“I don’t remember. Ten years ago. Maybe longer. I thought about it when we were in the antiques store yesterday and I saw some Jean Archer prints.”

“Could your mother have sat for a portrait when she was working on the fund-raiser?” I asked.

Amy was silent for a moment, then she said, “I don’t know. I was young—fourteen or fifteen. I was so busy with my own life that I didn’t pay very much attention to what was going on around me. She could have, but I don’t know why she never mentioned it, unless—” She paused.

“Unless?”

“Unless it was because of my father.”

“Your father?”

“I never really understood it, but my father always objected to my mother’s activities in the arts. He believed too many of the people she knew had more talent for taking than doing. He called them moochers. It was the one thing they disagreed over. I sometimes wonder if that wasn’t the reason for their divorce.”

“It’s not a new story, Amy. There’s someone in Atlanta who has something of the same opinion about her husband’s friends, who happen to be artists for the most part. And, in fact, she’s right about a few of them.”

She smiled sympathetically and reached across the seat and let her hand rest on my arm.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Bad joke.”

“It’s all right,” she replied. “I’m just confused, that’s all. My mother was a private person. Maybe she did have a portrait done by Jean Archer and was afraid to bring it home, but if she did, I wish she had told me about it. The truth would help now.”

“I read something once,” I told her. “It said: ‘Truth becomes heaviest when someone tries to help you carry it.’ ”

“Do you believe that?” Amy asked.

“No,” I said, “but I think that’s what people are afraid of.”

She slipped close to me and took my hand and kissed it. “I think that’s the way I feel about us. I’ve always wanted to tell Peter everything about you, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t expect him to understand. Even when I’ve thought about it over the years—and I have, often—it’s more like a childish dream than a reality.”

I thought of Avrum’s warning: It is painful to love someone and believe you can never be with them.

I asked if she was sorry that she knew about the painting.

She did not answer immediately. Then she said, quietly, “No. It has love in it.”