The dog is in the cemetery, coursing up and down the cracked and weedy drive. Must be squirrels, Ed thinks. The dog is mad for squirrels. But the dog doesn’t run toward the tree line. He stands there, sniffing the air with an upturned snout. He tracks along the drive, going farther than Ed should let him go. For an instant, Ed is afraid that the dog will desecrate a grave, but he doesn’t.

Ed leans against one of the pair of painted brick columns that flank the cemetery drive. The white paint has flaked away, leaving the bricks exposed. This old cemetery is fairly neglected; the grass gets cut, but little else is done to it. Only the more recent graves look visited. Some folks still have room in family plots owned since the eighteenth century. So many of the ancient stones are wafer-thin, like graham crackers left out in the humidity, their legends obscured by time and climate. Every Halloween, there is another one toppled. Old-fashioned angels sit in faceless guard over family plots, the history of the town in brownstone and granite. Founders and scoundrels.

A few yards further and he would come to the place he hasn’t been able to bring himself to visit, the place that Alice spends too much time tending. He gets mad at her sometimes, devoting all that attention to it, as if it’s a flower bed; it wasn’t good for her then and it still worries him when she gets into one of those moods. It can’t be healthy. He doesn’t have to read a headstone to remind himself of what happened. It doesn’t make him more accepting, or content, or reconciled. It just pisses him off. And Alice doesn’t get that. Goddamn chrysanthemums aren’t going to change things.

The dog returns to Ed, leash trailing behind, no longer excited. He sits, but his nose keeps working and his ears twist like little radar dishes. Ed needs to talk himself out of thinking that the dog is waiting for someone. Still, the dog looks disappointed. That is as clear as day.

“Time to go.” Ed picks up the end of the leash.

*   *   *

“Watch me, Daddy!” A little girl in a polka-dot bikini, her hair long hanks of dark seaweed against her shoulders. “Watch me!” For the hundredth time, Stacy launches herself off the side of the pool into the churned-up water, bobbing to the surface, laughing and grinning, proud of herself for conquering a seven-year-old’s fear of submersion. She paddles to the ladder and hauls herself out, water streaming, a human naiad. She shivers and looks pale and blue-tinged in the pool lights. The vaulted ceiling of the indoor pool room at the Holiday Inn echoes with her glee. Ed knows that he should make her come out, but he doesn’t.

*   *   *