“We’d have to wipe everything down,” Annie said.

“Well, let’s,” Sarah said. She went up the back stairs and came down with two clean, folded towels. Annie took one, and they both went outside. They swiped down the chairs in the backyard. They sat for a while, mostly not talking. The air was even cooler after the rain.

Maybe fifteen minutes after they’d taken their seats, Karen appeared at her own back door. Together, Annie and Sarah watched the old woman come slowly down the stairs and over to their yard. She bared her teeth at them in the rictus that passed for a sociable smile with her. She was wearing a man’s raincoat over what seemed like not much else. At any rate, her feet were bare, as were her long, bruised-looking shanks. Her hair was rumpled and wild, as though she’d come to them directly from her bed.

“Well, I know who you are!” she said to Sarah as she entered the yard.

“We’re even then, ’cause I know who you are too,” Sarah said, smiling back.

“Will you sit with us?” Annie gestured at one of the empty chairs.

Karen didn’t look at Annie, but she sat down. “You’re the girl. What’s your name, now?”

“Sarah.”

“That’s right,” Karen said, as though praising a bright child for her cleverness. They all smiled at each other.

Now that she’d settled in her chair, the old woman’s knees fell away from each other, and from her vantage, Annie saw that yes indeed, she was naked under the coat, her thin thatch of grayish hair in shadow between her legs, the rest in deeper shadow. She was glad Sarah was next to Karen and didn’t have this vista.

“But you don’t live here anymore,” Karen said. Her tone was almost accusatory.

“No, I’m in San Francisco now.”

“Are you?”

“Yes.”

“I was there once,” Karen said. “You know what Mark Twain said about it.” Before Sarah had time to respond, she turned her piercing gaze on Annie. “And where’s your jolly husband?”

“Graham,” Annie said.

“Yes, that nice fat man.”

Annie laughed once, helplessly, and let a little silence accrue.

“He died,” Sarah said, after the long moment.

Karen swung her head to Sarah. “Oh, come now. That’s ridiculous!” she said, her tone haughty. “He’s a young man.”

Neither Annie nor Sarah spoke for a moment. Then Sarah said, “I thought so too.” Her voice was a child’s suddenly, and it seemed she might cry. “I thought it was ridiculous too.” She inhaled raggedly, a few sharp breaths.

“Oh now, dear, stop that,” Karen said. “He’ll be back, you’ll see. Momentarily.”

Annie felt swept by a sudden rage. She stood up. “You know what?” she said to the old woman. Her voice was sharp. “I think I’m going to take you back home so you can get dressed. You’re not wearing much of anything under your raincoat, and it would be better if you did.”

“Oh!” Karen said. She was surprised, audibly. Perhaps angry too.

“No, let’s go,” Annie said. She wasn’t sure where her own anger came from. Maybe it had to do with Graham. Why should he be dead, when this old woman so uselessly, so carelessly, went on and on?

Or Sarah, she thought. Why should Sarah have to indulge Karen? Karen was their responsibility. Hers and Graham’s.

Hers, now. Only hers.

Karen stood up, obediently. Annie stepped forward and would have taken her arm, but the old woman moved ahead of her. One after the other, they walked past the dripping lilac bush and mounted the stairs into Karen’s house.

When Annie returned (the messy house, the faint smell of cat, the bare, stained mattress, the old woman’s flesh, sagging everywhere—dugs the word that leapt to Annie’s mind when Karen took her coat off and she saw the long, drooping breasts), she told Sarah she thought she’d lie down for a little while.

She did—she went up to the bedroom and lay down and almost instantly fell into a deep sleep. When she woke, she saw that the clouds outside the window had lightened again. She heard voices downstairs, Sarah’s, and then a man’s.

Lucas, of course. Lucas with Sarah.

She stood up. She went to the bathroom and brushed her teeth. When she came out into the upstairs hallway, she stood and listened to them talking for a moment or two. She couldn’t hear what they were saying, just the easy, familiar alternation of their voices. Siblings, after all. She’d never understood it, how they’d become such friends. Or when. Clearly out in the wider world, away from home. She remembered the first time that Lucas had reported back on Sarah, after he’d visited her in college. How interesting it was, how strange, to hear the way he thought of her, so different from the way she saw her daughter. Completely without the sense of the solitary, unhappy little girl she’d once been, the girl who still haunted Annie.

When Annie appeared in the kitchen, Lucas stood up and stepped toward her. He held her fiercely for a moment. When he let her go and stepped back, she said, “I didn’t hear you arrive. I didn’t hear the doorbell.”

“Oh! I’m supposed to ring now.” Even as she smiled back at him—his eyes so like Graham’s, disappearing with his smile—Annie thought, Yes, yes, you should: the sense of the house being taken over, of her being somehow no longer in charge of anything.

Then no, remembering how it had been, how delighted she’d been when, at age ten or eleven, Lucas began to come over by himself. Not ringing. Just walking in. “Is Daddy here?”

No, she was grateful to both of them, she thought, as they sat together in the living room.

After a while Sarah suggested they take a walk, partly just to get out of the house while the rain held off, and partly to escape the intermittent arrival of people stopping by with food. Annie loaned her a raincoat, just in case, and put on her own almost waterproof jacket, and they went down the driveway and got into Frieda’s car—Lucas had driven over in it. Lucas and Sarah sat in front, Annie in back. She noted that the two of them were almost the same height. There was something pleasurable in seeing this—Graham’s genes, in Sarah’s case triumphing over her own.

They drove to Fresh Pond, parked, and started on the path that ran around the water, three abreast on its wide asphalt, alert for possible dog shit underfoot or the panting footfall of joggers approaching from behind. Even though it was a Saturday, it wasn’t crowded—the rain had kept people away. The water in the reservoir moved, gray and sullen, on the other side of the chain-link fence. Ahead of them, the dark woods seemed unwelcoming.

Sarah said, “Lucas and I were talking, Mom.”

“Yeah,” he said. “We wondered if we shouldn’t have a service of some kind.”

We, Annie thought. Not you. Not are you going to.

But it wasn’t that, she didn’t think, that made her say, “I don’t know. Graham might have been appalled.” Her no was ready, for reasons she wasn’t sure of.

“Oh, I’m not talking about a religious service,” Lucas said.

Sarah said, “Yes, we didn’t mean a service, a religious service, so much as a gathering of some sort. At the store, maybe?”

“Can’t it wait?” Annie asked.

“You’re not ready,” Lucas said.

Annie forced a laugh, but she could hear that it wasn’t convincing. “I’ll say. I don’t think I’ll ever be ready.”

Sarah said, “But a lot of people will want to . . . I don’t know. Remember him. Ceremonially, I guess you’d say.”

“Well, that’s just it.”

“Too many people.” She was asking Annie, her eyes full of concern.

“Yes. Too many people with a claim on him. Too many people for me to deal with right now.”

“On your left!” someone called from behind them, and Annie turned just as Sarah caught her hand and pulled her to the side of the path. A whole team of adolescent boys, all wearing identical navy-blue shorts and gray T-shirts, pounded by, large and muscular and overwhelming as a group, a couple of them actually talking through their gasps for air.

Once they were past, Annie and Lucas and Sarah started walking again, Sarah still holding Annie’s hand. After a moment she said to her mother, “Your brother asked about it. And so did Daddy’s, actually.”

Annie could feel it—it had been decided. She knew that. Lucas and Sarah had decided it. They were taking charge of it. Of her. In the name of helping. Of being kind.

She had the sense of things shifting around her. It would be different now, without Graham. She and he together had made an impregnable fortress. They decided what happened next in their own lives. His death would be the end of that. They would speak to her differently now. They would speak to her the way she’d spoken to Karen. More kindly perhaps, but that way. Taking charge.