“Jet-setters.” Carroll nodded his head in an impressed fashion. In addition to having a barely functioning car, Carroll couldn’t operate the clutch. They lurched onto Sedgwick Avenue.

“Listen, if you ever need a ride to campus—”

“I’ll call a cab.” Anne put her hand on his arm as Carroll chose a lane. Horns blared from all sides.

“I must admit I learned to drive last summer. In Kinsale, we tend to ride around on goats . . . or my uncle Finbar.”

The Imperial growled up the incline to the Fordham Hill oval. “Last stop, Mrs. Malone.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Listen, Anne, Erikson is speaking at Columbia on Thursday night. I was going to go.”

Anne had a foot out the door of the car. “What’s the lecture about?”

“Identity crisis.”

Anne returned to the den and plunked down in one of the burnt-orange chairs she had brought down from the Bronx and had reupholstered. She wanted another drink but had to keep a semisober eye on Pat. I’ve picked too many fights with him lately. The man was sick, and she felt terrible about it. But when she saw him stumble around the house every evening, all she had was anger. You could have left this. No. You should have left this.

For distraction she cracked open The Thorn Birds again to find Meggie plagued by brutish men. Oh, Meggie, where are you going to now, girl? Anne skimmed ahead, reading the dialogue to follow plot—a trick that got her through Dickens in school. Okay, look out: Father Ralph, now Archbishop de Bricassart, was back in Drogheda.

“In a sense Ralph was like God; everything began and ended with him . . .”

Pull it together, Meggie. Anne jumped ahead a few pages, her annoyance growing. Now she was on Matlock Island with Reverend Richard Chamberlain lurking around.

“Before she could reach the veranda . . .”

Anne looked out at the concrete patio of her house. Verandas caused a lot of adultery.

“. . . he caught her, the impetus of her flight spinning her round against him, so hard he staggered . . .”

Anne sat up. Here we go . . .

“Up slid her arms around his neck, his across her back, spasmed; he bent his head, groped with his mouth for hers, found it . . . He could feel her yet he did not feel her . . . never again would he not know the upthrusts of breasts and belly and buttocks.”

Anne fidgeted in her burnt-orange sofa chair, and for a few seconds she was able to turn off the part of her brain that realized this writing made getting laid sound like a butcher watching aerobics. Anne thought of Ronan and the afternoon she drove up to the College of New Rochelle. He had gone back to the cloth. Not as a Jesuit; Diocesan. They walked down to that park to be alone. Through the tree line, which opened up to a rocky shore and blue skies over the Long Island Sound.