No, not a thing had changed under that roof except the people who had lived there, and of them, only Corinne and Myles remained, and he didn’t look as though he would remain much longer. He was sitting in his motorized wheelchair, facing the double door to his study, the once dense cumulus atop his head thinned into fine white strands like the mares’ tails that foretell unsettled weather, his torso emaciated, his skin translucent, revealing a system of blue veins and capillaries in his hands and temples. A catheter tube wormed out from under the blanket spread across his lap, against the chill infiltrating through the windows. He had been a collegiate oarsman, a wartime captain of a PT boat, a peacetime minister whose voice had never needed a microphone but had carried from pulpit to rearmost pew on its own power, and now he looked not fragile, but as if the idea of fragility had assumed human form, to warn of the collapse that awaits the most robust of men, if they live long enough. There was only his voice to remind Sybil of the man she had known, booming out a homily or scripture from the elevated pulpit that made him look twice his six feet four. No clergyman in Massachusetts, maybe in all Christendom, could say “God” quite the way Myles could, drawing the first consonant and the vowel into a long rising sonorous note that sounded as if it came from the organ in the choir loft, then adding a syllable to the last consonant with a loud aspiration: GowwWWWDuh. Listening to that GowwWWWDuh echo inside First Congregational, the ten-year-old Sybil used to think that the Almighty Himself was uttering His own name—that voice, which neither begged nor commanded but seized your attention, had not been enfeebled, and was the voice she heard now, greeting her, telling her to take a seat, and after she had (in the leather wing chair that used to be his favorite roost), inquiring about her mother’s health and her own. She said they both were fine (lying somewhat about her mother, who would need an oxygen bottle soon), then asked how he was feeling. How did she suppose? Myles answered, irritably and with a jerk of his head. First stomach cancer, and that no sooner conquered than a stroke crippled him. He was a dead man from the waist down and well on his way toward becoming one from the waist up.

“You’re not dying just yet, Cousinuncle,” she said, thinking how silly she sounded, addressing him at thirty-eight the way she had as a child.

“Of course I am! So are you, for that matter. I’m just a good ways further down the pike. State your business, Sybil. When you’re in the shape I’m in, you don’t have the time or patience for idle chitchat.”

“It’s about him.”