“I just got up,” he protests, “and came to look for you. I didn’t want to take the time to comb my hair.”

In Willow, when he was a child, his hair was combed only before Sunday school or after a haircut, and no one complained. Or did his mother complain? Trying to remember, he has a faint, scratchy memory of a comb raking his scalp, perhaps his mother crossly tending to his hair before sending him off to school with that pack of Second Street girls. Even now, he fears anger in his mother’s touch, though she is more than ten years dead.

In the kitchen, Julia turns on the television set, where a weatherman, young, bushily mustached, and excessively lanky—the tall don’t do well on television—keeps lunging a bit too far with his white electronic magic pointer, which slides and scribbles over Ohio as he describes a zone of high pressure moving toward New England through New York State.

“Why do you keep watching this junk?” he asks, in cautious counterattack. “The weather will come no matter what you know.”

“Quiet!” she says, in the fierce tone with which his mother had once commanded, Don’t touch it! “Now you made me miss about the front!”

“The front will show up however it wants to, don’t worry so about it. Not even you can control fronts. What’s in the Times?”

“Read it for yourself.”

“I read the Globe.”

“How very stupid of you, Owen. There’s nothing in it but rapes in Medford and murders in Dorchester.”

“Well, unlike the sanctimonious fucking Times, the Globe doesn’t claim to know what news is fit to print.” In his nervousness, he goes to the breadbox in its deep drawer and extricates a bag of Newman’s Own Traditional Thin Pretzels, which smell more baked than less moral brands, and bites one. The first bite is the best. Paul Newman is white-haired too, posing with his daughter Nell on the cellophane bag. Owen can remember him in Hud, as youthful and dangerous and semi-sleepy as the late James Dean.

Julia cries in something close to agony, “Eat over the sink! The floor gets filthy and the cleaning ladies were just here!”

These are a pair of freshly immigrant Brazilians, not sisters but identically shaped, with broad, bustling behinds. Sometimes they form a trio, the third being slimmer, with butternut skin and huge chocolate eyes and no English.

“Oh, you’re such a slob!” his wife exclaims. “Your mother didn’t teach you anything!”