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good host, he loped, long-legged back to the house to look.
    Again Phoebe’s laugh, and it charmed Ned. “You,” he said.
    “We’re getting old, Neddie.”
    “We’re not.”
    “Then where’s the urgent conversation?”
    “Look what I found!” Ben was waving a book, no larger than a passport. Tanglewood Tales, Riverside Series, Houghton Mifflin. “Let’s see. A gift to John Wren, 1913.”
    “Library smell,” Ned said, with his nose inside the book. He gave it to Phoebe, and she smelled, too.
    “The stacks,” she said, “Mem Library.”
    Isabel said it smelled like kindergarten to her, like construction paper and paste.
    So the talk bumped down stairs—from books, to the book, to The Marble Faun, to Italy. “We didn’t tell you about Rome, did we?” So Phoebe began with a fennel dish. Their last best moment in Rome came down to food. “You remember, Ben? That place we found in the book?” The fennel dish she ordered was to start; it came hot in a little ramekin with Parmesan, raisins, and something else. Pine nuts? “I meant to remember. It was so good. The only reason we didn’t gain weight was because we walked miles every day, starting early in the morning.” The streets were washed and cool then, and the jasmine—that was everywhere—didn’t overwhelm them with its scent.
    “When we were in Rome, it rained most of the time, but we did a lot of walking,” Isabel said. “We walked over six miles one day from the Spanish Steps to the Protestant Cemetery to see the poets’ headstones—and that was just in an afternoon.”
    “You went with Fife,” Ned said.
    “So?”
    Phoebe and Ben had been in Rome for a wedding. A wedding in ivories and greens—deep, and deeper. The ceremony was in the afternoon on a formal lawn, cypress trees, hedges, a goldfish pond. Greek classic—the bride looked like Aphrodite in a generously pleated, high-waisted gown; in her hair, a wreath of ivory flowers, the same in the bouquet. The light was salmony. Orange made small appearances everywhere all night—orange being the bride and groom’s favorite color.
    “A favorite color,” Ben said.
    “We don’t have one,” Phoebe said, “if you’re wondering.”
    “Look!” Isabel said, real surprise in her voice, surprise and something else—delight? She was on her knees. “Look what I found in the grass,” and she held out her palm.
    “What is it?” Ned asked.
    Ben looked closely into her cupped hands. “A baby mouse,” he said, “at least that’s what I think it is.”
    “Awful! Get rid of it,” Phoebe said.
    “I can’t do that.”
    Ned looked again and saw that the pink knob was, yes, probably a mouse, a hairless runt, jostled from the rodents’ wagon-train retreat. Why leave the nest at all, he wondered, but that the afterbirth that slicked the nest might have drawn predators—who knows? “You could put it there,” Ned suggested to Isabel.
    “What?”
    “Under the tree over there, next to the roots, cover it up with leaves. Its mother might come back.”
    “Are you crazy?”
    He watched as Isabel took the infant mouse into the house. Phoebe stood to follow. “I’ll go,” Ned said, and he started after Isabel, calling her name. “Isabel?”
    Inside, Ned watched as she turned her side of the room, the guest room, into a close, incubated space.
    “What are you doing?” Ned watched as she moved the decorative bedside lamp and put in its place the desk lamp with the arm bent low so the halogen might gently warm him—him?
    “It’s a rodent, for God’s sake.”
    “I need an eyedropper,” she said, “and some warmed-up milk. No sugar,” she said.
    “You’re crazy,” he said. “Use your first-aid kit. I’m going back outside.”
    But Phoebe and Ben were carrying the picnic, or what was left of the picnic, inside. Ben was going into town to get charcoal; Ned intended to stay near the mouse emergency, but in the end he stayed near Phoebe. On the screened porch, drinking rum, he sat