Of course. He had heard of her, had heard her interviewed more than once on National Public Radio, although he never would have connected this cool, austere woman with the widow he’d heard on air, heartbroken and elegiac, her voice practically melting with melancholy and regret.

“Congratulations on all your success.”

She toasted herself with her wineglass. “If I’d known the memoir was going to do so well, I would have written one years ago.”

Desmond nodded. Surely she had to wait for her husband to die, although maybe there were other deaths she could have exploited: Dead Mother, Dead Sister, Dead Dog. Come to think of it, it probably wasn’t too late for her to turn the whole thing into a lucrative cottage industry.

“Is your book still in print?”

He nodded, feeling a gesture was less of a lie than saying yes would have been. “I’m sure Jane’s mentioned her ideas about her and me working together.”

Rosemary drank down the rest of her wine and dismissed the possibility. “Jane and her ideas,” she said.

A few minutes later, Thomas walked around the side of the house and down the sloping lawn holding on to Gerald’s hand. The heavy humidity—everything was sweating, from the glasses to the furniture to the vegetable chips—seemed to have drained the color out of the sky and the trees, and the two figures looked like blurry cutouts on the overgrown grass. The row of low lanterns lining the pathway down to the carriage house below blinked on, and Thomas turned and waved up to Desmond and Rosemary with the kind of overdone enthusiasm that Desmond always found slightly embarrassing.

“I’ll be right up,” he called. “Gerald’s going to help his grandmother sign on to the Internet. Aren’t you?” He swung Gerald’s arm, but the boy didn’t turn around or speak. “Do you two need anything up there?”

“Common interests would help,” Rosemary said.

Thomas laughed at this and walked on. The lanterns were making eerie, poignant shadows on the lawn and magnifying the difference in height between father and child. Thomas was stooped slightly, obviously talking in a low, gentle voice to his son as they made their gradual descent. The sight of the two of them plodding along in the dim light stirred in Desmond a faint, jumbled longing—for a child, he assumed, although it wasn’t quite that clear. Russell occasionally mentioned the possibility of trying to adopt but Desmond had never taken the talk all that seriously, assuming it was Russell’s metaphoric way to express his disappointment that dogs weren’t allowed in their building. Still, he felt a lugubrious nostalgia for something he knew he’d never have, and wanting to include himself in this blurry twilit vignette, he called out, “Have fun, Gerald,” in a voice that was itself a little blurry.