She smiled and reached to refigure some minute way his collar. She said, “She’ll be flustered by you. Don’t pay any attention to that. You look wonderful; she’ll fall in love with you and treat you like someone trying to sell her something.”

The house was in the village, white with green trim, three stories under a pitched green tin roof. Behind what had once been a livery but now was a garage fronted with hand-crank gasoline pumps, the doors of the shop open where a man worked on his back beneath a T-model Ford. The man came up from under the Ford and moved slowly into the light of the day. In his forties, hard-muscled, with a slackness to his jowls and belly. His hands lined deeply with oilstain. He filled the Chrysler with gas and washed the windshield with a rag out of a bucket and dried it with another rag out of his hip pocket. Foster paid him and told him, “I’m looking for Constance Clifford.”

The man looked at him. Blinked slow once and did not introduce himself. “That’s Mother. She’s to the house with Dad. Park your car by the garage and walk around the side, you won’t miss it.”

As if she’d been expecting him she met him at the open front door, stepping onto the stoop, a thickly built woman in her seventies, low to the ground, a button-front sweater open over a sun-faded light print dress. Her hair a snarl of silver curls. She greeted him. “Beginning to think we’d have to come up there and pry you loose.” She did not smile. Her eyes the blue of winter water. “But you escaped all on your own.”

He felt he might apologize. He said, “You heard I was here then.”

“Prudy’s a talker. Some excited, I can tell you. I’m sorry to hear about your father.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Come in the house.”

Her husband Glen was a small person also, in a suit coat and vest with fob and chain and carpet slippers, who rose from his seat by the cold parlor stove and shook Foster’s hand, then covered their two joined hands with his other. His hair a pale fringe gone but for a sharply barbered clip behind his ears. They all took seats, the couple in their flanking chairs, Foster on the edge of an old stiff horsehide-covered sofa.

Glen said, “Prudence was correct. He favors your brother.”

“That’s what they say.”

Connie studied him. Then said, “You do take after him, it’s true. Norman was gone to the war between when I was a little girl and grew up. He was a man time I got to know him. He was a sentimental man, Norman was.”

“I’m afraid I’m that way too.”

“It’s not a trait to pity or fear. Perhaps it makes for sadness looking at the world. But that doesn’t make it less true.”

“Maybe I’ll grow out of it.” He tried out a small grin on her.