The week before Amy and Phil were to go to the Lowrys’ lake house, Amy felt her whole tucked-in life start to wrinkle as if left in the dryer too long. Memories and questions about Nick Lowry leaked out and she couldn’t stop them. Was it menopause? Almost-empty nest? Seeing her son with a serious girlfriend? All of these were possible reasons for the disintegration of her well-being. She began to look, really look, at things that had never before bothered her.

She usually moved with ease in their home. She once loved the laundry—the small piles of neatly folded clothes representing each member of the family. She adored the evidence of family life under her feet, the sound of children running through the home, moments spent planning the next birthday, the next Easter-egg hunt. She had listened to the complaints of mothers in her children’s schools and neighborhood—about their unfulfilled lives, their hatred of the minutiae, their quandaries with housekeeping, and she would wonder that she felt so grateful for all the things they found so grating.

She sought perspective now, grounding, and remembered how when her parents had been killed in a car wreck when Molly and Jack were infants, Phil had provided the only solid foundation in a world adrift. The sudden loss of her parents was filled only by the love she had with Phil, Molly and Jack. The loss of Nick’s love had seemed, then, insignificant compared to the dank emptiness of soul her parents’ deaths had produced. She needed to remember that—remember what was important.

She stood in the laundry room with its blue-and-white-striped walls that she and Molly had painted during an excruciating 102-degree day four summers ago, and she pulled the clothes from her daughter’s tennis bag in slow motion. Her actions seemed apart from her—distinct but separate. There was a time when she was dating Phil, when her heart had begun to heal after Nick’s breaking it, that Phil had asked her why she liked country music. She’d told him that she didn’t know why she liked it, or why she adored the color Tiffany blue, or the smell of her grandfather’s sweater or the way rain ran down bubbled antique glass. Why would she want to know why? Wouldn’t analyzing it ruin the knowing of it? Just knowing what she liked was enough.

She tossed the laundry and realized this was how she felt now—she didn’t want to analyze why she was anticipating this reunion. She was afraid it would ruin the expectation that she hadn’t felt in . . . she couldn’t remember how long. For now, the feeling was a remembrance of the days when possibility was endless and she didn’t know what would happen next, when things weren’t so set and understood. She compared it to the anticipation of preadolescence, knowing a change was coming, but not what it would entail.