“Yup. Okay. Good night.” He laughed. “I mean, not good night but good nappy night.”

“You won’t forget?”

“About what?”

“You’ve already forgotten!”

“No I didn’t. I won’t forget.” He laughed again. He didn’t move to go upstairs. “Laughing is weird. Why do we laugh?”

“Probably so we don’t blubber like babies.”

“Oh.”

Stevie took a couple of steps up and I followed. Elsie shifted with the sudden movement but didn’t wake up.

“Can we read the red car book?” Stevie asked me.

“Sure.”

We got to the landing. The air was warmer up here. We turned and could see Hugh now, still on the bottom step. He grew smaller as we headed up the next flight.

I lowered Elsie to her crib slowly, gingerly, and she did not wake up. I read Stevie two books, then he crawled into his firmly bound bed (Margaret made the beds every morning, tight as sausages). He was asleep before I’d gotten to the chorus of “Here Comes the Sun.”

Back out in the hall I stuck my head out over the upper railing. Hugh was still down there. He moved and I pulled back quickly.

Up in my room I continued my letter to Gina. It was over fifteen pages now, the longest thing I’d ever written. I liked to run my fingers over the words pressed into both sides of the pages with my blue ballpoint pen.

“Where’s Hugh?” Mrs. Pike said as I was buckling Elsie into her highchair that night.

“Davy Stives is home,” Kay said. “They went into town for dinner.” Town, to the Pikes, wasn’t downtown Ashing. It meant Boston, an hour away.

“I hope he told Margaret.”

“I told her.”

Mrs. Pike frowned as she spread her napkin across her dress. It seemed like she was looking for something else to complain about.

I retreated to the kitchen before her attention could alight on me.

It was nearly four in the morning when the Malibu crunched slowly into a spot below my window. I felt a familiar dread as he opened the car door and got out. But he wasn’t drunk. I knew drunk. I was already an expert calibrator of drunk and high and coked out of one’s mind. He cut a straight crisp line to the stairs and took them easily. He opened the door quietly and disappeared. The outside light went off.

He didn’t come down for breakfast. Kay and I took the kids to Drake’s Island on the ferry for the morning.

In the afternoon we were back by the pool.

“How long have you known she wasn’t happy?” I heard Kay ask him.

Mrs. Pike was out playing bridge so there was no chance of her overhearing.

“Happy.” He said it like it was a filthy word. “Is your husband happy? Every day? Some days? What is happy? What is being happy in a relationship? Are you happy? Such a stupid word. What the fuck is happy?”