He looked at the French cookbook she’d left open on the counter, and said, “Cauliflower Grenobloise?”

“I’ve made it before,” Vicki said. “It’s not as throwuppy as it sounds.”

Without looking up from her work, she said, “Not that I’m pushing you out the door, but I was thinking we should get you some books on tape for when you drive home.”

“You don’t think they’re kind of dangerous?” Jack said. “I’m listening to the book and it’s a really good part when I reach the house, so I pull into the garage and close the door and keep the car running to find out what happens and they find me in the car the next morning dead?”

Vicki handed him a jar of seedy mustard sealed with wax. “Can you do this for me?”

Jack opened the jar, then poured himself a scotch. He tore off the corner of a bag of cheese-flavored popcorn, summoning Banker and Boss. The dogs had been napping in the herb garden, and came inside wagging thyme, basil, and dill through the kitchen. Jack flicked kernels at the older dog, who caught them with a snap in the air. The clean way a dog enlists your heart, he thought.

Vicki mixed a vinaigrette and joined him, minus the scotch. She tried in vain to control the pup. “You can’t train a dog with popcorn flying through the air,” Jack said.

“Then give it a rest,” Vicki said to Jack. “Watch this.”

She got the puppy to sit but couldn’t get him to lie down. She tried to ask a question about Alex’s mother, but the puppy wanted to play, so her question was spliced and punctuated with commands—“Do you DOWN think you will NO go to California SIT to be with Alex?”—a kind of canine Tourette’s.

“Everyone’s out there now,” Jack said. “It’s later she’ll maybe need help.”

“What about you?”

“I always need help,” Jack said, and reached across the table for the smaller of the local papers. He turned to the “Tide Table” and, with a couple of hours before he had to pick up Trina, asked Vicki if she wanted to take the dogs to the beach.

Jack picked up the car keys when Vicki came out of her bedroom pulling on a large faded work shirt over a modest one-piece bathing suit. Vicki opened the tailgate of her station wagon, and Banker jumped in. The puppy whimpered until Vicki bent over and lifted him.

It was late enough in the day that they had most of the beach to themselves. Jack surveyed the surf as they hopped across still-hot sand; he said, “Look—the bluefish are running!”

Bluefish churned the water in a feeding frenzy. Closer up, Jack and Vicki could see two-footers leaping, roiling in the waves not six feet from the sand, scaring up bait fish onto the shore. There was no stepping around them, the sudden numbers of them, so that fish wiggled inside sandals, fish were under their feet, inside of their shoes, and they had to unbuckle those shoes and make squeamish faces as they held the shoes away from their bodies and the thin silver bait fish, inches long, rained to the sand.