“I am comfortable,” she said. “It’s wonderful here, like taking the cure at a sanatorium. It’s so peaceful.” And yet watching him walk into the room with his slow, rolling walk, she felt a tremor of anxiety unbalance the melancholy peace she’d felt only a moment ago. The muscles in her body tightened, and she heard a faint ringing in her ears, something high-pitched and very far away. “Did you resolve whatever problem you were having down there?”

“Nearly. They’re having some major conflicts between the restaurant design and code requirements. Americans with Disabilities Act, of course. A huge pain in the ass and a killer expense.”

“It’s awful,” Jane said. “Imagine having to cut into your profits just so a few disabled people can have the same quality of life as the rest of us.”

He held up his hands. “I just said it was a pain. That’s all. Your sarcasm flares up like an allergic reaction around me, Janey.”

She shrugged. She hadn’t meant to say what she’d said, but he was right, it just happened when she was around him.

Dale looked so silly in this room with its faded wallpaper—pink roses against a soft green background. The incongruity of his burly body and the pastel femininity of the room were almost laughable. It even smelled a little like old face powder up here. Thomas was so much taller than Dale, his head nearly brushed the low ceiling of the room; and yet Dale had the larger, more commanding presence (a word she hated, but like other words she hated—cute, sermonize, marvelous—it had its uses), so much so that she could feel him filling up whatever room he entered. He went to the bureau across the room from her and lifted one of the antique silver hairbrushes.

“I wonder how many decades it’s been since someone actually used this thing.”

“It’s a museum piece,” she said. “Usefulness is beside the point.”

“Apparently. Have you noticed there are no Touch-Tone phones in the house?”

“Don’t knock it, Dale, just because neither one of us has a family history we want to preserve.”

When Jane and Brian’s parents died, Brian was about to start college. Of course there were no retirement funds set up or insurance policies. A group of concerned relatives had cleared out the house and sold everything off to help raise money. She had no silver hairbrushes or chenille bedspreads, just a jumble of vague memories that grew vaguer every year.

“I wasn’t knocking it, Janey. As you probably figured out, I like all the pomp and most of the circumstance.”