She made her way like a sleepwalker through her old life, through the rooms of her old life, hardly daring to breathe, feeling her heart go faint with . . . was it love? . . . surely it was love . . . love for her parents, and a sense of precariousness, doom. Her father’s face was deeply creased, he had aged visibly since Monica last saw him; she supposed she was partly responsible. (The breakup of Monica’s marriage, the surprise of her divorce, the mystery of her “current situation,” the problem of her “future.” How had it happened, Monica’s father demanded, that she was teaching in a preparatory school in Glenkill, Pennsylvania?—why had it happened? Why didn’t she receive alimony payments from Harold? And if it was a teaching career Monica wanted, surely she could teach elsewhere, in Indiana, perhaps, in Indianapolis, why not here in Wrightsville where she needn’t live alone . . . ?) Several years ago Monica’s mother had been hospitalized with a severe bladder infection, from which she had never entirely recovered. At the time of the diagnosis Monica had thought at once: Cancer. She had thought: Now we will all be punished. But it wasn’t cancer, Monica’s mother had not died. (Because she hadn’t died, however, Monica was obsessed with the idea that something in the universe was wrong, their good fortune was undeserved, she herself was indebted to God, in whom she had been incapable of believing since the age of fourteen . . . which fact even now endangered her mother’s life. Confessing this curious reasoning to Sheila, Monica had wondered if, in her soul, she was still a child; still infantile in her expectations. Sheila had said, Of course, aren’t we all . . . ?)

Six days at home, in the old house on Arlington Boulevard, overlooking the Lutheran cemetery. Six days’ grace. She pleased her mother by working with her in the kitchen and by eating heartily at meals; she pleased her father by being pretty, vivacious, uncomplicated, as he remembered her. Why, she even played some of her old piano pieces for them, out of her battered Piano Classics book—a Mozart minuet, several short preludes of Chopin, Schumann’s “Träumerei”—the long-forgotten notes leaping, it seemed, out of her very fingertips. She played haltingly, stiffly, yet she did remember the pieces, it was remarkable how she did remember, while she had forgotten so much else.

Shorty before Monica boarded her plane at the Indianapolis airport her mother embraced her impulsively, and rather hard; leaned back to stare at her; and said in a lowered voice that she was holding up well—far better than she would have done, under the circumstances. “You’re a strong woman,” Mrs. Jensen said, regarding her critically, “—though you don’t look it.”

Monica laughed, though she felt obscurely insulted. “Why should it mean that much?” she said carelessly, stepping away from her mother. “It was only a friendship, after all.”

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