“The bluefish in a school, do they know one another?” This from Vicki, who did not wait for an answer but hooted at Jack to look at Banker, who was sitting at attention a few feet out to sea with the tail of a fish waving up and down in his mouth until with one intake of breath the dog sucked the fish in and gulped it down.

Jack was instantly giddy with fish. He scooped up handfuls of fish and, fast as he could, hurled them back into the water as though their lives were not already over.

Vicki gathered shells that she scattered in the garden when they got home. She threw wet towels across the picnic table to dry.

In the shower, watching sand wash down the drain, Jack recalled the psychic’s prediction of a turbulent year ahead, and it struck him that the psychic had not said that Alex was the love of his life. He had assumed that was who she was talking about.

This made him happy. “I am started,” he quoted the old poem, “the tugs have left me.”

He was ready for whatever the psychic could tell him. He wanted to be told what was coming and where he had been. And if you had to, he reasoned, there was nothing wrong with faking your way to where you belonged.

Trina was shorter than Jack remembered. She had, therefore, to look up at a man, exposing her throat, which was unadorned but for the deep V of a V-necked dress to entice the eye down.

“I thought we’d go into the city,” Jack said, and headed back onto the expressway where, for the ten remaining miles, they had a view of the skyline at dusk.

Jack said, “The city looks pretty good.”

The psychic said, “Give it a minute.”

She would always sleep with her husband and with another man in the course of the same day, and then the rest of the day, for whatever was left to her of that day, she would exploit by incanting, “French film, French film.”

The headlights hit the headstone and I hate it all over again. It is all that I can ever see, all that I can ever talk about. There is nothing else to talk about.

It is right there out in front. I mean the cemetery that is out over there across the street from our house. With the headlights turned off and the car parked outside the garage, there is enough of a moon to see that there is no missing it over there across the street in the part of the cemetery the people around here call the annex.

The annex is for when the cemetery fills up.

Anyway, there is a stone there that has the baby’s name on it. And there was a week-old bouquet of something all dried up past knowing what it was that was tied with wide white ribbon out there until the time I came home today. There was a white ribbon on it. I could have taken the ribbon away. But the woman would have come and put another one, I suppose.