Now she was hungry. Thanksgiving’s central meal had been over for an hour, and she was starving. Rachel leaned against the island in the middle of Winnie’s barn-sized kitchen and pulled small pieces off the turkey carcass with her fingers. She couldn’t remember when she’d last had a turkey that was this tender and flavorful. Her own, cooked for years in the temperamental oven at 144 Locust—and then just once, disastrously, last November in the “kitchenette” in the apartment on the side of the house—had always served more as vehicles for delivering bites of mashed potatoes, gravy, and (admittedly, canned) cranberry sauce. It was a revelation to enjoy the meat of the bird itself. When Avery dumped the leftover sausages into a plastic container near the platter, Rachel picked up one of those and ate it too.

After a minute, she noticed Avery just standing there, watching her, with his hand on his hip.

“What?” she said, popping the rest of the sausage—must have been lamb—into her mouth. God, this kid was good-looking. Nona should be thanking her lucky stars. Had Jerry looked like that, back in the day?

“Taste any E. coli?” Avery said. “Salmonella?”

Rachel chewed. “Staphylococcus,” she said, finally. “And a dash of mouse droppings.” He rolled his eyes and went back to the sink.

“Don’t think I haven’t seen that, and worse, in the places I’ve worked.”

“Spare me,” Rachel said. “I never go out to eat anymore, but I don’t want to ruin the possibility for the future.”

“Ah, nothing that bad’s going to get you out here. These places in town probably turn their tables over twice a night, if they’re lucky. You won’t get any vindictive busboys or seriously psycho waiters, out here in the boonies.”

The boonies. Rachel smiled to herself and used a serving spoon to get at the sweet potatoes. “Yeah, but that’s just the sabotage angle.” Did Avery think that she was so old, so suburban, that even a semi-wild night out in Manhattan was completely off her radar screen? It wasn’t so long ago that Rachel had been a regular at dollar draft night at McSorley’s on East Seventh. Well, okay: it had been twenty years ago, and it was a stretch to say she’d attained the status of “regular.” But still, did artfully bedraggled hipster Avery even know where McSorley’s was? “What about all the food safety stuff? Outbreaks come from raw ground beef, not waiters sneezing on things.”

“They come,” Avery said, “from leaving leftovers out too long.” He swooped away the turkey platter and the bowl of potatoes. Rachel snatched a last sausage before he firmly snapped a lid on the container.

The phone rang. Rachel wiped her hand on a dish towel and picked up the receiver.

“Don’t answer that!” Avery called, from inside the refrigerator.

“Why?” she said, pressing the button. “Hello?” There was a faint rustling noise coming from the line, but no voice. “Hello? Trevis residence?”

“Told you,” Avery said, shutting the fridge door.

“Hello?” Was it music? Yes, a recorded song she could only half hear, interspersed with fumbled thumps, as if the other person on the line was holding the receiver up to a speaker. “What is this?”

“Is it Joan Baez again, or that guy with the banjo?” Avery said. He was standing directly in front of her.

“Joan Baez?” Rachel said. Avery motioned for the phone. “Wait a minute.” She listened for a moment to be sure and then pulled the phone away slightly. “It is Joan Baez. I love this song.” She listened again. “What’s going on? How did you—?”

Then she caught on. “Are you kidding me? Does this have to do with—? Are these the tree crazies?” Avery nodded, and tried to take the receiver. “No, I’ll—Excuse me. Hello? This is Winifred Trevis’s daughter. I have to ask you to stop this. What do you think you’re doing, anyway? This is a private number, we’re having a family holiday here, and—”

Avery pulled the phone away from her and pressed it to his chest. “That’s not how you do it,” he said. “Watch and learn.” Then he held the phone a good six inches away from his face and roared: “Listen up, ass-hats! Call this number again, I’m gonna trace it, then get your loser name and home address, and post it on every frat-boy, web-nerd, Joan-Baez-hating blog in the tristate area. See how you like these kids, who have nothing better to do than stalk your every pathetic hour, and TP your house, and stink-bomb your car. And that’s just how they warm up. Are we clear, tree huggers?”

Rachel was laughing by “ass-hats,” and didn’t stop for several minutes after Avery pressed end and tossed the phone back onto the counter. Her arms were weak from hard, whole-body laughing, but every time she pictured his red-faced bellowing into the innocent phone, she lost it again. The physical release, which almost brought her to tears, matched an inner buoyancy that had been building since dinner ended, in a general shambles, with Avery storming out to heat the pies, his friends perplexed and uncomfortable, and Winnie utterly silent. The girls didn’t know where to look. And so Rachel, in a master hostess stroke, if she did say so, stepped up and made some general, vaguely calming statements—this is a lot for everyone to absorb, let’s all just enjoy the rest of our dinner—and led the disgruntled party into a conversation about the new Star Wars movie. Bob, to his credit, had joined in right away and little by little they had carried it off. Jerry, who had retreated to a “Who, me?” expression, heartily ate two slices of pie and then announced he was going for a walk. A minute later Winnie rushed upstairs.

“Mom! What’s going on?” This was Lila, hurrying into the kitchen from the den, where she and Melissa were watching a movie. She looked suspiciously at Avery. “Were you yelling at her?”

“Someone has to,” he said, and winked at Rachel, who tried to get herself under control.

“I heard cursing,” Lila insisted. Her calm eyes followed Avery back over to the sink.

“It’s nothing,” Rachel said. “What are you guys watching? We’ll head home in about an hour, I guess.”

“When Harry Met Sally,” Lila said. “But Mel’s just texting with some guy from school, so she’s missed half the good parts.”

“I’ll come in soon,” Rachel promised. “I’m just going to check on Nana.”

“Is she all upset about the—” Lila paused, glancing at Avery’s back. “Everything?”

“She’s just resting, I think. I’ll just run upstairs, and then be right in to watch with you, okay? Is Dad in there too?”

“No,” Lila said. “I thought he was in with you, cleaning up or whatever.” She turned to go, but not without a last glance in Avery’s direction.

As soon as she had left, Avery said, in a low, different voice, “Do you know who Frank was?” He was scrubbing a saucepan with the intensity and focus of a surgeon. Rachel moved to where she could watch him at work, passing the pan again and again under the hot water. The motions were mesmerizing, and tiny stray bubbles floated away on clouds of steam.

“I’d offer to help, but I don’t think my skills are up to your standards.”

Avery shook his head. “Frank. Did you hear him call me that?”

“Yeah. Who is that, his son? Your uncle?”

“His brother. I never met him. I think he died a long time before I was born. But Grandad’s been talking about him a lot, you know. When he tells stories about the old days. Stuff I’m supposed to write down. And I get the sense—”

“Old people get mixed up. He didn’t mean it.”

“That’s what I’m saying!” Avery exclaimed. He brought the gleaming pan up close to his face, and then plunged it back in the suds. “He didn’t mean it, putting me in the will. Something went wrong between them, Grandad and his brother, back when they were just getting the company going. I don’t know exact details, but it had to do with a deal Grandad cut behind Frank’s back. That went bad, somehow. Or maybe he screwed Frank out of some money, either on purpose or by accident. He never says the whole story, but I’m getting the gist of it.”

Rachel squinted, trying to understand. “So you think Jerry believes you’re actually Frank, his brother, from fifty years ago. And he made you—Frank—the inheritor of his estate to make up for a business debt he owed Frank—you—from the past.”

“I’m not saying he really, like, believes I’m Frank. What I’m talking about is more symbolic. Repaying someone in the only way he can think of to do that, now.”

“Karma?”

“Yeah, kind of.”

Rachel snorted. “I’d say it’s payback, Avery—but a whole different kind, for your mother.”

There was a silence. Avery rinsed off the pot and pulled a dish towel off his shoulder to dry it.

Shit. “I’m sorry,” Rachel said. “That just came out.”

“It’s okay,” he said. “Never mind.”

“But, Avery,” she went on, a little desperate for him to see the way things were. He’s so young, she reminded herself. He’s freaked out about what his mom will do. “Even if that’s the case, it’ll still be okay. He knows who you are. And it’s going to be your name on the paperwork. Right?”

He reared back and looked at her like she was crazy. “You think I’m worried about not getting the money? Or the legal shit? You think this is about that?”

She faltered. What, exactly, had she been trying to reassure him of? “Well, I thought you might be worried about…how it would all be perceived.” Rachel finished her sentence lamely, knowing now she’d been on the wrong track. He had already turned away, was stacking things in a cabinet. The dishes, she saw, were almost done.

“Well, I’d better check on my mother.” He nodded without turning.

But just as she passed him, Avery spoke again, in the same low voice as before. “Just don’t tell her, okay?”

“Tell her what?”

“That this isn’t the first time he’s called me Frank.”

From the window at the landing at the top of the stairs, Rachel could see that the light snow had stopped. In fact, all traces had vanished, from the brushy dark branches of the pine trees that crowded close to the back of the house, from the steeply pitched gables of a side roof, from the cars parked on Franklin Street. She paused at the window, listening. There was no sign of any movement down the hall. Boxes lined the hallway, stacked in piles at odd intervals. Rachel bent to one at her feet, and pulled open the flaps.

A jumble of items: woven baskets, a dusty glass vase, picture frames with glass cracked or missing, a rolled-up wad of material that turned out to be the runner Rachel remembered Winnie kept on the large dining-room table, under wobbly candlesticks and the wide, white ceramic bowl full of seashells she and Danny had collected as children, on summer trips to Long Island. She hadn’t seen most of these things since her father died; when Winnie moved to her small pre-furnished apartment, she hadn’t had the need or the room to display them. Rachel dropped the stained lace runner back into the box.

She pressed her middle fingers to the bridge of her nose and breathed a long, slow exhale. Boxes. Boxes up and down this hall and, undoubtedly, in the closed-up rooms throughout this huge, hardly used house. Yes, she knew that scientists said that humans used only a tiny fraction of their brains. But couldn’t Winnie see how pointless it was, to live as she and Jerry did, huddled close in three or four pockets of this place, the rest a dusty storage center for boxes full of shards of the past?

That’s how I’ve had to live, Rachel thought wildly. Boxes and boxes and boxes of things forgotten. Can’t it be different now? For all of us?

Last week at Hand Me Down, her friend Cynthia had stopped by, with three plastic storage boxes, the long flat kind made to be tucked under a bed. She and Rachel had pried open the tops and gently lifted out the baby clothes, pressed flat and tight. There were tiny corduroy overalls with rusted hook-and-eye buckles, and blue and red sweaters in squeaky acrylic wool, and lots of cotton rompers edged in curly piqué, the way they used to be made, even for little boys. Rachel got busy with sorting and stacking, mentally dismissing most of it as out-of-date or just slightly too worn. Though some of the overalls had an old-style charm and were lightly used. She set a short pair aside to hang in the boys, 12-month, summer section.

Then a stifled noise made her look up at the other woman, surprised. Cynthia, a petite, slightly pudgy Greek woman that Rachel had known for years, was suddenly gushing tears, and making no move to stop them. They slid under the tinted lenses of her sunglasses and down her cheeks. She was holding out a rather unremarkable dark green one-piece sleeper, its rubber-bottomed feet dangling, the fabric thinned to nearly nothing on the knees. Eighteen to 2T, Rachel thought automatically. $4.50.

“Oh, my God,” Cynthia said. She laughed, gesturing at herself, her face shining wet. “It’s just…I’d forgotten this one. And he’s driving now, you know?” She tipped the sleeper back so that it was resting lightly on her open hands. “Right now. He took my car to La Guardia, to pick up his aunt—my sister. La Guardia,” she repeated quietly, amazed. Eyes raking every inch of the faded sleeper.

“Keep that one,” Rachel advised. “Show it to him, tonight.”

Cynthia took a deep breath and wiped tears out from the folds of her neck. “You must be used to this,” she said shyly, recovering. “But it really took me back.”

Now Rachel felt the warmth of her own tears, the ones that had somehow made it past her screwed-shut eyelids, on her fingertips. So she opened her eyes wide and tipped her head back. There. She blinked them back where they came from, and found herself staring straight up at a couch-sized water stain on the ceiling. Numbly, she added it to a catalogue of the house’s flaws that she couldn’t help tallying: the chipped paint everywhere, peeling wallpaper, the torn carpet in the front hall.

Enough. Rachel pressed down hard on her own bitterness. There had to be a way to tackle all of this openly and practically—Jerry’s announcement and what it meant, for all of them.

Striding firmly to Winnie’s room, Rachel knocked twice, waited a perfunctory beat, and then let herself inside.

“Mom,” she began. She expected Winnie to be lying on her bed with a wrung-out washcloth covering her face. But the bed was empty and carefully made up.

“Shh,” Winnie said, from the chair tucked in the corner next to her dresser. Rachel was surprised to see her upright and alert, with a phone receiver held tightly to one ear.

“Who are you talking to?” And what were all these papers and folders, scattered on the floor in front of her? Rachel picked one up. Isn’t it time you listened to your heart? A tropical paradise awaits…right in your own backyard.

“Damn,” Winnie said, and pressed a button. “They never make these menus detailed enough.”

‘ “In-ground gunite’?” Rachel read. “Is that a typo for granite?”

“Dry mixture of cement and sand,” Winnie said, still on the phone. “Then they add water and spray it against the interior walls. Wait, here it is. Holiday hours for the weekend.”

Each photograph in the brochures displayed a piercingly blue, crystal-clear swimming pool differing only in variety of shape: kidney-bean, amoeba blob, rectangle. Rachel sat on the edge of the bed and sorted through papers until she found what she was looking for: three typed sheets, stapled. LuxPool Invoice for 50 Greenham: five consultations (first one gratis), preliminary underground utilities assessment, design options. LuxPool Invoice: soil test, depth measurement, project installation outline. LuxPool Invoice: ground and deck materials, equipment insurance, custom stairs, plaster finish, pebble application… The zeros attached to the prices next to each item racked up faster than Rachel could process them. Her head swam; this had gotten much further than she had thought.

Winnie hung up the phone. She made a mark in the notebook on her lap. “Well, they have it in the computer that we’re on for next week.”

“Mom,” Rachel began. Where to start? “Mom, it’s almost winter. You can’t put in a pool now.”

“It just so happens that early winter is the best time to install a pool, because the ground is hard and dry.”

“But—”

“And I’m not in the mood to hear any more opinions about what I plan to do with that tree. It’s coming down, and that’s that.” Winnie snapped her notebook shut.

“What about all these phone calls? These people are serious about—”

“So you think I should give in, just because they’re serious? Just because I’m getting harassed in my own home, on Thanksgiving? Seems to me that’s even more reason to go ahead with it.”

“It’s not just the crazies, Mom. You saw that piece in the Bugle, I know you must have. Don’t pretend you didn’t read it. The editors of the newspaper are writing about this tree, saying you should be ashamed to cut it down—and that means next week in the letters section it’ll be a free-for-all.”

“They dig up any old story to fill space in that paper. Tempest in a teapot.”

Rachel threw up her hands and went over to the window, pulling aside the curtain. There, through the window, was the long, gently sloping lawn in twilight, the grass still green in patches, though mostly wheat-colored, and scattered with wet leaves. Though a long line of maples bordered the front wall along Greenham, and several thin conifers speckled the property’s edges here and there, the sycamore might as well have been the only tree around, right smack in the middle of the lawn, a soaring, bare-branched giant. It was so tall and assured it gave off the silent perception that everything else in its wake—lawn, house, street—had been arranged to showcase its own massive growth.

What was that mark, on its trunk, about six or so feet off the ground? Through the fading Thanksgiving afternoon light, she could barely make out two intersecting red lines, crudely slashed across the sycamore’s patchy bark: a big, spray-painted X.

“Jesus,” Rachel muttered. “Joan Baez herself is going to be out there.”

Winnie had tucked up her stocking feet underneath her, with a defiant look. As defiant as she could be, that is, with that turtleneck pulled up almost to her nose. Rachel wished her mother would grow to accept the darkened patch of skin, and stop with all the endless accessorizing of scarves, and shawls, and big throaty sweaters. What would she do when spring came? Once, Melissa had nervously asked Rachel if Nana’s new rash was catching, or cancer—it wasn’t clear which one unnerved her daughter more. Every so often, when she couldn’t take it anymore, Winnie would burst out in despair to Rachel—It looks awful, doesn’t it? How can I go out in public?—and Rachel would resolutely argue her down until her mother was calm again—You’re being crazy, it’s hardly noticeable. It was a carefully choreographed routine that never changed. Rachel suspected each of them knew the truth lay somewhere in the middle, that the stain was indeed noticeable but not entirely awful, and that their scripted questions and replies were a form of mother-daughter catechism that she and Winnie had enacted their entire lives. Their long time habit was to seek a kind of comfort, and pleasure, in the expected.

“Mom,” she tried.

“I don’t care! Yes, it’s a big, beautiful tree, but it’s just a tree, and it’s going to get cut down in a week or two!” Winnie burst out, looking for all the world like Melissa used to, when she was a belligerent preschooler.

“I’m not going to argue with you about this tree right now,” Rachel said, exasperated. “It’s just that—putting in a pool is a huge commitment, and I’m not sure you’ve thought this all through.”

“Please. You know how I operate.” Winnie gestured at the phone, the notebook, the folders and brochures (each pasted with several sticky notes covered in her handwriting).

“All right, fine. You’ve thought it through.” Without including me. “But this house needs a lot of work, Mom. Maybe it would be better to tackle some of the more pressing problems, rather than, you know, the fun stuff. Like a pool.”

“Jerry’s back is a pressing problem!”

“You two aren’t going to enjoy the pool very much if the ceiling falls through in this hallway.” Winnie was prepared to counter this, so Rachel moved quickly to her real subject. “Also, a pool right in front of the house isn’t what everyone wants in this kind of property. You know most people in town belong to the club.”

Winnie sat back, astonished. “Who gives a fig what other people want?”

“Well, I’m just saying that it would be smart to get a clear idea of what the potential value is for this kind of major undertaking.” Her mother was silent, so Rachel went on. “The fact that Jerry is leaving this entire property to you means—”

“I don’t want to talk about that.”

“You might not want to talk about it, but you need to face it. This is a major development, and we have to carefully consider anything that might—”

Winnie stood up. “I need to use the restroom. I’ll meet you downstairs.”

“Mom, come on.” But she had already disappeared into the powder room and shut the door with a definite click. “Mom?”

Rachel heard the squeal of pipes opening, and then the rush of water in the sink. She sighed, and glanced down at the pile of pool brochures scattered on the floor—all those chemical blue spheres, each blindingly sunlit, each blank and empty, as if daring someone to take a running jump in—cannonball!—and break the smooth surface of the water.

Downstairs, it was eerily quiet. In the den, images flickered silently on the mute TV screen. Melissa gave a wave and then went back to texting; Lila was asleep on the couch next to her, hair spilling over the pillows in a shining mass. Rachel went through the darkened kitchen and let herself out the side door. It was impossible to see anything in the blinding light over the garage, but a noise in the front of the house led her along a path through high, thick bushes.

Suddenly, she came up on Bob, crouched down in the shadows on Winnie and Jerry’s front steps.

“Are you okay?” Her heart was racing. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing,” he grunted, pushing himself upright. “I’m fine. Just some trash.” He held a half-full garbage bag in one hand and nudged his glasses into place with the back of the other. There was a light on above the door, and its harsh orange glow lit up Bob’s shiny head and the dead-white skin of his scar, a long, puckered rope that began at a spot above his right temple, trailed down behind the ear, and back behind his neck, to disappear under his shirt collar. At times Rachel thought it made him look like a Secret Service agent or a bodyguard: someone who wore an earpiece with discreet wires.

Something about the freshness of the cold air, and the way the two of them were standing there together, right in front of this huge, impossible, beautiful house brought it back to Rachel, that earlier buoyancy. Happiness.

“Well?” she said. “So what do you think?” Sometimes, it was easy to forget how handsome Bob was—he had always had a professorial air, but in a Clark Kent, hiding-behind-spectacles way. Now the bare head and even the scar made him appear more rakish, a bit dangerous. She should really look at him more. As if to underline the idea, a flicker of bodily desire rose within Rachel for the first time in months.

“What do I think about what?”

“About the whole—” Rachel swirled her hand vaguely at the house, the lawn, the tree. “This is good news for us! I’m allowed to say that, right? After all, he’s got to leave this place to someone…why not Mom?”

But Bob had turned away while she was talking. He was wearing yellow rubber gloves and was stuffing something—paper towels?—into the garbage bag.

“What? Jerry knows the score—he’s older and it’s much more likely that he would…Look, if he can face facts, why can’t we all talk about this? About what it means? For Mom—for us?”

Still, he went on with the papers and that bag, and the way he was shaking his head started to irritate Rachel.

“What? I’m just looking into the future. She won’t need this huge place—she couldn’t possibly! We could sell it, definitely, or we could just—”

“Move in?” Bob said. “Take over?”

“Well, I don’t know,” Rachel said, caught off guard by the way it sounded out loud, her half-formed thoughts. “Maybe. Why not?”

“Ray,” Bob sighed. “Don’t get caught up in some big fantasy. None of this is going to happen.”

“Why are you saying that? You heard what Jerry—”

“Jerry is an elderly person who is in the middle of a heated family dispute,” Bob explained in an overly patient tone, as if he were speaking to one of the girls. Any desire Rachel had felt for him whooshed away, like air from a pricked balloon. “His daughter has already filed a lis pendens—that’s like a lien on the property. Even if he dropped dead tonight, every asset would essentially be frozen until it could all be sorted out. And then any ownership would be in jeopardy until the original claim is resolved.”

“Frozen for how long?”

“For years. And that’s just for starters. That’s not even addressing the related matter of this last-minute amendment to his will, which cuts his only biological child out of her birthright…” Bob wiped his hands on a towel and let out an obnoxious whistle. “That’s going to get very ugly, in court, when she challenges it. For years and years—probate court is notoriously slow. Frankly, I’m surprised he could convince his lawyers to put it through.”

“We don’t know she’s going to challenge it!” But even as she threw this out, Rachel heard how stupid it sounded. Wearily, she had to admire the way he sounded like a lawyer again. In a tiny way, she was reassured, even as frustrated tears stung her eyes.

Bob moved closer to her. “Ray. There’s no magic here, for us. We’re just going to have to stumble through.”

She nodded, suddenly ashamed by her childish hopes and the ugliness that had risen within her so quickly. Had she really been thinking along these lines, about how the house would pass to her? For to follow that to its logical conclusion meant Jerry dead—and then her own mother—

No. Rachel blew her breath out, hard. Bob was still watching her carefully.

She straightened up. “What are you doing out here, anyway?”

He half turned and regarded the garbage bag with a wry smile. “Cleaning up a special delivery. Dog shit in a flaming brown paper bag, tossed up on the stairs.”

“Dog shit…Are you kidding?”

“Ten minutes with Clorox and a now-contaminated scrub brush says no, I am most definitely not kidding.”

“How do you know…? And it’s from—them? Those crazy people?”

Bob stripped off the rubber gloves and tossed them into the bag. “I heard the doorbell ring and came out to find…this. There was a nice note taped to the bag, something along the lines of ‘Tree killer,’ et cetera, et cetera.”

Rachel couldn’t understand how he was so calm. “Shouldn’t we call the police? This is insane! What if one of the girls had been out here?”

“I’m going to report it. I just didn’t see the use of the police coming out when I knew I was going to clean it up anyway. And your mother doesn’t need more drama tonight. I’ll call it in tomorrow.” He motioned for her to go with him, back into the house, but Rachel stared out at the lawn, whose great size and dark shadows now seemed full of hidden malice. From inside came the faint sounds of music. Still she stood at the top of the stone stairs, rootless and worried.

“I just don’t get it,” she said.

Bob shrugged. “They want to save that tree. Environmentalists aren’t exactly going to see eye to eye with your mother on the need for a pool for Jerry’s back.” He shifted the garbage bag from hand to hand. “A lot of people don’t.”

“But—here? It just seems like the kind of thing people would get worked up about in the city, at NYU or something. Not here. Not up in Hartfield, for God’s sake.” She just couldn’t fathom that anyone she knew would go to these lengths just for one tree. Yes, it was a big tree. But this was the kind of thing you read about in L.A., or in the redwood forests—protesting the loggers or some hippie girl camped out in a treehouse for weeks at a time, giving interviews, posing for camera crews. Rachel felt the way she often did when they attended a production of King Lear or Macbeth put on at the high school by the local adult theater troupe—watching their neighbors in robes and makeup, weeping and cursing. That same sense of misplaced drama, of scale gone all out of whack.

Bob smiled, either at what she had said, or what he knew to be her train of thought. “People in Hartfield get angry and impassioned and obsessed, just like anywhere else. Come on. It’s late. Let’s get the girls.” Rachel let him put his hand on her shoulder and guide her in.

There was music inside—a loud cabaret song that Rachel at first assumed must be coming from a stereo. Gathered together again in the living room were all the strewn-out participants of Thanksgiving: Lila, sleepy-eyed, on one side of the den doorway with her sister leaning against the other; Thomas, with his back to them, sitting on the couch, his legs crossed, foot dangling. Avery was perched on the slate bench built into the front of the fireplace, his hands on Nona’s waist. Winnie and Jerry were in the center of the room, arms around each other, dancing. And Nona—Nona was the music. She was singing as if possessed by the spirit of some famous 1930s chanteuse. The rich, melancholy song pouring out of her open, red-lipsticked mouth might have been dubbed from an old jazz club performance.

Jerry stopped dancing and interrupted the song. “Now do Annie Ross,” he commanded. “Can you do Annie?” Nona, who had stopped mid-phrase, just grinned and put her hands behind her back. Everyone waited. Then she burst out in a completely different, faster, jazzy voice.

Rachel saw Jerry had shut his eyes and was nodding his big head. He was just standing there in the middle of the room, with Winnie close by—they couldn’t dance to the strange, fast beat of this song.

Nona sang, and then Jerry joined in, exactly in unison, for the chorus.

The group clapped, breaking up the song. Bob whistled.

“More scat?” Nona asked. “I can try some Ella, the earlier stuff. Decca.” She moved her voice up and down, giving him a taste.

“I like the Cole Porter years better,” Jerry argued.

“Or what about Peggy Lee?” Nona countered. She hummed and Avery thumped time on her hip. Everyone looked to see how Jerry would react.

But the old man shook his head stubbornly. He was about to say something else, when a touch on his hand from Winnie made his face soften. He stiffly took up a slow-dancing position with her and said only, “Lena.”

Nona saluted. She put a hand on her stomach and tipped her head forward. Soon a rich rushing melody burst forth, with another, twangy accent. Everyone knew this one; it was a standard, with lyrics about love and desire and whether it’s just too late.

Winnie took tiny steps, pressed up against her husband. And Jerry held on to her, mouthing the words as Nona gave them her all.