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I tried to explain to Henry that this was the transcendent act I wanted to do now.

He said, "Please don't feed Dad garbage." "I don't know what Dad wants me to do," I said. "I just know I'm not doing it." Henry took my hand and held it.

—•—

My father died later that night.

X V I

I called Archie at home. He said all the right things, but I didn't really hear any of them. He asked when the funeral was, and I told him.

"Do you want me to come?" he said.

"No," I said, "I'm fine," as though answering the question he'd asked.

—•—

Sophie drove down. She stayed with me in my room, and scratched my back while I talked.

—•—

My mother's mother didn't come to our house until the funeral. She spoke to the caterers. She looked over the trays of meat and salads that would be served after the funeral when people would come back to the house. She clicked around the kitchen in her high heels and talked to my mother about who was coming and how many people and—Remember Dolores Greenspan? She called. I thought that maybe my grandmother couldn't bring up my father. But then I realized that she was trying to help: make everything appear fine and sooner or later it would be. This was what she'd taught my mother.

—•—

My mother, Henry, and I got into the black limousine that had come to take us to the funeral. When a woman I didn't recognize walked up the driveway, Henry said, "Who's she?"

My mother said that she was a neighbor who'd offered to stay here during the funeral, when burglars might come, thinking the house would be empty. "Mrs. Cali-phano," she said to me.

The woman waved, and my mother nodded.

"She seems like a nice lady," my brother said. "I hope they don't tie her up."

—•—

The night before Henry went back to Boston and I to New York, I told him that I hated to think that Dad was worrying about me when he died.

"He wasn't worried," Henry said.

"How do you know?"

"I was there when you called," Henry said. "After he hung up, I said that I'd be happy to kill Archie if he wanted me to. And Dad said, 'Thanks, but I think Jane can take care of herself.' "

X V I I

Archie was kind and patient. He kept fresh flowers on the table. He somehow found soft-shell crabs for dinner, even though they were out of season. He drew a bath for me every evening when I came home from work. A tonic for the spirit, he said.

—•—

He invited Mickey to spend Labor Day weekend with us in the Berkshires, maybe hoping to break the spell of my grief.

Mickey told a lot of jokes, most of which were of the animals-sitting-around-talking variety, my favorite. He did little comedy bits: after lunch, he turned to me and in a twangy voice said, "I have weird thoughts sometimes. Do you think that's weird?"

It hurt not to laugh. Finally, I asked him to give up on me for a while.

Sunday, when they went to play golf, I stayed behind at the house. I took the manuscript for Mickey's new book out to the picnic table underneath the apple tree.

I adored Mickey. I thought he was sweet to try so hard to make me feel better. But he irked me that weekend as he never had before. The tiniest things bugged me—like, his not washing his cereal bowl or coffee mug. I even wondered if Archie had noticed—and it bothered me, thinking he hadn't.

Monday night, Archie called Mickey and me in from the meadow, saying, "You kids ready to go?" And I realized that what I'd been feeling that weekend was sibling rivalry.

X V I I I

There's a passageway connecting Port Authority to Times Square—the Eighth Avenue subways to the Seventh—and one morning when I looked up I saw a poem up in the eaves, sequential like the Burma Shave billboards:

Overslept.

So tired.

If late,

Get fired.

Why bother?

Why the pain?

Just go home.

Do it again.

Something changed then. I saw my life in scale: it was just my life. It was not momentous, and only now did I recognize that it had once seemed so to me; that was while my father was watching.

I saw myself the way I'd seen the cleaning women in the building across the street. I was just one person in one window.

Nobody was watching,