A few days later, Rebecca called Stefan, all excited. She had indeed arranged that big commission for him to do a full landscaping of the parklike lawn that surrounded The Alice Hodge Safe Home and thereafter maintain the garden and the green space adjacent. The weather stayed open, more springlike than polar, so he did some planning over there, laying out strings and doing digital drawings of where he might set lavish herbaceous borders, then adding artful ornamental trees, like holly and hemlock, maybe an unusual blue ceanothus and an apple tree like the one we’d planted when he was born. He hauled paving brick, taking advantage of the strangely warm weather, and set to work constructing a small central piazza with rubbled stone benches and a huge old cement birdbath at its center, surrounded by sentinel arborvitae. So that the women residents could grow their own vegetables, he was thinking to build raised box gardens and he sketched how the succession gardens, separated by winding paths, would start with spring peonies, poppies and irises, followed by midsummer lilies and late-summer irises and asters. When he showed me and Jep the plans, the very names made me tipsy.

Becky and I met for coffee again and she told me Stefan received a lot of attention from the ladies, who competed to bring him hot cider and hang around to watch him heft the bags and stones. I tried to see Stefan as they might see him, a quiet, polite, hunky guy with an ephemeral smile, and got a kick out of the image. One day, I dropped by to view the progress. Becky, who’d popped like a plum in recent days and was now enormous in girth, was sitting outside on a folding chair with a big blanket over her lap. In the late afternoon sun nearby was a small older woman bundled in a vivid red padded coat and hat. Her grandmother, I thought; but no, to my surprise, it was Stefan’s grandmother, my own mother. To see her there filled me with delight, because, of course, her connection to the Hodges was even stronger than mine. “Look at all this,” she told me proudly, gesturing with the black lacquer cane she only affected, because my mother could outwalk a peasant farmer. “He has a gift, Thea.”

Becky got up, with difficulty, and pulled me aside then. “I should have asked you this sooner.”

“What?”

“Would you be with me when I go into labor, Thea?”

“Rebecca, that should be your own mom.”

“But it’s up to me,” she urged me. And her mother also lived out of state, and what if this all happened suddenly? So I agreed. Everything was on track, Becky told me. The baby was due any day. Her doctor said Becky just had to follow along. I knew she would remember that comment ironically someday.