Twenty minutes later, while Rosalie is still washing up, Edwin returns to the kitchen. He’s more presentable this time, face washed, curls combed, wider awake. “Rose,” he says. “Would you show me Father’s grave?”

“Of course,” she tells him, all tender and flattered.

Asia, uninvited, insists on coming along.

Only then she doesn’t. While Edwin is fetching the carriage, hitching the horse (Roman, a chestnut Morgan), and bringing it all with much clatter to the front of the house, Asia’s friend Jean Anderson arrives unexpectedly. Clearly there is gossip of some sort, confidences to be shared. The whispering begins before Jean has even removed her gloves. So Asia begs off and suddenly the tête-à-tête Rosalie wants is being offered without any contrivance on her part.

In spite of the sun, the wind is cold enough to sting Rosalie’s cheeks. Her bonnet is too small to provide much protection. She remembers a time when women went out blinkered like horses. Edwin helps her onto the running board and into the buggy, puts a rough blanket over her lap, and takes up the reins. They drive in silence for a few blocks, down a street framed with sycamores, branches trembling, leaves rattling. And then Edwin asks her, “Do you remember my pet lamb? She used to follow me around, just like in the rhyme?”

“Yes,” Rosalie says. “I can’t remember what happened to her.”

“She went back to the farm. One day I was trying to read and she wanted to play. She kept pushing the book out of the way. So I hit her, a good solid crack on the nose with the book. I’ll never forget how she looked at me. After that, she never came near me again.”

“What made you think of her?” Rosalie asks.

“I don’t know. Regrets.” Perhaps his head is still hurting. He shakes it vigorously, smacks his own temple with his hand as if trying to dislodge a stone from his brain. The carriage bumps over something in the road, something small, an apple maybe or a potato someone dropped. Rosalie can’t lean out far enough to see. Edwin doesn’t seem to have noticed. He’s in the middle of telling her what it’s like to play Father’s old roles, how Father ghosts his every move so that with each gesture he can see his father’s hand moving through the air and must force his own in a different direction. “Like a rebellious puppet,” he says.

Rosalie thinks of suggesting that he not take the roles Father was so famous for. After all, his youth and beauty are more suited to romantic leads and less to glowering villains. But she can see that he’s deliberately announcing himself as his father’s son.