I told her I hadn’t, that I was just finishing something else first. She looked at me imploringly. “Well, please, as soon as you can. I love Peggy and she’s wonderful to me, but when I back her up, she has no idea how much prep time I’ve put in. I’d hate to spoil the illusion she has that I’m brilliant.”

I laughed. “It’s no illusion.”

She took another sip of her coffee. “Where’s Boberino?”

As an answer, there came a very unmusical noise from my piano upstairs, the sound of a kid hitting a bunch of low piano keys in clusters, with the right damper pedal pressed down so that the notes reverberated. It resembled discordant thunder. Kids love to do this. Leave a kid who’s never seen a piano before alone with one in a room for no less than fifteen minutes and he or she will discover, all on their own, that this can be done. It makes them feel powerful.

To anyone else, it would sound like noise. To this father, it was a symphony.

“Enough,” said Gail, standing forthrightly. “You’ve put me off too long. I’m going up there to give him his first piano lesson.”

“Oh, thank God, please do,” said Nancy, joining us at the kitchen table. “His father thinks it sounds wonderful when he does that, but I can’t take much more. My nerves aren’t what they used to be.”

I mock-protested, “No son of mine is going to be a musician. They’re a bunch of scoundrels and rogues. He’s going to be a marine biologist, or an astronomer, or an encyclopedia salesman—anything but a musician.”

“You can’t help it, if it’s going to happen,” said Nancy. “That’s pretty much out of your control.”

“Is he as much of a handful as ever?” asked Gail.

“Do you mean Ray or Bob?” Nancy asked back. The two of them laughed, sharing their resigned tolerance of me. “I suppose Bob’s the one who runs me the most ragged. I thought the hard part was having a baby at thirty-eight. That was a milk run, figuratively and literally, compared to having a ten-year-old.”

“Scott and I can’t wait to have those problems,” said Gail. She downed the last of her coffee, and sighed. “Well, let’s see how much Bob loves me when we’re playing scales instead of catch.” Smiling, she left the room and went up the stairs.

I took Gail’s coffee cup over to the sink, where Nancy was rinsing off some tomatoes she’d miraculously managed to grow in an unpromising patch of our backyard. She examined them with the same thoughtful, hopeful eyes she and Linney had always had in common.