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rejected the idea of makeup; it would be an achievement just to brush her hair and find the barrette that had fallen under the bed.
    Five minutes later she was lying with her cheek pressed against the carpet, intent on a shimmer of mother-of-pearl beneath her dusty headboard. She took a pencil from the bedside table and stretched her body flat, inching the barrette around the abandoned books, socks, and cough-drop wrappers, all the while thinking: Was this necessary? Why did she need to dress for Nate? But the answer was obvious. Every woman dressed for Nate. To stand beside Nate wearing shabby clothes was to look like a chain-link fence propping an arbor of roses.
    Nate was a beautiful man, a man whose face had determined his fate. As a child, his dark hair and blue eyes, combined with an eloquent tongue, had left a wake of charmed teachers, moonstruck girls, and one mildly disgusted elder brother. According to David, Nate was a sweet-tempered boy ruined by the flattery of schoolmates.
    Sarah couldn’t say whether David’s assessment was fair; she had always felt an unspoken sympathy for her brother-in-law. Now, as she clipped the barrette in her hair and walked into the kitchen, she paused at the photo of Nate and David that hung on her refrigerator. In any other family Nate would have been the ideal son—handsome, popular, and bright. But the McConnell brothers had been raised by a pair of philosophy professors who valued the life of the mind more than the wonders of the flesh, and who maintained, from their own awkward youths, a lingering prejudice against prom kings.
    David was the son with whom they sympathized, a young man intelligent but not cocky, attractive but not beautiful. David’s face was somehow more authentic than Nate’s. When the two stood side by side, Nate looked like an artist’s flattering vision of David’s flawed features.
    While Nate had ruled his high school social scene, at home he was always second best. His B’s were shadowed by David’s A’s; his election as president of his college fraternity was a bleak lampoon of David’s induction into Phi Beta Kappa. Although Nate had earned a fortune as a Merrill Lynch broker, his wealth seemed obscene beside David’s idealism.
    Sarah heard Nate’s car arrive as she stirred a pitcher of lemonade. She smoothed her dress, pinched her cheeks, and regretted, for the first time, the absence of mirrors in her house. Tucking loose strands of hair behind her ears, she opened the front door and was struck by the color blue. Blue jeans, a blue pin-striped oxford shirt, and blue eyes that looked, today, surprisingly kind. Nate seemed to have descended from the clear autumn sky.
    “How are you, Sarah?” He brushed her cheek with a light kiss.
    “Royal Copenhagen,” she murmured. It was David’s favorite cologne as well.
    As she closed the door behind him she saw a silver Mercedes parked at the curb. He had switched cars again in the two months since the memorial service.
    She took one of the three white deli bags from his arms. “Let’s eat on the patio.”
    Nate had brought a small feast—roast beef on rye, turkey on wheat, bagels and lox, pints of chicken salad, potato salad, herb cream cheese, and tabouli. A few baguettes. Enough food for a week. Was it obvious to everyone that she had been surviving on peanut butter?
    She poured two glasses of lemonade, and placed Nate’s on a napkin. “How are things at your job?”
    He shrugged. “The market’s a nightmare. I’ve got folks in my office crying, like I’m the one who told them to put their entire life’s savings into stocks.”
    Sarah nodded as she lifted a bagel. Compassion was the chief quality that had always distinguished David from Nate. David had an intrinsic desire to alleviate suffering; she had sometimes been impatient with his need to make things right for other people, people who had no care for themselves, or for him. But for Nate, business was business, and if a couple lost