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mind. He may be gaga, but I still know how to behave .
    They didn’t make love anymore either. They hadn’t for more than a year. She would become sexless, then—a sister, a daughter, a nurse. She would manage their lives in Pomeroy, as she’d managed getting up here this spring, as she’d managed their successful arrival home tonight.
    She sat back in the creaking chair and looked through the window into the living room. She did love the house. In another life, she might have been glad to live her last years here. And it was in better shape now than it had been in a long time—the new bedroom wing on the ground floor, the new furnace, new storm windows. Insulation had been blown in, everything had been repainted.
    All of this she’d been in charge of, too. And there would be other issues to deal with. There always were. Last winter the fancy new generator had gone on the fritz in a snowstorm. Who knew what else would come up? Algae in the pond, peeling paint, rot here and there. And all of these problems would fall to her to sort out, while Alfie worked on his book on Virgil’s Eclogues or read or made notes for the Harper Prize.
    The Harper Prize. He’d been so pleased to have been asked to be on the jury. She’d felt almost sick when he told her. She’d already been worried on his behalf, he was having so much difficulty with other intellectual tasks.
    But it seemed cruel, given his pleasure, to remind him of any of that, so she’d said nothing. They’d gone out to dinner to celebrate, and in the subdued lighting of the only really elegant restaurant in Bowman, he had looked younger. And because he was so exuberant, so animated, he seemed younger, too. It made her think maybe he could do it, could call up in himself the sense of focus, the energy, to read carefully, to make an intelligent judgment.
    And after all, it was a committee. If he weren’t up to it, there would be the others to take over, to cover for him.
    When she went into the bedroom, he was lying on his back, utterly still. She froze, unable to step closer. She had the sudden conviction that he was dead; but then he drew a shuddering, snorting breath through his nose and open mouth, and she felt herself relaxing.
    She’d been holding her own breath, she realized abruptly, and because of that, perhaps, her heart was beating faster, a little irregularly.
    As if she were excited .
    No. That wasn’t so. She’d been frightened, that was all.
    She pulled off her clothes in the cool night air and put on her pajamas. In the bathroom, as she brushed her teeth, she watched herself in the mirror, ready to dislike what she saw there. But all that showed in her face was how tired she was, how old.
    At six, she got up. In the night, she’d heard Frankie moving around in the living room, awake again, as she’d been last night. She’d thought briefly of getting up, of going in to talk with her, telling her about Alfie tonight, but decided not to. If it had been Liz, she might have, but Frankie … no. No need to worry her when she’d be leaving so soon.
    She dressed in the living room so as not to disturb Alfie. In the kitchen, she got the coffee carafe out and set the kettle on to boil. When the coffee was done, she sat in the living room drinking it, looking out the window at the overgrown meadow down in front of the house. The grass on the lawn around the house was nearly as long—all the rain they’d had, and then the nonappearance of Adrian Snell, who was supposed to take care of the mowing as he took care of so much else for the summer people, though some of the newer ones used other, younger, handymen, too. But for Sylvia and Alfie and perhaps six or seven other old-timers, Adrian was the one who plowed, who mowed, who cut firewood.
    She’d have to speak to him about the lawn. An image of him rose in her mind, the barrel-chested, self-assured man he’d turned into, completely at ease with himself in his own small world.
    It was complicated,