“Oh, Lordie,” said Patty-Cake, brushing at her skirt as she stood up. “Bruce has gone and given those boys bows and arrows. I don’t know if he’ll ever learn. And now the men are going to get into it. There will be tears before bedtime, you mark my words. And there’s your cameraman, taking photographs of the whole thing.”

Tony had appeared from around the side of the house. He had the Nikon out and he was dancing back and forth, the Tony ballet, Rivera called it, when he liked what he was seeing in his viewfinder. Of course it would be far better if he were shooting over here—Miss Zula’s laughter was worth a few frames at least—but Angie and Rivera had learned to trust Tony’s instincts about where to point a camera.

Then the crowd opened up a bit and Angie saw the youngest of the grandsons, a little boy with a round potbelly, a head of streaky blond curls, and a fat strawberry of a mouth. He stood on a chair aiming an arrow at a bull’s-eye set up on an easel at the other end of the veranda, all his concentration on the target. Angie doubted he even heard all the men shouting directions and encouragement at him, while the women for their part shouted warnings. As Angie stood up to get a better look, John Grant came around the corner.

Patty-Cake said, “There they are finally, my niece Caroline and Dr. Grant—the department chair? Her fiancé.” Those words were still hanging in the air when the arrow left the bow with a twang that could be heard all the way across the garden.

John’s face, familiar and strange and beautiful. How could she have forgotten that face? The answer was, of course, that she had not. She had forgotten nothing at all. In that split second when he met her eye, Angie saw that same flash of recognition, even as Patty-Cake’s words ordered themselves in her mind to add up to an understanding of another kind: too late.

Somebody screamed. John, who looked down at the blossom of blood on his neatly creased trousers, made no sound that Angie heard. He touched the arrow embedded in his upper left thigh, not quite center, tilted his head as if trying to make out a whispering voice, and then fell over, gracefully, elegantly, into the arms of the woman he was going to marry.

“Len!” Somebody shouted. “Front and center!”

“It’s a good thing Eunice married a doctor,” breathed Patty-Cake, her hands fluttering around her face. “I don’t suppose we’ll ever have one of these birthday parties without making a trip to the emergency room.”

SIX