The St. James Parents’ Weekend notice had sat on the pile of mail next to the kitchen phone for two and a half weeks. It was on the slightly heavier stock of magazine subscription cards and fundraising solicitations. Helen put the notice on top of the pile, knowing he would see it and hoping he would say something, but she knew he wouldn’t bring it up. It had been hard enough for him to go up with Ben, wincing over the outstanding balance, half expecting some administrator to take him by the sleeve.

That Saturday, she finally went outside as he was raking the lawn. It seemed to her that the walls of their house might store their conversation and they wouldn’t be able to escape it again.

His body still looked so right to her, long and properly braced against each stroke of the rake. Against her dread was the good smell of the leaves.

“Let’s go up there. It’s his first Parents’ Weekend.”

“But it’s Teddy’s, too.”

He kept raking, its sound part of the wind’s sound. “Harry, it’s too late. We can’t keep putting it off. Let’s try to borrow some money, or just go on financial aid.”

“But we’re so close. The rezoning proposal is before the town board now, and they meet December first.”

She remembered his reaction from the first two times, at the beginning of their marriage, that investments of his had gone beautifully. She had thought it was a kind of good taste and appealing lack of braggadocio that he had seemed a little surprised, happy in a sheepish way, unsure exactly what to do with the profit but putting what she guessed was a prudent amount away and then paying for a trip to Lake Como. She wondered more often recently whether his surprise had in fact been surprise. She had loved him for never seeming to have money on his mind.

Money had always dominated her family’s mind, and her father’s mood. Helen was the youngest of six. She knew very early that even the fact of six kids meant you weren’t the right kind, and because she was the sixth it was vaguely her doing. Her father taught at Pritchard, a declining private day school near Gloucester, Massachusetts, where boys with good families but bad academics could go. As a teacher his pay was meager, and even after he was promoted to dean it was not quite enough. Later from her friends she learned to be glad that her father didn’t drink, but at the time she had wished for some variation to the solemnity. Enrollment at Pritchard went down and the new headmaster brought in his own dean, and her father went back to being a teacher. In the morning her parents poured water over yesterday’s tea bags.