“The maples. They keep growing. We’ve lost some trees over the years. There was a beautiful big copper beech shading the side that I miss. Are you sure you wouldn’t like a drink of something?” Janice can’t bring herself to use the girl’s pretentious, storybook name. She is thinking that what she herself really wants, to cushion this shock, and get her through this strangeness, is a glass of dry sherry.

“A glass of water would be lovely.”

“Just water? With ice?”

“Oh no, not ice. You’d be amazed at the amount of microbes that live in ice.”

Harry had always made her feel impure, even when he was in the wrong. She hands the girl her tumbler of clear liquid. Fingerprints on fingerprints. Now they use DNA—not that O.J. didn’t go free anyway. That long-legged prosecutor outsmarted herself, and that black lawyer was slick. The girl seems minded from the way she faces to go out the back door and sit on the sunporch with its view of the vegetable garden and the old swing set, but Janice firmly heads back to the living room, gloomy and little used. It’s on the way out. She has the girl go first and lags behind her enough to snatch the Taylor sherry bottle from inside the dining-room sideboard and unscrew the cap and tip a little into her tea. The hearty, tawny tang of the liquor arises and erases the antiseptic scent the girl trails, a kind of cool mouthwash, from the back of her neck and her bare arms. “So I expect you’ve told me about all there is to know,” she says when they have settled again, on the same furniture.

Annabelle does not concede this. She resumes, “I was saying about my parents, as a child I never knew when they got married, and when I grew old enough to be curious, my mother allowed that maybe I had come before the wedding, since Dad’s mother was still alive but ailing and a marriage might have hastened her death. This seemed to figure, it being back in 1960, before things got liberal.”

What got liberal? Janice asks herself. Abortion, she supposes. And young couples living together. But these things happened then too, only deeper in the dark. The year 1959 seems very close, as close as the beating of her heart, which beat then too, back in the tunnel of time, that same faithful muscle, in its darkness and blood. She doesn’t want to prolong the discussion, though; she doesn’t want to get involved, though there is a tug, back into the past’s sad damp pit.