When she returned home, she forbade herself to touch her piano; she knew it made her unruly. The freedom she’d experienced on her voyage was gone, but she was determined, and she set about making reparations with her remaining sons, her daughter, her husband. Building the relationship with her young grandchildren, trying to show them that she could be trusted, that they could count on her.

Yet the whole thing felt as treacherous as a high-wire act, and she so often slipped. No matter how she’d tried! What hurt most was that, with each failure, she felt she was letting Chase down, too. The resentment that stabbed her when she noticed her oldest son Jack’s hair beginning to go gray—he had left his brother so far behind. The Christmas dinner when from her end of the table she hurled a spoon at John; she remembered how large all the eyes around the table were as the spoon pirouetted past and clattered against the marble fireplace behind him. There were more examples that she didn’t care to remember.

More than twenty-eight years had passed since she had last laid eyes on Chase, and more than twenty-seven since the news of his death. His drawings, still posted on her vanity mirror, had turned yellow and brittle. Yet she still felt closer to him than to any of her other children. She heard the strain in Harry’s voice whenever she spoke to him on the phone; she saw the exasperation in Jack’s eyes. Her only remaining connection with Jinny was those furtive afternoons when Wilma would sneak into the living room and sink to her knees before the radio, flip on the noise, and turn the dial to WEBC and “Chesterfield Presents …Damsels of My Heart.” Her daughter, now known as Jennifer Michaels, in the major role of the vixen divorcée Roxanne Rogers, spewed out her husky lines as Wilma leaned back against the radio and let the voice vibrate through her own shallow lungs.

She had failed them all entirely, yet she kept trying. Each time she cooked a meal for John—or for any of the family who happened to visit—she considered it a penance of sorts, a peace offering. And each time she burned herself on the stove, or burned the supper and had to begin it again, she told herself, No more than what I deserve. Yet they never once had said to her, “This is difficult for you, isn’t it? What ever happened to your love of music? Why don’t you play your piano anymore?” They had not noticed the enormousness of her efforts at all.