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grandmother told Lila this on the telephone, her voice was dry and unsentimental. Lila was startled by death, someone she knew, and sad for her grandmother, truly, but she was too young to have a real notion of how much the event must have mattered. “I’m really sorry, Grandma,” she said. Those weren’t enough words for the occasion; scrambling for more, she asked, “What happened to the goats?”
    There was a pause, and when her grandmother spoke again, her voice had a choking sound that made Lila feel awful. She had said the wrong thing? Or her clumsy sympathy was of no use? “Your grandfather took care of them. They were sold off for slaughter. He’s bought up her land, too.” He’d have had no more idea than Lila why her grandmother was upset about that, and if he had known, how could he have understood? What he had done, tidying up June’s small estate, would have made kind, practical and profitable sense to him.
    It did not seem strange to Lila that it was not her grandmother and grandfather who were best friends. What was strange, what she hadn’t considered before, was that grown-ups needed best friends, leaned on them, cared for them as best they could, and grieved for them. Her grandmother and June also gave Lila her first notion of women who wear different faces and speak different words when they’re together. As Lila, Nell and Patsy do. Probably Lila’s grandmother and June had their disagreements, just as Lila, Nell and Patsy do.
    Nell’s three-so-far marriages have certainly puzzled the other two—what exactly is it she wants?—and Patsy’s divorce was a trial for them all. They were both on hand when Lila met Geoff, her last lover before Tom, and listened sympathetically when she left him. She doesn’t know quite what they think of Tom. “You know,” Patsy told her one Saturday night over drinks, “when it comes down to it, we don’t give a shit about him. He seems okay, but you’re the one we care about.”
    â€œSo,” Nell threw in, “if he fucks you around, we’ll just have to hurt him, real bad.” They could all laugh, but in hard and unsafe circumstances, it was still a comfort.
    What they tell each other, Lila and Patsy and Nell, is that what they will have, in the end, is each other. “We sound,” Patsy said, “like kids swearing a blood oath. Should we cut ourselves and pool our blood?”
    Nell snorted. “We’re women, for god’s sake. We don’t have to cut ourselves to get blood.”
    The three of them began teaching about the same time, Patsy in psychology, Nell and Lila in English. They may have met over common difficulties, being women on an unhelpful campus, and in alliances and little plots; but it was an easy step to fondness, and then to confidences. Like love, there is a chemistry to friendship. None of them would dream of telling all their secrets, they’re not ridiculous, but they can tell what they want to.
    Which is why Nell and Patsy are the only people who know Lila’s here.
    If she can’t remember telling Tom about June, she knows she told them. About, among other things, June’s extreme response to a couple of extreme events, the choice she must have made in favour of huge consequences over ordinary limits. “And you know,” Lila said, “it looked like something that could happen so easily. Almost naturally. Do you see what I mean?”
    â€œBut,” said Nell, “as you say, it’s about consequences, isn’t it? Risks are easy enough, as long as you can take the results.” But Nell is braver than either Patsy or Lila, who has not been inclined towards either her grandmother’s housedressy, stoic grace or June’s gum-booted eccentricity.
    Tom seems unable to grasp properly that parents in general, he specifically, can have no idea of the small random moments, obscure influences,