantly surprising, they were never not upsetting.

I had turned to Jadey and gestured in front of us. “Do you ever feel guilty about all of this?”

“All of what?” she said.

“I’m reading an article about a man in Walnut Hill who has hepatitis, and then I think of how my worst problem is that I can’t get my daughter to eat vegetables. Does it ever occur to you that you should be leading an entirely different life?”

“Oh, I know.” Jadey was nodding sympathetically. “I used to want to join the Peace Corps. Can’t you picture me in, you know, Zambia? How could I have made it ten minutes without my hair dryer?”

Although she spoke warmly, I knew not to push my point—she had sidestepped it the way she sidestepped our mother-in-law’s insults and decrees—and I wondered if already I might have violated decorum, positing myself as ponderously thoughtful, as self-righteous. It was inappropriate to introduce poverty and woe while sunning yourself pool-side; you either ought to be elsewhere, doing something about it, or you ought to sun yourself in the spirit that sunning requires. There was an older woman I knew in Garden Club, Mary Schmidbauer, with whom three or four years earlier, I’d been assigned to host a meeting, and when I’d suggested holding it in the country club’s sports room, as was common, she’d said, “Don’t take this the wrong way, Alice, dear, but I haven’t been a member since my husband passed on. They’re not crazy about having women belong by themselves, and of course they’ve never allowed Jews or blacks. When Kenneth died, I realized I’d had enough.” I had been chastened, and Mary and I had ended up holding the meeting in my living room.

That Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, after Jadey, Ella, Winnie, and I had signed in—there was actually a line, which never happened on a normal day—we staked out lounge chairs on the southeast side of the pool, a little ways behind the lifeguard’s chair, and Winnie and Ella obliged Jadey and me by letting us rub sunscreen on their backs. The second we were finished, Ella followed Winnie as her cousin darted toward the water, and they both dove in; they had the clean form of children who’ve taken lessons for such things. Jadey adjusted her lounge chair so it sloped farther back, then settled in, surveying the scene before her. “Is this a gorgeous day or what?”

It was indisputably a gorgeous day: sunny and still, the temperature in the low seventies. Leaning toward her bag, which was set on the flag-stone between our chairs, Jadey extracted two magazines and held them up side by side: an issue of People and an issue of Architectural Digest. “Which one?”

I pointed at Architectural Digest, and she said, “I was hoping you’d say that, because I need to know what Princess Di is up to this week.”

As we sat there, companionably turning pages, occasionally reading aloud a line or showing each other a picture—the ones I showed her were of fancy pillows or antique desks, and the ones she showed me were of Cher in some peculiar outfit, or Bruce Willis and Demi Moore holding hands—I was very tempted to repeat to her what Charlie had told me about buying the baseball team. I couldn’t, though, because he’d explicitly asked me not to, and I didn’t blame him. What I shared with Jadey she would surely share with Arthur, who would share it with John and their parents, and presumably all of Wisconsin and half of Washington, D.C., would soon know.

The night before, when Charlie had told me, I’d said, “You’re not serious,” and he’d said, “I am, but we can talk about it in the morning.”

“We don’t have enough money,” I said. I didn’t know how much it cost to buy a baseball team, but it had to be millions of dollars.

“Good God, not me alone,” Charlie said. “It’s an investment group, and I’ll be managing partner. Managing partner of the Brewers has a nice ring to it, huh? I’ve just got to put up six or seven hundred grand, and the rest will come from the other fellows, namely Zeke Langenbacher and our very own Cliff Hicken. This is the opportunity of a life-time, Lindy, it’s what I was meant to do. My brothers’ll eat their hearts out.”

Only six or seven hundred grand? But I didn’t respond—despite the surprising nature of what he was telling me, now that I knew his secret wasn’t anything troubling, I found myself teetering again on the edge of sleep.

Sounding blissful, he said, “Think about going to all those games, and it counts as work.”

Sleep was pulling me in, it was winning. I could hear him, but I was having difficulty forming a response. “Maybe you can find out what happened to Bernie Brewer,” I said. Bernie was the lederhosen-wearing, mustachioed mascot who had been retired a few years earlier. Before his retirement, whenever there was a home run, he would slide into a large beer mug, which had delighted Ella.

Charlie chuckled, and I promptly fell asleep.

In the morning, I woke shortly after six, and Charlie was lying on his side, his eyes shut, his breathing rhythmic and untroubled. “Are you awake?” I said, which was a disingenuous trick I occasionally used. When he didn’t respond, I asked again, and without opening his eyes, he shook his head. I said, “Did I dream that you and Zeke Langenbacher are buying the Brewers?”

Our real conversation had not taken place until a few hours later, at breakfast. Ella was also in the kitchen but on the phone, talking to her friend Christine (that she would soon see Christine at the pool apparently made a check-in more rather than less urgent), and Charlie explained the situation: Because Monday was Memorial Day, they’d be making the eighty-four-million-dollar offer Tuesday; the family who currently owned the Brewers, the Reismans, knew the offer was coming and were prepared to accept it.

Charlie was eating a piece of toast, and I was standing with my back to the sink. I said, “Well, congratulations.”

“That sounded lukewarm.”

“Not at all. I’m really excited for you, but what I don’t understand—if your investment group is offering eighty-four million dollars, how many people are in it? I’m not suggesting you put up more, but how can six or seven hundred thousand be enough unless there are dozens and dozens of investors?”

In fact, parting with such a large portion of our savings did not seem insignificant. But it wasn’t really my money, it never had been, and even if we lost it, we’d still have a cushion. We’d never had a mortgage or car payments, and some years our biggest annual expense was Ella’s tuition—we’d be fine.

“Oh, they didn’t come to me for my deep pockets,” Charlie said. “Compared to some of these dudes, we might as well be in the poor-house. No, a lot of what Langenbacher wants to do in bringing me on board is get the credibility and the connections of the Blackwell name, and frankly, I have no problem with that—I’m going into it with my eyes open. It’ll be a synergistic type of situation, good for the team, good for me, good for our family. They know I went to B-school, and they recognize what I have to offer.”

“So what will being managing partner entail?”

“Cheering for Robin Yount.” Charlie grinned. “Booing when the White Sox come to town. Finally memorizing the national anthem. No, there’s six other guys in Langenbacher’s investment group, counting Cliff—you’d know most of these fellows by name—and they’re all successful, obviously, but none of them are stars in the charisma department, if you catch my drift. They need a public face for the owners, whether it be with marketing or acting as a liaison to other leaders in the community. This is still top-secret, but one of the major goals is to build a new stadium ASAP, and you just know that’ll necessitate a lot of kid-glove negotiations.”

“And you’re sure the Reisman family wants to sell the team?”

“Oh, Lloyd Reisman is thrilled that locals are prepared to pony up. It would be devastating for the morale of this city if the Brewers got relocated again. You’re not worried about the money, are you? Because trust me, eighty-four million is a bargain. There’s no way we won’t get rich off the deal.”

“I just never knew you had this kind of thing in mind,” I said. “You’re such an avid fan, obviously, but professional involvement—I’m surprised, is all.”

“Now you know what Langenbacher and I were having our big talk about at the ballpark Sunday. You up for eighty-one games a year? Actually more, ’cause I’ll travel with the team sometimes.”

I smiled. “Sure.” Could this be it, the thing that would bring Charlie peace? Being managing partner of a baseball team—and one that, for all Charlie’s loyalty to it, wasn’t particularly famous or winning—did not seem to me a recipe for a legacy. But given that I didn’t understand why a legacy mattered in the first place, perhaps it was predictable that I didn’t understand what might create one. If it was enough for Charlie, it was enough, more than enough, for me. Charlie was sitting at the kitchen table, and when I stepped toward him, he set his arms around my waist, hugging me. We were quiet, and Ella, who was still on the phone in the corner, said in an agitated tone, “But Bridget cheats at Marco Polo!”

Charlie said, “Which do you think most people would rather do: coach high school baseball or own a baseball team?”

“You’re not doing this just to impress your Princeton classmates, are you?”

With his face pressed against my stomach, Charlie laughed. “Give me some fucking credit.”

AT NOON, I walked around the perimeter of the pool to the snack bar to place our order for lunch: tuna sandwiches and Diet Cokes for Jadey and me, grilled cheeses and lemonade for Ella and Winnie. The snack bar was essentially a glorified shed with a kitchen in the back and a counter where you ordered; whenever an unexpected storm broke out, most people got in their cars and went home, but the most optimistic would cram into the front of the snack bar, hoping the rain would pass.

When I carried our tray of food back to the lounge chairs, Ella and Winnie were huddled together on mine, both soaking wet. Seeing me approach, Winnie called, “Step lively, Aunt Alice—we’re starving!”

I distributed the food, and Winnie said, “Mom, when I’m finished, can I have an ice-cream bar?”

“Only if you bring me one, too,” Jadey said.

We made the girls wait an hour before going back in the water, and they wandered off toward the grassy stretch at the north end of the pool; as soon as they were out of earshot, Jadey whispered, “When I was their age, I never waited.” Jadey, like Charlie and Arthur, had grown up belonging to the country club, swimming in this pool. She’d told me that at her debutante ball, which had occurred at the club in June 1968, the theme had been “A Hawaiian Luau,” and she’d worn a strapless Hawaiian print dress and an orchid lei around her neck; guests had drunk fruit cocktails, eaten pineapple-and-shrimp kebabs and pig from a spit (it had roasted for hours ahead of time), and while there was a traditional twelve-piece dance band in the dining room, outside, a man with a ukulele had sat strumming on the high diving board.

“You know who walked by when you were getting the food is Joe Thayer,” Jadey said. “I was thinking I should have an affair with him.”

“Jadey, he’s going through a divorce.”

“Oh, I love wounded men. I’ve often wished Arthur were more bruised by life. But what makes me wonder about Joe is that their daughter turned out so creepy, and she had to get it from somewhere, right?”

“Megan’s not creepy,” I said. “She’s nine years old.”

“I can’t stand that girl.”

“Jadey!”

“Honest to God, last year at Halcyon, I was walking down to the dock and dropped this huge tray of snacks and drinks—everything went everywhere—and I’m cursing and picking it all back up, and then I look over and she’s been watching me the whole time, not saying a word. She wasn’t even laughing, she was just staring at me.”

“She’s a kid,” I protested.

“She’s a sociopath. Plus, Winnie said Megan once offered her a poop sandwich.”

I suppressed the urge to repeat Ella’s similar story. Poor Megan seemed to have enough problems without my gossiping about her, so I said, “I think you should talk to Arthur. I’m sure he knows you’re mad at him, but he probably doesn’t want to bring it up.”

Jadey was adjusting the back of the lounge chair again, flattening it, and she made a harrumphing sound and rolled onto her stomach. Her face was turned to me, half of it pressed against the chair’s vinyl straps. She said, “Did you have any idea marriage would be so damn much work? God almighty.” She’d removed her sunglasses before lying down, and her eyes dropped shut. In a drowsy voice, she said, “You still worried about Chas and his whiskey?”

“I may have been overreacting.”

“I forgot to watch him at Maj and Pee-Paw’s, maybe ’cause I was so busy knocking back the vino myself. You have any of that merlot?”

“I had a glass of the chardonnay.”

She opened her eyes, propping herself up on her elbows. “A glass?” she repeated. “As in one glass?” When I nodded, she said, “Honey, maybe it’s not that Chas needs to drink less. Maybe it’s that you need to drink more.”