“George. Lovely to see you, et cetera.” She took my shoulders and actually gave me an air-kiss, her left cheek brushing mine, her lips missing me by a good couple of inches. Automatically I shaped up for a second kiss on the right, but I’d forgotten that’s the European way—in America you get just the one.

Well, that was about as much affection as I generally got from Gina.

She said, “As you can see I took time off work to see you, though Dan couldn’t get away. The boys are on their way home from school. I secured them a half day off.” Her accent was vaguely mid-Atlantic.

“I appreciate that . . .”

Her house was modern, the walls wooden, perhaps a little sun-bleached around the front door. The rooms were filled with light, lined with bookcases and TVs—it seemed there was a set in every room, and in most a computer—and there was a bright but slightly irritating smell, perhaps of pine-scented air freshener. This was a big, sprawling homestead set in an extensive acreage of finely cut lawn, over which sprinklers hissed, even at this hour, eleven in the morning. There is always so much space in America, so much room.

But the first thing I saw when I walked into her hallway was Dad’s grandfather clock.

It was a big, moth-eaten, unmistakable relic, whose heavy, tarnished pendulum and time-stained clock face had made it a kind of focal point of our childhood. I hadn’t noticed it missing in my clear-out visits to the house in Manchester. But now here it was—it looked as if it might even have been renovated—and I realized that Gina must have taken it from Dad, presumably with his consent, before he died.

She saw me looking at the damn clock. We both knew what it signified. It wasn’t that I wanted the clock, or would have stopped her taking it, but I would have appreciated some discussion over this bit of our shared heritage. It wasn’t a good start to the visit.

She took me to a breakfast room, sat me at a polished pine table, and loaded a coffee percolator. We sat and talked, inconsequentially, about the continuing fallout from our father’s death: the sale of the house, his business affairs. She didn’t ask me about my own life, but then she never did.