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against him, and this I can never do.”
    Miranda is unwilling to bring up the past, a dark wave that could all too easily drown them. She does not yet know who he is, whom she is with. It is far too soon to know; she has been alone with him only for minutes, if not seconds: time in the elevator, time stuck between the two doors of Valerie’s building, time when he hailed her a cab and made this plan: that they would meet for just as long as she liked to walk in the Villa Borghese.
    “My mother loved you very much. She was always happy with you. You were the girl she wanted to be.”
    “Perhaps at first.”
    “My mother didn’t change the way she felt about someone once she decided they were hers. And you were hers. Nothing could change that.”
    Miranda refuses to begin speaking this way.
    “Her death, how was her death? I hope it wasn’t difficult.”
    “A few difficult weeks. Not much pain because Jo, but you wouldn’t know this, of course you wouldn’t, is a hospice nurse.”
    “Jo, it makes me happy just to think of her. She was a perfect little girl. Her life? Has it been happy?”
    “Yes, I would say she’s had a happy life. She’s found just the right work for herself. She always knows, she says, that she is doing good. And her husband—well, Phil seems to have trouble holding on to a job. He wanted to be an architect—but, who knows what happened? Once again, it doesn’t seem to be the kind of thing we talk about. I mean my family. Her son is a sculptor, very charming, though once again we don’t talk about his work. It seems to be all about rubber tires. I think she supports him, too. She was wonderful at the end with my mother.”
    Miranda thinks, I would love to see Jo again. Jo, whom I entirely, uncomplicatedly loved. Jo, who was fifteen last time I saw her.
    An old woman is holding an ice-cream cone to the lips of an old man in a wheelchair. The breeze ruffles the man’s white hair. She pats his lips with a light blue cloth handkerchief.
    “My mother’s mind was clear almost until the end,” Adam says. “A few days of derangement, which had, even in their dreadfulness, a comic aspect. Knowing my mother, it’s not surprising. When one of the doctors or nurses or helpers would come in the room she’d say, ‘Oh, your son plays the piano, too.’ ”
    Miranda doesn’t think it’s amusing, doesn’t even pretend to laugh. She doesn’t believe Adam thinks it’s funny, but is used to saying it is, or that it has its comic aspects, because this is a way of breaking up the flat glass sheet of death.
    “Do you still play the piano?”
    “Not much. I’m much more concerned with teaching my students, directing the chorus.”
    So you have lost a very great deal, she wants to say, but only exhales the single syllable, “Ah.”
    “And what about your father?” she asks. “He was such a nice man. I don’t think I heard him speak more than five sentences, ever. I don’t even know his first name.”
    “He didn’t like it, maybe that’s why. It was Sal. Salvatore. He died soon after my mother. He just had a heart attack, sitting in front of the television. He died the way he lived, not making a fuss, not causing any problems. I think he had no interest in living after my mother died. It was only about six months.”
    She doesn’t know what he wants her to say to this. Her eye falls on a dog with the body of a golden retriever and the head of a cocker spaniel. She’d like to draw his attention to it, so they could take their minds off sadness, but it seems, she knows, wrong: she doesn’t want him to think her unserious, unable to hold dark thoughts. And besides, she remembers: he doesn’t like dogs. He’d been bitten by a dog when he was only three. There was a small scar on his right thigh. Was it still there? Were scars one of the things that escaped time? Or had age covered even that mark, that sign of history.
    The dog’s master whistles; he runs off on his disproportionately long