It was Saturday, about 5:30, and Annie was making a warm frisée salad with new potatoes and bacon. Nothing heavy, she’d said to everyone. “We’ll all be in recovery from Thursday.” (Thursday, Thanksgiving, when she, Sarah, Lucas, Jeanne, and Claire had all spent the day at Frieda’s, the adults eating a meal of the traditional dishes Frieda liked to make—a huge turkey with stuffing, sweet potatoes with marshmallows, both apple and pumpkin pies.)

Today Annie had set the table for nine adults, and asked Lucas to bring down the high chair that had been Sarah’s from the closet on the second floor. She had put candles in a row along the center of the table, the way she’d always done for the big dinners she and Graham had given. She felt light, actually cheerful, she realized.

For the last two years, the holidays had been difficult for Annie; she was still so entwined with Graham’s death and then her anger at him for all that had happened afterward. The first year, Sarah had come home for both holidays. And last year, Annie and Frieda had gone together to New York on the train, just for Thanksgiving Day, and Lucas and Jeanne had hosted them. No turkey, Jeanne had insisted. (“Turkey is an American invention. Unknown elsewhere.”) They had small game birds instead, and the meal was spare and delicious, as if in defiance of the American notion of excess. Afterward they had sat in the living room with cognac and passed the baby around until it was time to go to the station. Annie had been grateful for this, for the way the baby made it unnecessary to sustain a conversation. She felt—she had felt for months—that she had nothing of interest to say to anyone.

In the taxi on the way back to Cambridge from the train station in Back Bay, she and Frieda had both fallen silent. Looking over at Frieda, Annie had seen stamped on her face the exhaustion that she felt herself. Here we are, she thought. Two old ladies. Stuck together.

This year, having ceded the Thanksgiving meal to Frieda, she’d decided to have a small party two days later. At the moment, just the family had arrived. They were all waiting for the others—Natalie and Don, who’d been in New Jersey for Thanksgiving with their only child, an associate professor at Princeton. Edith, of course, after the huge Thanksgiving she’d been in charge of at her house for her children and grandchildren and Mike and his partner. And Peter, who had just returned to Boston from a long, wine-focused trip to California.

Lucas had started to assemble various bottles on the kitchen island, and to open a few of the reds Annie had set out. Frieda and Sarah were in the living room with Claire. She was toddling across the room from one of them to another, playing a game she’d invented. She would hand a wooden spoon over to one of them, and it was Sarah or Frieda’s job to hold on to it and let the little girl tug at it for just long enough so that when it was released, it felt like a triumph to her. She would laugh, a hiccupping squeal of joy and triumph that sometimes convulsed her so thoroughly that she would sit down, hard, on the floor—which itself seemed funny to her, made her cry out again with a gurgling pleasure. Jeanne was there too, taking the opportunity of the other adults’ engagement with Claire to flip through the newspaper.

Peter arrived, bundled up, his cheeks pinked by the chill, so that for a few moments he looked like someone else, not the dark, brooding version of himself he usually presented to the world. He’d brought a cake with him, from the new branch of the local bakery that was everyone’s current favorite. He handed the white box to Sarah so he could take off his coat. (“What a shame you wasted your time making that perfectly ordinary chocolate mousse,” Sarah said to Annie as she set the box on the counter back in the kitchen.)

Jeanne roused herself and carried Claire off, back up to the guest bedroom, to change her diaper. The little girl shrieked her protest all the way up. While she was gone, Edith arrived, walking in without ringing the bell, stopping to greet Frieda in the living room before she went back to the kitchen to kiss Annie. She’d brought a fancy sauterne for after dinner.

The kitchen suddenly seemed crowded, people greeting one another, embracing, getting drinks. Annie chased them all into the front of the house—“I’m trying to get a meal on the table here!”

When Jeanne came back downstairs, she brought Claire to the living room again. The little girl looked silently but cheerfully around at all the new adults: so many fresh playthings. Then she picked her spoon up from the floor and the game began again, all of them sitting in a kind of circle around her.

The last to arrive were Natalie and Don, apologizing as they came in. They’d been having a long walk on Plum Island and hadn’t noticed the time. They too brought wine, and a wooden box of clementines.

“Oh, what a beauty!” Natalie said when she’d hung her coat up and come back into the living room. “What a cutie!”

“But of course,” Don said. “Look at her antecedents.”

Jeanne curtsied her head, making light of the compliment, but Annie could see, even from the kitchen, that she had flushed in pleasure.

Lucas offered them their choice of drinks—champagne, mimosas, martinis, scotch. There was a pleasant buzz of conversation that Annie heard snatches of while she warmed up some small fennel rolls she’d made earlier, tilting them back and forth in a pan of olive oil and then salting them. She put them in a straw basket under a cloth and took it to the living room, setting it down on the table along with some napkins.

Peter and Lucas immediately reached for the rolls, Lucas even as he was pouring a glass of wine for Annie.

“My god, these are wonderful!” Peter said, his mouth full.

Annie blew him a kiss.

Claire picked up a roll and chewed on it for a moment, then put it down on the table, spitting the bit of dough out. “Too sour!” she said, making a face.

“Not sour,” Lucas said, reaching for another one. “Salty.”

“Salty,” she echoed. She watched him steadily as he ate, exaggerating his chewing motion for her.

They reviewed their holidays. They bemoaned the difficulty of travel. They discussed the weather and compared it with the Thanksgivings of years past—the unseasonably warm, sunny one, everyone out walking around outside without coats. The heavy snowfall another year that kept people from having to travel.

When Annie called them to the table, Lucas brought Claire and set her in the old-fashioned high chair, offering her several spoons to bang on its wooden tray. Natalie unpacked a clementine and rinsed it off at the sink. She set it down on the high-chair tray also. She began to show Claire how to peel it.

The salad was passed around the table, and the rolls. They started to eat. Lucas moved behind each of them, pouring wine.

“So, what have you done with the cat today?” Frieda asked Annie.

“Well, the good thing about cats is, you don’t have to do much of anything with them.”

“What cat?” Lucas asked.

“Did I not tell you?” Annie asked, looking up at him. “About the cat?”

“No,” Lucas said. “You certainly did not.”

She seemed puzzled. “I didn’t tell you Karen died?”

“No. God!” Lucas said. “No! You didn’t.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry.” Annie sighed. “Well, she did. She died. It was about three or four months ago now. Four months.”

“Ah, that’s too bad,” Lucas said. “She was such a fixture in our lives.” He set the wine bottles on the table and sat down.

“What did she die of?” Don asked.

“Old age, I suppose you’d say,” Annie answered. “I don’t know, actually. I assume, heart failure or something like that. She was over ninety, so I don’t think they did an autopsy or anything like that. And she died at home.”

“But what has this to do with the cat?” Jeanne asked.

“He was Karen’s.” Annie looked over at Sarah. “Sarah remembered him.” Sarah nodded. “You don’t, Lucas?”

“Not so much. I’ve been gone kind of a long time, as you will recall.”

“So you took him in,” Jeanne said. “The cat?”

“Well, it’s a little more complicated than that.”

“Tell,” Peter commanded.

It was a long story, as Annie told it. She was interrupted often by someone asking someone else to pass the wine, or the salt and pepper, or the salad bowl.

She had been bothered one night by Karen’s cat, she said, yowling almost as if he was in heat. “But of course, he’s a male cat. Altered, but male. So I assumed, well, maybe she was keeping him in because there was some cat in heat nearby. But it went on and on through the night—well, off and on—and then the next morning, it started up again.

“When I looked over, I could see him inside there, at the kitchen window this time, hanging by his claws on the screen, and really, I knew right then. I tried telephoning, but of course there was no answer. I could hear it ringing and ringing. It was about seven in the morning by then, so I called nine-one-one and the ambulance came.”

“I thought you had a key,” Edith said.