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maybe commenting on the failure, as he sometimes did, “I completely lost my train of thought there,” when he paused in the middle of a sentence he’d launched himself into, befuddled. Or “I forgot for a couple of minutes where I was going.” And they would commiserate, though it was sometimes hard to keep the tone light—she was aware of the sharper note of real perplexity in him from time to time. But what had frightened her most tonight was that he wasn’t perplexed at all—that he’d seemed so unconcerned with their being, essentially, lost.
    At first, she had ignored the signs—he’d always been a little forgetful anyway, a little scattered. Years earlier, long before any of this had started, she had pinned a New Yorker cartoon to his study door—a bearded, anxious man in a tweed jacket, stopping a policeman: “I’m an academic. Where am I?”
    Then, for a while, she was impatient, irritated. Well, she could still be impatient and irritated, if she were honest. But within the last year or so, she was mostly just worried. And as a result there was this—booze, which she used too often. The strained attempt not to notice, to be kind. The solitary assessing and reassessing. The managing of appearances. The covering up.
    But it was he, after all, who had pushed them toward this move, to retirement. He who had faced that realistically. Who had brought them to this little town. To this house.
    Which had been in her family since the town was settled, lived in from generation to generation. When it became her grandmother’s, though, it had become a seasonal home, empty through most of the year. She’d used it as a summer retreat from visibility as a minister’s wife—the place she could always come “to be as naughty as I care to be,” she would say. It had become Sylvia’s about twenty years ago because she was the oldest child of the only son, but mostly because she was also the only one in the family who wanted the managing of it.
    And she might not have been interested either if it weren’t for Alfie, who had loved it from the moment he saw it, and then for the girls, to whom it represented home in a way none of the other houses they lived in had—too many houses in too many towns as Alfie moved around in academia.
    At first she had resisted the idea of retiring, of moving. What she had said to Alfie was that she wanted to keep on teaching. But as the fall semester dragged on, she realized that wasn’t it, that there would be a kind of relief to stopping. That a part of her was tired of waxing enthusiastic about her students’ halfhearted, mediocre essays, tired of hearing their excuses, the same disasters that had befallen students year after year and made it impossible for them to get their work done—parents divorcing, a sick grandmother, breaking up with a boyfriend or girlfriend. Sometimes they just forgot. No, although there were pleasures involved in her work—her colleagues, the occasional really gifted student, the sense sometimes of having won a class over to a writer she loved—there was also a lot she could easily leave behind.
    No, her resistance was centered on Alfie. She didn’t want to be alone with him, watching his old age happening to them both in slow motion. Being in charge of it.
    Leaning back now in the old wicker chair, looking at the net of stars in the black sky above her, she thought of one minor episode after another. The time he didn’t recognize his own coat and held it up for her to put on. The time he got lost on the way home from the campus and had to knock on a stranger’s door, had to ask to use the phone to call her to come and get him. When Sylvia picked him up, she could tell that the woman who’d let him in was frightened of him. Sylvia had written her a note of thanks the next day, realizing even as she did it how self-servingit was, that she was trying to assert something about herself, to put some distance between herself and Alfie in the woman’s