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age seventy-two, in Melrose, listed under her husband, Timothy.
    A woman answered the phone on the fifth ring. He imagined a tan wall phone in the kitchen, a long gnarled coiled cord.
    “Is this Joan?”
    “Who’s calling?”
    “It’s Rick Hoffman. Leonard Hoffman’s son.”
    A pause. “Oh, my goodness, Rick, how are you?”
    “I’m good. And . . . Tim?”
    “Yeah, you know . . .” She suddenly sounded worried. “Oh, no, is it—Lenny?”
    “Dad’s fine. I mean, he’s the same.”
    “Oh, good. I paid him a visit a couple years ago, Rick, but it’s hard, you know. Seeing him like that.”
    “I know.”
    “I can’t. It—it tears me apart.”
    “Me, too,” he said. “Me, too. Thanks for that.” He paused. “I haven’t heard from you in a while, so I assume everything’s okay with the insurance, right?” She’d set up long-term care insurance for Lenny and very generously volunteered to handle all the paperwork for him as long as he was alive.
    “Everything’s fine, nothing to worry about.”
    “Joan, I wonder, if it’s not too much of an inconvenience, whether I could come by and talk to you for a bit. I have some questions.”
    An inconvenience. Like your schedule is crowded,
Rick thought, between mah-jongg and trips to the supermarket and to the post office to buy stamps, one at a time.
    “Talk? I don’t know what I—”
    “Just some loose ends concerning my dad’s law practice. It’s about . . . Well, I don’t know anything about how law firms operate. Things like escrow accounts and how he dealt with cash and all that kind of thing.”
    “Escrow? Is someone complaining they never got their retainer back? Because—”
    “No, nothing like that. It’s a bit . . . involved. Could I drive out to, ah, Melrose, and maybe we could have a cup of coffee?”
    “I’ve got houseguests,” she said. “Can this wait?”
    Rick agreed to call her back in a couple of days, after her guests had left. But Rick wasn’t particularly optimistic. She hadn’t sounded defensive or squirrelly on the phone. If she knew something about a vast quantity of cash, she’d sound different, he decided. Evasive, maybe, if she’d been involved in covering something up. Or frightened. Or at least
knowing,
somehow.
    He went out to get some supplies for the next few days.
    Half an hour later, in line at a supermarket on Mount Auburn Street, pushing a cart full of cold cereal and milk and yogurt, plus some junk food, SunChips and Tostitos Hint of Lime, he heard someone call his name. He turned around.
    “Rick? That
is
you. Oh my God.”
    “Andrea.” His face lit up.
    He’d barely noticed the woman in line behind him, wearing sweatpants and a long puffy white down coat, scraggly hair pulled back in a kerchief. At first glance she looked like some overscheduled Cambridge mom racing through her checklist of errands.
    Andrea Messina had been his girlfriend senior year at Linwood. They’d gone out starting with the winter semiformal, continuing into the summer after graduation, when he’d broken things off before heading to college. He hadn’t seen her since. Just seeing her now gave him an uneasy pang of guilt. He’d been an asshole and had never paid the bill.
    He hugged her, gave her a kiss on the cheek. She kissed the air. She smelled of a new, different perfume than he remembered, something more sophisticated, but after two decades a woman had the right to change perfumes.
    On second glance, he realized that despite her general dishevelment, she was attractive, strikingly so. Even more than in high school. She’d always been cute, doe-eyed, winsome, graceful. A dancer. Her brown hair had honey highlights. Now her face was thinner, more contoured. She still had creamy skin; she’d always had, but in a woman in her midthirties it was particularly noticeable. She’d grown into her beauty.
    “Great,” she said. “I haven’t seen you in like forever and I look like a bag lady.” She adjusted