“Never wear white pumps after Labor Day,” her mother used to say, “or before the twenty-fourth of May.” Kay believed this. It made a kind of sense, these permissive bracketing holidays and the broad field of liberty that lay between. “If you lose something,” a girl named Patsy Tobin told her when she was about seven or eight, “just shut your eyes and pray to St. Anthony.” Patsy Tobin’s family was Roman Catholic, which was why she knew of the secret and specialized powers of St. Anthony. The advice worked. After uttering a short, breathy prayer (“Dear St. Anthony, please help me find...”), Kay almost always came across her lost shoe or doll or handkerchief or whatever. “When you have the growing pains in your legs,” her Auntie Ruth said during one of her prolonged summer visits, “lie very still in bed, not moving a muscle, and count to one hundred.” This proved excellent advice, practical to the point of magic, for not only did the pains ease as she counted, but she was almost always fast asleep before reaching a hundred.

“Happiness is capability.” A woman Kay knows has written this sentence on a slip of paper and stuck it to her refrigerator door with one of those little magnets. “Oh, I know it sounds simplistic,” she said, reading Kay’s expression, “but it works. And it’s the only thing that does work.”

“There must be something you can do for him,” Kay said to the doctor when her father lay dying-bedridden, bored, kept from his pinochle and poker cronies-in terrible pain. She had arranged the postponement of her comprehensive exams and come home for a few weeks.

“Aside from boiling up a deck of cards and feeding him the broth, we can’t do a thing,” the doctor said.

She liked this brand of non-advice. She found it ironic, indirect, cocky and kindly meant. It seemed like the sort of folksy palliative you might hear from a grunty old family practitioner. But this was a young doctor speaking. A very tall, good looking man with exceptionally blue eyes. Kay had only just met him that morning. His name, he told her, was Philip. They shook hands and then he helped her on with her coat. She looked tired, he said, especially her eyes.

For some reason-self-pity or injured vanity-this made her want to lean up against him and cry, but she remembers that she resisted.