Sometimes when he was a little drunk, on Sunday afternoons in particular, Everard got onto the old subject of Joe, his dead brother Joe: there were scores to be settled, Everard wasn’t going to forget, he didn’t want fresh trouble but he wasn’t going to forget. . . . And that Sanjek bitch, that cunt, where had she gone and why hadn’t she ever sent any word? . . . Lee was intensely interested in all this though he kept his voice low and guarded. Why couldn’t they do something?—even now?—he remembered his uncle Joe pretty well, was it too late? They discussed the possibilities, the dangers, drinking bottle after bottle of ale together, their words lurching and heated and curiously abstract. Once, cleaning up after supper, Marya happened to overhear Lee say passionately that what he’d have done, back then, he’d take a shotgun and stick it up somebody’s rear and pull both triggers, he’d do it even now: all Everard had to tell him was who.

An old subject, familiar, discussed tirelessly over the years, yet still capable of arousing pain and exhilaration. Marya learned not to get upset when she overheard. Eventually she learned not even to hear.

TWENTY YEARS LATER, crossing a street in a distant city, Marya happens to see a teenaged boy straddling a bicycle at the curb nearby, talking and laughing loudly with two of his friends: thick-necked, long-limbed, sinewy, brutish and childish at once: the very image of her cousin Lee.

Her cousin Lee as he’d been, of course—long ago on the Canal Road.

That age. That physique. Braying with laughter, showing his big white teeth, poking one of his friends in the shoulder. Marya stares; freezes at the curb; feels her heart beating rapidly; wonders what the boys are talking about. . . . The slang, the hearty smut, the companionable gestures and mannerisms, the camaraderie of adolescent boys. . . .

Marya who knows herself tough and resilient and supremely capable of blocking unwelcome incursions from the past nevertheless feels a powerful welling-up of dread, excitement, vertigo. She finds herself staring helplessly at the boy as if she were waiting to recognize him. Waiting for him to recognize her.

Then someone says: “Marya? Is anything wrong?”

“No. Nothing. I’m fine,” Marya says.

The moment passes swiftly, the faint roaring and buzzing in her head has already lifted. She is supremely in control, it is twenty years later, she is in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a very long way from the Canal Road, and the boy straddling the bicycle looks nothing at all like her cousin Lee Knauer. It must have been a trick, Marya thinks, of the hazy May sunshine.

VERA WASN’T WELL, she slept through much of the day, sprawled on top of her dirty rumpled bed, breathing so hoarsely and erratically that Marya thought she might be dying.