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I thought I was moving away from when I finally left New York City.
    I walked past Paul’s house and noticed a front loader pawing at a bunch of tree stumps, the freshly spaded earth a rich terra-cotta brown. I remembered him mentioning a plan to expand his vegetable garden, but the ground, in my opinion, was still too frozen to excavate. I continued another half mile to Anthony’s, set at the back of gently sloped snowy fields, a two-hundred-year-old Colonial, stained a deep Delft blue, with an unattached barn that is painted pristine white, and, like many of the old Vermont barns, is slowly caving in on itself.
    The fact is I knew the Waites somewhat, but not nearly as well as I might have. Up until now I’d kept a bit of a distance from them because of a strange coincidence. Anthony had done his medical residency at a hospital in Saint John, New Brunswick, near to Grand Manan Island, where my family had kept a summer residence since 1865. The first time we were introduced I quickly figured out that he was the young doctor who’d come over from the mainland to attend to my stubborn, domineering grandmother, who’d been having trouble breathing but refused to be hospitalized. Once we established that I was one of the Grand Manan Winslows, Anthony recounted his first glimpse of Granny sitting on the porch facing the lighthouse on Bancroft Point and saying, “I’ll be right here plugged into this chair when I go,” as he pulled a glittering vial and a needle out of his black bag. “But not yet,” she told him with wide-eyed trepidation. “Don’t worry, I’m not euthanizing you,” he joked, preparing the injection, dosing her with a steroid that made her a lot more comfortable. Granny was amused by Anthony’s comeback, and subsequently, whenever something ailed, she’d call and request him. Despite his crippling schedule, he would show up; the old lady apparently intrigued him.
    Even though I wasn’t by birth a New Englander, I adopted a bit of a New England attitude toward Anthony in that I found it awkward that he actually knew my grandmother. Then, too, I happened to remember a negative remark Granny once made about the young physician who had tended to her, specifically about a relationship that he’d been in which he’d ended “cruelly”—that was the word she used.
    I knocked on the sliding glass door that led to his kitchen and he opened it with a grand gesture, hair tumbling into his eyes, a dishcloth balanced on his broad shoulder. He told me to come on in, “Just pulling a few more pancakes,” returning to an old, enameled, wood-fed cookstove, beige disks of batter smoking in a black skillet. The kitchen smelled of yeast and coffee, and his two young daughters were sitting quietly at the table, elbows planted on vinyl place mats decorated with huge green frogs. Because their maternal grandmother was black, they had wonderful clear and dusky complexions. They were staring at me in such a way that I almost felt foolish for intruding.
    “Good morning,” said the eldest, twelve years old, whose eyes looked huge behind the lenses of her large round tortoiseshell glasses.
    “Hiya, Mrs. Winslow,” said the slightly younger and more striking of the two, with carrot-red hair and lots of big, dark freckles.
    “I told you before you can call me Catherine,” I said to them.
    Glancing at her father, who was ladling more batter into his skillet, the youngest said to me, “Dad says we’re supposed to call you Miss or Mrs.”
    I turned to Anthony, who said, “Until you are given permission otherwise. She’d like you to call her Catherine,” he told his girls, laughing to himself while I looked around the kitchen.
    “So where’s Mama hiding out?” I wondered.
    “Grading final exams,” the three of them said in unison. Emily was a professor of botany.
    Anthony was born in 1967, the same year as I; he looked youthful and fit flipping pancakes with a happy, jaunty air, still wearing his plaid pajama