After I got behind the wheel, Glenna said, “You want everything from me, don’t you?”

There was no hint of accusation in her tone. She was simply asking a question.

“What’s ‘everything’?” I said.

“Don’t have a clue. But after rounds on Saturday, we’re going to Vermont. You want to help me look for it there?”

“Aren’t you on call?”

“Found someone to switch with me,” she said, and kissed me softly on the lips. “So you want to help me look?”

“Absolutely.”

Chapter 10

BENNINGTON WAS A classic Vermont college town, its quaintness marred only by the occasional pizzeria or factory outlet. Along the narrow side streets, past the grassy commons, stone churches, the stacked rock walls, and the saltbox houses built before the Revolutionary War, old men in plaid lumber jackets raked leaves into fires, and because the top was down on the GTO, the smoke washed over us in a sweet mist.

We checked into the Paradise Inn, which sat up on a hill in the center of town, and after Glenna and I took some pictures of each other with my Minolta, we ate lunch at the Brasserie, a rambling clapboard building attached to the Bennington Potters. A young freak with long, stringy sandy hair and tinted Ben Franklin specs provided the entertainment by waiting on us at one of the tables in the courtyard.

“What’s the soup du jour?” I asked.

Peering at me as though I’d asked him to elucidate the meaning of existence, he replied, “Like I don’t know, man. It’s different every day.”

I skipped the soup, and we had some white wine from a local vineyard and ate salad and cheddar-cheese-and-tomato omelets and a freshly baked baguette with sweet butter and strawberry jam from a farm a mile outside Bennington. We were too full for dessert and sleepy from the wine and the meal, so we drank espresso and then wandered over to the potters’ gift shop, where Glenna bought four place settings of aquamarine stoneware.

“Glenna, you think fine dining at home is eating take-out Chinese. What’s with the fancy dishes?”

“Palmer,” she said, paying the cashier, a flinty old woman with a white bun on her head that was so tight it had to be a method of Puritan torture. “He loves these dishes.”

I was suddenly angry, but there was no use fighting about Biff in Vermont; we could do that in New York.

“Let’s go explore,” I said.

We drove north on Route 7, and twenty minutes later we left the car on the side of the road and climbed to the top of a rise above a lake. A farmhouse and a barn with a silver-domed silo were beyond the dark blue water, with a redbrick church beyond the farm, its steeple pure white against the flaming maples, and beyond it all were the mountains and leafy treetops standing out against the clear sky in clouds of russet, orange, and gold.

We spread a blanket and pillows on the grass behind a wall of pines, took off our shoes, and lay next to each other reading.