Pars watched Ana across the table. She smiled wryly at him; it made him feel the smallest bit warm inside. How it thrilled him to see her smile, for him to make her smile. For two years, each time he saw her in Manhattan or Berkeley, she had looked perpetually distracted, as if she were always working out some impossible algebra equation in her head. Only recently did she seem more present, more relaxed, as if something unmeasurable had lifted from her soul. At Magnetic Hill the day before in Moncton, she’d rolled down the window and hung herself out in the breeze, and screamed as the car was going backward; and for a moment Pars thought: This is what Ana looked like when she was eight years old, before the first worry: how one never quite loses the face of one’s childhood, how it sneaks into the creases and folds at times unannounced, unbidden, as it had that afternoon. And now, looking across the table at her, her hand over her mouth, her eyes shining, Pars saw it again: Ana at sixteen, at five. Ana at fifty. Ana when her husband married her. Pars felt incredibly close to him; he was always the third party in the room, this man named Russell. His name the word for what a bird does in the dark. He was there too, in that face; all of it in Ana, in a flash.

Kevin brought out more Sauvignon Blanc, and an Oregon Pinot Noir. He handed a bottle of Australian Shiraz to Pars.

In your honor, Kevin said.

Pars studied the label. His grandfather had made his own wine from the sweet amber grapes named after the city. But the Shiraz now, he explained, had little in common, unfortunately, with the original Persian grape.

Just then the kitchen door swung open and the odor of the roast filled the room. Sheila Quinn brought the silver tray to the table and set it down in the center among the other dishes. Ana closed her eyes and thought of her parents’ house on Long Island and the pot roast her mother used to make on Sundays when her grandparents visited from Queens. Claartija was transported briefly back to holiday meals at her home in southern Holland; for once, there was no fighting, and a Gestoofde runderlappen steamed on the table. Pars too was reminded of the tiny kitchen and the Abgousht his mother used to make, the heady odor of onions and sumac and lamb stewed for hours.