There, in his palm, a tiny animated scene, a man in a powdered wig, a woman in a milkmaid’s costume, her legs open, his pants down, his tiny pink enamel penis with its red tip tick-tock-ticking at her crotch, also pink and white and red. It was ridiculous what passed for arousing in the old days. She was aroused.

“Old Walter,” said Aksel. “He lasted awhile, then. He started taking care of himself?”

“No. He got worse and worse. He was eighty.”

“He never wanted to be,” said Aksel in a sympathetic voice.

“I know it.”

He offered the watch. “In four years, perhaps your boy will be interested.”

Ah, no: it was ruined. Not because of the ticking genitalia, but because it was somebody else’s private joke, and she the cartoon wife wanting in, in a robe and curlers and brandishing a rolling pin. Even a cartoon wife might love her rascal husband. She did.

“He wanted you to have it for a reason,” she said.

Flora’s son and Leo played a Viking game that involved rolling iron hoops down a hill. Flora’s son was sullen and handsome, with green eyes and licorice breath, terrible at mime, and so he put his hands on Leo’s to show how to hold the hoop and send it off, then looked Leo in the eyes to see if he’d gotten it, all with a kind of stymied intimacy that Leo understood as a precursor to grown-up love.

I will learn Danish, thought Leo. I will never learn Danish.

He turned to let the hoop go, and there was his mother, striding up the hill. Bowl her over for ten more minutes with this boy, ten more minutes in the Iron Age—where they had no concept of minutes—ten more minutes of this boy scratching his nose with the back of his wrist then touching the back of Leo’s wrist with his Viking fingers. Bowl her down and stay.

No, of course not. The stride told him that they were leaving.

Would he have wished her away? Only if he could wish her back later.

And would she, Joanna, have wished her beloved Leo away? Only if she could also wish away his memory. To long for him forever would be terrible.

“See you later,” said the Viking boy, who spoke English all along, and ran to gather the hoops.

Nothing, Darling, Only Darling, Darling

“Who died and made you boss,” Sadie asked Jack, and he answered, “Nobody. Everybody. How do you make somebody boss when you’re dead, anyhow?”

Not everybody was dead, just a handful of significant people. Sadie’s parents, Jack’s sister, most recently Jack’s nephew, blond Thomas of the passions, who’d gone to study piano in Poland and had stepped off a building at ten thirty in the morning. He’d been twenty-seven.