She nodded, her head moving against his shoulder. He couldn’t see her face. “It just feels so weird to be back here. It’s not like I remember it.”

He kissed the top of her head—her hair was still damp—and gave her bare behind a squeeze. “Hey, so what. We’re making new memories now.”

She looked up at him and smiled. “You’re such a sweet boy, Henry.” She kissed him soft and slow, and in a minute he was up again, and though she resisted, playfully—“I told you, Henry, I’m starving”—with a nudge she got on top of him and they found each other without trying.

After lunch they sat out on the front porch and watched the rain, which was cool and fragrant, and she pointed out houses on the street and told him about the people who had lived in them during the summers. There were the Woods, in the cottage across from them, whose daughter, Betsy, used to babysit her sometimes. Next door to the Woods, in the large house with the barn-shaped roof, lived her friend Vivian Healy, whose older brother, Charles, had died in Korea. A few houses down, on this side of the street, in the big purple Victorian, lived an older couple who always kept to themselves. She never knew their names. “You’d just see them walking hand in hand down the sidewalk, and they’d smile at you and say hello, but that was all. There was never anyone else there, no children or grandchildren. Just the two of them.”

“That’ll be us someday,” Henry said.

Effie laughed. “Don’t say that. It’s too sad.”

“How is it sad? It sounds sweet to me.”

She shook her head. “No,” she said. “You and me—there’ll be no peace for us, I’m afraid. We’re going to have us a roost.”

“God help me,” Henry said. She’d made it clear to him that she wanted five children at least, all boys if she had her way, that she wanted a house that never rested, that she and Henry, into old age, would be at the center of a maelstrom of life (she wanted dogs too), and though he didn’t care one way or another about children, or dogs—in fact her idea of the future had alarmed him when he really thought about it, in the weeks before their marriage—now it made him feel light and for a brief moment radiantly happy. They were going to be all right.

“What are you smiling at?” she said.

“You,” he said.

“Quit it,” she said, and she kissed him before he could say anything more.