“You know,” she went on, splashing the water languidly with her hands, “I know you might want to pester him when he comes, but you might try being a little less attention-seeking, do you know what I mean? He travels a long time to get here, and he wants a boy, not a little dog following him around and breathing down his neck.”

I nodded again, behind her back.

“Now that I think of it,” she said, shifting a little from side to side, “that might have been the problem, last time. Because he was meant to stay the whole weekend, wasn’t he?”

She crossed her arms over her belly, and above them her breasts lay like two collapsed balloons.

“And I had so much planned, so that was a shame. We won’t let that happen again, will we? You will try to be more self-sufficient?”

There was a thing, deep inside me, and this conversation had piqued its interest, and while my mother had been talking and I’d been rubbing her temples, it had scrabbled up bit by bit, so that now it had reached the base of my skull.

“Young man?” said my mother. “Did you hear what I said?”

There was a sound as the water splashed. She shifted around. I heard her laugh, a nervous, ragged sound.

“What is that?” she said. “What’s that you have in your hand?”

“Oh, this?” I said. “This is just something I picked up earlier.”

Because of course it would have been impossible to explain about Professor Pindar and his harpoon, and how he was descended from New England whalers. Even though I feared gravely for my ability to keep the right thoughts afloat, I knew that those things were not relevant here, in this time. Because I could recognize this as one of the many evenings (though perhaps, I thought, there had only really been a handful, each one blazing out of my memory as brightly as Christmas) when my father had been due for a visit at my mother’s house and had failed to appear.

Now I brought the paperweight down. One! And again. Two! Something gave beneath it, a bright noise.

Because (Three!) I thought, as I brought the paperweight down again to meet the noise. What is a face, in the end? What is a face, but a layer of skin over bone? Because, I thought, as I raised it up and brought it down, this face has changed so much, in such a short time—surely, and again it came up and down, like a hammer at a fair, this is not the way a face should be. Surely, I thought, a face should not be so changeable. Surely, I thought, and another thought crept up beneath it like a worm: This face has run its course.