“Ah my love, ah my own, in me all that fire is repeated… my love feeds on your love, beloved.”

The air was filled with sweet steam; Mitzi’s skin was rosy and glowing from the heat of the water. Kelley often brought her a mug of lemon-ginger tea, and more often than not, she would emerge from the bath and let Kelley help her on with her thick, white robe. She had looked like the subject of a Degas painting but far more lovely.

My love feeds on your love, beloved.

Those days are OVER.

What else can Kelley throw on the fire? Because it’s Christmas, he can’t bring himself to torch the Mrs. Claus dress, even though the sight of it sickens him. Just as he can’t seem to get out the trash can and dump all of Mitzi’s carolers and nutcrackers. I’ll leave those for the rest of you to enjoy. More like, I’ll leave those here to torture you and make you cry.

Kelley ransacks Mitzi’s drawers. She has taken everything. She has, he realizes, taken every family photo that has Bart in it. The only photos left in the bedroom are ones of him and the three olders.

On the top shelf of the closet, he finds the accessories that go with the gold lamé jumpsuit—namely, a gold braided headband and gold wristbands, excellent in their absurdity. He throws them into the bathtub, then wishes for lighter fluid. He finds half an inch of Mitzi’s organic hair spray. Will this work? He pours the hair spray over the gold lamé mess, then hits the leg of the jumpsuit with the Kiss lighter he bought at the liquor store. The Kiss lighter resonates with Kelley’s sense of irony, and it’s even better now that he’s using the lighter to set the gold lamé jumpsuit on fire and, along with it, the vision of Mitzi dancing and skating to “Rock and Roll All Nite.” The material smolders at first and emits a toxic smell, like something coming out of Jersey City during a sanitation strike in the dog days of summer. Then the fire catches—the organic hair spray is clearly flammable. The jumpsuit curls and crinkles like aluminum foil; the bathroom fills with smoke, and Kelley hurries to open a window, but he has trouble because he installed the storm windows right before Thanksgiving, and they’re sticking tight. He turns on the bathroom fan. If the smoke alarms go, the inn will have to be evacuated, and the fire department will come, and Kelley will have some explaining to do.

There is a knock on his bedroom door, which he ignores.

He watches Mitzi’s roller disco outfit transform into something even more hideous than it was, if that were possible.

“Daddy!” Ava says. “Open up!”

Ava, his sweetheart, his only little girl. He loves her like crazy, but she has always belonged first to Margaret. In fact, her voice right now sounds just like Margaret’s.

“Daddy!” The edge of hysteria, or just extreme impatience. The same tone Margaret used to take when she had to stay late at the studio and she really needed Kelley to leave work to go pick up Ava from piano lessons or attend one of the boys’ basketball games. One of us has to be there, and it can’t be me! Well, it couldn’t be him either a lot of the time; a lot of the time, the Quinn children had neither parent representing, which was humiliating to everyone involved and ended with Kelley and Margaret fighting, each of them screaming, My job is important! Whose job was more important? They could debate that, at 110 decibels, for hours. Margaret was more visible; Kelley made more money. He asked Margaret to quit; he wanted her to stay home and parent. Why me? she said. Because you’re the mother, Kelley replied. Kelley had been doing a lot of cocaine at that time, to stay sharp, to stay awake, to constantly monitor the overseas stock markets. It was the late eighties, the administration of Bush 41, but that was no excuse. Kelley asked Margaret to quit, and what did she do? She moved out.

Within a year, she was hired away from NY1 by CBS. It was the big time, national news, and her salary eclipsed Kelley’s. Made it look like milk money.

“Daddy!” Ava says. Pounding with the flat of her hand now, he can tell.

He sighs and opens the door. Ava is pale, and her eyebrows are knitted into a V. Her red hair is tucked behind her ears, which is exactly how Margaret used to wear it. And her green eyes, clear as glass, are exactly the same as her mother’s. These eyes are flashing with annoyance now.

“What,” Ava asks, “is that smell?” She pokes her head around the door and sees smoke billowing from the bathroom. “What are you doing, Daddy?”

“Uh…,” he says. He ushers her into the bedroom. He’s afraid if smoke gets in the hallway, the alarms will go off.

She charges like a bull into the bathroom, where she starts coughing and gagging. “What is that?”

“Mitzi’s roller disco outfit,” he says. “Her headband and her…”

Ava turns on the water in the tub, and the whole mess smokes and hisses like a wet, angry dragon with golden scales.

“… wristbands,” Kelley says weakly.

“I saw your Facebook post,” she says. “Really, was that necessary?”

“Uh…?” Kelley says. He feels a crushing sense of shame. He is a sixty-two-year-old man who just sought revenge on his wife via social media.

“We are having the party tonight,” Ava says. She eyeballs the pack of Camels and the bottle of Wild Turkey like a mother superior. “So, please, pull yourself together.”

KEVIN

He knows what he has to do. It is only a matter of courage.

And, also, of money. He has socked away twenty-nine thousand dollars in the years since Norah sold their house, took the profit in lieu of alimony payments, and left Nantucket for points south. Twenty-nine grand doesn’t sound like a lot, compared with the millions that Patrick makes, but Kevin is pretty proud of himself, considering he gets paid in cash, which could have easily flowed through his hands like water. It takes extreme willpower for him to make it to the bank with a deposit, and yet he does it every week. Before he met Isabelle, he was focused on getting out from under his father’s roof—he’s thirty-six, and living at the inn has done a number on his self-esteem—but now that he’s fallen in love with Isabelle, getting his own place is even more important.

He wants to buy a cottage where he can take Isabelle, so the two of them can stop sneaking around. He wants to somehow turn into a man who wears a watch instead of a sailor’s bracelet, who owns a nice pair of suede loafers instead of bar clogs, a man who rises at six a.m. to work, rather than at noon.