Which is often the way, I think, with what ruins us: it comes back, to offer us at last—well, nothing we’d have wished for, exactly. Who wouldn’t have wanted it all to happen differently! But the thing that harms turns out, sometimes, to be the very thing that restores, the exact thing.

In the autumn of 1997, something happens I’d never have predicted. My father and his second wife come to visit Cape Cod, a day’s stop on a bus tour of New England they’ve taken to see the fall foliage. They have, these years, traveled everywhere together—cruises to Hong Kong and up the Yangtze, up the Pacific Coast to Alaska—and my stepmother’s even gotten my father to dancing lessons, and to join a square dance club. The day their group tours the Cape—looking at lighthouses and shopping for souvenirs—Larry and Edith spend with Paul and me.

We’ve been making ourselves crazy with a ridiculous flurry of preparations; Paul’s nervous about meeting them, after all he’s heard, and he vacuums as though his life depended on it. We oil the furniture and dust the bookshelves and polish the kitchen till it gleams, or comes as close to gleaming as an old and well-used house, home to two men, two dogs, and two cats, is capable of. I decide the front of the place is looking inexcusably shabby, and two days before Larry and Edith are due to arrive we’re up on ladders, wielding scrapers and buckets of paint. From the whirlwind emerge brilliant white clapboards, black shutters, everything redone but the front door, which there’s no time for, and anyway we rather like its faded, scaling green, salt-air scoured to just the right patina.

We pick them up at their motel, at the appointed hour, and they chatter away in the backseat about the people in their tour group, and the nice and not-so-great places they’ve stayed, and the colors of the leaves. They ask Paul questions about himself; I am startled that they seem to find him completely likable. The quality of affection it would perhaps be difficult to direct toward me, complicated as our history is, they offer him unguardedly. He’s solicitous of their well-being, and he notices how Edith cares for my father, looking after him, and how he’s always careful to make sure things are just as she likes them. We stop at a beachside restaurant—hot dogs and clam chowder, their choice—and when Paul gets up from the table they both say to me, “Such a nice young man.”

I say, “He’s not that young,” but they just smile.

When it begins to rain a little and Paul produces a pair of umbrellas from the trunk of the car, my father says, “That Paul thinks of everything.”