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Susan, Jeannie reported; he was very much involved in her life. Divorce was too expensive, for now. He shared half a house with two other guys but they were starting to get on his nerves. Sure, he would finish college. Someday.
    But still, somehow, it wasn’t enough information. Oh, always there seemed to be something else—something that surely, if they could ferret it out, would at last explain him.
    He stayed a day and a half, that time. Then he left, but—here was the important part—they did have his cell phone number. That number they’d dialed was his cell phone number! This changed everything.
    They allowed a strategic lapse of several weeks, and then Abby called him (Red hovering in the background) and invited him to bring Susan for Christmas. Denny said Carla would never allow Susan to be away on Christmas Day, but maybe
after
Christmas he’d bring her.
    Red and Abby knew all about his maybes.
    But he did it. He brought her. Christmas fell on a Tuesday that year, and he brought her down Wednesday and they stayed through Friday. Susan was a self-possessed four-year-old with a mass of brown curls and very large, very brown eyes. The eyes were a bit of a shock. Those were not Whitshank eyes! Nor were her clothes the rough-and-tumble play clothes that the Whitshank children wore. She arrived in a red velvet dress, with white tights and red Mary Janes. Well, perhaps on account of Christmas. But the next morning, when she came down to breakfast, she wore a ruffled white blouse and a red plaid taffeta pinafore very nearly as fancy. Jeannie said itmade her kind of sad to think of Denny having to button all those tiny white buttons down the back of Susan’s pinafore.
    “Do you remember us?” they asked her. “Do you remember coming to visit us when you were just a baby?”
    Susan said, slowly, “I think so,” which of course could not be true. But it was nice of her to pretend. She said, “Did you have a different dog?”
    “No, this is the same one.”
    “I thought you had a
yellow
dog,” she said, and they traded unhappy glances. Who was it she was thinking of who had a yellow dog, and perhaps one not so slobbery and arthritic as old Clarence?
    She was entranced with her cousins. (Aha! They could be the Whitshanks’ bait: fairy child Elise and rowdy little Deb.) She seemed unfamiliar with card games but soon developed a passion for Go Fish. Also, it emerged that she knew how to read. They were surprised that Carla could have reared a precocious child, but maybe that was thanks to Denny. She liked to snuggle next to Abby and sound out the words to
Hop on Pop
, heaving a loud sigh of satisfaction whenever she finished a page.
    By the time she left, she’d lost all her reserve. She stood in front of the train station holding Denny’s hand, waving like a maniac and shouting, “Bye-bye! See you! See everybody soon! Bye-bye!”
    So Denny brought her again, and then again. She had her own room now, the one that used to be the girls’ room. She drank her cocoa from a mug reading SUSAN , and when it was time to set the table she knew where to find the alphabet plate that Denny had once used. And he, meanwhile, sat back and watched all this benignly. He was the most accommodating father. It seemed she had smoothed his edges down.
    In 2002, shortly after Jeannie’s Alexander was born, Denny came to stay with Jeannie and tend her children. At the time, this was puzzling. Abby had already done the usual grandmother stint—takenoff work to keep Deb while Jeannie was in the hospital, and stopped by frequently afterwards to offer help with errands and laundry. But then all at once, there was Denny. And he remained there—slept on Jeannie and Hugh’s pull-out couch for three solid weeks, pushed Deb in her stroller every afternoon to the playground, cooked the meals, met Abby at the door with a diaper draped over his shoulder and the baby in his arms.
    It came to light only later that Jeannie had been going through