Sadie’s mother was tall and narrow, with a long braid down her back, black when Sadie was very little, then silvery, then silver, an instrument to measure time, an atomic clock. Her father had been tall, too, both he and the mother the tallest members of short families. In photographs and at reunions, they loomed. Everyone was happy when they had a short child: they’d decided to fit in after all. Sadie was small and plump and blond, and when she was nine, her father died, and it was just the mismatched mother and daughter, a different kind of sight gag.

Years later Sadie brought Jack home to meet her mother, Linda Brody, who still lived in the green house on a hill in Swampscott, with its view of the ocean and its cyclone fence. Windy on that hill. All his life Jack had felt like an interloper. He might as well, he decided, interlope on purpose. The doorbell was a little button with an orange light so you could see it in the dark. It was daylight. Sadie pushed it.

“You can’t go in?” Jack asked.

“It’s her house,” said Sadie. She opened the storm door and her mother opened the front door, a minuet, and mother and daughter met on the threshold. They hugged each other so long Jack wondered whether he should leave. Finally, they disentangled, Linda in her apple-red cowl-neck sweater, Sadie in her cherry-red winter coat. Linda offered Jack her hand and said, “Linda,” still gazing, lovestruck, at Sadie.

She’s basically a hermit, Sadie had told him, and Jack had imagined a lady lighthouse keeper, a kind of nun—not a nun nun, since Linda was Jewish, but a woman of the book, devoted to reading. She was a high school librarian; she’d gone back to school for it once widowed. Here she was, with her cheekbones and her hair in its braid, her little house bound up in aluminum cladding the pale green of an after-dinner mint.

“Come in,” she said, “before the wind takes you.”

She strong-armed the storm door open so that Jack and Sadie could step inside, but she seemed unable to look at him. In his life he’d been ignored, but in ways that had made him feel invisible. The way Linda Brody turned from him, he felt blindingly bright, gargantuan. He took himself to the window and watched Sadie’s mother unzip Sadie’s down coat, take it off shoulder by shoulder, elbow by elbow, wrist by tender wrist. Down the hall was Sadie’s childhood bedroom, and Jack understood that he wouldn’t see it this visit, might never: it would be shut to him forever.

“Let me look at you,” Sadie’s mother said to Sadie, and set her hands on Sadie’s hips, and frowned.

“Okay, Mom.”