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What the hell? Was this an inside joke from when they were married? Caroline broke out into snickers, clamped her lips together, then exploded with laughter. She laughed and tried to stop and stopped and started up again, the way she and Vic used to laugh, the way she and her high school buddies used to laugh, the way she never laughed anymore; and she kept it up until she was crying. No. Not that. She finally got control and wiped her eyes with a handy napkin.

Both Nance and her father were staring at her, her father with a worried smile and Nance with a big pumpkin grin. This Nance was a different person than the one who’d sat in their living room a couple of days earlier—the old Nance had been earnest and eager to please, even if she hadn’t been convincing talking up her and Suzi’s trip to Italy.

“I’m sorry, kids,” Caroline said in a jolly voice. She dabbed her eyes and blew her nose. “Let’s get back to the crossword puzzle. Okay. Thirty-two down. An eight-letter word for nocturnal creature.”

“Huh,” Wilson said. He glanced over at Nance.

Nance pursed her thin little lips and shook her head. “Armadillo?”

“That’s nine letters,” Caroline said. “Good guess though.”

“I saw an armadillo in your yard just now,” Nance said. “He squeezed out from under that shed in the back.”

“That’s my pet armadillo,” Wilson said. “Animus.”

“Tee-hee,” Nance said.

Caroline set down the newspaper. She picked up her coffee cup, wanting to hurl it across the room. “Anyone else want coffee?”

They both refused, eager, Caroline felt, to get rid of her.

When she returned, blowing on her third cup of the morning, Nance was reading an article from the paper aloud to Wilson, her voice changing when there were quotes. Caroline always read the paper in a bored monotone. Nance must’ve been able to tell, just by being around Wilson for a short time, that he was in dire need of levity and a fresh face.

Caroline stood in the doorway to listen. She studied the old woman’s sharp features. She could see no resemblance at all between Nance and herself.

“Frank Comas,” Nance read in a newscaster’s voice, “a physician, appeared before the president’s advisory committee to defend the work done by the Oak Ridge doctors.” Here Nance’s voice changed to a basso profundo. “ ‘It is with some sadness and also some annoyance, I must confess, that I am obliged to try to exonerate ourselves for something perceived by some as devilish acts where science was God and damn all other considerations.’ ”

Wilson sat in his chair, head down, his fingers twined together in his lap. Caroline hoped he wasn’t falling asleep. It was odd. She’d just read most of that section of the paper to Wilson, and she didn’t recall the article that Nance was now reading.

Nance went on reading, something about a committee and a hearing, blah, blah, blah. Caroline stood and listened for another minute—well, not really listening but watching her father to make sure he seemed content—and then, with a slightly lighter heart, she drifted away.

She knew she should stay away from Ava, but somehow she found herself in the hallway outside Ava’s door, where she often ended up, back at the scene of her many failures to communicate with her daughter, wondering whether or not she should go in to make sure she was studying for her algebra test. Ava, when she was involved in some activity, could react angrily to being interrupted. Caroline knew this from years of experience, but of its own accord her hand was on the doorknob, turning it, and she was looking into the room where Ava sat cross-legged on the bed, studying a book, the big book of Elvis photographs Nance had just brought over. How had she gotten hold of it so fast?

The sound of Elvis’s melodramatic, self-mocking voice came from Ava’s room from morning until late at night. “Polk salad Annie, / the gators got your granny.”

“Ava,” Caroline said now. “Please turn the music down.”

Ava ignored her.

“Shouldn’t you be studying algebra?”

Ava kept studying the photographs, hunched over, her dark hair hiding her face, the fingers of one hand