“I’ll get them, Audrey,” Frances said, sharp, the way she spoke to the son she didn’t like much.

Sue had gotten the sugar and was filling the little pitcher with cream. Ben had wandered down the hall past the sunroom. Audrey found him at the end of the spider leg, in Cassie’s module. Cassie was the youngest and the farthest from her parents’ bedroom, which was down past the den.

“You passed the sunroom,” Audrey said from the doorway.

“It appears I have grandchildren,” he said, touching a copy of Madeline on Cassie’s unmade bed.

“Yes, you do.” She felt a flare of anger at him. Her own father had died a month before her first child was born. He’d written a letter to that unknown grandchild in a cursive jagged with pain. It struck her as more poignant now, that letter, than it ever had before. She had been so consumed by her own loss that she’d barely considered his. Though I will never cast an eye on you, he’d written, I will always love you, all your days. He had anticipated the end of his own ability to love anyone. When you die, she thought now, you can no longer give love. You can’t give love anymore. She wouldn’t be able to love her children. It struck her suddenly as the very worst thing about death, worse than not being able to breathe or laugh or kiss. A kind of existential suffocation, to not be able to give her children her love anymore. She thought of Larry. There would come a day when one of them would not be able to give the other love, when one would be alive without the love of the other. But this didn’t feel as dramatic.

Ben was still touching the book. But he was watching her.

“Papa!” The panic was back in Frances’s voice. “There you are. Don’t look at Cassie’s room. It’s a mess.”

“It’s a pristine and perfect room,” he said, not even pretending to look away from Audrey.

In the sunroom they drank coffee in the white Spode cups. The sun shone through Ben’s hair to his scalp. Sue led them into silly conversations. Beach club membership rules, Bonwit’s new charge card.

They went back and played another rubber, Frances with her father. They didn’t have the cards but Sue let them win, bidding low, passing unnecessarily, making mistakes. Sue wanted Frances to have Audrey’s experience of a victory with him. But Frances was not his girl and a half. Audrey felt him beside her, felt the heat of his arm though it never touched hers, felt his eyes on her hand when she played a card, felt they were speaking the whole time, though later she would wonder what on earth she thought they were saying.