She bought a sandwich to go at a shop she liked on the ground floor of one of the old town houses. She sat on a bench in the nearby park to eat, watching the Chinese boys playing pickup basketball on the asphalt court and the dog owners standing around talking to each other in the enclosure while their pets dashed wildly back and forth in barking waves.

She was thinking of this morning, of Graham. It was clear to her that he’d forgotten completely about the show: What are you up to today? She shook her head now—it had been so surprising.

Was she angry at him about that, then?

Not really, she thought. More puzzled. Puzzled because it loomed so large in her own thinking. And because it was so unlike him to forget what was happening in her life, even momentarily.

But something was going on with him. And she didn’t know what.

Well, there it was, wasn’t it? He had his life, his worries, and she had hers. Was that what was happening between them? The thought made her sad.

When she was finished eating, she went across the street to the chic wine shop there and bought a dozen bottles, half red, half white, for the dinner party tomorrow night. For dinner tonight, too.

She drove the few blocks to the gallery and parked in the vast empty lot next to it, encircled by the old factories, almost all of them full of offices and galleries and restaurants now. She carried the first framed photograph in. She could see Danielle in the office, busy on the phone. Her assistant, Valerie, was seated at the desk in the open gallery space, and she got up to help Annie, going back and forth with her, hauling the pictures in. Together they set them down, leaning them against the white walls below the paintings that were coming down the next day.

Before she left, Annie stopped in the office doorway to talk to Danielle. She was, as usual, a bit cool, a bit distant, but cordial. Just before Annie left, she said, pointing her finger at Annie, “This show is going to be good. It’s going to get you going again.”

“Well, I’m glad to hear that you think that.” Annie couldn’t keep the surprise out of her voice.

“Of course I do,” Danielle said. She sounded surprised at Annie’s surprise. “I wouldn’t be interested in putting it up unless I felt strongly that way.”

“Yes, of course,” Annie said awkwardly. “Well, good!” She patted the doorframe for emphasis. “Great. I’ll see you Saturday, then.”

She drove distractedly back to Cambridge, the sun in her eyes as she headed west on Memorial Drive. She saw without truly noting them the tilted sailboats crowding the glimmering river, the half-naked joggers on the sidewalks that traced its banks, the Canada geese moving in slow waddling groups on the grass, their long necks arched to peck at the ground, their goslings strung out unevenly behind them, disorderly and confused-looking.

She was pondering the surprise of Danielle’s vote of confidence. One of those mysterious people, so reserved as to seem critical when nothing like that was intended, apparently. How did she manage to have a life? She was married, she had grown children. What would it be like to have such an unreadable wife? Or mother, for that matter?

Then she was remembering that Sarah had accused her of something similar once when she was twelve or thirteen. Something like unreadability. It was after a dinner during which Sarah had loaded her plate with second helpings of everything. They had been to the doctor not long before, weight had been discussed, and Annie couldn’t help herself, she made some comment. She couldn’t now remember her exact wording, but it didn’t matter. Sarah had burst into tears and fled the room. Her feet were thunderous as she mounted the back stairs.

“Oh, Christ,” Annie had said wearily. She and Graham pushed their chairs back at the same time. “I’ll do it,” Annie said. “I started it.”

She found Sarah lying on her bed, turned away from the doorway. The light from the hall fell on her rounded shape and on the poster on the wall behind her: Suzanne Farrell, en pointe. It had always made Annie sad, looking at it. Sarah had been five when she picked it out to decorate her room. She was taking classes at the Boston Ballet School. Already at that age she towered over the other students, those little fragile-looking girls. And it wasn’t just her height that had made Annie ache for Sarah. It was her solidity, her unpretty thick legs, her loud voice, her big hands.

Annie asked if she could sit down.

“No,” Sarah said, without turning over. “I don’t want you here, and I don’t want to talk to you. I don’t want to hear any of the understanding things you’re going to say. Because I know what you think.”

“And what do I think?”

“You think I’m a fat pig.”

“Oh, Sarah, that’s not what I said.”

“It’s what you meant. You think I’m fat, and you hate me.” She had readjusted herself slightly on the bed, and her voice was muffled now, smaller.

The problem for Annie was that she didn’t feel loving toward Sarah at this time. Sarah was always angry at her. Annie felt it was because she was angry at life, and perhaps at herself, for the hand she’d been dealt. The big, smart, nondescript girl, too shy even to have friends. “I couldn’t possibly hate you, Sarah. How could you think that?”

There was a long silence. Then the little voice said, “Well, you sure don’t love me.”

“That’s not true. I do love you.”

Sarah lifted her head and looked back over her shoulder at Annie. “How am I supposed to know that?” she said clearly. “You never show anything that you feel.”

That was it, wasn’t it? How Sarah thought of her. Annie couldn’t remember what else they had said. Maybe not much more. She did remember going back downstairs and talking about it with Graham. Graham, whose relationship with Sarah at that stage—at every stage really—was so much easier than Annie’s. They had conferred over the leftover dinner wine. They didn’t often talk about it together—Sarah’s size, her isolation—but now they did, keeping their voices low. How could they help her? Was there anything they could do to make her feel better?

Perhaps we should ask her that question, Graham said.

So he went up. When he came back down, he reported that Sarah had let him sit on the edge of her bed and rub her back, briefly. But when he asked her their question, whether there was anything he and Annie could do, she said no. She said they should just stop trying, that it made everything worse for her to know how much they worried about her.

Now Annie remembered that later that night, just as she was finally dropping off to sleep, Graham had spoken to her out of the dark in his gravelly voice: “Are you allowed to say that your own child makes you almost unbearably sad?”

They lay side by side without speaking for a minute. Annie felt swamped by her own sorrow about Sarah, by her inability to feel loving toward her at that period in their lives, by her awareness of Sarah’s understanding of that, at whatever level she was experiencing it. “No,” she had said then in the dark. “I don’t think we want to begin that conversation.”

*

She had already prepared the white beans with thyme and olive oil for tomorrow’s dinner, and the plan was to put the lamb in a marinade tonight. But she still had some shopping to do—last-minute things.

Back in Cambridge, she stopped at Formaggio, the fancy neighborhood shop, for cheeses—cheeses and crackers and several kinds of olives. They had cherry tomatoes that looked nice in the produce section, so she got those too, and a few other things for a light dinner tonight.

Standing in line to check out, she was mindlessly looking over at the flowers displayed in the corner of the shop. There were tulips, lilacs, peonies, irises. Gorgeous, she thought. Hopeful, as spring flowers always are. She’d get some. For the party, of course. But for Graham, too. A pick-me-up against whatever it was that was bothering him.

She stepped out of the long line, sacrificing her place, and went over to the flower stand. As she was waiting for the person manning that counter to trim the bunches of things she’d chosen, to wrap them in the clear crackling cellophane they used here, she thought she saw Rosemary Gregory by the produce section. She couldn’t quite tell, the woman turned away so quickly.

But when she went back over to rejoin the line to pay for the cheeses, yes, there she was. Annie stepped in line behind her. She was in gym clothes, her hair pulled back, enormous running shoes on her feet. “How are you?” Annie asked, thinking of Rosemary’s divorce from their friend Charlie, of something Graham had said about her after a party they’d all been at a month or two earlier. That she seemed a bit . . . what was it? Desperate, maybe.

“Oh, I’m fine,” Rosemary said.

“You shame me, exercising,” Annie said. “I haven’t been in weeks.” This was almost so. Maybe ten days anyway. She’d been feeling vaguely guilty about it.

“I try to go every other day,” Rosemary said.