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altered. She had planned to be a novelist, and had moved to Manhattan to pursue this plan, but then she promptly acquiesced to her parents’ unspoken but ironclad expectations and married Sam Scofield, a young English professor at NYU, at twenty-two. By thirty, she’d found herself the mother of three small boys. Until recently, she had been “nothing but” a wife and mother, and now she was “nothing but” a twice-widowed grandmother. She had always, through all those years, tried very hard not to compare exciting, sexy Oscar to faithful, gentle Sam, who stayed up late grading papers, who had tenure and was good at what he did but was never ambitious enough to publish, network, push himself out of his comfortable groove. She sustained and tortured herself with her own suppressed ambition, the idea that someday she would write the novels she’d been born to write.
    But shortly after Sam’s funeral, she’d been introduced by mutual friends to a wealthy retired engineer whose wife had also died recently, the kindly but not-quite-there Peter Williams, and a little later on Lila had married him, almost out of the habit of having a man around. He had lasted ten years with her before he, too, gave out, and during their marriage she had found that he, like Sam and the kids before him, took up all her time. Now that everyone was gone, she kept trying to start a novel, but no matter how many times she tried to get a narrative going, she discovered that the fire of inspiration she’d tried to keep burning in the pit of her stomach through decades of ministering to others seemed to have gone completely out.
    “Well, if either of these biographers wants to talk to you, are you available?” Teddy said, throwing Lila a bone; of course she knew Lila had always secretly lusted after Oscar and also secretly judged Teddy for being what Lila perceived as rough on him. But neither of them wanted the slightest crack of a schism between them or could afford one; even though they both had children and grandchildren and other friends, in a nearby daily sense, as someone to count on, Lila was Teddy’s mainstay, and vice versa.
    “Of course,” said Lila, seeing right through her ploy and accepting it as the small peace offering it was. “Anyway, who’s this new one?”
    “His name’s Ralph Washington,” said Teddy. “Sounded wet-lipped on the phone.”
    “What did you think of the first one, besides the fact that he was earnest?”
    “Henry Burke? In the end, I liked him. He was insulted at first that I’d made him a tan-colored mush; then he took a couple of bites.” She paused a moment to remember something, smiled inwardly, and added dryly, “I think he fell a little in love with me, actually.”
    “Really?” said Lila. “How old is he?”
    “I would say forty, maybe a little older.”
    “A boy,” said Lila.
    Teddy said with a gleam in her eyes, “I bet I could have seduced him.”
    “How would you know? I’m not sure I would be able to tell such a thing at my age.”
    “He was…ripe for the taking, in a general sense, and he was surprised by his attraction to me, which is always an advantage in seduction. When a man is tipped off balance, there’s nothing easier than knocking him over.” Teddy flicked the air with her index finger.
    “Did you
want
to?”
    “Only to prove I could. And at my age, that’s not enough of a reason.”
    “At your age, I’d say that’s a great reason.”
    “So I could tell you all about it over breakfast today?”
    “Of course,” said Lila.
    “I bet you can’t wait to get these biographers to yourself.”
    “Oh, come on, Teddy.”
    “Actually, Henry didn’t care for my lack of proper humble womanly devotion to Oscar any more than you ever did; it almost scotched the whole deal. But once we got off the topic of Oscar and onto the topic of his sex life, he was all mine, although he may not have realized it.”
    “His
sex
life?” Lila sputtered with laughter. “What did