He pulled her close, but Paula came around the corner then, and they jumped back. His daughter, however, was grinning. She took them each by the arm and led them to dinner. She’d lit a candle and poured apple juice into wineglasses. She’d put the heart of chocolates by his place. Lasagna sizzled in the center of the small table and Kate was smiling and Mitchell felt, if only for this moment in his kitchen, if only for this one winter evening, that he might not need a never-ending spell after all.

WHEN IN THE DORDOGNE

The summer of 1986, the summer before I entered high school, my parents went to the Dordogne for eight weeks. My father had been sick, and it was thought that France, where he had studied as a young man, would enable his recovery. Through the university’s employment office, my mother hired two sophomores to house-sit for the time they would be out of the country. As I came with the house, these two college boys were obliged to take care of me, too.

We lived at the end of a short street in a quiet neighborhood. Our house was big and gray, exceptionally large for three people, though I didn’t realize that until Ed and Grant arrived in a maroon Pontiac that first afternoon. The two boys stood responsibly beside me as we waved my parents off. Grant might have murmured something consoling as they disappeared around the corner, about how they’d be back before I knew it. And then, after a respectful pause, they let loose.

Ed ran into the house and circled the rooms like a dog just let off its leash, climbed up the front staircase and came down the tight back stairs and then went back up the front set again, whooping and whooping again, all the way to the third-floor balcony where he called down to Grant and me still standing in the front hall. Just as we looked up, he released a pale-green globule that landed right on Grant’s cheek. Grant barely flinched, wiped it off with the bottom of his T-shirt, and tore up the stairs. I could hear them on one floor and then another, down across the back hallway to my father’s study—I didn’t tell them not to go in, though I was screaming it in my head—and around to my sisters’ old rooms, my brother’s old room, all of them having left before I could remember them ever having lived there, their rooms still stuck in the seventies: the girls’ closet doors covered with McGovern-Muskie bumper stickers, my brother’s with Nixon-Agnew and Ford-Rockefeller. I stood there frozen in the downstairs hallway, not with fear but with amazement, with revelation. I had only seen people behave one way in this house, prudently, laconically, in codes I could not understand but had learned to imitate. And now here was another way.