YEARS, DAYS, SEASONS. Marya recalls the cracked windshield of the old car, the fuzzy blue covering on the steering wheel, the rusted gauge . . . but couldn’t begin to estimate how many times Lee had taken her there. It was like the games played with cards or dice, one game shading into another, always the same game, really, indistinguishable from any other. And was it finally important, Marya demands of herself; was it finally significant, giving a certain tone, a certain poetic flavor to that distant period of her history called childhood . . . ?

She doesn’t want to exaggerate. She isn’t sentimental, she wants no excuses, she is likely in fact to be rather pitiless with herself.

One day soon she will tell her lover about Lee Knauer, but the opportunity must present itself gratuitously, like fate. For Eric Nichols isn’t in the fullest and richest and most magnanimous sense her lover. (He claims to love her, to be devoted to her, but Marya knows better: it’s just his notion of her, a kind of capsule-sized female in his brain, “Marya” in this pose, “Marya” in that, “Marya” imagined, of all things, as deserving of love.)

However, she will tell Eric Nichols about her boy cousin; she is conventional enough to believe that he has a right to know.

For if this man loves her, even if he is deluded in his love, he must have a sense of her history, of who it is he believes he loves.

And telling him about Lee will serve the purpose of explaining certain hesitancies and doubts in Marya’s nature, that stoniness of soul he has surely noticed. (Not that Eric Nichols has said anything to Marya. He is kind, patient, gentle, supremely civilized. Not at all what Marya Knauer deserves.)

When I was eight years old. . . .

There was a cousin of mine, a boy, a few years older than. . . .

My parents died when I was eight and my two brothers and I were taken in by. . . . And I had two cousins, a boy and a girl. And the boy, he didn’t really mean any harm, he didn’t really know what he was doing. . . .

This sort of thing happens all the time, it isn’t uncommon though I once thought it was. In recent years . . . the statistics. . . .

ONE DAY LEE was working in the garage, doing repairs on the Jelinskis’ Pontiac, lying flat on his back on one of those wheeled contraptions that roll under a car, when the jack somehow slipped and the car came crashing down and his left leg snapped—the bone called the “femur” (as the Knauers would later learn). It broke in two places, causing such pain that Lee fainted. He’d had time to cry out—a single strangulated cry Marya would hear many times in the course of her life.