He baked and cooked for hours. A light rain thrummed outside the window. At noon, he showered and dressed, and Douglas returned from town. Around two he made a final check of the dining room. At three, Oscar began barking on the porch. Kevin fixed his hair in the hallway mirror and shouted for Douglas. They were here. He threw off his apron, smoothed his cardigan. He wanted to look respectable, reassuring, comforting. He couldn’t find the umbrella in the hallway stand.

Where’s the fucking umbrella? he shouted.

Douglas came up behind, with a large striped golf umbrella, and they went out together to the porch. A cream-colored limousine had pulled in to the drive, the windows tinted, headlights on, wipers slapping. A fine drizzle misted the lawn. The dog began running toward the car.

Oscar! Kevin shouted. You stay.

The dog dropped his ears and sat and watched as well. Kevin didn’t want to appear too eager, too pushy. Standing on the portico, he felt for a moment like the head servant of a country estate in a Russian novel, waiting to welcome his masters back from a long absence in the city; because didn’t death, tragic death, bestow a kind of nobility on the bereaved? Didn’t they become, for a few days at least, untouchable, venerable, beyond rebuke?

A girl in a black leather jacket climbed from the back of the limousine. Her hair was cropped short and bleached at the ends. She had a piercing near her eyebrow, and her jacket sprouted metal studs on the left shoulder. A young man, a few years older, in a blue blazer, got out the opposite side of the limousine. He had the same pale moon face and determined jaw as the girl. Out of the passenger’s seat leapt a woman in a gray pantsuit. She spoke to the girl, tried to hand her a green umbrella, but the girl shook her off. The woman in the pantsuit turned and, seeing Kevin and Douglas, shot a hand into the air.

Kevin walked down the steps to greet her; Douglas remained behind. Betty McIntyre introduced herself and clasped his hand. She was with the Red Cross, their Disaster Response Unit. Yes, Kevin said, they’d talked on the phone. There were tight lines around her mouth; her lipstick was unevenly applied. She handed Kevin a card with a Red Cross symbol in one corner. The rooms, he said, were all ready.

Mrs. McIntyre glanced nervously back toward the limousine. The girl in the biker jacket had wandered down to the shuffleboard court; the boy was smoking a cigarette on the gravel drive. Mrs. McIntyre leaned toward Kevin.