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of days, vanishing from the hardware store and leaving his clerk in charge. Then Bonny’s Uncle Ollie would find out and come storming to Bonny, and Bonny would sigh and laugh and ask Morgan what he thought he was doing. He would say this for Bonny: she didn’t get too wrought up about things. She just sloped along with him, more or less. He reached out for her, now, as she passed with a pitcher of orange juice. He crooked an arm aroundher hips, or tried to; she had her mind on something else. “Where’s Brindle? Where’s your mother?” she asked him. “I thought I heard your mother hours ago.”
    He laid the classified ads aside and tugged another section from beneath him: the news. But there was nothing worth reading. Plane crashes, train crashes, tenement fires … He flipped to the obituaries.
“Mrs. Grimm. Opera Enthusiast,”
he read aloud.
“Tilly Abbott, Thimble Collector
. Ah, Lord.”
    His daughters had begun to seep downstairs. They were quarreling in the hall and dropping books, and their transistor radios seemed to be playing several different songs at once. A deep, rocky drumbeat thudded beneath electric guitars.
    â€œPeter Jacobs, at 44,”
Morgan read. “Forty-four! What kind of age is that to die?”
    â€œGirls!” Bonny called. “Your eggs are getting cold.”
    â€œI hate it when they won’t say what did a man in,” Morgan told her. “Even ‘a lengthy illness’—I mean, a lengthy illness would be better than nothing. But all they have here is
‘passed on unexpectedly
.’ ” He hunched forward to let someone sidle behind him. “Forty-four years old! Of course it was unexpected. You think it was a heart attack? Or what?”
    â€œMorgan, I wish you wouldn’t put such stock in obituaries,” Bonny said.
    She had to raise her voice; the girls had taken over the kitchen by now. All of them were talking at once about history quizzes, boys and more boys, motorcycles, basketball games, who had borrowed whose record album and never given it back. A singer was rumored to be dead. (Someone said she would die herself if that were true.) Amy was doing something to the toaster. The twins were mixing their health-food drink in the blender. A French book flew out of nowhere and hit Liz in the small of the back. “I can’t go on living here any more,” Liz said. “I don’t get a moment’s peace. Everybody picks on me. I’m leaving.” But all she did was pour herself a cup of coffee and sit downnext to Morgan. “For heaven’s sake,” she said to Bonny, “what’s that he got on his head?”
    â€œFeel free to address me directly,” Morgan told her. “I have the answer, as it happens. Don’t be shy.”
    â€œDoes he have to wear those hats of his? Even in the house he wears them. Does he have to look so peculiar?”
    This was his thirteen-year-old. Once he might have been offended, but he was used to it by now. Along about age eleven or twelve, it seemed they totally changed. He had loved them when they were little. They had started out so small and plain, chubby and curly and even-tempered, toddling devotedly after Morgan, and then all at once they went on crash diets, grew thin and irritable, and shot up taller than their mother. They ironed their hair till it hung like veils. They traded their dresses for faded jeans and skimpy little T-shirts. And their taste in boyfriends was atrocious. Just atrocious. He couldn’t believe some of the creatures they brought home with them. On top of all that, they stopped thinking Morgan was so wonderful. They claimed he was an embarrassment. Couldn’t he shave his beard off? Cut his hair? Act his age? Dress like other fathers? Why did he smoke those unfiltered cigarettes and pluck those tobacco shreds from his tongue? Did he realize that he hummed incessantly underneath his