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whole belly. It seems to be getting softer lately, rounder, the kind of belly women trap under jeans with elastic waistbands, gardeners and grandmothers, proof that they have paid their maternal dues.
    That night at 8:00 P.M., precisely the hour Charlotte had decided she would call someone—the Jersey police or the highway patrol or, least appealingly, the roommates in New Hampshire—she hears Emily’s car. Charlotte knows the rattle of it by heart, an old barn-red station wagon Emily inherited from Joe when she first got her license. Charlotte rushes to the foyer and presses her face to the cloudy glass blocks framing the doorway,like a child in a toy store window. She watches Emily’s thin silhouette open up the trunk, hoist out a bag. Hears the dull bang of the trunk as she shuts it. Sees her pause, chin lifted, surveying the row of condos for the right address.
    Charlotte yanks open the front door and starts waving. “Em! Here!” She pushes open the screen door, and cold air wraps around her, snaking under her sweater sleeves and up the legs of her tan capri pants. “Over here, honey!”
    Emily lifts a hand and starts walking across the lawn. Charlotte feels a rush of love just looking at her daughter’s familiar shape: the thin shoulders, bowed head, pointy chin. Emily has always been tiny, but what might otherwise come across as fragile is challenged by the utter confidence of her stride. Emily has walked with this same assurance—a near defiance—ever since she was two years old and took her first fearless lunges toward a neighbor’s kiddie pool.
    Emily arrives at the porch step with an emphatic clomp. “Hi, Mommy.”
    â€œHi, sweetheart.”
    Emily gives her a kiss on the cheek. As she steps inside, Charlotte takes a quick inventory of her daughter: hair, clothes, accessories. It wouldn’t be unusual to discover something new, something that’s been pierced or altered since the last time she saw her. But today, nothing radical. Nothing permanent, anyway. Emily is wearing rust-colored corduroys, a white T-shirt, brown hiking boots. A wide pink silk bandanna, like something women wore in the 1920s, is swathed around her head and knotted at the nape of her neck, the tail of the scarf tangled in her long, messy brown hair. Her eyes look tired. Sunken. Well, naturally. She must be exhausted from the drive.
    â€œHow was your drive?” Charlotte asks. “Any problems? Any traffic? Did you get lost? I was expecting you a while ago—”
    â€œI got a late start.”
    There is a pause, a silence that feels tentative, unfamiliar. For a long minute Emily gazes around the house, and Charlotte just watches her, a nervous smile pasted to her face. Then Emily shrugs off her duffel and starts rooting around inside it. “Here,” she says, and holds out a plastic bag full of what look like green flower petals.
    â€œWhat’s this?”
    â€œArugula. From our garden.”
    â€œYour garden?” Charlotte takes the bag. “You grew these yourself?”
    â€œMe and Walter.”
    â€œOh! Well, they’re just—that’s just great. Grew them in your garden!”
    Her enthusiasm is too much, she can feel it, but it’s better than the awkward quiet a moment before. Charlotte isn’t used to awkwardness around Emily. When Emily used to arrive for visits on Dunleavy Street, there would be an immediate flurry of activity, familiarity, dropping bags on the floor, flopping on the couch, digging through mail, rifling through the kitchen cabinets. “Well, here, here, come in, come in,” Charlotte blusters, shutting the door. “Let me give you a tour of the place. This is the foyer.”
    â€œGod, Mom. You have a foyer?”
    â€œI didn’t specifically
ask
for one, but you know. It comes with the place.”
    Emily nods. She probably considers living in a condo community “selling out.” A house