He was just settling into the porch swing when he noticed a figure seated in a folding chair halfway across the sea of grass that swallowed up the drive and ran off into the forest in all directions. It was a girl, her back to him, and she had an easel propped up in front of her. For a moment, he thought it was Lori—the pinched shoulders, narrow waist, the flag of black hair—and he was already congratulating himself when he saw that he was mistaken. It wasn’t Lori, it was Nancy. Which was fine. Nancy, out there on the lawn, painting. He took his time—he didn’t want to push it, didn’t want to jinx himself—but eventually, when the drink was just a rattle of ice cubes and a brownish tinge at the bottom of the glass, he got up from the swing and went down the steps and across the lawn to her.

She was using watercolors, dipping her brush in a paint-stained fruit jar and then touching it to the palette in her left hand, the painting a duplicate of what he was seeing over her shoulder, the lawn, the fountain, the drive, trees like grounded missiles and six different shades of green, and though he was no judge of art he couldn’t help thinking she really wasn’t half-bad. Which made him feel a sort of paternalistic pride, even if it was secondhand. She was his son’s first real girlfriend, puppy love and maybe something more, though Joanie had put an end to that. He had nothing against her. She was a kid, that was all, and what the kids did among themselves was no business of his.

She must have felt his presence because she turned around just as he reached her, her eyes startled for the briefest fraction of an instant before she smiled and murmured, “Oh, hi, Fitz.” And then, as if she needed to apologize, added, “I’m just painting.”

“Looks great,” he said. “Really.”

She took the compliment in stride, cranking her smile up a degree. “Mr. Tortora, my art teacher at school? He said to keep it up over the summer because that’s what a real artist does, practice, practice, practice. You really like it?”

“Sure,” he said, “yeah, but listen, I was just wondering if you’d seen Lori around anywhere?”

“Lori?” she repeated, as if she’d never heard the name before. She leaned forward to dab at her painting, the green blotch there in the canopy of one of her reimagined trees, then straightened up and gave him a glance over her shoulder. “No, I don’t think so. She wasn’t at breakfast this morning, was she?”