There was a little silence that was just beginning to feel awkward when Rosemary spoke again. “Some bouquet! What’s the occasion?”

“Well, we’re having some people over after a reading at the store.” And then, because she remembered at that moment that, of course, Rosemary hadn’t been invited, she said, “The same party you’ve been to a dozen times.” This wasn’t true. They’d had Rosemary and Charlie over maybe three times, total.

Trying to change the subject, she said, “Really, though, they’re for Graham.”

“Oh?”

“Just that he’s been a little blue lately, and I want to cheer him up. Plus, of course, it’s a way of telling him what a nice husband he is.”

“Oh,” Rosemary said, her voice suddenly less friendly. “Well, good. Good for him. Good for you.” And she stepped forward to pay for whatever she’d bought.

Leaving Annie feeling awkward and chagrined: the party Rosemary hadn’t been invited to. The mention of a nice husband to someone just divorced. Why did she have to open her big mouth? She’d probably offended Rosemary. Worse maybe: wounded her.

But her sense of discomfort about this fell quickly away as she drove home through the warm green of the tree-lined streets. Inside, the house was lit with the rays of late-afternoon sun. She loved this time of day, the thick slantwise yellow light. She went back through it to the kitchen area and put away the food and wine she’d bought. She had just finished arranging the flowers in an old white slop pitcher when she saw Karen standing in their backyard. She was dressed now, but barefoot. The cat sat by the old lilacs between their properties, apparently waiting to see what she would do next.

Annie set the big pitcher down on the table. She opened the back door and went down the steps to where Karen was standing. She greeted the older woman, but Karen didn’t answer her. She was looking at the boxwood that circled Annie’s brick terrace.

Without lifting her eyes, she said in a soft, puzzled tone, as if to herself, “I’ve no idea why I planted these horrid box shrubs, when I detest them so. They’d better come out, I think.”

“Oh, I think not,” Annie said, perfectly cordial.

Karen looked up at Annie. “But they’re so . . . unimaginative!” she said. “I’ve always hated them.”

“That may be true,” Annie said. “But since this is our yard, that just doesn’t matter.”

Karen’s mouth opened. She was frowning, about to speak, but Annie spoke first. “Why don’t you come inside, Karen? Come in, and I’ll fix us a drink of some sort.”

Karen looked at her. She seemed to be pondering this.

“Then we could sit out here, on my patio, to drink them.”

The old woman’s face shifted somehow. For the first time she looked as though she knew who Annie was. “Now that sounds lovely,” she said. She smiled her chilly New England smile. “I’ve always liked your patio.”

“Let’s go get that drink, then,” Annie said.

They went in, and Annie fixed Karen a shandy, always her drink of choice. She’d put two bottles of the good white wine in the refrigerator earlier, and now she opened one with the nearly hydraulic fancy corkscrew Graham had insisted on. (“When we want wine, we want it now!”) She carried both of their glasses outside, leading the way. They sat on the terrace in the wicker chairs there, surrounded by the boxwoods, by birdsong. Her wine was a little too warm. In the distance somewhere, someone was playing the piano. Chopin, Annie thought. Nice rubato.

She looked over at Karen. “I love that dress you’re wearing,” she began.

6

At five thirty Graham takes over the second register, next to Bill. There’s a steady flow of customers. Never a line, he never has to call for backup, but he has barely a moment to stop and think. And then it slows, and there are once again browsers moving slowly around the store or sitting in the chairs, reading. This is the time of day when he and Bill usually lean back against the top of the low wooden bookshelves that run under the windows behind the counter, lean back and talk to each other between customers.

Today that’s not going to happen, though, because Graham realizes he’s made a decision while he was so busy. Maybe it has to do with what he remembered John saying about him all those years ago, that he asked too much of people, that he needed forbearance. Maybe it has to do with Annie this morning, Annie in the sunlight, lifting her hands to him and saying “My sweet husband.” Or John—John at lunch, saying about Rosemary, “Be mean to her, a bit. That’s what you have to do.”

So the next time he and Bill are standing idle next to each other, Graham asks him if he thinks he can manage alone until Sasha arrives—the part-timer who comes late and helps with the closing up.

“No problem,” Bill says.

Graham fetches his suit jacket from the office. He locks that door behind him and says his good-night to Bill.

Outside the sun is lowering in the sky. In its syrupy yellow light, Graham walks fast. He turns right on Ash Street and walks up to Garden, then past the old brick hotel, past the intersection by the music school where you always have to wait for the walk signal. When he gets to Shepard, he turns right. He passes what used to be the Radcliffe Quad when he was young. Left on Avon, right on Martin, and there, almost at the corner of Gray and Martin, is the big house Rosemary lives in, a house she’s going to have to put on the market, she’s told Graham.

He’s startled by her appearance as she opens the door. As she clearly is by his. Her mouth opens and her hand rises to her hair, which usually falls in long, carefully curled-under sweeps around her face. Now it’s pulled tight and held in some kind of clip at the back of her head. Her face is scrubbed clean of makeup, pale and washed-out in a way he finds prettier, actually, than her usual careful presentation. This is not a presentation at all, and he’s somehow touched by it. By her.

“I didn’t expect you,” she says, stepping back into the hallway, holding the door open for him.

“I know. Am I intruding?” He smiles at her. “Or really, I guess, may I intrude?” He bows slightly, a joke.

“Well, of course, now that you’re here. I just wish . . .” And her hands rise again, a vague gesture. “I just got out of the shower.” She shuts the door and they stand awkwardly in the wide hallway for a silent moment. Then she gestures behind her at the stairs, which rise up to a landing with a multipaned window. “Shall we?” she asks, smiling.

“Let’s just sit for a while,” he says, taking a few steps toward the open archway to the living room.

“Oh!” She hesitates. “Okay,” she says, and follows him into the room.

He sits down on one of the two small matching couches facing each other on either side of the fireplace. The word comes: settees, they are. She remains standing, though she moves to the fireplace and rests her elbow on the wooden mantel above it. She’s in khaki pants, and her feet are bare. Her toenails are painted a rich emerald green, another surprise for him the first time they made love.

He looks around. It’s an old-fashioned room. Formal furniture, worn oriental carpets on the floor. Bookshelves on either side of the fireplace. He’s been in this room only once, the first time he came over, but he didn’t really take it in then. They’d had a drink, sitting on one of the couches together, but once they began touching each other, kissing, she suggested they go upstairs. After that, they went directly up to her bedroom each time he arrived, up to the king-size bed she’d shared until recently with her husband.

“You’re making me a little nervous,” she says now. Her smile looks forced. Anxious.

He feels suddenly overwhelmed by pity for her. He should have warned her, he should have let her fix herself up. His mother used to call it “war paint” when she got ready to go out. Lipstick, rouge—nothing as complicated as Rosemary’s stylized eye makeup, or the skin makeup, whatever it was, that let her look unblemished. Today she’s pale and freckled, and her eyes are unshadowed. They look exposed, smaller.

“Why don’t you sit down too?” he says. He pats the settee next to him.

She does, she comes over and sits down, but at the opposite end of the settee. She swings her legs up, tucks her feet under her buttocks.

“Tell me why you’ve come, when you said earlier that you wouldn’t.” Her voice is flat, without the teasing, seductive tone she usually uses with him.

He’s conscious of trying to make his own voice gentle. “I’ve come to say I can’t come anymore.”

He watches as her face changes, several times. At first, briefly, it’s as if he’d struck her. She sits up taller. Then she almost smiles. Somehow, within a few seconds, she’s achieved a kind of pained dignity. “Why not?” she asks. Her voice is polite enough, but still expressionless.

“It’s too dangerous. For my marriage.”