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Three I Maggie had a song that she liked to sing with Ira when they were traveling. "On the Road Again," it was called-not the Willie Nelson chestnut but a blues-sounding piece from one of Jesse's old Canned Heat albums, stomping and hard-driving. Ira did the beat: "Boom-da-da, boom-da-da, boom-da-da, boom! boom!" Maggie sang the melody. " 'Take a hint from me, Mama, please! don't you cry no more,' " she sang. The telephone poles appeared to be flashing by in rhythm. Maggie felt rangy and freewheeling. She tipped her head back against the seat and swirled one ankle, keeping time, In the old days, when she'd driven this road alone, the countryside had seemed unwelcoming-enemy territory. Among these woods and stony pastures her only grandchild was being held hostage, and Maggie (smothered in scarves, or swathed in an anonymous trench coat, or half obscured by Junie's bubbly red wig) had driven as if slipping between something. She'd had a sense of slithering, evading. She had fixed her mind on that child and held her face firmly before her: a bright baby face as round as a penny, eyes that widened with enthusiasm whenever Maggie walked into the room, dimpled fists revving up at the sight of her. I'm coming, Leroy! Don't forget me! But then over and over again those trips had proved so unsatisfactory, ending with that last awful time, when Leroy had twisted in her stroller and called, "Mom-Mom?"-hunting her other grandmother, her lesser grandmother, her pretender grandmother; and Maggie had finally given up and limited herself thereafter to the rare official visits with Ira. And even those had stopped soon enough. Leroy had begun to fade and dwindle, till one day she was no larger than somebody at the wrong end of a telescope-still dear, but very far removed.

Maggie thought of last summer when her old cat, Pumpkin, had died. His absence had struck her so intensely that it had amounted to a presence-the lack of his furry body twining between her ankles whenever she opened the refrigerator door, the lack of his motorboat purr in her bed whenever she woke up at night. Stupidly, she had been reminded of the time Leroy and Fiona had left, although of course there was no comparison. But here was something even stupider: A month or so later, when cold weather set in, Maggie switched off the basement dehumidifier as she did every year and even that absence had struck her. She had mourned in the most personal way the silencing of the steady, faithful whir that used to thrum the floorboards. What on earth was wrong with her? she had wondered. Would she spend the rest of her days grieving for every loss equally-a daughter-in-law, a baby, a cat, a machine that dries the air out?

Was this how it felt to grow old?

Now the fields were a brassy color, as pretty as a picture on a calendar. They held no particular significance. Maybe it helped that Ira was with her-an ally. Maybe it was just that sooner or later, even the sharpest pain became flattened.

" 'But I ain't going down that long old lonesome road all by myself,' " she sang automatically, and Ira sang, "Boom-da-da, boom-da-da-" If Fiona remarried she would most likely acquire a new mother-in-law. Maggie hadn't considered that. She won- dered if Fiona and this woman would be close. Would they spend their every free moment together, as cozy as two girlfriends?

"And suppose she has another baby!" Maggie said.

Ira broke off his boom-das to ask, "Huh?" "I saw her through that whole nine months! What will she do without me?" "Who're you talking about?" "Fiona, of course. Who do you think?" "Well, I'm sure she'll manage somehow," Ira said.

Maggie said, "Maybe, and maybe not." She turned away from him to look out at the fields again. They seemed unnaturally textureless. "I drove her to her childbirth classes," she said. "I drilled her in her exercises. I was her official labor coach." "So now she knows all about it," Ira said.

"But it's something you have to repeat