She pulled from me and crossed her arms again and again stepped on the rock covering the brochure, pushing her weight against it. “She worries,” she said after a moment. “I’ve never told anyone about this, Bobo, and you’ll have to keep it between us, but two years ago, my parents separated for a few months. I don’t know why. They just did. My mother left and we didn’t hear from her for weeks, then she came back. They live together now and they’re nice to one another, but that’s all.” Her eyes became moist. “They don’t even sleep in the same room,” she whispered. “I don’t know if you know it, but they have twin beds here. Sometimes—sometimes, I think it’s all a show for me.”

I could not imagine Joel and Evelyn Lourie living apart. Their relationship was the most tender I had ever seen.

“I’m sorry,” I told her.

She reached her hand to me. I took it and moved to her and held her.

I could hear her voice against my shoulder. “She likes you. She thinks you’re very talented. She loved the drawing you did of me.”

“She was nice about that,” I said. “So was your father.”

“It’s a Jewish thing, to worry,” Amy said. “Especially about children.”

“I understand,” I told her.

“Bobo?”

“Yes.”

“I love you.”

“And I love you,” I said.

Her face was damp from crying, her mouth hot on my mouth.

* * *

Sammy Merritt was overjoyed that I would accept his gift of the sculpture that he called Old Man. He asked if I knew where I would display it, in my office at school or at home. I told him I felt it would be more personal to keep it at home, that Carolyn had a place in her favorite bookcase where it would fit well. I could see Sammy’s imagination at play in his furrowed brow and glad eyes— his sculpture among leather-bound books, a small pinspot lighting it. “Good, good, good,” he muttered.

He had followed me on a before-dinner walk along a route that elderly guests of the Inn, the refugees at rest, had taken in 1955—past the untended swimming pool with its shallow, dark green pond of algae and leaf-rot, past the cemetery, then along a grass-covered roadbed where a rope-pull ski lift had once operated. It was the same route that Amy had taken to meet me at the birch tree.

I had not invited Sammy to join me. He had simply appeared from the Inn, jogging to catch up. He wanted to tell me about the gift of the Old Man, he said, because he was too eager to wait until after the memorial service for Avrum.

I was glad that Lila had warned me, but still I tried to act startled.