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painting for the book, and tomorrow or the next day, he would drive her to the airport and she would go back to the summerhouse. This visit had been her longest, almost four months. During the last book, she had come for three and had been staying in the guesthouse when Kara finally left him for good.
    Having his mother, or anyone else, around to witness firsthand his getting dumped should have been a nightmare of humiliation and awkwardness, but it wasn’t. He remembered how she had waited a few days, staying nearly invisible and quiet as a cat, before weighing in on the breakup. Then all she’d done was tilt her head to one side and say, “I liked her.”
    “She liked you, too,” said Will. It was true. Some women might have minded—might have detested —having their boyfriend’s mother living in the backyard, but Kara had repeatedly told him how much she loved it, even going so far as to ask her to eat dinner with them nearly every night, an invitation that, most of the time, his mother graciously refused. In fact, Kara seemed to have a crush on his mother, blushing in her presence, agreeing with her about the smallest things, asking her what kind of perfume she used (“Eau de paint” his mother had said, laughing). Once, Will had come home to find Kara wearing the cardigan his mother had left in their kitchen the night before. Will hadn’t completely understood this enthusiasm, but sincerely hoped—and almost believed—that it had nothing to do with what Kara had once referred to, with a complete and disturbing lack of irony, as his mother’s “pedigree.”
    “I liked her,” his mother continued, “but, if I may be blunt, I didn’t think she would stay.”
    “Why not?” Will had asked. Forty-eight hours earlier, he might have asked this defensively, but now he felt more exhausted than anything else. Besides, he was curious.
    “The way she cleared out a separate shelf in the pantry for her own food, instead of mixing hers up with yours. I thought it was a bad sign.”
    “Oh.”
    “Also, she always seemed to be a little mad at you.”
    Actually, Kara had seemed more than a little mad, a fact that Will had asked her about exactly five times during the nine months they were together. The first time, she had laughed it off. The second time, she had cried and apologized and blamed her anger on her own moodiness. The third time, Kara had yelled, thrown a magazine in his direction (it didn’t hit him), and slept in the guesthouse (his mother wasn’t staying in it at the time), but at four that morning, he’d woken up to her hands pulling up his T-shirt, her mouth on his chest. “Forgive me,” she’d murmured, and he had.
    But then, just days later, when her anger came slashing toward him out of nowhere again, and he’d asked her about it, she had pressed her lips into a line, walked out of the room, walked back in, and said matter-of-factly, “You’re just a closed-off person. That’s your right, of course. But I’m passionate; I wear my heart on my sleeve. Sometimes, I get frustrated that you aren’t the same way.”
    This had surprised Will because he had never considered himself closed-off. He wasn’t a secret keeper, for the most part; he disclosed. He expressed his feelings when it seemed important to express them. When he tried to explain these things to Kara, she had cut him off, tenderly, saying, “Please. I didn’t mean to put you in the position of having to defend yourself. You are who you are. I love you, and I value you, and I’m sorry,” which pretty much put an end to that conversation.
    Then, one night, on their way out to a dinner party, he had kissed her and said, “I love you in that dress,” and she had pushed him backward with both hands, slapped the kitchen table, and snapped, “Well, that’s just great, Will. That’s just peachy,” shoved her handbag over her shoulder, and slammed her way out the front door. Will had stood in the kitchen, listening to the screen