She and Sarah had driven up together, bringing the ashes with them, the wooden box set upright in the middle of the back seat. Glancing over at it from time to time, Annie had had the thought that it looked like some strange, small passenger—an ET, hitching a ride.

Now, driving back to Cambridge by herself, she felt solitary in the car. Sarah had offered to come with her, but Annie insisted she go back to Cambridge with Lucas and Jeanne, who’d driven up from New York to meet them at the cottage in a rental car.

She had thought they might want to talk. As she was packing up the perishables from the cottage kitchen, she’d been listening to the murmur of Jeanne’s and Sarah’s voices out on the porch. She’d heard Sarah say, “This is so exciting! Do you know what it is yet?”

She had stopped what she was doing to hear Jeanne’s answer. “No,” she said. “They can’t tell you that until a little bit later than this. And quite honestly, I am not sure that’s something that Lucas and I even want to know ahead of time.”

Annie understood immediately what this was: a pregnancy. Neither Jeanne nor Lucas had said anything about it to her. Perhaps this was something they didn’t want people to know yet.

Now, alone in the car, she wondered if Frieda knew.

Then she thought again of how complicated things had become with Frieda. After they got back to Cambridge tonight, for instance, Sarah, Lucas, and Jeanne were going out to dinner with her. They had asked Annie along, but she’d said no, that she’d see them the next day at the parties for Graham, that she thought that Frieda should have her time alone with them, as she had had hers today. She didn’t explain that she felt this the more so—this wish to give the evening to Frieda—because she’d been relieved that Lucas and Sarah had wanted to scatter the ashes without Frieda. She had some guilt about that. Guilt about the decision itself—which she thought had been mostly Lucas’s. And guilt about her own relief at the decision.

In any case, she had let the decision stand.

The plan was that Lucas would be the one to tell Frieda. Annie wasn’t able to imagine how he would do it, but she allowed herself to believe that he would know what to say, how to present things in a way that made sense to his mother. That rescued her feelings.

But this was not at all what happened.

One day in mid-August, Annie had answered the phone. It was Jeanne. She wanted to let Annie know that she had told Frieda of the decision about half an hour earlier. That Frieda had called her, “out of the blue” she said, to ask when the scattering of the ashes was to take place, and Jeanne had been forced to tell her both the date, and then that she, Frieda, wouldn’t be a part of it.

Frieda had been upset at the news, Jeanne said, and she thought Annie might be getting a call from her. She thought Annie should be prepared for that.

Annie was silent for a moment, thinking of Frieda, imagining her shock. “That must have been difficult for you,” she said finally to Jeanne. For Frieda, is what she was thinking.

“Of course it was,” Jeanne said. “I did try to put her off, in order for Lucas to be the one to talk to her, as we’d planned, but she couldn’t understand why I simply couldn’t tell her. So I did, finally. I didn’t see how I could reasonably get out of it.”

After a long moment, Annie asked, “What did she say?”

“She was upset, quite naturally. Or really, she was angry, though she wouldn’t have acknowledged that to me. She asked who had decided this, and I said of course the family had. She asked me if I was in on it—that’s precisely what she said: ‘in on it,’ as though it were a crime—and I said I wasn’t. That I hadn’t been there for the discussion.”

“Did she ask about me? About whether or not I was ‘in on it’?”

“She did. And I told her no. But then she asked if you had approved the decision.”

“And you said?”

“I said, I think, that you had yielded to the others.”

“Oh, Christ,” Annie said.

“Yes. Well, she got very angry then, although she still wouldn’t admit it. I could tell, though. But I must say that I got angry too, Annie.”

“At Frieda?” Annie said stupidly.

“Yes. I said you had already shared so very much with her. That I would never have been as generous as you have been. And that perhaps you had a right to the moment just with Graham, just with his children. I told her I understood the decision. That I agreed with it.”

Annie said nothing, and after a moment Jeanne spoke again. “She doesn’t have the right, Annie, to be angry at any of you. Not you, not Lucas. And I told her so.”

Annie was silent. She was shocked. By what? By Jeanne’s . . . toughness. By her honesty, really.

Finally she said, “I just don’t know if I can do this, Jeanne.”

“Do what?”

“Stick with the plan, I guess. Not include Frieda.”

Now it was Jeanne’s turn to be silent. Her voice, when she spoke, was chilly, Annie thought. “Of course you must do what you need to do, Annie. I know that you’re friends with Frieda. I will only say that for Lucas—and perhaps for Sarah too, I wouldn’t know—it would be better. Better to stay with this plan.”

Annie didn’t know what to say. She felt cornered, she realized.

“I feel that Lucas has the right to be just with his father,” Jeanne said. “That is my stake in this affair. I want for him what he wants. What he needs. It will have a different meaning for him to have his mother there. It will make everything harder.”

After a long moment, Annie said, “God, what a choice.”

“You mean, for you?”

“Yes, for me.”

After a moment, Jeanne said, “But perhaps, in this case, it really isn’t your choice. You don’t need to feel it is. He was your husband, Annie, of course. I understand that. But Lucas and Sarah are his children, and this is the way they wanted it. Perhaps it was more Lucas, yes. But Sarah too, I think.” Jeanne was quiet for a moment, as if to let Annie think about this. Then, the coup de grace. “And I must say, I feel that today I have borne the brunt of this—isn’t that what you say? Brunt?”

“Yes.”

“Another strange word. Very English. The brunt of it, then. I was the one who had to tell her. Who was honest with her. I faced all of her hurt and her anger, and told her what I thought. So it’s done. There don’t need to be all these telephone calls back and forth. It’s over. Fini.” Annie didn’t know what to say. After a long moment, Jeanne said, “Let it rest, Annie. It doesn’t need to be such a big . . . drama. Frieda will get over it.”

As soon as she got off the phone with Jeanne, Annie called Frieda. Who wasn’t home. She left a message on Frieda’s phone, but didn’t hear back that day.

She called Frieda again the next day, and again had no return call.

And then she decided not to keep calling. What she felt was that, after all, Frieda had a right not to have to discuss her pain with someone who’d been a part of causing it.

And Annie had a lot to do just then, anyway, to get ready for her part of the memorial events. It made it easier to let it go, to imagine Frieda was perhaps slowly letting it go too.

20

There were to be two memorial gatherings the day after the ashes were scattered. The first was the bookstore party, which Peter and Lucas and Sarah had planned with the staff. And Annie had decided finally to host a separate party after that one, back at the house. Hers would be smaller, just family and close friends, but even so she’d had a long list of things to do and order and arrange in the weeks ahead of time. She’d found herself almost grateful for this—for the sense of purpose it provided. And then after the difficulty around the scattering of the ashes, for the distraction it offered from her worries about Frieda.