If Alice didn’t quite like Richard, she had to admit that she found him a romantic figure. Not like sexual romantic. Romantic in the old-fashioned sense, meaning mysterious and poetic. His past was so tragic: his first wife, Martha, dying of cancer, then his only child, Camilla, the same age as Alice, dying in a car accident a few months later. Richard was the man who had everything who finally had nothing—nothing truly important, at least—all of it snatched away by the indifferent hand of fate. And, not surprisingly, there was an air of sadness that hung heavy around him. You could feel it, Alice often thought. You could feel the shadows, too, creeping up on him when he wasn’t looking. Only her mother seemed able to chase them away. Alice had seen the way his face would suddenly go blank in the middle of a conversation or meal, all expression vanishing from it so that it resembled a mask, something cold and hard and dead, and you knew that behind that mask he was remembering. Then her mother would say something to him, or touch his hand, and he would come back. He’d laugh or shake his head, and all at once he looked human again.

Alice watched the two of them. Richard was steering with one hand, holding her mother’s hand with the other. It was still crazy for Alice to think that her funny, spunky mom, who ran around most of the time in jeans and men’s shirts with the tails hanging out, hair in a messy ponytail, who claimed to prefer generic Raisin Bran to the real thing, who would only go to see a movie in a theater before six p.m. when matinee prices were still in effect, who voted for Ralph Nader in every presidential election Alice could remember, who helped start the Boston chapter of Food Not Bombs, driving one of the buses down to New Orleans two days after Hurricane Katrina passed and the Red Cross could barely get through, was now a rich man’s wife. She was already starting to look the part, Alice noticed uncomfortably: linen suit so simple and understated you just knew it had to cost an arm and a leg, a subtle dab of coral lipstick, hair in a sleek bob. Then it occurred to Alice that maybe her mom had always been this way, only pretended to be the other way because there was no money and she was making the best of a bad situation. Alice didn’t know why but this thought disturbed her. It was like she didn’t know her own mom, like her mom had been putting on an act her whole life, like her mom really was a Margaret, as Richard called her, not a Maggie, as Alice’s dad called her.