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the emotion, not the confusion. Never argue. She might have said, “You sound anxious about work.” Or, “Are you missing Roger?” The proper volley was easily imagined, but Evelyn played better in practice than she did in the game.
    “Stop being silly. He’s read the books. All the books. Except the one you didn’t finish.”
    It took an hour of pulling and corralling and repeating herself to get him out of the room. The more she pressed him to calm down or tried luring him into the sanctuary she’d set up in the living room, the angrier and more agitated he became. He didn’t want to go sit in his chair. He didn’t want to listen to music. He’d sooner drink bathwater than a goddamned cup of chamomile tea. She tried toggling the light, as if it were intermission at the theater and flashes of darkness might quiet the crowd, but Henry and, with him, the specter of Roger Fitch refused to leave. Tonight, it was Roger. But it could have been anyone: Claudia, Benjamin, his mother or father, the sister he’d stopped talking to two decades ago. Even she, Evelyn, thirty years younger, fresh from packing the kids off for school, had haunted Henry’s nights. Only Jane was missing. He had yet to see her, which surprised and, it would be lying to say otherwise, pleased Evelyn deeply.
    The hour-long tussle, which ended with Henry throwing his wedding ring in the trash, left them defeated and spent, but Evelyn, with her still-sharp mind and unwavering purpose, emerged the victor every time. She may have been seventy-eight, but other than a touch of arthritis in her hip, she moved like a woman a good deal younger. With bowed head and shuffling feet, Henry followed her downstairs. He allowed her to deposit him in his easy chair. Suffered the radio she’d tuned to Brahms. And there he sat, a frightened boy left to find his way through a dark, dark thicket and reach the clearing (that may or may not exist) on the other side.
    Exhausted, Evelyn went into the kitchen. With its white cabinets and white tiles, it struck her as a canvas she’d never gotten around to painting. She’d always intended to add more color, to paint a great garland of flowers that ran around the room rather than the solitary swag with a cabbage and a bird’s nest that decorated the wooden valance above the sink. But then—well, but then: life.
    She picked up her husband’s socks where he dropped them, had dinner on the table the same time each night, painted almost every day without a scrap of ambition to have her work seen. She was a certain type of woman who lived a certain type of life that most girls of Claudia’s generation regarded as a disease they’d been lucky or wily or smart enough never to catch. Where Evelyn felt contentment, Claudia felt claustrophobic. Where Evelyn saw a home she could take pride in, Claudia saw a swamp to sink in. Through Claudia’s acrimonious filter, the prioritizing of family became the death of imagination. Care became sacrifice. Fidelity, a chain. But Evelyn had wanted a family. More than anything, she had wanted children. And it saddened her to no end to think that she and her daughter were at odds over both. Claudia’s approach to marriage had been as slow and trepidatious as her rejection of motherhood had been decisive and swift. They gave to different charities, went to different movies, spoke of the past as though it wasn’t one they shared. Inch by inch the differences added up until the two stood on opposite sides of a great gulf. It broke Evelyn’s heart.
    Gathering herself in the kitchen in the dawn’s dove-gray light, Evelyn hit the button on the coffeemaker, her coffeemaker, which sat alongside a much larger and more evolved cousin. The cappuccino machine docked like a shiny silver barge on the kitchen counter, ready to brew double shots of espresso or froth milk, should she suddenly, at nearly eighty, develop a taste for lattes. It had arrived on her last birthday, with a card from Claudia and