“It used to be Caroline’s,” Alice said, spreading the skirt. Surely the dress had never looked so good on her sister. The warm deep brown set off Alice’s hair, which she’d done differently, one pale band on either side pulled back and plaited. He wished he’d been the one to plait it.

“We were working on a terrarium,” Miss Atkins continued. “We lost track of the time. When we realized how late it had gotten, we threw on our boots and snowshoes and forgot we’d left our shoes behind.” He forced his attention back to her. “Have you heard anything more from our friend in Pennsylvania?”

Charlie shook his head. “Not yet,” he said, trying to match her cheerful tone. Enough gloom in the house already. Many of the wineries were already shuttered; others would be locked by officials on January 16th, when the new laws went into effect. Only a few had managed to make other arrangements. One friend’s family had gotten a permit to make and sell medicinal wine, to be prescribed by doctors, while his own family’s winery had a contract for sacramental wine. A rabbi in Rochester needed a supplier of kosher wine, too: a sign, his father promised, that not everything would collapse. But Charlie wasn’t sure he believed him. In the last few months his father had begun to look like he slept beneath a sofa, and even now, greeting guests by one of Bernard’s famous carp-handled vases, he was frowning.

At him? Maybe because he was talking with Miss Atkins. His father thought she interfered: Miss Atkins, who cared mainly about fish and fossils and moths and bees, her students—she’d been teaching for more than forty years—and now him. He said, quietly, “I wrote Professor Hardiman again, as you suggested. Just to remind him I’m interested.”

It was wonderful that she thought so highly of him. Yet possibly mortifying: What if she was wrong? She probably was wrong. A budding paleontologist, she’d proclaimed, after he’d done no more than go on a few field trips, examine some fossils, research their background in a couple of libraries. Based on that, and on some drawings he’d made and a few notes he’d written, she’d begun lending him her own books and ordering others from Cornell. Then, without even asking him, she’d written on his behalf to her old friend at the University of Pennsylvania.