Later that same spring Irene Putnam went with her husband down to the Blue Ruin. Everyone heard about the trip. Bobby Putnam told the story in his deep Adam’s apple voice, shortening it each time as he became more adept with the important points. Lilian heard the earliest version and was glad for the details, finding that they revealed more than Bobby Putnam was aware.

They had had to take a number of planes to get to the island, each aircraft shrinking in size till the last tiny one landed them on a short airstrip. They rented a car and drove over a straight dry road seeing no cars going the other way, heading to the north of the island. The land was flat, dusted over with white, with low brush, and Irene said how much she liked it. They stopped and got out of the car to watch the sun go down. Bobby Putnam leaned against the car, arms folded, squinting, wondering if they should try to get a boat tomorrow. Irene stood in the scrappy weeds, still in her wool dress but bare-legged, having taken off her stockings. It occurred to Bobby Putnam that they’d not been alone together since the children had come, at least it seemed so, and he thought of how Irene was a different girl from the one he’d married, a woman now he supposed, and it struck him, seeing her away from Boston, though he couldn’t have said how, how different she was. A traveler’s weariness hung over them, pale and rumpled, and they felt slightly disoriented.

That night they ate in the dining room with the other guests, a few small families, a pair of elderly sisters, a middle-age couple, and another couple their age. The usual group. They tried the local cocktails then fell back on their usual gin. Bobby Putnam was a gin man, and it was through him that Irene had taken it up. She had made an effort earlier in the month — Lilian had known about this — to cut down on the drinking, and her doctor had given her some pills to help her sleep, but she found that it hadn’t improved her mood, in fact quite the opposite, so she’d taken it up again. Bobby Putnam had encouraged her, they were here to have fun after all. He thought drinking would make her feel better, it did him. He wondered afterwards if the period of abstinence might not have thrown off her system.