On the day Blair chose to put up the Christmas tree, her mother came over to help. Between the two of them, they managed to wrangle the tree onto the stand, and then Kate went about stringing the lights while Blair collapsed on the divan with a cigarette and two fingers of Glenlivet, willing the nausea to just leave her alone for once. She had invited her mother and David for dinner and planned to serve cheese fondue; she’d painstakingly cubed a loaf of sourdough and sliced some cured sausage, both provisioned that morning from Savenor’s. Angus had called at lunchtime and said he would be working late again, and Blair wanted to cancel the dinner altogether, but Kate insisted that Blair needed company, so now Blair could look forward to a lopsided fondue dinner with her parents.

She watched her mother wind the lights around the tree, infinitely patient, careful, thorough, and competent in her task. She wore a dark green shirtwaist and pumps and had pearls at her throat; her blond hair was in a smooth chignon, her lipstick perfect. Kate was always put together, always impeccable. How did she manage it? Blair knew that her mother had suffered dark times. Blair’s father, Wilder Foley, had been fighting in Korea for much of their early marriage, and then when he came home, there were, as Kate put it, “adjustments” to make. Blair remembered her father’s homecoming: They picked him up at the airport; he was wearing his dress uniform. She remembers him at the breakfast table in a white undershirt, smoking and eating eggs, pulling Kate down into his lap and growling at Blair to take her sister and brother upstairs to play. Wilder didn’t drive Blair to school or ballet; her mother did. Her mother prepared their food, administered their baths, read the stories, and tucked them in. Blair remembered one night her parents had gone out for dinner. Her mother wore a red sheath and her father his dress uniform, and Janie Beckett from down the street had come to babysit, which had been a matter of great excitement. Kate had bought Coke to offer Janie, and Blair had sneaked peeks at the three exotic green bottles in the icebox; the Foley children weren’t allowed soda. That night, Janie gave Blair one sip of the Coke; it had been so crisp and spicy and unexpectedly fizzy that Blair’s eyes had teared up and her nose tingled.

She had retained all of those details but relatively little about her own father. And then, suddenly, he was dead. Kate had found Wilder’s body in his garage workshop, a gunshot wound to his head.

On that morning, Blair had been taken to school by her grandfather, which was unusual indeed. When she got home, there had been men at the house, so many men—neighbors, Mr. Beckett (Janie’s father), a swarm of policemen, and, later, bizarrely, Bill Crimmins, the caretaker for the house in Nantucket.

Blair doesn’t remember being told that her father was dead; possibly, she overheard something or just intuited it. Nor does Blair remember her mother screaming or even crying. This struck Blair as unusual only when she was older. When Blair was sixteen, she and Kate had an argument about Blair’s public displays of affection with her boyfriend, Larry Winter, and Blair turned Kate’s composure during this time against her, saying, You didn’t even cry when Daddy died. You didn’t shed one tear!

And Kate had spun on her in an uncharacteristic show of anger. What do you know about it? Tell me please, Blair Baskett Foley. What. Do. You. Know. About. It.

Blair had had to admit that she knew nothing about it, really, and that was true to this day. Kate must have been devastated, haunted, and set adrift by her husband’s unexpected death. Blair was tempted to ask her mother now what it had been like to find him, how she had coped afterward. Blair wondered if she could learn something about her own marriage by asking Kate those questions. But at that moment, her mother held her hands up to showcase the tree. The lights were evenly hung at different depths on the branches in a way that created a glowing, three-dimensional marvel.

“What do you think?” Kate asked.

Blair admired her mother so much, she couldn’t summon words strong enough to praise her. She nodded her approval.

Everyone promised Blair she would feel better during her second trimester, and this proved to be true. The month of April delivered the sweet spot in her pregnancy. The nausea was gone, and the exhaustion had abated somewhat. Blair’s hair was long and shiny; her appetite for both food and sex were prodigious. But Angus was even more distant and remote and he suffered his episodes more frequently. The only days he took off from work, he spent lying in bed, despondent.

On Tuesday, April 8, two days after Easter, Blair woke up and immediately consumed two grilled-cheese sandwiches, a butterscotch pudding, three chocolate-coconut eggs, and a handful of black jellybeans from the Easter basket that Exalta still prepared for all four of her grandchildren even though three of them were adults. It was a glorious spring day, warm for the first time in months. Blair, energized by the sudden sugar rush, decided to walk from their apartment all the way over to the MIT campus and surprise Angus at work. She wore one of her new maternity dresses, a full-term size even though she was only five and a half months pregnant. Her girth was a source of private embarrassment. She was so big. Exalta had commented on it with disapproval at Easter, and Blair had feared that Exalta might even withhold her Easter basket. Blair had no explanation for her size except that everything about her pregnancy had been extreme—she had been so sick and so tired, and now she was so enormous. She assumed it meant that the baby would be a strapping, healthy boy—smart like Angus, handsome like Joey, athletic like Tiger.

Blair wore low, stacked heels, comfortable for walking, but when she reached Marlborough Street a tiny, blue-haired woman stopped her on the sidewalk, told her she had no right to be out in her condition, and implored her to return home.

Blair stared at the woman, aghast. “But I’m only five months along,” she said. She immediately regretted giving out this piece of personal information. One thing she had noticed with dismay was that being pregnant made her public property. It meant that old women who had probably given birth at the turn of the century felt they could stop her on the street and tell her to go home.

Blair had moved on, indignant but self-conscious. Her maternity dress was buttercup yellow, which suited the spring day but also made her stand out. She had been looking forward to strolling over the Longfellow Bridge and watching the rowers below, but after she’d walked a few more blocks, a taxicab pulled up alongside her; the driver cranked down the passenger-side window and said, “Lady, where ya going? I’ll give you a ride for free.”