So Joey came to live with Virginia Reeves. Through the rest of July and the month of August. And did not ask and did not need to be told what lay between the woman and Sloane but could see it for herself that first afternoon and later the one or two evenings a week he’d come to the house at a quarter past five on his way from his sporting goods store to his home where his wife and children waited dinner upon him; stop as Virginia prepared a gin rickey for herself and Sloane would pour himself an inch of scotch into a tumbler from the decanter on the sideboard and they would sit then, the three of them, and pass the time of day. Joey could see them as they were when their younger selves first came to the grand collision that would not be enough to draw either of them from the course each had already set but strong enough to alter that course and so create the taint of sadness in their pleasure of each other. The pleasure Virginia Reeves and Edgar Sloane created was received and bestowed measure for measure effortless but at great cost. And she watched them together and knew she was being allowed a privilege few others had. Watching them, her skin hurt.

Daytimes she sang scales and exercises until her stomach muscles were a hard band and her lungs pressed outward within her chest. Drank chamomile tea with lemon and honey for her throat. They worked through Joey’s repertoire as song by song Virginia Reeves discarded all but a handful and she learned new ones, some new to her and some new altogether off sheet music arrived from New York. Afternoons they had tea with frail cookies baked by the Irishwoman in the kitchen and served by an Irish girl and the tea would turn to drinks and then they would eat together a meal again prepared and served by the mute help and afterward would sit in the parlor alone on the nights Sloane did not stop and play mah jong or listen to opera arias from the Victor gramophone; they would sit when a record came to an end with the haunt of sound lingering until one or the other would finally rise to lift the bumping needle and place the heavy curved arm back in its rack or sometimes start the needle at the beginning to listen once more to the recording. What conversations they had beyond instruction and manners were slight, as if the Reeves woman in her silence was not only maintaining privacy but allowing Joey the opportunity to discern the full import of a mantle of discretion.