By the time drinks had been poured and hors d’oeuvres were circulating through the living room, Winnie felt better. The hors d’oeuvres, at least those that she’d seen so far, were reassuringly normal: cheese puffs, a bowl of roasted nuts. At Bob’s urging, Lila had put in a tape of her recent diving meet, and a group had gathered around the silent television to watch a revolving series of young girls, in matching green swimsuits, who stood as still as statues on the board and then launched themselves into the air with gusto. Bob and Melissa and the others—whooping or shaking their heads in unison—seemed to be able to tell the most minute differences between the divers and their dives, so Winnie pretended to also, though she wasn’t always sure which one was Lila, even. The fire was coming along nicely, after several false starts and many interventions, and a flickery warmth had filled the room.

In fact, it had become a little too warm in the living room, but of course Winnie was wearing a turtleneck sweater—of close-knit blue silk, but a turtleneck nonetheless. The patch of darker skin near her jaw had not receded or faded. If anything, the pigment had deepened further, and now the affected area seemed to be spreading down the left side of her throat. Rachel insisted you could hardly notice it, and if Dr. Reynolds wasn’t worried—and he wasn’t, though she’d been back twice to check—then Winnie should really try to forget about it…Had she tried some makeup, like foundation or concealer?

Yes, of course she had. With dismal results. Last week, when she had been together with Jerry—in her bed, in the middle of their tender contortions—Winnie had become paralyzed by the fear that he might look down at the spot on her jaw, in the moment, and think it ugly. She was distracted, and then ashamed of her inattention, and then miserable on both accounts. So she had edged a pillow closer to her face, and then closer, and all the while they had continued to make love, until she had the pillow arranged, just so, over most of her cheek and throat.

Jerry had opened his eyes then and flipped the pillow out of the way. “Are you trying to smother yourself?” he’d exclaimed, with the barely restrained exasperation of a man interrupted. She had to laugh. And then they had resumed that slow, sweet work, and Winnie forgot the spot on her skin.

But it was harder to forget it now, and if she wasn’t tugging the turtleneck up almost to her lips—a silly, unhelpful gesture, she knew—she had to fight herself from ducking into the tiny powder room under the staircase, each time she passed by, in order to confirm that the spot was still there. It was always still there.

Avery’s friends were perfectly pleasant, even if they were keeping mostly to themselves, so far. It had been a real surprise to see how, well, old his girlfriend was, though she was trying hard to stave that off, what with those regrettable tattoos and that wild mass of tangled hair. After Avery had proudly introduced her to the others, Rachel had sent Winnie an amused look across the room—eyebrows raised—so Winnie knew she wasn’t the only one who had noticed. Still, the woman had a kind face.

And if she was making Jerry’s grandson happy, then who cared about anything else? The voices filling her home, the gathering of family, the familiar turkey aroma: all were restoring Winnie, but she was still struggling to come to terms with that earlier encounter with Avery. It had all happened so fast, and then he rushed out of the house—Winnie knew she had hurt him, but she wasn’t sure how, exactly. This was a rare, fragile connection growing between Jerry and this young man—she had seen how easily they kidded each other, how invigorated Jerry was after these visits. He would ransack the house for a book he’d promised Avery, trudging slowly up and down all the stairs; once he made Matty take them to a Cuban-Chinese restaurant—in the Bronx!—that Avery had gone on about. Oh, couldn’t she have kept her mouth shut?

All she had wanted, Winnie argued with herself while admiring Lila’s new sweater, was to make sure it was something real that was still bringing Avery out to visit—not just the restaurant or its prospects, shifting things like that—but something true and unchanging. Could Avery tell the difference?

But she had botched it.

Avery was a whirling dervish in the kitchen now, firing up every stove burner, and he had firmly turned them all out, even Winnie, who had ventured in a few minutes ago to bring him a glass of cold soda, meaning to apologize (without apologizing, exactly).

“I’ve got it from here,” he’d said, his face red from the heat. He had a red kerchief tied on his head and suddenly he looked like a real chef, moving easily around the kitchen, shaking something in a pan, dropping handfuls of herbs into another pot. She backed uncertainly away, afraid of the distance now between them.

But then Avery had said something in their old, joking way and then, to her great relief, he had even swatted a tea towel her way. “Get out there and keep an eye on my girl, Winnie. Don’t let her pocket the silver.”

She had mock-scolded him for impertinence, and left with her heart eased. For now. Even the phone had stopped its endless ringing, so there was that, too. And here was Jerry, holding court, in his favorite high-backed armchair by the fire.

With Waugatuck’s pool closed for the season, they had found him an indoor place to swim, but it was all the way out in Edmonton, a good forty-five minutes each way, and Matty had said to Winnie—low-voiced, afraid to be overheard—that the drive itself was so uncomfortable for Jerry that its effects nearly undid any benefit the water might have provided. She had quickly found someone to install a whirlpool fixture in the upstairs bath, and that might help, it seemed, at least a little. Still, the pool project beckoned to Winnie—a kind of promise, a way to hold on to something.

Now Jerry began a favorite story, about the time he’d met Alan Greenspan in the hallway outside the men’s room at a function in Chicago and dressed him down for using the word “recession” in a speech, even though the point had been that there wasn’t going to be one. Winnie knew it well, and she needed to check the table settings, but she stayed for her favorite part:

“He listened to me, thanked me for my thoughts, and then just as he was leaving, leans in real close”—here Jerry started laughing, and Winnie joined him—“and then he tells me that my fly was down. My once-in-a-lifetime five minutes with the Chairman of the Fed. I guess I made a pretty good impression. Completely unzipped.”

Winnie savored the sound of laughter as she went in to survey the dining room. Did the new arrangement of nine settings work, or were the places too crowded together? Should she have Bob or someone bring the table’s second middle piece up from the basement? That would mean taking every piece of china off, and the runner and cloth, and the flowers and candles—not to mention locating the middle piece, because who knew where it could be…Oh, who were these people who showed up to dinner unannounced and uninvited? To be fair, Thomas had been more than apologetic, in a smooth and charming way. But Avery’s tight smile and silence about the matter told Winnie all she needed to know. Surely, though, Avery couldn’t be jealous? Maybe she’d have to find a way to tell him the obvious: Nona’s friend Thomas was not interested in women, in the slightest.

“Hey, Nana, guess what?” Melissa had followed her, drumming a loud pattern on the doorway, and then the chair back, and then the table. The child never stopped moving, it seemed.

“Do me a favor. Sit down here.” They squeezed next to each other near the end of the table, where Winnie’s place would be, to test the spacing. “Will your elbow be in your sister’s face all evening? Or is this all right?”

Melissa pretended to cut up her turkey with fierce sideways motions. “We can handle it,” she said. “Guess what? Mom said she’s going to take me and Lila to California to visit Uncle Dan in January! And the beach is, like, right outside their house. Although if Lila has practice over the break she might have to go by herself on the plane the next day. Which is kind of scary to her, but not to me. I would love to go on a plane by myself, but Mom says no way, José.”

“What about your father?” This was the first Winnie had heard of Rachel’s plan. And she immediately squelched the thought that it must be Jerry’s money paying for this trip: Really, did that matter at all? Then she carefully amended the question. “Or maybe he can’t get away. All this writing. I know he’s working hard.”

Melissa looked at her in surprise, as if something obvious had been ignored. “He wasn’t really invited, I guess,” she said in a carefully low voice that pierced Winnie. “She says it’s just a girls’ trip.”

“Those are the best kind,” Winnie agreed. “Let’s go peek at Avery. Do you think he’ll let us in there to get the water pitcher?”

She followed Melissa into the hallway leading to the kitchen, trying to recover from the girl’s matter-of-fact response. Winnie supposed she shouldn’t be so surprised. They were smart girls, and they had been through a lot. Of course they knew more than either she or Rachel assumed, or wanted to admit, about the rift between their parents. This was something she would have to bring up with Rachel, and this thought stayed with her through the last-minute pre-dinner preparations, the serving spoons and baskets of bread and finding a book of matches for the candles, until the very sight of all of them around the same table, talking and laughing and ignoring her, pushed everything else to the side. Lila and Melissa were just to Winnie’s right, Lila’s perpetually hunched shoulders within an arm’s reach, and Bob and Nona next to them farther down. To her left was Nona’s friend Thomas, with Rachel in the middle, and Avery down at the other end. And directly across from her was Jerry, of course. Winnie reached out to push one of the glass candle covers out of the way. There. Now he came into full sight, her husband, in his heathered wool sweater and worn sports coat—the gray of that sweater, she saw, matched his eyes exactly; he rapped the table once, hard, said, “What’s everyone waiting for? Let’s eat.”

Last Friday, she had taken Bob to a late lunch at Mary’s Café. It was a date she had arranged carefully, at a time she knew Rachel would be at the dentist with the girls. As they took their seats, though, Winnie said something casual about how it was too bad she couldn’t have joined them—and Bob had only met her eyes with a calm nod. He knew, of course, that she’d wanted to meet with him alone.

“Well, it’s not as bad as I’d guessed,” he said, after several minutes of studying the papers she’d brought. He held half a sandwich in one hand and turned pages with the other. “Everything about the sale of the house looks in order.”

“But—you see what she’s saying about him. That he—wasn’t in his right mind when he, when we—”

“He had a car take him over to the closing, right? That’s too bad.” Bob took another bite and neatly caught a piece of chicken salad that fell. “Weirdly enough, driving yourself tends to convince the court of competence. You see it in probate challenges all the time—some geezer will have left his entire fortune to his pet Pekingese, but if he drives himself over to Dunkin’ Donuts that day…”

Winnie tried to smile. “Do you miss this? The legal business? You must learn an awful lot about people. About their unhappiness, that is.”

Bob put his sandwich down and wiped his hands with a paper napkin. The early-afternoon light filled the café’s small front room, and caught the lenses of his glasses when he looked down. “Sometimes. It’s not always juicy scandals and intra-family disputes. Sorry. You know what I mean. Most of the time, it’s the usual paper pushing. Especially for those of us who didn’t make partner.”

“That was the firm’s loss,” Winnie said. She knew how much that had crushed Rachel, when it happened a year before Bob’s accident, but she had never spoken directly to her son-in-law about his career. Even now, it was hard to tell what he was thinking.

“I’m going to tell you something, Winnie. And it doesn’t have to go further than this lunch, but it needs to be said.” Bob brought a level gaze up to hers. “Rachel can’t keep taking money from you and Jerry.”

“I didn’t know if you—”

“Aside from my own personal feelings about it, which…She just can’t. Not while you are involved in this lawsuit. Do you know what they use to determine mental weakness?”

Winnie flinched at the term, but if Bob noticed, he didn’t stop—his voice was now hard-edged. “It’s not just old age that can constitute grounds for this—it’s old age in combination with other factors. Including prior history, fraud, or undue influence. What could be construed as undue influence.”

This last phrase hung between them in the quiet restaurant.

“Have you spoken to her about this?” Winnie asked. “The money?”

“Have you?” Bob replied. And for a moment, the two of them just stared at each other. Winnie thought about telling him that she had tried to raise the subject with Jerry, a few days after that unbearable meeting in the lawyers’ office. I’m not stupid, she wanted to tell her son-in-law. Of course she worried about what those loans would mean to Annette, what dangers they might expose Jerry to. She had suggested he put on hold, temporarily, all that generosity he’d shown Rachel, and even Avery.

“Just until it all gets sorted out,” she had said, trying to strike a casual tone.

But Jerry had waited so long to respond that Winnie had been afraid she’d crossed a line. And then she thought he was going to ignore what she’d said.

Finally, he spoke. “Don’t worry about any of that,” he said. “I’ll take care of it.” Which was a rebuke, of sorts, even though his voice was level. And Winnie was hurt, though she tried not to be, and so she didn’t feel like describing to Bob that particular moment, or the fact that she had failed in what she’d set out to do. Nor could she put into words the look on Jerry’s face when he’d said, I’ll take care of it. He hadn’t seemed surprised by her suggestion (nor did he show any sign of considering it) or unsettled by any part of the escalating family feud led by his daughter. No, Winnie realized. He’d looked like he’d been down this road a thousand times before, with someone giving him unasked-for advice, with someone telling him what he should do with his money. He’d looked like he was spoiling for a fight.

She and Bob might have said more, but just then the waitress came over to the table, and dropped her pen right into a water glass, and then Renata Harwood spied them from the sidewalk, and tapped on the window to say hello, and then Winnie’s phone rang—so in the flurry of paying the check and speaking to other people, the discussion was left unfinished.

At Thanksgiving now, she jumped up to get a tea towel—someone had tipped over the gravy boat, and Nona and Lila were trying desperately to corral the spreading pool of brown sauce before it spilled onto the floor. Bob dropped his napkin on top of the mess, still talking, his voice just a shade louder than anyone else’s.

“—didn’t know what to do with it, so they kept it a Chinese place, for over a year,” she could hear him saying, even from the hallway off the kitchen. The subject was the town, and that jinxed little restaurant on West Meade in particular, the one that had changed hands four times in the past two years. Avery hurried past her, loaded down with two platters and a handful of serving implements. Winnie wished he had let her hire someone to help out.

“Dad, it was the Chinese place after it was Sunny Sundae,” Melissa corrected.

“You’re right, you’re right. Then it was an ice-cream place. But after Rachel’s friends bought it, there was a fire, and before they could collect all the insurance—”

“Not my friends, actually,” Rachel said. She was prodding a piece of food, very gently, with her fork. “Is this…what is this, Avery?”

“In the mustard greens?” he said. “Caperberries and bacon. But there are some pieces of horseradish in there too, so keep an eye out.”

“No, I mean the…meat. The other meat. Not turkey.”

“Oh, yeah. This guy let me borrow his fifteen-pound sausage stuffer. This thing is awesome. One’s smoked pork belly, and the other’s lamb. With fennel.” Next to Winnie, Thomas gave a delicate, visible shudder.

“You made sausage?” Rachel said. “Wow.” She smiled at him and then shot a warning look over to Lila and Melissa: Don’t eat that, girls.

“Anyway,” Bob said. “They couldn’t move on new construction for almost a year, so they kept up the Chinese takeout and tried to sell those organic pizzas they wanted to make, at the same time. You could call up and order either. Sometimes, I used to pick up some of each on my way home from the station.”

“I miss Sunny Sundae,” Melissa said. “Remember the one with pieces of bubblegum on top?”

“What is it now?” Nona asked. She used her knife to load both turkey and sausage onto her fork, before taking a bite.

“It’s a boutique shoe store,” Rachel said, rolling her eyes. “We’ve got four now, in town. Because God knows Hartfield women need their three-hundred-dollar driving shoes.”

“Lila got Uggs,” Melissa said, looking around, as if providing interesting information from a general perspective. “Mom wouldn’t let us, and then somehow she did.”

“They were Bethany’s,” Lila countered, from the other end of the table. “They didn’t fit her anymore.”

“Lucky for you,” Melissa mumbled.

“Girls,” Rachel said warningly.

“What’s an ugg?” Avery asked Lila, who shook her hair down in front of her face, mortified. “Did it hurt?”

Nona laughed at him, a full, throaty sound that opened up the room and startled Winnie. There was a sexiness in her laugh, a rich uncaring intimacy that made everyone else at the table sudden witness to the rushing current flowing between her and Avery. They locked eyes and he made a little face at her, and Nona just laughed some more, now at the private, wordless conversation of her lover. Winnie, whose first reaction had been mild disapproval—a little unseemly—found herself warming to the sound, for all the love and shamelessness she heard in it. She looked across the table at Jerry, to glimpse their own connection amid the raw happiness of the young.

But he hadn’t been listening, or so it seemed. He was absorbed in chewing, and was looking over, with an unseeing expression, to where the four oval portraits of her parents’ parents were hung above the sideboard.

“Shoe stores,” Nona’s friend Thomas said, with a disagreeable snort. “Why is it always the shoe stores? Same thing in the city—first comes Starbucks, then the shoe stores. They push out anything useful or independent-owned and then they convince people they need overpriced grandé versions of basic things, like a cup of coffee.”

“Well, Solo Soles is independent-owned,” Bob said. “I just don’t get the name. ‘Solo Soles’? What does that even mean? You come out of there with one shoe?”

“But you’re missing his point,” Rachel said. “That’s exactly what is happening in town. It used to be a local kind of place. Now we have people driving up from Westchester, scouting out real estate, shopping for designer bath towels. When we were growing up”—here she looked over to Winnie for confirmation—“the same stores had been around forever. Now everything is always changing.”

No one spoke for a moment. “Maybe you should put that in the book,” Rachel added, to Bob, as if to make fun of herself. “Hartfield: Don’t Get Too Attached.”

“Except it’s about head trauma,” Bob said mildly. “Not nostalgia lane. And it’s my book.”

“Those cultural studies of suburbia always wind up with the same conclusion anyway,” Thomas said to Rachel. Avery turned to say something in a low voice to Jerry, who chuckled. “Money moves in, people move out. Blah, blah, blah. As if everyone hasn’t read that before.” No one responded, but to Winnie, it looked like Rachel was oddly satisfied with this remark.

“How did you get the turkey this tender?” Winnie called out firmly, down the table to Avery. She wanted to resettle things back to where they should be. “Not a trade secret, is it?”

“I brined it for about thirty hours,” he shouted back, echoing her loud voice. “Like I told you.”

“What does brine it mean?” Melissa asked.

“You just soak the bird in a big bucket of salt water,” Nona answered. “He made me take out all three shelves in my refrigerator.”

“Thirty hours?” Rachel said. “Is that safe? With all the bacteria that can grow, I mean?”

“She said it, I didn’t,” Thomas said, leaning over to reach the bottle of wine.

“So you guys, like, stay over at each other’s place and stuff?” Melissa asked Nona, who made a questioning face at Rachel.

“Well, since we’re all here together,” Jerry said, and his voice startled the room into silence. Deliberately, he set down his knife and fork, plate cleaned.

“May I first toast my Winifred,” he said, raising an empty wineglass. “No sappy stuff, except to say you’ve made an old man happier than anyone has a right to be.”

“Ooh,” Lila whispered.

As the others raised their glasses, Winnie’s heart widened, even though Jerry wouldn’t look at her. He was busy making himself look fierce and impatient, embarrassed in the wake of all the murmurs and loving looks surrounding him. Finally, Winnie thought. This is what they were together for—the harmony of the expected.

“All right, enough,” he said. “Next is for the chef. My grandson, who cooks a damn fine dinner.”

“Hear, hear,” Winnie called. Everyone clapped, and Melissa drummed her spoon a little too hard against her glass of water. Avery held up both hands, and Nona blew him a kiss.

“And now that that’s out of the way,” Jerry said, waiting for them to be quiet. But what was this? Why did he look so serious? Winnie’s chest tightened. Rachel glanced her way, concerned.

“Sometimes in a family…it’s like business. You need to make some changes. Maybe you’ve done things a certain way for a long time, but then—well, even if people expect things to continue in the way they’ve been going, and they rely on that, you’re going to need to assess the situation and change course as needed. Not always easy. Not always popular.”

“Jerry?” Winnie asked. She tried to catch his eye, tried to ease him with a smile. How could she get back to that lovely balance of a minute ago?

“I may be old, but that doesn’t mean I’m out of the game. I know how it’s played. And Jerry Trevis isn’t any kind of pushover, either. Frank here can tell you.” Jerry thumbed angrily toward Avery, who looked as worried as Winnie felt. Nobody corrected the name mistake.

“Darling,” Winnie said. “Of course not. Why don’t we—”

“I changed my will, and you might as well know about it now,” he said, glaring around the table. “I wrote Annette out, and that’s that.”

There were audible gasps, from Rachel and Melissa. Lila was wide-eyed.

“Is this for real?” Thomas exclaimed, under his breath, to no one in particular.

All Winnie could do was stare down the table at Jerry. “I’m sorry, Winifred, but it had to be done. I didn’t discuss it with you first because I knew you’d just try to argue, change my mind. But my mind is made up.” She nodded dumbly. And what came to mind was the letter she had written to Annette, the one she’d torn up and written again and then mailed, anxious but determined, yesterday.

Your father doesn’t know I’m writing to you, it began. And then it went on to plead, cajole, and apologize. Winnie had thrown herself on the mercy of this strange woman, she had acknowledged that her new presence in the family—she had even, after much internal debate, characterized her own marriage as “sudden”—was obviously causing problems between father and daughter, and she offered to meet with Annette to discuss whatever grievances there might be and how to resolve them. But, in other paragraphs, she also hadn’t been above thinly veiled references to Jerry’s advanced age, or hints that such a division in his family could make him ill—could, in fact, serve to bring on a recurrence of what Winnie had called “those problems he had in the past,” trusting that her restrained phrase would signal to Annette that now she, Winnie, knew everything there was to know about Jerry’s mental health. There was no more advantage to be had in withholding that information.

But now, as Jerry was saying something about voiding the prenuptial agreement she had gladly signed, and that he’d met with Ed Weller two days ago, and the new papers had already been drawn up—Winnie could vaguely hear Bob trying patiently to convince Jerry to reconsider—all she could think was that it was all her fault. In writing that letter, by violating Jerry’s trust, by going behind his back to try to win over Annette, she might have made a bad situation worse. Now what would happen? Annette would surely tell Jerry, would throw this attempt right back in his face. And then what would she say? How would he react? What would it do to this nightmare?

With this chaos of thoughts crowding her mind, Winnie barely heard or understood what Jerry said next.

“This house—our house—will be Winnie’s sole property, to use or dispose of as she wishes. To pass on to whomever she wishes. And god damn anyone who says otherwise.” Jerry nearly shouted this, as if the entire squadron of Annette’s lawyers had suddenly materialized at the dinner table. Winnie was flushed, breathless. How could he make her think about living on here, alone?

“And as for my estate, I’ve made it over to Frank. I mean Avery. He’ll be sole inheritor.” Jerry glared at them all, as if expecting vigorous dissent, when what he met was a continued silence. Then he faltered a little, unsure now, and spoke more quietly to the young man next to him—who was, Winnie saw, even through her own hazy shock, frozen. “It’s a bum rap, what your mother and I have put on you. I’m sorry for my part of that. But it doesn’t change what I’ve done. You’re going to inherit it all.”

Avery looked up, but not at Jerry, and not at Nona, who put her hand on the table and slid it toward him. He turned only to Winnie, and in his face she read the echo of her own stricken expression.