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legs.
    “I’d heard about your parents’ accident,” Adam says. “From my mother, of course, who was very saddened by it. She liked your mother. I think they went on seeing each other afterward … but I don’t know. It’s the kind of thing my mother would have kept from me.”
    “I blamed my father for the accident. I still do. He had no business driving those icy roads.”
    “Well, we don’t know.”
    “No, I suppose not. But my father and I never came to terms. Not after what happened with my brother.”
    “I was frightened of your father. I never got over that.”
    “I think he liked frightening people.”
    “He didn’t frighten you. And I think he liked that, too.”
    “It’s hard for me to credit him with anything. But I guess my powers of observation—which after all is what I do with my life—well, I guess he gave me that. On those walks in the woods. His teaching me the names of trees and birds.”
    “And Rob, how is he?”
    “I’m hardly in touch with my brother now. He’s still farming in Manitoba … he’s become quite bitter, quite isolated. He thinks I’m soft and frivolous, I know it. Like many people who live entirely honorable lives he has no problems being judgmental and openly critical. It makes being with him unpleasant … and it’s difficult to get there and, well, so many difficult things. I learned from him the pain of being the victim of that kind of righteousness. I like to think it made me less tempted by self-righteousness.”
    “You’ll forgive me if I find the idea of you being soft and frivolous almost hilarious.”
    “Well, you’d be surprised. And you don’t know Rob.”
    “Did your mother live to see your children?”
    “She died when Jeremy was three and Benjamin eight months. But seeing her with them made me kinder to her, I think. You were kind to my mother. Kinder than I, I think.”
    “I wouldn’t say you were unkind, but you could be impatient.”
    “Your constant kindness to her gave me leave to be impatient.”
    “I knew that it annoyed you when I sat and listened to her when she offered me tea at the kitchen table.”
    “I was bored out of my mind. I thought you were encouraging each other to be boring.”
    “How you hated being bored! More than anyone I’ve ever known! You fled from boredom as if you were fleeing from infection.”
    “The plague of boredom. It does make me feel like I’m about to suffocate. Death by drowning. Death by boredom.”
    “I never found your mother boring.”
    “No one ever bored you.”
    “It’s true. I find almost everyone interesting. Perhaps because it always strikes me as quite strange that any of us is alive.”
    She thinks this is a wonderful thing to have said, and it is the kind of thing people she knows now do not say. She wonders if he always said things like this, if they were always talking this way to each other.
    “So now we are both orphans,” she says. “I wonder how common that is, if we are statistically unlucky. Orphans: it sounds like something we’re too old to be. What it means is there’s no one between us and—what would you call it?—the hereafter.”
    “Shall we walk?” he asks.
    They walk down a lane bordered by large old trees, their leaves turned nearly bronze from autumn dryness, but no less lush for that. They walk between rows of white marble heads, busts of the famous, many of whose identities they do not know. Someone has drawn, with Magic Marker, a mustache on Petrarch.
    “Your mother had beautiful hands,” he says. “They always seemed very soft and cool to me. They smelt of a very light perfume. I think it was her lotion: Jergens. When I smell that almond fragrance, I always think of her.”
    “I think about the way your mother cooked. Those wonderful thick soups. The sauces: those enormous pots of tomato sauce going on the stove all day and we’d come in and she’d dip a piece of bread in the sauce and hand it to us on a plate, and we’d eat it with a