In the nursing home, Molly had lived across the hall from Esther, and the two had formed an immediate alliance (which was needed with the likes of Ruth Sussman and Milton Schernfuss on the floor, each of them having more unfortunate opinions and personal habits than the other, and let’s not even begin to consider the undesirable traits possessed by a certain Frieda Rosenbloom, who made everything unpleasant whenever she could, which was why nobody liked her, not even the most patient member of the staff) from the spring day Esther made her reluctant move from her apartment.

Just a few days after Esther was settled in, Rebecca’s visit to her had coincided with George’s visit to his aunt Molly. There had been some pleasant chat in the hallway. Two weeks later, when George and Rebecca coincided again, the two old ladies had insisted on being taken out for a walk together, and the four of them had spent most of that afternoon sitting at a table in a neighborhood café, drinking iced tea and talking about Molly’s life and Esther’s, and the coincidence of Rebecca and George both having a Yale connection. They found out later that Molly and Esther had schemed this match from the first hour Esther had been on the premises, when Molly had espied Rebecca systematically helping her grandmother organize and unpack. They also discovered that Molly and Esther had known each other years earlier, from Workmen’s Circle meetings, though Molly was years younger than Esther. “The kid,” Esther always called Molly, and she even commissioned Rebecca to get a birthday cake decorated with the words “Happy Birthday to The Kid” for what turned out to be Molly’s last birthday, her eighty-fifth, the year Esther herself turned a hundred and one.

Rebecca and George fitted together in an eccentric and harmonious living arrangement that none of their friends, not even their closest friends, really understood, not completely. Their friends also didn’t understand why they weren’t married, or why they never had children after all these years together. George lived and worked in the West Village. Rebecca lived and worked in New Haven. Each of them had learned to accommodate the other’s requirements, whether it was the good bedside reading lights Rebecca brought to George’s unaccountably dim bedroom so she could read in bed comfortably, or the enormous drenching showerhead that George spent a strained and exhausting weekend installing at Rebecca’s to replace the puny, ineffective dribbler that she had somehow lived with in her Willow Street apartment until then. (They had come to agree, over time, that it wasn’t really his fault that the old water pipe cracked as he tightened the fitting, causing a literal cascade of disasters that flooded the apartment below.)

Neither of them would have strayed into a romantic involvement with someone else; no one had been even remotely tempting for either one of them for many years. The time they spent apart wasn’t about anything like that at all. Maybe theirs was a slightly more theoretical and intellectual—and less passionate—connection than some couples have, Rebecca sometimes considered when she thought about what she knew of the way other people conducted their lives. But how could it be? Their attachment was fierce, if played out in unconventional counterpoint. It worked for them. She was pretty sure they loved each other at least as much as more traditional couples seemed to, and the years in which they might have had children had passed without her ever wanting a child for more than an hour or two, never long enough to make her even begin to contemplate all the hazards of artificial insemination or adoption, even though every adopted Chinese baby girl she knew (and she knew five) was irresistibly sweet and bright.