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the book he’s been writing with a colleague for the last year and a half. It’s abouta poet from the 1700s named—well, I forget his name. Alexander Pope called him “Namby Pamby,” so that’s what I’ve been calling him. George is sorry he ever told me that. He swears they’ll be done with the book by next May, which is about the time I’ll be queen of England. When George retired from the college two years ago, I thought our interesting new lives were about to start. We’d travel, maybe learn a foreign language together, take up some sedentary sport. Talk. Well, surprise, so far that hasn’t worked out. He still spends all his time in his study with the door closed, reading, writing, and not talking to me. Carrie called one night about a month ago, teary and upset. “Mama, it’s so quiet in this house. It’s as if everybody died, not just Stephen.” I didn’t say it, but I thought, oh, honey, it’s like that all the time at my house.
    I pushed some papers to the side and sat down on the corner of George’s desk, next to the computer so he had to look at me. “Is anything bothering me?” Already he looked sorry he’d asked. “My arthritis. My blood pressure medicine. My upcoming senility. Those are off the top of my head.”
    “Ha ha,” he said, humoring me. He had his trifocals on top of his bald, freckled head. He’s shrinking; these days when he drives, he needs a pillow to see over the steering wheel. I’m shrinking, too, but not as much as he is. He’s two years younger than me, but he looks older. I hope.
    “George,” I said, “wouldn’t you think at our age we’d know something?”
    He turned his good ear toward me. “What’s that?”
    “When you were young, say when you were Ruth’s age, didn’t you think people as old as us knew something? Knew something ? I sure did. But don’t you feel like the whole thing’s still the same mystery it was when you were fifteen?”
    He just blinked at me. He’s supposed to be the intellectual in the family. I married him partly for his brains, and look where it got me. “What’s the trouble?” he said, but his eyes were drifting. He fidgeted when the screen saver came on, a reminder that time was passing.
    What’s the trouble. If I knew, I could fix it. “Oh, I just haven’t felt like myself since the accident, I guess.” That’s what we call Stephen’s death, “the accident.”
    George nodded solemnly. “We all miss him.”
    I nodded solemnly, too, but that wasn’t it. I’m not sure anyone but Ruth really misses Stephen. That sounds terrible, I take it back—Carrie’s a mess, sometimes I think she’s never going to be her old self again. Well, me, then: as fond as I was of my son-in-law, as much as I approved of him for Carrie, I don’t miss him, put it that way. Not that he wasn’t a fine, decent, admirable man, good husband and father, all that. He was always standoffish, though, and now it seems to me he’s just standing off a little farther.
    “Do you remember if heart trouble ran in Stephen’s family?” I asked. “Birdie told me I told her that’s how his father died, but I stood her down and said that wasn’t it at all. Do you have any such recollection?”
    “Well, now, that rings a bell—”
    “No, it was something else, it wasn’t heart. Stephen’s attack was a fluke, heart does not run in that family.”
    “Maybe so.” He shrugged. He doesn’t make associations the same way I do—one of our many differences. Stephen’s death was Stephen’s death; it didn’t make George worry more about his prostate, or think about buying a plot at Hill Haven, or look at his old man’s face in the mirror and ask it where his life’s gone. Supposedly George lives a life of the mind, but it doesn’t always seem to me to be his own mind.
    He started drumming his fingers on the keyboard space bar. “Guess who was at Carrie’s this afternoon,” I said to keep his attention. “When I got there with Birdie and