“Yeah,” Lucas said. “I’d have preferred something that emerged from the text. Still, he’s the boss. . . . But here’s the interesting thing. He came to the office to meet me—this was after we’d taken the book—and I was expecting this young guy. Or youngish, anyway, the voice of the novel was so convincing. And I was astonished. He’s old. Older than Dad was, for sure.”

“Oh, ancient,” said Annie. She was sitting at the table again. She’d set the camera on the kitchen counter.

“Well, you know what I mean,” Lucas said. He grinned. “But he is, he’s really old. He had a couple of books when he was a whole lot younger that did very well then. Critically, anyway. I’d never heard of them, but I guess I was too young to have read them. Then this long, long hiatus, until now.”

“What’s his name?” Edith asked. “Mister Young and Easy. Not that I’ll remember. You’re writing it all down, Peter?”

Peter nodded, and Lucas said, “Pedersen. Ian Pedersen.”

Sarah was looking down the table at her mother then, about to signal that she wanted her to pass the wine. She saw Annie’s face shift, her mouth open, just slightly.

“Peterson,” Annie said to Lucas, frowning.

“Yeah.”

“How do you spell it?” she asked Lucas.

“With a d. Pe-der-sen.” He pronounced it more carefully this time, so you could hear the d, and the final e.

“Ah,” Annie said. Her face had changed again, Sarah thought. She looked frightened. Was that it? Frightened? White around the gills, her father used to say.

“Have you read him?” Lucas asked, leaning forward to meet Annie’s eyes.

“I did,” she said. “A long time ago. Those early books.” She nodded. “Actually,” she said, “I knew him.”

“Oh, you knew him?” Lucas said.

“I did,” she said.

“From the store?” Peter asked. “Did he read there?”

“No, I don’t think so.” She shook her head. “No, he didn’t. I’m certain of that. No, I knew him from MacDowell.”

“What is this—MacDowell?” Jeanne asked.

Annie turned to her. “An artist colony.” She gestured dismissively. “It’s like a summer camp, but for adults.” She laughed, self-consciously, it seemed to Sarah. “Adults in the arts. Writers, photographers, painters. One composer during my time, as I remember it.”

“I don’t recall your going to a colony,” Sarah said.

“No, it was long ago. Before you were born, actually.”

“Damn it, everything interesting happened before I was born,” Sarah said. “I’m sick of it.”

“For instance, all the rest of us were born,” Lucas said, smiling his teasing smile across the table at her.

“Well, now I have Claire,” she said. “At last, somebody younger.”

“No, I have Claire,” Lucas said. He’d made his voice like a schoolyard taunt. “Get your own somebody younger.”

There was a little silence. Lucas heard in it what a possibly cruel thing he’d said.

But Sarah rescued him. “Maybe I just will,” she said, squinting her eyes at him. The room seemed to let out its breath, she thought.

Annie pushed her chair back to start to clear, but Lucas insisted she sit, and when he got up, Peter and Don joined him, as if by agreement, ferrying the dishes to the kitchen sink.

When they were done, Annie got up again and brought Peter’s cake and then the mousse she’d made to the table. Sarah got bowls and plates. Annie took orders, and the dishes went up and down the table in the scattered conversation.

When at last the sauterne was served, Lucas ticked his fork gently against the delicate glass. “Ahem, ahem,” he said. Then, when everyone was quiet: “Let’s drink. Let’s drink to the missing member of our gathering.”

“Oh yes! To Daddy,” said Sarah, and Lucas smiled and reached across the table to touch his glass to hers. They made the lightest of pings.

“The one who’s always here, in spirit,” Peter said.

“To Graham,” Edith said, raising her glass.

“To Graham,” said Natalie.

“To Graham,” said Frieda.

“To Graham,” Jeanne echoed, raising her glass and turning to Annie, sitting on her left.

Annie’s fingers were resting on the stem of her glass, but she quickly raised it too and clicked it gently against Jeanne’s. “To Graham,” she said.

Frieda was watching her. And Sarah.

Shortly after this, Jeanne and Lucas got up and began to assemble Claire’s things. Jeanne laid the little girl on the living room couch to put her into her snowsuit, which made her protest. She didn’t want to go, she said over and over. Frieda got up too, and Natalie and Don, who had a long drive home, back up to Rowley.

The front hall was full of people then, people putting on their coats, people moving around to embrace one another. Claire stood in her snowsuit, almost in the center of a rough circle that had formed. She was looking up at all these grown-ups in her life, smiling her openmouthed smile. When a little silence fell, she clapped her hands and shouted, “Ebbrybody JUMP!” her hands rising, opened, at the command.

For a second no one knew what to do, though they were laughing, delighted with Claire, with her having thought of this. Then Jeanne took Peter’s hand in hers on her left side, and Annie’s on her right. Quickly they all started to hold hands, Frieda’s hand in Lucas’s, Edith’s in Don’s. When they had formed a circle, Peter counted to three, and they all jumped.

As they went out the door and down the walk, they were all talking, laughing with one another. Annie and Sarah stood at the door, calling goodbye over and over, and then came back to the table, where Edith and Peter were sitting down again.

They sat too. They talked about Claire for a moment, how bright she was, how much fun. Then Sarah rested her arms on the table and dropped her head onto them dramatically. “Pffff,” she said. She raised her head again. “I am so wiped out.”

“The holidays will do that,” Edith said.

“Yeah,” said Sarah. She looked over at her mother. “If only we had Daddy here to help us clean up. Remember, Mother? In that crazy old apron of his?”

“Yes,” Annie said.

Sarah stood up to start to clear the table.

“Oh, wait a minute for that, sweetie,” Edith said. “We’ll help. Let’s just sit for a little longer. Do you want some more sauterne?”

Sarah shook her head. “No. No thanks.”

They were all quiet for a moment. Sarah turned to Annie. “I was thinking—do you remember this funny time, Mom, when Daddy was in that apron and we were all shouting, ‘No!’?”

“I do,” Annie said.

Sarah frowned. “So what was that about? What were we doing?”

Annie lifted her hands. “We were saying no to an imaginary molester, of course.”

There was a second or two of silence. “You could enlarge on that,” Peter said.

“Oh, it was just this thing at Sarah’s day care,” Annie said. “We—we parents—were supposed to be teaching our kids about how to protect themselves in case some evil person tried to do horrible, sexual things with them.”

“Well, that’s really crazy,” Sarah said.

“It was crazy,” Edith said. “It was utterly nuts. It had to do with this whole recovered memory thing then,” she said. “With little children.”

“Oh, yeah, we all know about that,” Sarah said. “Recovered memory. As in, Catholic priests.” She frowned. “But here’s what’s interesting, I think. Why is it always the bad stuff? Everything you recover.”

“Interesting,” Peter said. “I hadn’t thought of that. Yeah. Why don’t we ever work on recovering memories of the good stuff?”

“Because you don’t forget the good stuff,” Edith said.

“Sure you do,” Sarah said. “There are people who specialize in that. Only the memory of everything awful. Gloom and doom.”

“Well, in this case,” Edith said, “these very dubious child psychologists were working exclusively on the bad stuff. They got the kids to testify that they’d had terrible things done to them by their day-care teachers.”

“Virginia McMartin,” Annie said. “Remember her?” she asked Edith. She turned to Peter and Sarah. “This dumpy, elderly day-care person. A Satanist, if ever there was one.” She looked at Edith again. “And around here, there was the clown.”

“Yeah, the wicked clown.”

Annie explained to Sarah. “This was a day-care teacher, a man, who was supposed to have dressed up as a clown and taken the children into a mysterious room—a room which, by the way, no one could ever find—and done nasty things to them.”

“I remember the clown,” Peter said. “Somewhere in Medford, I think.”

“Yes, I think that’s right,” Edith said.

Sarah said, “I knew there was a reason I didn’t like Medford.”

“Anyway,” Annie said emphatically. “We had these instructions, the gist of which was to teach you kids to say no to people like these clowns. So we made a game of saying no one night after dinner, and Graham was there, cleaning up in his famous apron.”

“What kind of game?” Edith asked.

“Oh, nothing really. It was dumb. Just, we shouted out every word for no we could think of. Sarah loved it.”

“I did,” Sarah said. “That’s what I remember. Just that part of it.”