“I’ll call it a raised ranch,” Chloe said. “Sounds exotic.” She made a note in a black leather notebook while Tim hooked his stringy yellow hair behind his ears and watched her with slack-jawed admiration.

Jane wanted to think she’d once been like Chloe, young and ambitious and exacting, but she knew it was more simple and complicated than that. Yes, she’d been ambitious, but usually impatient to be somewhere and annoyed with the process of getting there. Desmond pulled the van away from the house and continued down the block. Maybe this impatience had in fected all of her life. Maybe she’d been so eager to be in love with Thomas, with a man who loved and respected her, had been so eager to be a reliable wife and mother, after having failed once at being a wife, she hadn’t paid enough attention to the tiny details involved with getting there.

They stopped in front of an even more unpromising house, a brown, vinylcovered raised ranch or bungalow or Gothic cathedral for all she knew. Planted in the front lawn was a cut-out piece of plywood depicting a woman bending over at the waist and showing her bloomers. In the big picture window, two egg-shaped people in sweatshirts were waving cheerfully.

“Wow,” Chloe said, awestruck. “This is right out of Diane Arbus.”

Maybe so, but they looked content in their house, happy to welcome their guests, thoroughly pleased to be themselves.

2.

“I would say you don’t look a day older than you did a couple of years ago,” Mr. Walsh told Desmond, “but I guess you’d know I was lying. Wouldn’t he, Jean?”

“Oh, sure,” Mrs. Walsh said. “Dennis knows how old he looks.”