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him.”
    We talked a little more about work, and then I asked about the car wreck.
    “Not serious,” she said, waving her good hand. “It could have been, but I was lucky. The ribs are the worst, it hurts to laugh or take a deep breath, and there’s nothing I can do but let them heal. Still, I don’t know why everyone got quite so upset. Except maybe it reminded us,” she added. “About how quickly things can happen.”
    Again, silence fell between us. I was the first to break it. “I still miss Dad,” I said.
    “I know.”
    “What do you think of Blake?” I asked after a moment. “Working for Art, I mean?”
    She was looking out at the water with its dancing nets of light, and shook her head slightly. “I try not to get too involved, now that you two are adults. Art has been a terrific help to me, Lucy. You haven’t been here to see it, but it’s true. I guess your father’s death made a powerful impression on him. I think maybe they always imagined they’d have time to patch things up, time to find a way to get along, but then, just like that, it was too late.”
    “Whatever happened between them, anyway?”
    “Oh, honestly, honey, it’s hard to pinpoint. There was always tension. I remember when your father brought me here for dinner and announced that we were getting married, Art made a point of taking me aside to tell me all your father’s faults. It was strange, almost like he was jealous and wanted to keep things from working out. That didn’t really make sense, because he was already dating Austen. But anyway, I didn’t think much of Art for doing that, I can tell you. As an only child myself, I always wanted to have siblings, so I’ve never understood why they couldn’t get along. But that’s just the way it was for them, growing up, maybe because they were born so close together.”
    “And Dream Master?” I asked. “That happened later?”
    My mother glanced at me, her expression somewhat guarded. “It did.”
    “Well?”
    “You were always such a persistent child,” she observed. “No wonder you’re such a success around the world.”
    Long stems of white gladioli stood in a vase on the table. I touched a petal, feeling hurt rather than complimented; my mother had argued against my living overseas, especially after 9/11 happened while I was in Sri Lanka, and it was still a sore point between us. Golden pollen coated my finger.
    “These are pretty. Secret admirer?”
    To my surprise my mother laughed, color rising briefly in her cheeks. “Not so secret. Someone I met in the emergency room. His name is Andrew. Andrew something or other. I was pretty spacey from the pain pills. We had a lovely conversation, of which I remember almost nothing.”
    I opened the florist’s envelope and pulled out the little card.
    “Yes, go ahead,” she said. “Feel free.”
    Dear Evie, thank you for the good conversation on a very bad day. As discussed, these are Apollo gladioli. Hope you like them. Yours, Andrew Stewart.
    “Why Apollo gladioli?” I asked, catching the envelope as it skidded across the table in a gust of wind that rattled the wind chimes and slammed waves against the shore.
    “Well, we talked about the moon landing, that I do remember. Where we were in 1969, that sort of thing. I suppose I must have mentioned my old moon garden, though it all went to seed years ago. But maybe that’s why he sent these.”
    “Looks like you made a big impression.” I put the card back in its envelope, suddenly very sad. My parents had met as volunteers in a community garden just as my father was about to leave for Vietnam. Over the next year, they wrote. My mother savored his letters, the onion-skin pages in their thin envelopes filled with his slanted script. She had known my father so briefly that it was as if she had made him up to suit herself, and when she wrote back it was with a reckless freedom, telling him things she’d never shared before—her secrets, fears, and dreams.
    Then