Ed barely smiled. He too, away from Stacey’s salads and sprouts, had put on weight. Stacey had left him and gone back to California. A bachelor again, traipsing from house to house as a dinner guest, Ed presented it as a simple matter of her being too young, and a member of another culture. California wasn’t another state, it was another country. Connecticut had never seemed real to her—too green, too quaint, everything too close together—and, with the hours he had to keep at the plant, she was lonely. Thus he reframed what must have felt to him as a shameful failure—a lack of juice, of enough entertainment value to a young woman. If only they had produced a baby, he speculated to Owen, it might have been different. He had wanted one, she hadn’t. Owen often thought back to the night they had smoked pot and Stacey had stayed on the floor. He wondered if her offer of a blow job had been unique to him or been repeated more successfully with others around Middle Falls. He was sorry she was gone, because he would accept the offer now. He understood it better now: it had been no big deal. She had had an expansive Western nature and Ed was an emotionally cramped nerd from the Bronx, where a gangster tact and taciturnity ruled the streets. To know more than you say was part of Ed’s code, here in Middle Falls, where the game was gossip; he somehow knew about Owen and Alissa and the baby, but would keep the secret.

Phyllis, three glasses of white wine to the good, wanted to hold the baby. She had dressed, showing her contempt for this most Christian of holidays, in tight blue jeans, small pearl earrings, and a man’s striped shirt folded back at the cuffs as if to expose the thousand-dollar Swiss watch Owen had given her for their fifteenth wedding anniversary. “It’s been so long,” she explained, bending her tall, slim-hipped body down through the shards of porch sunlight and in her hands quickly gathering up the little blanketed body from the carrycot. Alissa couldn’t conceal her alarm—her glasses flashed—and she rose in her chair and almost reached out, but Phyllis gently beamed down upon the mother a gracious smile of reassurance. “I haven’t forgotten about the head,” she said, and showed how she was supporting it with her left hand. “How hot their little skulls are!” she said, and gazed into the infant’s face as if searching out a meaning there, a riddle, in the unfocused wide stare. “Oh, Alissa,” Phyllis went on in that soft yet somehow commanding voice that Owen had once strained to overhear, “she’s exquisite. Owen,” she went on, finding his face in the clustered, hushed group, “we must have one more, before it’s too late.”