The fancy new homes that had seemed so raw when Sherri first visited Arthur are still nice, but they aren’t so new anymore. Now they are swallowed by overgrowth, at least on the sides of the homes that face the road. The old oak and ash trees have a thick, shadowy canopy for her to drive under. After so many years in the desert, she’s forgotten how wise and reassuring trees feel—tall trees, not like the Joshua trees that grow only a few inches a year. She doesn’t realize until that moment that she’s missed them, just like she’s missed the smell of damp soil and leaf dust, which is the pervasive scent on that shadowed stretch of land. Nothing is damp back home.

She follows the road for a quarter mile or so before the woods thin and the marsh becomes visible. If she goes to the right at the fork, she knows she will end up at the white Mediterranean-style house that looks out onto the main lake. A left should take her to Arthur’s old cottage, but when she takes it and drives to the end of the other point, his house isn’t there. Sure, she’s a nervous wreck, but it would be impossible to have forgotten where it was on this spit of land, wouldn’t it?

Once, when Bayard had meetings in D.C., he’d taken Sherri to see the starter home he’d shared with Nell in Leesburg, where they’d lived back when he’d worked for Xerox. That place had been his home for a dozen or so years, but even after all that time he drove from street to street, unable to remember which block they’d lived on, which threshold he’d carried Nell over for the first homecoming as a married couple, which front door he’d walked through holding newborn Meg, which yard he’d mowed and driveway he’d shoveled. Sherri thought about breaking up with him right then and there. What kind of person forgets where they’d lived? Was this a kind of domestic absentmindedness only men could enjoy?