When we pulled into the driveway, crickets were ringing the summer’s end. It could have been any August night from my childhood, returning from the cool lake to the hot city. On Corcoran Street, my brother and I would race each other into the house. Now I didn’t want to leave the car. Robin braced his arms on the steering wheel for an elaborate yawn, exactly as my father used to do, while I observed that the measures we took to make the house appear inhabited while we were gone—arranging the dormer blinds at different heights, setting the porch lamp on a timer—only drew attention to its emptiness.

Inside, I slapped my shoulder bag on the dining room table and flipped through the mail that our neighbor, Mrs. Platt, had left in a neat pile when she came in to water the plants and feed the cat. Robin scooped Cloud up like an infant, yodeling “You Are My Sunshine” to her sulky face, until she struggled from his arms and stalked off. When I first got her for Maddy, she’d been a tiny parcel of bodiless fur. Now she had an adult’s swinging gait and the smoky features of her breed. I didn’t care if she was annoyed at us for locking the cat door and leaving her at the mercy of Mrs. Platt, who in our absence maintained a dry prison diet. I just wanted to find her there when we returned.

Robin smiled wearily at me, his forehead scored with sunburn. When I first met Robin, he had been under this very table, on whose surface I was tracing spirals with my fingertips. I had come back from shopping the morning of my fortieth birthday to find two men assembling the gift from my parents, hand-crafted from English walnut. I don’t remember the assistant—he has a different one now—but I often think back to that version of Robin, when he was a wiry stranger supine on the floor, his hands gripping the slab to position it and screw the legs on from underneath, squinting in concentration, his raised arms causing his T-shirt to untuck from his jeans and flap over the shadow of his waist. In his low nimble commentary he told me he had moved to northern Virginia to apprentice to a Japanese master craftsman and eventually set up his own business. He’d rescued the wood from a construction site near Culpeper where trees were being felled and burned; the slabs had been drying in his workshop when Rose and Walter went to see him about a commission.

“Nice people, your folks. Nice as they come.” On his feet again, he stopped and studied me for the first time, to see whether niceness ran in the family.