“It’s just as well I have Claire around, then,” Fee told him. “She’ll keep me company when you drop dead of a heart attack.”

“I’m not going to. Claire’s already donated me her heart as a spare. She keeps going on a little kitchen timer—she asked for a battery, but I told her it was too expensive. Good evening, ball and chain.” Perhaps in reaction to his wife’s liberal sprinkling of her conversation with “honeys” and “sweeties,” David tended not to use conventional endearments for those he loved best. He kissed Fee, and reached into a cupboard for a bottle of wine. “Hello, Lu, what a nice surprise. Glass of wine?”

“I’ll just have a cup of tea,” said Lulu. “I have to get back to the pub.”

“Ah, yes, the pub-a-grub-dub.” He poured himself a glass and sipped appreciatively. “It wouldn’t do to go back smelling of real wine—you’d only confuse them. How’s it going there, anyway?”

“It’s going.” Lulu tipped milk into her tea and looked warily at her father.

“Any fisticuffs broken out over illicitly acquired dentures? Anyone keel over dead from watery hop poisoning?”

“Not lately.”

“Pity, I could have used a cheap laugh at the expense of my neighbors.” He frowned. “I don’t like that place, Lulu. Is there any other news on the employment front?”

Lulu sighed heavily.

“No, Dad,” she said. “No news. None whatsoever. Not even a whisper. Okay?”

“Nothing at all?” he asked. “Not even something from the vet’s office, which would at least be an improvement?”

“Nope.”

“Any possible other thoughts of something else you might be thinking of doing?”

“Absolutely none.”

David sighed in his turn. “Any other question I might ask that wouldn’t lead to a dead end?” he asked.

Reluctantly, Lulu smiled. “Probably not,” she said.

“Poor Lulu,” said Fee. “We’re always bugging her about her work—let’s talk about something else. I heard from Aunt Amy, Lulu. The exhibition opened, and it seems to be going well, even without Grandma Cissie’s recipes. And she loved the photograph of Grandma Jo—she does remember that day, although she hadn’t known there was a photograph of it. Have you found anything else interesting up there?”

“This and that,” said Lulu. “I found some pictures of you at the collective. You looked scary.”

“You don’t know the half,” said David. “She was terrifying. We met at a party in Boston. She walked in wearing dungarees and boots, she’d just had her head shaved to make a point about something or other, and I turned to the person I was talking to and said, ‘I’m going to marry that girl.’ And I did.”

The story, one of David’s favorites, had long acquired its comfortable niche in family lore; but now, with her mind awakened by Grandma Jo’s romance, Lulu wondered for the first time what her mother’s experience had been of falling in love.

“Did you know you were going to marry him, Mom?” she asked.

“I don’t know.” Fee looked across the table at David and smiled. “All I knew was that there was this eccentric English guy following me around who talked like someone out of Monty Python, and we started to spend time together, and the next thing I knew I was marrying him and moving to England.”