It was the following morning, Sunday, the house quiet—and cold, so cold you tried to stay in bed as long as you could, in Fitz’s case with the Times, which he normally shared with Joanie, but that wasn’t in the cards this morning because Joanie wasn’t in bed with him. Joanie was in the meditation house with Fanchon, in bed or not, and Corey had come in without knocking and asked where his mother was because, as it turned out, he had a paper due the next day for history and she’d been helping him with the research.

“For the whole week?”

“It’s an experiment. We all voted on it. It’s a way of bringing us all closer together—”

“One big family.”

“Right.”

Corey just stood there, his loose-leaf notebook thrust under one arm, looking puzzled and upset. As fiercely as he asserted his independence, he was still a kid—not yet sixteen—who didn’t seem to have much of an idea as to how clean underwear wound up in his dresser drawer or the food got from the supermarket to the stove to the table, and though he’d never admit it, he needed his mother. If not as his confidante—it seemed Nancy and Richard had replaced her there—then as the bête noire he could react against and at the same time test over and over with his multiplying needs. That night of the snowstorm, the night the kids had been shunted off to the Bowling Alley and Joanie had found him there with Nancy, was the turning point, though Fitz had been unaware of it at the time. Joanie hadn’t come to bed at the usual hour that night and he’d assumed she was busy with the cleanup and preparations for the next day’s meals and seminars, but when he woke at dawn there she was, sitting on the edge of the bed, still dressed in the white skirt and sweater she’d put on for the paying guests. “What’s the matter?” he’d asked. “Are you all right?”

For a long moment she said nothing, her breath steaming in the cold of the room that might as well have been a tent in the woods for all the heat the radiators gave up. “Corey,” she said. “I won’t have it. I won’t.”

“Have what? What are you talking about?”

“He’s going to get her pregnant, you know that, don’t you?” “Nancy?”

“Who do you think I’m talking about, Queen Elizabeth? You know what he did?” Suddenly, angrily, she was shoving the sleeve of the sweater up her arm to reveal a dark seep of discoloration in the crease of her elbow and a matching bruise on her forearm. “He pushed me out the door! Pushed me!”