“Yes, I think he would have. All of it.” She smiled at Sarah. (“The most joyless smile I’ve ever seen,” Sarah said to Thomas later.) She reached her arms up to Sarah and they hugged, the tall daughter and the small, slender mother. Then Annie went to the other side of her absurd old car and got in. Sarah stood watching, waving, until the van went around the corner at the end of the street and disappeared behind the huge oak tree there. She turned then and walked slowly back up the driveway, lifting her face to feel the light rain on it. She opened the gate and stepped up to the house.

Her old house. She came into the living room and sat down, looking around consciously for the first time in a long while at this space she’d grown up in, surrounded by books and records and CDs and paintings and photographs and odd things that had pleased one or the other of her parents over the years. There on the shelving running along one wall was the beautiful but unusably delicate bowl her father had given her mother because of its color—a blue so pale it was like the sky just before dawn. A collection of tiny shells was spread out next to it, pink or flecked or pearly. They’d gathered them together and separately over the years from various beaches they’d walked on. In front of Sarah, on the trunk they used as a coffee table, was an ornate silver platter, given to her great-grandparents on the occasion of his retirement as the pastor of a church in Minneapolis. The bookshelves from floor to ceiling on two walls of the room sagged in the middle with the weight of the books, some tucked in horizontally along the tops of the ones that stood in rows.

Years ago her parents had painted the room a pale ochre that had faded over time. Sarah couldn’t think of the word that would give a sense of its color now, a color she had thought of in her childhood as rich and elegant. Now it was worn, a brownish white. The floors were scuffed, she noted, and stained here and there. Annie’s photographs hung everywhere, or were propped on the shelves in front of the books, including many shots she’d taken of Graham and Sarah and Lucas, of various friends, many of groups of people at parties. There were paintings on the walls and shelves too, most of them by artist friends of her parents.

It was shabby, you could see that clearly now in the daylight—transformed from the loveliness Annie had created last night with the flowers, the softer lighting, the candles everywhere. Sarah hadn’t known that, growing up—that the house was shabby. She hadn’t noticed how different it was from the grand houses around it. Small, square, the one big room downstairs, four small ones up—it had felt capacious to her. It had felt perfect.

But once a friend from college had stopped as she came into the big room and said, “Wow! This is so . . . funky. Or bohemian. Or something. So . . . sixties. There’s just so much stuff.” Sarah had seen it clearly then, that it wasn’t beautiful, as she had thought it was. But maybe that was after things in the neighborhood began to get elegant—the houses that had been divided into apartments reclaimed as single-family homes, shutters hung, clapboards repaired and painted in rich colors, gardens established. Maybe it was then that she began to see that her house didn’t belong on their grand street, among the big Victorian houses with their wide porches, their cupolas.

Would Annie stay on here? she wondered. Could she even afford to?

It occurred to her that she had no idea of her mother’s finances. She couldn’t earn much of anything from her work—maybe, actually, not even enough to pay for the studio, maybe not enough for the developing—which, since her mother had moved to the large color prints, was almost prohibitively expensive, she knew.

Did they even own the house? She knew they’d gotten a second mortgage to pay for her college, but she had no idea how much of that they might still owe. Or even whether the first mortgage had been paid off. She hadn’t asked her mother any of this, hadn’t thought about it until just now.

She couldn’t imagine Annie anywhere else, she realized. Even as she also realized that this feeling had to do not so much with her mother as with herself. Really, what she couldn’t imagine was not having this home. Of course this home to come back to, yes. But also, she understood, to be gone from. The place she could call up from far away in her own life when she thought of home—this room, and everything in it.

She got up and went back to the kitchen. The breakfast things and their later coffee cups were still in the sink. She cleaned it all up—loading the dishwasher, wiping the counters and the end of the long table where she and Annie had been sitting. When she was done, she went into the living room again. She moved around, looking more closely at everything there, touching things. She stood in front of one of the framed photographs of her father. He was looking at the camera—at her mother—with a gentle smile, his eyes announcing all that he felt for her. There was a smaller picture of herself that she’d always liked—she was in the sandbox that had predated the brick terrace in the backyard, dirty, wearing just shorts, a clear stripe through the dirt on her belly where she’d drooled on herself, waving a plastic shovel at her mother. Or at the camera, anyway.

Before she left the room, she stood for a moment, turning in a slow circle. Then she went quickly over to the low shelf. She reached down and slid about a quarter of the tiny, beautiful shells off it and into her hand. She put them in her jeans pocket. Then she went to the kitchen area again and up the back stairs, up to her parents’ bedroom.

She stood for a moment in the doorway, surveying everything. She crossed the room and sat in the big chair at the foot of the bed, her father’s chair. Part of her had been glad when Annie left, she felt it now. Yes, glad to have the house to herself. Glad to move around in it, to remember her father here, without her mother’s sorrowing presence.

She smiled. Glad to have a chance to take something that connected to him without having to ask her mother’s permission, without even having to let her know she’d done it. A secret.

She put her feet up on the bed as her father used to do in the mornings when she was a little girl. On the weekends especially, Sarah had sometimes joined her parents in here, climbing into bed with her mother or sitting on her father’s lap while the two grown-ups went on talking and drinking their coffee.

Through the open window now she heard the rain intensify, she smelled the dampness of earth. She remembered the sense she often had when she came into this room—the sense that her parents had been telling secrets to each other, that there was something between them, maybe everything, that she didn’t know about. Her strategy for making room for herself between them then had been to throw herself at one or the other, to be wild, noisy. Her father always responded, tossing her around, roughhousing, making her shriek with joy.

Her mother was not as much fun—on those mornings when Sarah started being too rowdy, she simply withdrew. She’d get up out of the bed, tying her kimono tighter around her, and head for the bathroom. Which ended everything.

How obvious it was to her later, thinking back on it—embarrassingly obvious—that often enough it must have been sex that she’d interrupted.

She had a memory now of waking in the night in her own room. She must have been seven, maybe eight. She’d heard something, a cry. A moan. She had lain there, listening intently for a long, silent interval that frightened her.

But then her parents’ voices began, that familiar rhythmic flow between them. His deep rumble, whispering. Her mother’s higher, gentler voice answering him—rising, falling. They laughed softly. Sometimes her mother’s voice was so low she couldn’t really hear it. But she could still somehow feel it, the special way of talking she saved only for him.

Sarah had started crying in her bed then, at first just for herself, a nameless, private grief that at that age she didn’t ask herself to understand. But then more loudly, wanting someone to come to her. After a minute or two, her mother did, sitting on the edge of the bed. Pushing Sarah’s hair gently off her face, she asked whether Sarah had had a bad dream.

Sarah remembered willfully intensifying her sorrow then, moving into a kind of hysteria that became real as she enacted it.

Finally her mother left and her father came in, the one she had wanted all along, apparently. He sat with her, stroking her hair as her mother had, whispering to her in a kind of song, “Hey, little girl, hey, little girl.” When he lay down next to her, she began slowly to calm herself, until finally she fell asleep.

She had talked about this with Lucas once much later, her wish, her “classic wish,” as she described it to him, to interpose herself between Graham and Annie. To triumph over her mother. So embarrassingly oedipal.

Or Elektral, he said.

“Whatever,” she said. She’d asked him if he’d ever felt anything like that.

“Toward Graham?” he’d asked.

“I suppose.”

“Well, as you know, Annie was not my mother, so everything was different for me, I think.”

“I guess so. Yeah.”

“I liked her being with Graham. I liked Graham’s being with her. I wanted her for my mother. I wanted him for my father.” He grinned at her, his famous Lucas wolf-grin.