I imagined—more than once, more than a few times that summer—my parents killed in a car crash in France. I imagined Grant and Ed moving in permanently; I wondered if my parents had a will and in whose care they’d planned to leave me. I imagined long courtroom scenes with my mother’s brother or my father’s aunt, both of whom seemed likely candidates for guardian, versus me and Ed and Grant. I imagined us winning the lawsuit, taking a big road trip like the ones we were always talking about: to Louisiana, to Acapulco.

To wish your parents ill, to wish that they would never return, seems heavy from an adult perspective but it sat lightly on me that summer. A frivolous, whimsical wish that I knew would never come true.

And it didn’t. My parents returned on August 16 as they had said they would, at six in the evening as they had also predicted. My father seemed stronger, full of a loud bluster I remembered from years earlier. My mother hugged me several times, each time telling me, like a grandmother, how tall I’d gotten. And then she looked me directly in the eye—I saw it was true that I had grown; I had to look down at an even steeper angle to meet her eye—and told me she was so surprised by how terribly she had missed me. On the word “terribly,” her lips crumpled out of their usual fixed position and she could not seem to right them. I held her gaze and said I was surprised by how little I missed her. And then we laughed. What else could we do?

“Let’s get you boys settled up,” said my father, and he led Ed and Grant up the stairs swiftly, without the torpor of the past few years. He opened the door to his study and I followed them in. From the bottom drawer of the desk he pulled out a three-ring binder that held his checks. He wrote slowly, one check for Ed, another for Grant. Behind him the hole was gone. I raked my eyes over the white surface until I detected a small, slightly darker area where it had been patched up and painted. I tried to catch Ed’s eye, but my father was asking them which professors they’d had, to see if he knew any of them.

“How was the Dordogne?” Grant asked.

They were awkward and stiff, strangers in a house that was once their own.

My father slid the binder back inside his desk and shut the drawer. “The Dordogne was the Dordogne.”

I knew it was a line Ed would savor, that it would become part of his lexicon with Grant. My father shook both their hands firmly and thanked them for taking good care of the house.

I walked with Ed and Grant down the porch steps, across the lawn to the Pontiac.