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Westchester before returning to college, it was clear that he would continue on the more predictable white-collar path taken by all of her children’s friends.
    And, in truth, why should she have expected him eventually to go on to cooking school? It wasn’t as if Catherine ever again wanted to have anything to do with either a restaurant’s kitchen or its dining room.
    Spencer still enjoyed cooking—that was clear—and he certainly enjoyed cooking here in New Hampshire. The problem was that he now cooked like a—and there was only one word for it—weirdo. She shuddered when she thought of the odd beans and curds and funguses that he considered legitimate sources of nutrition.
    Behind her she heard the screen door clap shut and for a split second it had sounded to her like a gunshot, and she thought suddenly of the deer and her idea to remove the signs that forbid hunting on her property. She turned around and saw her two granddaughters racing toward her, Willow in a blue terry-cloth cover-up and her cousin in only that minuscule string thing that both Catherine and Charlotte insisted was a bathing suit. She sighed and then prepared herself for her daily battle with the older girl: The child might have only the merest hummocks for breasts, but she still could not arrive at the Contour Club dressed like a lap dancer. It was just that simple.

Three
    J ohn Seton was lying happily on the floor of his living room in Vermont, a wisp of black bang across his eyeglasses, watching enrapt as his son pedaled the pudgy water balloons that passed for his legs like an upside-down bicyclist. Patrick was not quite five months old, and any day now John was sure that his cherubic baby boy was going to dazzle him by overcoming his turtlelike inability to roll over and start spinning like a dervish on a ski slope. It could happen this very second, if only because the child might grow tired of feeling the Dijon mustard that in the last moment he had let loose into his diaper with the power and sound of a fire hose.
    Upstairs he heard Sara in the boy’s nursery, and he presumed she was getting the baby monitor off the nightstand and throwing a couple more onesies and doll-sized socks into the baby’s suitcase. He and his wife—260 pounds of grown-ups—would share a single overnight bag, while their thirteen-pound eleven-ounce son would have to himself a piece of luggage the size of a steamer trunk. The clothes the boy wore might not be big, but he sure needed a lot of them. And then there were the pillows and the blankets and the menagerie of stuffed animals from his room here so his crib in New Hampshire would smell like his crib in Vermont.
    The boy stared up at the ceiling and gurgled contentedly. He smiled at something John could neither see nor understand, and John smiled back. Then he sighed. Young Patrick was not going to roll over today—at least not this morning—and so he scooped his son up and carried him to the bathroom to change him.
    As he passed through the kitchen with his boy in his arms the phone rang. He wanted to let the answering machine get it because in all likelihood it was either his office or Sara’s answering service, and today was supposed to be a day off. They were driving to his mother’s in New Hampshire, and they were hoping to leave by nine thirty—ten at the latest—so that they could stop by the club and surprise everyone while they were having lunch or whacking tennis balls or whatever it was that Mother had the girls doing at boot camp today. But he knew that if he didn’t answer the phone Sara would. She’d only been back at work for two months, and so she was still in that professional’s postpartum phase in which anything she did with one of her patients was more satisfying—and, in truth, easier—than hooking up a Hoover (either Patrick or the pump) to one of her breasts, or waking at one or five in the morning to feed the child, or trying (and failing) to quell the aneurysm-inducing