“Good. I’ll take an early train in the morning. Be there well before noon, I would think.”

After he’d hung up, he stood for a long time at the window in his office. In his mind he saw his father, that big, happy man, as he had looked when Lucas turned up at the bookstore after school on the days his father had him.

How had he gotten there? He supposed early on someone had picked him up at school and dropped him off. Someone—Annie?

Not likely Frieda. She was teaching by then, out in the suburbs.

But what he remembered best was later, when he was allowed to walk down to the store by himself after school, a walk that seemed endless, and bitterly cold in winter. But he had loved it: the sight of the old yellow overhead lights in the store, entering its warmth, everyone greeting him. His father coming out from the office or behind the counter, calling his name. “Lucas! Here he is, at last. My arctic explorer. My brave young man.” Swooping him up, asking him questions, making jokes. Later, he’d settle Lucas in one of the big chairs with a book, or his homework, and every time he passed, he’d set his hand on Lucas’s head.

How could he be gone? He was at the center of everyone’s life. Frieda’s, Sarah’s, Annie’s.

Then he was trying to imagine it, the way Frieda had said it happened: Annie, waking up, finding Graham lifeless in the bed next to her. He couldn’t. He couldn’t get beyond that point, that image.

Someone knocked on the doorframe. His assistant, Caroline. She was tall, blond, soft-spoken. She wore her hair in long braids that she pinned up in a bun at the back of her head, like some Scandinavian princess. She had printed out the manuscripts that two of his authors had emailed in—manuscripts he supposed now he’d be taking with him to Boston on the train.

He told her about his father.

Why? She hadn’t even known he had a living father. But sympathy leapt to her face, transformed it. Tears stood in her eyes.

She put her hand on his arm. “I’m so sorry,” she said.

And how odd that now, with this simple gesture, he was so stricken with his sense of loss that he had to turn away from her. “Thank you,” he said, in an unsteady voice. When she left, he closed the door and sat down at his desk.

He was thinking about this on the subway ride home, standing close to the door, hemmed in, gripping the overhead rail and not seeing anything, anyone, around him. Why did Caroline’s sympathetic but essentially rote response reach him, when the news from his mother hadn’t?

Because his mother had her own sorrow, he supposed, and needed him. That was the impediment, wasn’t it, to feeling his own grief? He had a quick flash of the resentment he’d felt for his mother as a teenager, a young man.

Frieda was good, she was honorable. She’d sacrificed so much for him. Even the job she’d taken, teaching history at the Canfield School, was work she did for him, so that he could attend high school there tuition-free when the time came, since none of the parental figures in his life had, as his father put it, two dimes to rub together.

He’d minded it, he’d minded it all. Minded being alone with her as a child, exiled from Graham, minded the sense that she needed him, minded driving out to the high school with her, minded her cheerful greeting when they ran into each other on the campus there. Minded the guilt he felt about resenting all this.

But here it was: there was a sadness at his mother’s core that he had felt the wish to lift as a child, the impossible wish to lift. And because he could never achieve that, what he wanted as he grew older was to be free of it. To separate himself from it, and therefore from her. He’d tried boarding one year at Canfield, and he’d spent much of his adolescence hanging around at Annie and Graham’s house.

He remembered abruptly a winter afternoon, sitting at the table in the big room talking to Annie, trying to explain his feelings about Frieda to her. Snow was falling steadily outside, thick, heavy flakes. The bare branches of the lilac bushes in the backyard were outlined in white. He was saying that he wished that Graham had never left his mother. “I mean, not that I don’t like you as a stepmother, but it’s like she’s never going to get over it.” He’d gone on for a while, listing his complaints, slowly becoming aware of Annie’s silence, of the sense that she was just waiting, waiting for him to stop so she could talk.

So he stopped; and Annie told him that it was more complicated than that. That he should try to understand, now that he was a little older, how complicated it was. That it was Frieda who had left Graham, not the other way around. That Graham had been unfaithful to Frieda. Did he understand what that meant?

Yeah, he had said irritably. Of course.

She went on, explaining the way the world was then, the great experiment of the 1960s that Frieda had turned against, that had made her feel she needed to end her marriage to Lucas’s father.

After that, his father had spoken about it with him too—because of course Annie had talked to him about her conversation with Lucas. What he said to his son was that Frieda was “blameless.”

Lucas never forgot the word. Blameless.

It only made things worse for him, to be told that he had no right to his anger at his mother—which was how he heard all this. It wasn’t until he went away to college—went away legitimately, as he thought of it—that he had the sense of shedding it all, Frieda’s sadness and his responding anger at her.

But today, he realized, he was feeling it again. He saw that somehow his father’s death would have to be, for him, first about his mother. That her sorrow would have precedence over his, would once again get in the way of what he wanted to feel, cleanly, selfishly: grief. Grief for the father he had loved so unequivocally, the one he held, always, blameless.

12

Annie wasn’t sure how the afternoon passed. Mostly, she stayed in the house. At one point, for no particular reason, she went outside and weeded in the backyard, but then didn’t have the energy or willpower to pick up the little heaps of wilting green she’d left everywhere on the bricks.

The funeral home called and asked her to come in and fill out some forms, so she drove over and signed her name several times. The young man in the office there offered her an array of containers for Graham’s ashes, and, confused—who cared, really?—she chose one.

Her friend Edith came over late in the afternoon with takeout food from Formaggio and a bottle of wine. “In case you feel like eating,” she said. “Or maybe just drinking.”

Annie was glad to see her, glad to be held, to have to talk; but also glad when she left, relieved to let herself sag back down into silence, into the nothingness she felt, which she knew was just the holding off of a grief that promised to be, as it threatened every now and then, overwhelming.

Around seven, she was still sitting at the table with a glass of Edith’s wine. She had set out the cartons of food and eaten a few bites of each one. Without bothering to put the food away, she had poured herself a second glass and had sat down again to drink it slowly.

Shadows had started to gather in the backyard when she heard the footsteps on the front porch.

Graham! Her breath seemed to stop.

For the three or four seconds that followed, she understood that everything that had happened wasn’t real, that it had been a dream, a dream she’d had of his death. And now—of course!—he was coming home to her in life, just as he always did. Her breath seemed to stop.

But then the doorbell rang.

She thought of not answering, of just sitting there in the empty room, her heart still pounding, waiting for the footsteps to retreat.

But some sense of duty or obligation moved in her, and after those few seconds more, she got up and went to the front of the house.

When she opened the door, John Norris stood on the other side of the screen, beaming at her. He raised his arms and waggled the flowers he had in one hand and the bottle of wine in the other.

She was confused for a moment, and then remembered: of course, he’d been invited to dinner—yesterday, when Graham was alive—and because she’d forgotten that this morning, he hadn’t ever been uninvited.

By the time she reached out to push open the screen door, his smile had dropped. He clearly knew, by how she looked and was dressed, by the deep silence in the house, that something was very wrong.

“Come in, John,” she said.

“Did I get the day wrong?” he asked. “What is it?” He came into the hall. “What’s happening?”

“Graham died, John. He had a heart attack.”

“Christ! Annie!” He looked stupid, Annie thought. Almost funny, standing there with his mouth open, his hands, still full of his useless gifts, dropped down by his sides.