“I want to hear this,” said Essie.

“I’ll make it up to you, baby, I swear I will,” said the telephone man. “Call me.”

The next morning Arthur was back, and he worked all that day and the next day with his mind the whole time on just two things: one, the Gravely mower; and two, Essie. Every now and then a little shred of a thought would work its way to the surface and he would be moved to sing out a word or a phrase, and all afternoon Helen and her little painting students on the porch would hear, “Elberta peach!” or “Ag tires from Axelrod’s!” or “‘Rave On’!”

For most of one afternoon he thought about a day fifty years ago out at Reed Pond, the day he fell in love with Essie and never got over it. Essie in her black bathing suit, eating an Elberta peach. Arthur could bring that day up in his mind anytime he wanted to and see it just as clear: the pickerelweed and cypress trees on the far bank, the sparkle on the water, then the posts of the dock and the wet and dry spots, then Essie and her laughing eyes, the way she looked at him right before her teeth sank into that Elberta peach. Then moving on from there, his own hands on his knees—both of them in those days—and on Johnny Lovett’s transistor radio that he was so proud of, Buddy Holly singing “Rave On.”

That day was the beginning of it, and everything had started changing on that day and never stopped changing from then on: Essie gone off to college and becoming a demonstrator, Helen in New York City an artist, and Reed Pond now called Mirror Lake, with lawn grass where the cypress trees used to be and houses all around it, each one as big as the Taj Mahal.