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then college—clever, flirtatious, quick with a joke—and not at all like O’Neil or his friends, whom Miriam adored. She drank the water O’Neil had handed her, surprised to find how much she wanted it. No, she couldn’t quite bring herself to like him, much as she’d tried. From the first day Kay had brought him home to visit, she had thought it; his life was a train he expected her to board. She saw it all: the old station wagon strewn with toys and the sacks of groceries in back, the dry dinners with deans and visiting economists, the burrowing claws of life on the margins of some small college town. (And wasn’t it also true that she, Miriam, had never really gotten along with Kay? That love was one thing but getting along was something else, and there had been, well, certain difficulties, certain unnameable tensions, between them? That this gap was the very one Kay had chosen to fill with Jack? Making it, in the end, Miriam’s fault?) So, no. She didn’t like him, not one bit. But more than this, she had forgotten—actually
forgotten,
if for a moment—that the party was her daughter’s, not O’Neil’s. The yellow stripes of the tent, the band’s silly music, the crispness of the autumn air, and the calming presence of the waiters and waitresses gliding through the company with trays in their hands—she had forgotten that all of this has been called into being by her daughter’s decision to marry Jack.
    “Mom? Come in, Mom.”
    She looked up to find O’Neil, grinning and wagging his eyebrows. A waiter moved past, and she placed the empty water glass on his tray, trading it for a full one of champagne.
    “Ammunition,” she said then, and drank; she smiled back at O’Neil, who was drinking too. She thought about telling him to go easy on the champagne, but decided quickly not to. Beyond the walls of the tent it had begun to grow dark, blue afternoon bruising to black. One of the caterers was firing up the propane heaters that hung on poles in each of the tent’s four corners.
    “All right, hon.” She put down the empty champagne glass. “The mother of the bride will go ask her son-in-law to dance.”
    “Now you’re talking.” He rolled his eyes. “I’m sure that will be, you know, interesting. Jack is an interesting guy.”
    “Very,” she agreed, and touched his sleeve. “But I’m not doing it to make you laugh. For Kay, like you said.”
    And so she danced with Jack (O’Neil, solving a problem, appeared at that moment to take Kay by the arm and whisk her off across the floor); she danced with him not once but twice, and though he talked her ears off—all nonsense about his dissertation and his theories of wage and price controls, and which uncle was a partner in which St. Louis investment firm, as if she might someday have some serious money to spend in St. Louis—she found herself, for that time, liking him, almost, just as O’Neil had hoped. He was just a nervous boy, not really a man at all, uncertain how to dance with a grown woman or where to place his gaze and what to say to her while he did so (nothing;
Say nothing,
she thought). He was doing his very best, in other words, and what else was there to wish for? When it was over, he made a little bow, awkwardly hugged her; looking over her shoulder, he might have actually called her Mom.
    The sound of a car horn: Arthur, idling at the curb, is waving to her from the wheel of the mud-spattered Peugeot. Miriam buttons her coat again and heads outside to meet him. Their suitcases are in the backseat, as promised, and a surprise: beside them she sees their old wicker picnic basket, with a wool blanket folded neatly on top. Greasy diesel fumes huff out the tailpipe and are whisked away into the autumn air.
    “Sorry.” He makes a flustered gesture with his hands. “I decided to pack a lunch. And I couldn’t find the goddamn cat again.”
    “You and Nestor need to work some things out.” She arranges herself in the front seat.