Glenna said, “This is the only spot I don’t let my maid service clean.”

“You might want to rethink that.”

She laughed.

“Is that—” I stepped over to the wall behind the treadmill, too startled to finish my question.

Glenna didn’t answer, but she walked over with me and stood in front of Femme, the Picasso print she’d bought for me in Albany.

Glenna said, “You wouldn’t take it when you left, and I wanted to throw it out. But I’d written that promise on the back, that you, me, and Femme would still be together in ten years. And it felt—I don’t know—wrong to get rid of it. I stuck it in a box and put it in the basement, and when I came back here, I hung it up because I felt like this was where she belonged.”

Sadness welled up in me, and I was afraid if I looked at Glenna, I’d start to cry. I wandered over to the bay window. Snowflakes sparkled as they fell through the icy glitter of the moon.

Gently Glenna said, “Was coming here too hard?”

I shook my head.

“What’s bothering you, Gordon?”

“Dylan went electric.”

“Like forty years ago,” she said.

“It’s taking me a while to get over it.” I was dizzy and sat on the couch. I said, “I’m glad you kept Femme.”

“I’m glad I kept her, too.”

When the room stopped spinning, I handed my iPhone to Glenna. “That’s my son, Alex. I took the picture when we were at a baseball game in August.”

“What a good-looking young man.” I felt her sit on the other end of the couch. “I see you.”

Glenna returned my phone. I placed it on a stack of journals.

“Did I tell you how funny Alex is?”

“You didn’t.”

“Even as a little boy, he was funny. Once, when Alex was five or six, we were at the Washington Zoo and a deer bolts out of Rock Creek Park and into the lions’ area. The cats go after the deer, and Alex says, ‘I didn’t know the lions get room service.’”

Glenna said, “Sounds like he inherited his father’s sense of humor.”

“And my curiosity. Right after he came to live with me—he was what, fourteen?—I find him in the basement going through my army trunk, and he pulls out my medals.”

“You won medals?”

“The Purple Heart because a sniper nicked my arm. And the Bronze Star.”

“What’d you have to do for that?”

“I had to be ignorant. My sergeant was up ahead of me in a field of scrub bamboo, and he starts shouting that he got bit by a snake. So I run out into the field and carry him back so the medic can check him out. It was a dry bite—”

“No venom?”

“No venom. And when our lieutenant catches up with us, he says that another recon team had marked the field as mined, and he writes me up for the medal. Truth is, and I told Alex, I doubt I’d have run out there if I thought my ass would get blown off. But I’m Alex’s dad and he figures I’m a hero—especially since he knows a little about the work I was doing. Alex is real smart, and he begins reading about Vietnam and has a million questions. I try to answer them, but I’m nervous, because my dad’s Silver Star got me interested in war. Which is why I pushed Alex to go to Berkeley, since from what I heard nearly all the profs and students there hate capitalistic American warmongers, and I’m hoping my boy becomes a commie peace freak.”