“You did your best, though, right?” she asked. When I couldn’t even nod, she asked me again. “Tell me. Did you do your best?”

I thought back to the suddenness of his diagnosis—the reason he had been mixing up day and night was because of a tumor that had sprung up seemingly overnight in his brain like a big spongy mushroom—and surgery; the rush to get him placed in a good rehab hospital and then into a good assisted living facility that would agree to take such a short-term resident—they’d said he had a year at most, but it was exactly half that. As the dogs played in the tall grass along the path—Charlotte was still on a leash then—I thought of all the paperwork, all the trips back and forth to visit him during the day and in the evenings, sometimes taking the dog with me, or Teddy; how Gary would sometimes meet us there and we would have dinner with my father in the resident dining room, pretending that we were like all the other families at the surrounding tables, enjoying time with a healthy senior who had merely downsized from a big house to independent communal living. I thought about all the trips with him downtown for chemo, all the MRIs and phone calls to doctors, and to the insurance company, running, always running, from home to Teddy’s school, to my father, back to Teddy, then home again. Those days and months were a blur, as opaque as the white sky that March day at the reservoir. I couldn’t see past it.

“Then I will answer for you,” Glenn said. “You did your best.” When I didn’t respond, she dug her fingers into my arm. “Say it. It’s important that you say it. Because it’s true.”

“I did my best.” The words came out with my breath and hung in the air.

“And?”

“I did my best and I was a brave bear.”

“A very brave bear.”

Today, with Phoebe, I nod. “That’s exactly right. All you can do is do your best.”

“Well!” Phoebe says, half-laughing half-crying, wiping tears from her eyes. “Now I’m the Debbie Downer! Let’s get back to Nick! What else did you assume?”

I shift my weight, move my back away from whatever was sticking into it. “That he’s probably about as big of a pothead as Gary is.”

“Gary’s a pothead?”

“He’s supposed to be quitting. Again. Really soon.” In my dreams.

“Well, you’re certainly right about that,” Phoebe says.

“I am?” I feel like I should win a prize, but she just grins at me benignly. I guess this is what a normal conversation is like: one measured, appropriate sentence after another. “How long have you guys been together?”

“A year this past August.”

“A year!” I want to tell her a year is nothing, that everyone’s happy after the first year, that it’s the years that come later that will crush you if you’re not careful, but she’s staring past my head suddenly, then poking excitedly at something on one of the shelves with her unwieldy hooves.