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right now!” And then she came back on. “Is Stephen there?”
    “No, not yet. But I want you to remember. Stephen was our big older brother. He was the chief torturer, the big cheese, the big tease. I loved him”—Laurie

    thought, I am using the past tense —“best next to you. He was a guy . We all had to take care of him. And he had to take care of us. He was the daddy. And Suzie just wanted to grow up and get out of the house. That left us.”
    “Is Elliott there?” her sister asked.
    “He’s at the drugstore,” Laura explained. “I wanted him to get me some things.”
    “At the drugstore ?” Angela brayed.
    “Yes, I don’t have time to explain. Before I hang up, I want to tell you, Suzanne had Mother. You had me. There are things you will always remember about me. Remember when I painted you as a Picasso for Hal- loween? All blue on one side and all yellow on the other? Remember when I read you Little House in the Big Woods , and you wanted to move to Wisconsin and live in a log cabin, and we got the plans from the library . . .”
    “And stole the lumber. Stephen could have been a full-time thief . . . ,” Angela, now fully awake, said roughly.

    “He built the tree house! He could have been a builder or an architect!”
    “If he wasn’t a full-time screw-off . . .”
    “Don’t say that, Angie,” Laura reproved. “Stephen’s just . . . it’s a phase . . .”
    “He’s forty-two, Laurie!” Angela snorted, and there was no arguing it: Stephen, the man for whom the term “peripatetic” had been invented. He was a some- time laborer, a sometime roadie for bands, a sometime collector of seasonal unemployment.
    “Think of how he built you that house, so you could pull up the rope and no one could get you? But then you really did it? And we threatened to call the fire department? You didn’t care, and we actually had to call them? You were so gutsy, Angie. What were you, five?”
    “How can you do this?”
    “I know it hurts. It hurts me to remember, too. But I have to do it all right now.”
    “I mean, leave me, and then talk to me as if it were any other day.”
    “I don’t have any choice. I told you that! Ell and I

    went to Cirque du Soleil for our anniversary, and it was so wonderful, and then I got this massive, this incredible pain in my head . . .”
    “Don’t you dare leave me before I get there.”
    “I’ll try hard,” Laura said, relenting, wondering how a brain could will itself not to wink out.
    “Laurie, I love you! I love you! I’ll, when I graduate, I’ll find a way to stop this . . .”
    “No, you take care of babies, the way you want to.” “Laurie!”
    “I have to call Suzie and Stephen. Well, Stephen will probably come over. So I have to hang up.” The voice that replied was Cobb’s.
    “I think she’s . . . throwing up, Laurie. I’ll watch over her. I have a plane flight. We’ll be there by . . . I think by noon. They’re still landing. I want to tell you, I wish you could be at our wedding,” he said. “I’m sorry I said that.”
    “Some would say I will be, huh?” Laura answered.
    “We’ll have a picture . . .”
    “Oh, Cobb, no, ick!” Laura answered, as Elliott, wet and disheveled, entered the room with a double hand-

    ful of plastic bags. “That would be so morbid. It will be summer then. A long time from now.”
    She thought of her mother-in-law’s garden, as it was when Amy was alive, the riots of bleeding heart, gerbera daisies, hosta like great umbrellas spoked by the stargazer lilies. Laura was a disaster with her own garden. She was limited by inclination and sheer languor—weeds and worms? Or books and oatmeal cookies?—to hydrangea and Rosa rugosa . Elliott called Laura the Black Thumb, after she was able to pull off the impossible and murder a cactus dish garden. “Kiss Angela,” she told Cobb, and put the phone down, turning her attention to her husband, getting up off the bed. Why should she be in bed? Had anyone told