They welcomed him on sight, in their mild way. Seeing them now in the light of the lamps, which had already been lit, both his parents looked nervous, bright-eyed, flushed pink, self-conscious. Aunt Inger looked like that too. So did his cousins. It was something that would have been easier to miss if they weren’t all together in one place. Lucas wondered about their strange, lingering sadness—but it couldn’t be real sadness, even if they kept their voices down like people who didn’t want to wake a sleeping baby in the next room. Their manner reminded him, come to think of it, of people with newborn babies in the house; they had the same odd combination of fatigue and alertness. What was it? They were all overwhelmed with adult business. That’s the way it is. He felt more grown-up for thinking about it that way, closer to his parents and relatives, and a mimicry of resignation passed over him as a novel and interesting experience.

Lucas greeted everyone, and then Aunt Inger led him across the hall to the sewing room. The light was better there. Together they sat on the stiff horsehair sofa, she reading to him, and he looking at the illustrations and following the tip of her tapering finger as it scanned the lines of text. This was one of his favorite books. He knew the story by heart and took satisfaction in the way the events slotted reliably into place, one after another. As she read, he could hear the bustle of preparations going on in the house, the regular squeak of the kitchen door, the tramp of feet, the incessant murmur. After a while, his father appeared in the door, summoning Aunt Inger to assist his mother with the last preparations. He looked haggard, but then helping to make family dinner always seemed to tax him, and he didn’t fail to give his son an encouraging smile.

“Are you hungry?” he asked.

“Oh yes!” Lucas said.

His father laughed inaudibly.

“We’ll begin in a minute,” he said, going away with Aunt Inger.

Lucas went to the bathroom in the meantime, then made his way through the back of the house toward the parlor, where he could hear the clank of plates and plink of steel forks and spoons. They didn’t use the silver anymore.

The door was open, the kitchen was in its usual order, redolent now of onions and chicken, and there was another, unfamiliar smell too. There was something unusual about the kitchen, he realized: the door in the corner, what they called the closet door, and which was supposed to be impossible to open for some reason, was ajar. He’d never seen inside. And his parents had told him clearly that the door was useless. Had they been hiding something from him? Or had they only just managed to get it open?