“Exactly my point. Your youth is worth more than all his money. So cherish it, Jake. Use it. And when you’re my age I recommend that you find a way to make enough money so that you can find someone young to be with yourself. When I’m with you, I’m a young girl again. It’s not forever, I know that, but it’s much better than tennis with the girls, or going into the city to have dinner with Richard and his insurance friends.”

“Does he know about us? Does your husband know?”

Emma Codd leaned away from Jake to get to her pack of cigarettes on the bedside table. Jake studied her body, always a little less attractive to him after they’d done it. Her heavy breasts sagged a little, and there was puckered skin on her thighs and buttocks. After lighting two cigarettes and passing one to Jake, she said, “He doesn’t not know, I guess. He knows I’m not entirely alone out here week after week while he’s in Hartford tallying numbers, but he doesn’t know about you, specifically.

“He’s no saint, himself, you know. He used to have a few regular girls, but I doubt he still does. He can’t perform, you know, in the bedroom, anymore.”

“Oh,” Jake said.

“You’re my replacement. That’s a good thing, not a bad thing, for everyone involved.” Emma Codd blew out a plume of blue smoke, then leaned over and kissed Jake on his hairless chest. “Don’t grow old, Jake. That’s my advice to you. And if it happens anyway, then find someone younger than you. I know of what I speak.”

Two and a half years later, at the beginning of Jake’s senior year, Mrs. Codd told him that she was having some health problems, and they wouldn’t be able to see each other anymore. He objected but was secretly okay with it. He’d found a new girlfriend by then, a plump blond sophomore whose single mother worked afternoons at the town library. Jake taught her everything he’d learned from Mrs. Codd, and decided he liked being the teacher as much as he’d liked being the student. Maybe more.

After his senior year, Jake went to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst on a partial scholarship to study economics. He came home that first Christmas, and during a silent midday meal with his mother and father, neither of whom had asked him how he liked school, he asked about Mrs. Codd, and if his mother was still doing housework there.

“You didn’t hear?” she said.

“Hear what?”

“She died months ago. She had cancer.”

“Oh,” Jake said, taking a bite of the dried-out turkey.

“The house was sold and everything.”