By the time he reached the top of the hill he was panting. Ahead, he saw lights burning in the kitchen and the family room of the house, lights that had not been on when he had gone out at around two o’clock. From the fireplace chimney a vine of woodsmoke, moonlit, climbed against the night sky. It meant that Aunt Marian was up, for she was the only other one in the family who shared his troglodytic passion for fire-gazing, and would start a fire in the fireplace as casually as most people, unable to sleep, would light a cigarette or raid a refrigerator. Hook walked slowly on, not eager to talk with anyone this night, not even Aunt Marian.

Entering by the back door, he took off his coat and shoes, and padded through the kitchen into the family room, which looked warm and comfortable with the fire raging in the fireplace he and Uncle Arnie had made out of fieldstones taken from a fence Hook’s great-grandfather, the laconic James, had built just before the turn of the century. The room was carpeted and walnut-paneled. The furniture was stout maple, an originally expensive but repossessed suite Kate had bought secondhand on one of her occasional shopping forays into the rich bedroom suburbs west of St. Louis. On the davenport, in Arnie’s bathrobe and with her gray hair braided for sleep, sat Aunt Marian, with Jennifer curled up against her shoulder. As Hook crouched before the fire, holding his hands out to it, she asked him if he had been at the cemetery.

“No. I just went for a walk. Down to the road and back.”

She studied him sadly, not believing him. “Arnie’s asleep,” she said.

“Good. He needs it.”

“Needs it, my foot. If that man never slept another wink in his life, he’d still be way ahead of everybody else.”

The remark meant nothing. They both knew her husband’s love of Chris. The only difference between Arnie and them was that he could sleep with a broken heart and they evidently could not.

Hook asked her if Bobby was in bed.

“He was up a while ago. Then he went back.”

Standing now, Hook’s knees popped like the wood in the fire. At the same time, Jennifer sat up and dropped her hands into the lap of her blue flannel pajamas. Firelight was snared in her long tousled hair and she looked to Hook not just pretty this night but beautiful, beautiful in her grief, solemn, older.

“Dad, we’ve been talking,” she said.

“Yes, honey.”

She looked at Aunt Marian, then back at Hook. “We don’t think you should go back there, to California.”

“Why not?”

“We need you here.”

Hook got out a cigarette and took his time lighting it with a faggot, trying to move slowly and carefully over this ground, for he knew that he would be going back to Santa Barbara no matter how the two of them felt about it, but he did not want to leave a divided and unhappy family behind him.