And what is he doing, lingering here before Ruth’s dresser when the rest of the afternoon lies before him? He looks up from the photograph and glances around him, trying to relocate himself in the day. He needs to get going, he thinks, looking at his watch; Ruth and Isabelle will surely be home soon, and he’s got that phone meeting with the travel agent. The vet had taken longer than he’d expected; Dr. Bremer had decided to give Maggie another round of treatment, which Wilson tries to see as a good thing. It is a good thing, he thinks, because now there is that much more medicine working to contain and kill Maggie’s cancer—but he’s fooling himself, he knows. A single round of treatment ought to have been enough, and it was not. He didn’t dare ask the vet about Maggie’s prospects this time; he didn’t want to have to hang his hope on any number more meager than the twenty percent to which he clings.

He sighs and looks once more at the photograph before setting it down, and then takes the single step from the dresser to the window beside it. Their street is empty below him; garbage bags are piled on the curb awaiting pickup, and pigeons strut the gutter, pecking at scraps. A taxi careens into view, coming off Madison down their street; it could be Ruth and Isabelle, he thinks at first, but the taxi goes on by their canopy and disappears around the corner, where he knows it will merge with the flow of traffic on Fifth.

No one seems to be smiling today. From where she sits in the fogged window of the coffee shop, Isabelle has counted thirty-four people pass by, and only one had the trace of a smile on his face. No one is smiling in the line outside the popover café across the street. She looks across the table at her mother. She is not smiling, either. And neither is the woman behind the counter, or the man reading the paper at the table behind theirs. Isabelle spreads a smile across her face, the forced kind, the kind you put on not because you’re happy but because someone has asked you to smile for a photograph, or because you’ve just opened a gift in front of the giver. She holds that smile until her muscles start to quiver and her cheeks to ache and twitch. It’s strange, she thinks, that a smile should hurt.

She looks again at her mother. She is swirling the dregs of her hot cocoa with a spoon, where Isabelle knows rich chocolate has settled; Isabelle watches her take that last, best sip, and then she takes a sip of her own cocoa, which is still more than half full.

Her mother seems to feel her gaze, and she looks up. She takes a breath as if to say something, and Isabelle can, quite clearly, hear the words catch in her throat; she tilts her head expectantly. Her mother takes another breath, and then, “Isabelle,” she says.