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and plays she’s seen. She has all sorts of stories she’s never told me before.
    One day in my grandfather’s rowboat she points to a red boathouse across the lake. “That’s where I met your father,” she says.
    “Where?”
    “That’s a tennis club in there. Your father was playing in a tournament. I saw him on the court and I walked slowly past the fence. He was warming up, practicing his serves. And when he went topick up the balls, he asked me if I wanted to have an iced tea with him afterwards.”
    Was it really like that then? Did you just get picked like a flower by some guy? “And you said yes?”
    “No. I said I had a hair appointment. So he asked me to the movies, which was much better than an iced tea.”
    “Did you like him?”
    “I did. Of course I did.” She stops rowing. I think she’s looking right at me but it’s hard to tell with her sunglasses. Her bottom lip scrunches into her top one, like she’s only just realizing my full connection to the story. “He was very attractive, very funny. I can’t remember the movie we saw, but in the middle of it a couple got into twin beds and your father leaned over and said, ‘When we get married, we’re going to have a double bed.’ I was so charmed by that.” She shakes her head. “All it really takes is a few words here and there. You can hang on to a few words for a long time. Fill in the rest with the fluff of your imagination.”
    She starts rowing again.
    “But when did he ask you to marry him?”
    “At the end of the summer. I don’t know why it happened so fast but it did back then. We were all in such a hurry. And your father was an only child. He’d just graduated from Harvard and I think he was scared of being alone.”
    When Nixon resigns in August, we have to watch it up in our bedroom, on the little TV we brought from the kitchen on Myrtle Street, because my grandfather wants nothing to do with it.
    “Good evening,” Nixon says. He’s wearing a black suit and black tie. “This is the thirty-seventh time I have spoken to you from this office where so many decisions have been made that shaped the history of this nation.”
    My mother usually berates Nixon whenever he appears on TV, but tonight she’s silent. She listens intently on her bed, chewing her lip. Nixon holds his stack of papers, reading from the top one then setting it gently to the side and starting at the top of the next. His hands don’t seem to be shaking. His words wash over me: political base, national security, American interests. It sounds like any other speech. He glances up only briefly to the camera, except at one point when he lowers his papers and without reading says, “I have never been a quitter.”
    After a long time his voice starts to slow down and I know he’s getting to the end.
    “To have served in this office is to have felt a very personal sense of kinship with each and every American. In leaving it, I do so with this prayer. May God’s grace be with you in all the days ahead.” And then he gathers his pages and they shut the cameras off.
    “Goodbye to your sweet ass!” my mother hollers, then falls back on her pillows, exhausted, satisfied.

3
     
    At the end of August we leave Lake Chigham. It’s like our arrival played backwards, with Nonnie giving us kisses in the doorway and then Grindy pulling me and my mother into a hug in the grass beside our stuffed car. But we don’t drive directly to Ashing. We go to Boston, where we meet Garvey at Park Street and I get out of the car and my mother drives away. She’ll pick me up at Garvey’s in three days. We go down a grimy set of steps below the street and take the T to Somerville.
    Garvey’s apartment is on the third floor of a house that has slipped off its foundation sideways. A corner of the porch is sunk into the ground. Everything is broken—the porch railing, the windows. Even the front door has a crack running up the middle.
    “This is the best part, right here,” he