Don’t forget to put water in the bottom of the roasting pan, he added.

Ah Verdomme! she said and threw a hand in the air.

Kevin watched her go; he recognized the borrowed gesture and was secretly pleased. He turned toward the stairs. He needed to shave and shower before the guests arrived.

The first few years, the anniversaries were solemn. The second year hardly anyone showed up. Yet something happened around the third year. People stopped coming out of obligation or a sense of deep bereavement. They told stories around the table. They laughed. They spoke—for the first time—of the future. The weekend was no longer so reverential or sober. Claartija, who’d been living at the inn for almost two years now, took them out in the Sunfish on the water. They lay on the beach for an afternoon or barbecued in the evening. Kevin imagined they came partly to remember. But also, partly, to relax.

That fifth year, Ana Gathreaux made the journey from Manhattan. The drive took at least two days. If she’d caught the ferry in Bar Harbor it would have been shorter, but Ana liked traveling overland, through the Maine forests, past Katahdin—the haunt of Russell’s Bicknell’s Thrush—up to Houlton, where she crossed the border into New Brunswick. She’d done the drive twice now. Once at the first-year anniversary with her mother-in-law, and again the third year. She enjoyed driving alone, at the end of summer, feeling the continent slip beneath the wheels of her rented car, smelling the ripe fields through the window, the goldenrod, corn, and hay—and watching the migrants along the way heading in the opposite direction. Crossing into Canada, she always felt as if she’d left a piece of herself behind there at the border and once through customs, she felt a little lighter, shorn of a slight percentage of body weight? Memory? Her work? She didn’t know which. But during those first empty miles on Highway 2, sunlight splashing the pavement, she couldn’t help but smile, as if she’d somehow gotten away—from what, she couldn’t say.

This year, however, she hadn’t come alone. She’d driven from New York City with Pars Mansoor. They spent a night in a roadside motel in the Maine woods. In Moncton, they visited Magnetic Hill and drove up and down it six whole times. They stopped in Great Village, Pars wanting to see Elizabeth Bishop’s childhood home. In Truro, they watched the tidal bore, the long tides rushing in from the sea. It was something of a vacation for them both. They spent the last night outside New Glasgow before heading down to the South Shore.