Whistler

1

Chapter: "1"

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Daphne and her husband Jonathan stand in the Medieval Art gallery, where Jonathan whispers that an old man near the exit sign has been watching her—first in the ticket line, then following them through the gallery. Daphne dismisses it, pointing out that everyone cuts through Medieval Art. The banter between them reveals its own history: Jonathan is leaving tomorrow for what might be a long trip, and Daphne has just posted her end-of-year grades. They are enjoying a rare, unburdened day in the city.

Jonathan suggests they go up a floor to see if the man follows, and Daphne reluctantly agrees. As they climb the Grand Staircase, Jonathan teases her about having a jealous lover, and the joke circles back to an old confession Daphne once made: that old guys have always loved her. Jonathan has never let go of that confession, and Daphne regrets ever telling him.

In Modern and Contemporary, they stop before a monumental granite slab carved with two horses by Charles Ray. The old man appears, winded from following them, sees them seeing him, and quickly walks away. Jonathan wants to confront him; Daphne, remembering her dead father's advice about not engaging with strangers who might become dangerous, wants nothing to do with him. But Jonathan leaves to follow the man, and when Daphne grows annoyed at his absence, she goes to find him. She discovers Jonathan talking to the man in the next gallery, and Jonathan delivers the stunning news: the man is her stepfather.

Of course, it is not her stepfather Lucas Ekker, who lives outside Boston with her mother. Jonathan pushes her to think further back, and the man introduces himself: Eddie Triplett. Daphne makes a sound she cannot stop, putting her hand to her mouth. It is his voice, coming out of this old man's mouth, that undoes her. Eddie explains he didn't mean to chase her, that he knew it wasn't her mother but recognized Daphne as someone he knew without being able to place her. Jonathan hands Daphne his handkerchief as she begins to cry, and Eddie calls her "Duck," a name full of sorrow. Something inside Daphne breaks, and she steps into an open crack in time, falling backward into memory.

Jonathan guides them to the museum's Dining Room, with Eddie following. In the elevator, Daphne's crying abruptly stops. She looks at Eddie and asks if it reminds him of anything, and he quietly sings, "See the USA in your Chevrolet," the song that was once Daphne's mother's favorite. Daphne barks out a laugh.

At their table, Eddie explains himself. He went to his office at Random House that morning only to find the building's water shut off for water main work, everyone sent home, so he came to the Met on a whim. He is still an editor, a fact that makes Daphne's heart leap. She remembers the game he played when she and her sister Leda were children: stepfathers were called Eddie, junior editors were Eddies, senior editors were Eds or Edwinas, and the top man was an Edward. Eddie and Daphne's mother both worked at Houghton Mifflin—he in editorial, she in publicity—before she sent him packing, insisting he leave not only their family but his job too. Daphne recalls being outraged, and she also remembers that the fault for the divorce, in her child's mind, was somehow hers.

Eddie tells them his life story: he moved to New York, got a better job at Simon & Schuster, then moved to Random House, which became his terminal stop. He isn't retired, which disappoints Jonathan, who wants everyone to retire now that he has. Eddie asks what Jonathan did, and Jonathan tells him about hospital administration; Eddie mentions he had a stent placed there almost three years ago and praises the cardiac care, which makes Jonathan beam with pride.

When Eddie turns to Daphne and asks if she's a writer, she says she isn't. It doesn't matter, she tells him; she isn't bound by a promise her nine-year-old self made. They had promised each other, the night of the accident, that they would both be writers and dedicate their books to one another. She teaches English at a girls' prep school instead, though Jonathan interjects that she teaches creative writing and every girl wants to take Mrs. Fuller's class. Mrs. Fuller, she explains, because she took Jonathan's name—but it was Eddie's name she wanted as a child. Daphne Triplett, a name she printed on the flyleaf of every book she owned, planning to use it as her pen name. Eddie had told her, while they were hanging sideways in the car, that everything was more convincing in French: Nom de plume.

Daphne asks if Eddie married again. He shakes his head slowly, saying he knows what he's good at and what he's not, and he wasn't good at marriage. She asks about children, and Eddie looks at her with love, saying, "Just you and your sister." He asks about Leda. Daphne tells him about her sister, a clinical psychologist married to Steve, a Korean hedge funder, whose New York Times column "Your Therapist" makes Eddie put down his fork in surprise. Leda, it turns out, became the writer. Eddie says the girls could have done anything, and he insists Daphne was extraordinary as a child, which embarrasses her. She swerves the conversation to books, and they discover Eddie has edited many of the ones she recommends. Jonathan remarks that he's never known anyone who reads as much as Daphne, and Eddie replies, "Well, now you know two of us."

When the time comes to leave, Eddie writes his number on a tiny slip of paper from a leather notebook—refusing to put it in Daphne's phone—and declines to take her number in return, saying if she's relieved to be rid of him, she won't regret not giving it to him. She puts her hand on his hand. He tells her that only her mother, her sister, and she ever called him Eddie. When she asks what people call him now, he smiles and says he'll never tell her, that she'll have to call him Eddie for the rest of her life.

They take the elevator down together, and at the choir screen from the Cathedral of Valladolid, Eddie hugs Daphne goodbye. His neck smells faintly of Ivory soap, and the memory of that smell—of the single night she slept with her face buried in his neck for warmth—overcomes her. He tells them he's going back to look for a Monet, a haystack in the snow, the whim that brought him to the Met in the first place.

Jonathan and Daphne leave the museum into the clear May light. The day is wrecked for anything else, and both of them know it. They're going home. After two blocks of silence, Jonathan says, "That was something." Daphne takes his arm and asks a favor: let her go see Leda for an hour or two without feeling bad about abandoning him, and then she'll take the train home. He stops walking, pointing out that he's never made her feel bad about seeing her sister. She admits he never has, but she feels bad anyway.

Jonathan admits he hasn't asked enough about the past, and now he feels guilty because Daphne is leaving tomorrow. She reminds him she is leaving to see her sister. He remembers. He offers a compromise: text her sister to see if she is home, and if she is, let Jonathan walk her over. He promises he will not come upstairs, no matter how many times Leda asks.

They lean against the stone wall circling the park while Daphne texts Leda. Leda does not see patients on Thursdays, but she often fills the day with errands or yoga or lunch with friends. She writes back quickly: she is not home, but close; twenty minutes. She asks if everything is okay. Daphne says yes.

Jonathan says he has been trying to remember what Daphne ever told him about Ed Triplett, and he cannot recall anything except that her mother had three husbands. He takes this as a personal failure. He loves asking Daphne questions about her past, and he is sorry he never asked more about someone Daphne herself had all but forgotten. For Daphne, the past is a sinkhole. Not terrible, but nothing there for her.

She tells him Eddie did not get much of a run. A year, possibly two. She and Leda were crazy about him, but when he was gone, he was gone. Jonathan, a father of two grown daughters, cannot imagine letting go of his children. But Daphne and Leda were barely his stepdaughters. Daphne explains that her mother scrubbed him out of their lives. No visits, no birthday cards, nothing. She guessed at nine that her mother thought they would get over it better that way. It probably had to do with her father. Buddy was the one her mother truly wanted to scrub, but she was not allowed to do that, while with Eddie she had complete control.

Jonathan asks if she ever thought of finding Eddie. Daphne looks around at the fresh leaves, the lilacs, New York at its best, and wants to say: the present, let's live here. She tells him she thought about it when she was nine, but by the time the internet existed, she had forgotten. Had she failed Eddie? She had been sure of it at the time. Maybe she was right. Jonathan puts his arm around her, kisses her head

Interstitial

Chapter: "Interstitial"

Friday, January 18, 1980, starts quietly in Winchester, Massachusetts. Leda Zabriskie stays quiet all morning, but in the school cafeteria, she vomits her egg salad sandwich onto the floor. The lunchroom lady, Mrs. Valenti, cleans up and finds Leda feverish, her head on her Camp Snoopy lunch box. When Mrs. Valenti says they need to go to the nurse's office, Leda vomits again. Mrs. Valenti picks her up and carries her there herself.

The thermometer reads 103.5. Leda is too sick to hold it under her tongue and throws up even the ginger ale. The nurse looks up the school directory and finds the name Abigail Triplett, mother, beneath the names Daphne and Leda Zabriskie. No father is listed. The children have a different last name. That's all the story the nurse needs.

Back at Abigail's office, the timing is lucky. Lunch for first and second grade started at eleven fifteen, and Abigail has a twelve o'clock launch meeting. If the call had come later, she wouldn't have been at her desk. The nurse tells her to come get Leda as soon as possible. Abigail hangs up and thinks that the purpose of a sick bay is so a parent can work without worrying about losing her job. She loves her children, but part of caring for them means keeping the job she loves, especially after the Christmas holidays. She decides she has time to walk over to talk to Eddie.

Eddie works in a converted storage closet. Abigail and Eddie put that closet to use whenever possible, not for sex, but for kissing like teenagers behind a closed door. Eddie is a magnificent kisser. Things progress quickly, and Abigail feels arousal climbing the stairs, having to remind herself that her daughter is sick. She tells Eddie that Leda is throwing up and she has to go get her. Eddie asks if it's a virus and notes that school is a petri dish. Abigail mentions the fall list meeting in seven minutes and wonders if she should pick Leda up an hour from now, claiming traffic. Eddie shakes his head. "Go get her. I'll tell them what happened. I'll make it sound dire."

This is the benefit of working for the same company: they can cover for one another. Eddie hands her the car keys and promises everything will be fine. Abigail feels better immediately. Eddie keeps his head, doesn't roll his eyes, helps her think things through. He kisses her to show support. As she heads down the hall, he calls out to remind her to make sure it's not appendicitis. He tells her to press on the right side of the lower abdomen, and if the child screams, take her to the ER.

Abigail forgets Eddie's instruction when she sees her daughter on the cot, crying to go home, holding up her arms to be carried like a baby. But once they're home and she's helping Leda out of her sour-smelling clothes, she remembers. Leda, hot and dry, screams as soon as her mother touches her stomach. Abigail didn't even have to press. She doesn't want to go to the hospital for any number of reasons, including a fresh January deductible, but Leda is sobbing and heaving up teaspoons of bile. The minute Abigail says the word "appendicitis" to the nurse, the ER staff springs into action. Poor Leda has people lining up to press on her lower right abdomen, then sticking needles in her. Abigail holds her daughter's hand but turns her head, thinking she might faint. Things move so quickly she doesn't get a chance to call Eddie until Leda is wheeled off to surgery.

Eddie explains he knew because his brother's appendix ruptured when they were kids. His mother kept trying to give Martin ginger ale, and by the time she got him to the hospital, the doctor said another half an hour and he would have died. Abigail realizes how close she came to letting Leda sleep, and thinks that all of life's mistakes are the fault of the mother. Eddie lays out a plan: he'll come to the hospital, get the car, give her a kiss, pick up Daphne, go home and pack bags for her and Leda, then come back to visit. Abigail had forgotten about Daphne but doesn't say so. She can only hold one child in her head at a time. She tells him to bring the manuscript she left on her desk.

Sitting in the hospital hallway near the doors where they took her daughter, Abigail closes her eyes and feels the sickening speed of her heart. It's the almost death that terrifies her, the almost derailment of everything she's ever known. She turns her fear into rage because she cannot abide it. Her rage takes the shape of Buddy Zabriskie, who on this freezing January day is no doubt sitting in a shed mending lobster traps, his phone long disconnected. He doesn't know his younger child almost died, or that she was saved by the good thinking of Eddie Triplett, the man who paid for lunch, sat beside her at meetings, passed her notes, wanted to marry her, did marry her, and loved her girls. Eddie knew where the appendix was located, because honestly, she did not. Abigail thinks there ought to be a test before you're allowed to have children: identify a good man (she had to repeat a grade on that one), then prove basic proficiency in keeping your child alive. Her greatest fear is that she and Buddy Zabriskie are soulmates, and that they should be together on that boat with no one to hurt but one another and some fish.

Daphne attends an after-school program, which is where Eddie picks her up. Full-on dark of night arrives before five o'clock in winter, and Daphne waits behind the glass front doors in her teddy bear coat. When she sees the station wagon, she runs outside, sliding into the front seat even though she knows she's supposed to sit in the back. She reports that Leda threw up everywhere in the cafeteria, that all the kids were talking about it. Eddie corrects the mythic pack of other children but not Daphne, saying Leda is pretty sick. Daphne asks how sick, and Eddie tells her Leda had to go to the hospital and have her appendix out. Daphne is struck by the glamour of surgery; people in books had surgery. Eddie says she'll be fine. Daphne likes her sister. People talk about how pretty Leda is, but that doesn't bother Daphne, who privately knows Leda to be a strange little bird. Daphne suggests they bring their mother dinner, since Leda can't have any, and Eddie agrees.

They go home and pack. Daphne packs for her sister: a nightgown and bathrobe, underwear, toothbrush, a bear named Mr. Crispy. Eddie packs for his wife. They stop at their favorite chicken place and get a grilled chicken sandwich and fries for Abigail, with Daphne telling the girl at the counter, "No onions, double sauce." They get chicken tenders with honey mustard for themselves to eat later at home, and three Cokes.

The visit isn't much of a visit. Leda sleeps through the whole thing, looking insubstantial in the hospital bed, her golden hair caught up in a blue paper surgical bonnet. Their mother tells them Leda's appendix ruptured during surgery, so the doctor took longer than expected. Leda will be monitored overnight and, if stable, can go home in a few days. Fortunately it's Friday, so Abigail has two days before worrying about work. She looks so exhausted that Eddie offers to trade places, to sleep in the chair while Abigail goes home with Daphne. But Abigail declines. Even though Eddie is more competent than she is, she isn't about to drop her guard now.

Eddie and Daphne head home just past six, but the night is so cold and dark it looks like the small hours of the morning. The big car is warm and smells of chicken. Daphne wishes she were the one who'd had her ruptured appendix removed and been laid out in a hospital bed like Sleeping Beauty, but she's also glad to be the one with Eddie. Daphne has no details from the time her parents lived together, and since the divorce she has seen her father so infrequently that the thought of him makes her uncomfortable. What she knows about him: he's burly, often but not always bearded, his face above the beard either sunburned or wind-chapped. He never smelled of fish on the occasions she saw him, but she assigned the smell of fish to him anyway. Passing the tank of lobsters in the grocery store, their bound claws tapping at the glass, she wants to ask them: did my father do this to you?

Eddie Triplett is cut from entirely different cloth, and it's the same cloth Daphne comes from, or so she tells herself. He reads constantly, not just finished books but books that are loose piles of paper, marking them up to make them better. "A work in progress," he likes to say. At her insistent begging, he once marked up a theme paper she wrote for English class, correcting it like a teacher so she could write it out a second time. "I don't think I'm supposed to be doing this," Eddie says, circling her misspellings. "Other parents do it," she says. The word "parents" strikes him. "My parents," she says, and that's what wins him over. Eddie makes room for her in his big chair and shows her how to improve

2

Chapter: "2"

Daphne checks her watch. It’s five o’clock, and she tells her sister she has to go. Leda protests: Daphne has only told her the part she already knew. But Daphne has promised Jonathan she’ll be home for dinner. He’s leaving for Wisconsin in the morning to clean out his mother’s house with his sister Bea. Daphne is torn between this long-awaited conversation with her sister and her commitment to her husband. When Leda demands the story continue, Daphne offers a punch line instead: “We lived.” Then she is out the door, taking the stairs down to the subway.

On the train, her head fills with what she hasn’t said or thought about in decades. She remembers that her own childhood wasn’t knocked out of her by Eddie at all. It was her mother’s third husband, Lucas Ekker, who deserves the credit for that. By the time he arrived, Daphne was twelve and finished with father figures. Her mother had abandoned Greek mythology for a baby name book and gave birth to Christopher and Matthew. Lucas was a Methodist, so their mother converted. Leda grew up to dig into other people’s childhoods; Daphne locked her own away. Lucas had been their mother’s author at Houghton Mifflin, and she saw the sales potential in his book Positivity! even when her colleagues dismissed it. Thanks to her, he stayed on the New York Times list longer than Dale Carnegie. She went on the road with him, leaving Leda and Daphne behind, first with neighbors and cousins, later with Eddie. The Ekker empire grew. They bought a big house on the other side of Winchester, and Daphne and Leda kept sleeping side by side in twin beds. It was the AIDS epidemic that crushed the empire, because no one wanted to be positive anymore. But her mother had managed the money well, and all four children went through college free of debt.

Daphne crosses through Grand Central, glancing up at the painted blue ceiling with its stars. She catches the 6:23 with moments to spare, finds a seat, and gets thirty quiet minutes to look out the window. When the train pulls in, Jonathan is on the platform waiting for her. He has sushi. He knows this is a night best spent at home. They drive back, and he asks if Leda helped her sort things out. Daphne isn’t sure what sorting it out would even entail. Jonathan wishes she’d come to Wisconsin. Daphne won’t: she doesn’t fly, hasn’t since her father Buddy Zabriskie died. He asks if seeing Eddie rattled her. She insists she was surprised, not rattled. Then Jonathan admits his real fear: he wants to be sure she’ll be here when he gets back. “You think I’m going to run off with Eddie Triplett?” she asks. He says no, but Eddie seems to love her more than most of them do. “Jonathan, he’s my stepfather,” she says, and that explanation provides no comfort at all.

In the backyard, in Adirondack chairs, they eat sushi and then strawberries. The conversation circles back to travel. Jonathan says he wants to see things while he still can. He brings up Fiji and the Milford Sound. He mentions his first wife, Candy, whose dreams all had to do with travel, and who died at forty before she could do any of it. Daphne listens, understands that he’s destabilized by his new free time, and suggests he ask Bea, who never gets to go anywhere. Jonathan softens, apologizes for bringing up Candy. They hold each other, make love, and Daphne knows this is the best way she has to reassure him that he can go and come back and she will still be here.

In the morning, she drives him to the airport, and on the drive home she thinks about calling her mother to say she’s seen Eddie. But she gets stuck on that week after the car accident, when she was nine. Leda was in the hospital on the second floor, and Eddie was on the fourth floor after surgery on his ankle. Daphne had a brutal row of stitches down the left side of her face. Her mother arranged for her to stay at the Cathcarts’ house down the street. She liked going to the hospital then. She ferried notes between Leda and Eddie. Eddie would write back on the back of the same paper, complaining about the dull fourth floor and offering Leda his ice cream. He sat propped up in bed, marking away at his manuscript. Daphne wanted to stay right there with him, to sleep rolled up at the foot of his bed. When she asked about his stitches, he kicked back the covers and showed her his bare leg with a scar from the neighbor’s dog Judith, twenty-three stitches. She had twenty-six in her face but didn’t want to seem competitive. He told her she was the kind of person who asked about the dog, who knew he was fine, who wanted to make sure Judith was okay. She kissed him and believed they were inseparable.

Four days later, everything went to hell. Daphne walked home after school and found her mother sobbing at the kitchen table. She was sure Eddie or Leda was dead, but instead her mother said she was divorcing Eddie. Because, “He could have killed you.” Eddie had sent Daphne out into the snow to find help after the accident, even though his ankle was broken and his foot was pinned by the emergency brake. Daphne tried to explain it wasn’t his fault, that the car slipped, that this was Eddie, the most trustworthy person she knew. But her mother honed the tale over the next month, and Daphne swallowed the truth she carried with her: it was her fault. If she hadn’t been in the accident, her mother wouldn’t have had to get divorced for her safety. She was nine. Her heart exploded with the blow.

Now she is fifty-three, driving back from LaGuardia on a Saturday morning, and for the first time she wonders what changed in those four days between being found at the raspberry farm and her mother crying in the kitchen. She doesn’t know enough yet to solve that puzzle. She doesn’t call her mother. Instead, back at the house, she calls Eddie. He answers on the first ring. “Daphne!” he cries. He’s been walking around with his phone in his hand, waiting for this. They tell each other how good it is to hear the other’s voice. She tells him it has been forty-four years. He whistles. He asks if Buddy Zabriskie walked her down the aisle. Daphne tells him Buddy died before she got married, which is how she met Jonathan, in the hospital when Buddy was sick. Eddie says he’s sorry, and she can hear it in his voice. Then he says something that catches her: “I wasn’t allowed to say it at the time, but I was enormously fond of your father.” Daphne is stunned. “You knew him?” “I’m sure I didn’t know him,” Eddie says, “but I’d do the handoffs when he came to get you and Leda. Or I’d drive to Gloucester to pick you up—”

The Call

On the phone, Daphne and Eddie revisit the old routine of Eddie coming to their father Buddy Zabriskie’s apartment to take them home, and how carefully they hid their joy until they were back on the highway, because they never wanted Buddy to know how happy they were to be leaving, or how happy they were to see Eddie. Eddie remembers Buddy as a decent man who had no business getting married or having children, a man who just wanted to be out on his boat with a couple of beers. He was flummoxed by girls, kept buying them hats, and fed them Cheetos. Eddie brings up The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea and says that was Daphne’s father: his nature was the ocean, and Daphne’s mother thought she could change him, but no one changes another person’s nature. Eddie sighs over Daphne’s mother, who was never much for picking husbands. She married a third time, Lucas Ekker, the pontificating bore whose publicity work she had done at Houghton. Eddie wishes her every happiness and asks Daphne if she has told her mother that she and Eddie ran into each other. She hasn’t.

Daphne takes the phone out into the backyard and sits in Jonathan’s Adirondack chair while two small rabbits graze in the spinach beds. Eddie tells her he is afraid of getting his hopes up, afraid that once she tells her mother, she will put his memory back in its little box and never hear from him again. Daphne says that even if her mother told her Eddie was a Russian operative working to overthrow democratic elections, she would still go to dinner with him. Eddie says he will expense the whole thing to the Kremlin and suggests she bring Jonathan, Leda, and Leda’s husband. Daphne explains that Jonathan is in Wisconsin with his sister, cleaning out their mother’s house. A long silence follows.

Eddie has to go to a black-tie party the next night at the Century Club, the fiftieth anniversary of Skip and Polly Hotalling, with fifty couples and a very precise seating plan. His date caught a summer cold, and Polly would never forgive him if he showed up without someone. Daphne accepts his hal

3

Chapter: "3"

Leda lies in bed beside Daphne, staring at the ceiling, tears soaking the pillow. She asks whether Daphne really thought she knew "that story." Daphne says she thought Leda knew some of it, that when she was nine she assumed they transferred information telepathically. Daphne admits she isn't sure how accurate her memory is; it was traumatic and a long time ago, and Eddie must have made parts of it up when he told it to her. Leda asks what part Daphne is sure about, and Daphne rolls onto her side. "The horse. I'm positive about the horse."

Daphne walks through the doubts: there is no evidence the dead people showed up, or the dog. Mary Carter had a broken ankle, a broken wrist, two broken ribs, and a collapsed lung. There could have been infection, fever, dehydration. Maybe she saw things that weren't really there, or maybe she stopped writing about the event because she didn't want readers questioning her memories. Leda offers another possibility: Mary might have been sure about what happened but came to think of it as private. Either way they will never know. The only thing anyone can be sure of is that the horse came back to get her and brought her back to the ranch. Whistler was real.

After breakfast, a long shower, the walk to the train station, the train ride to Bronxville, and the walk back to the house, Daphne convinces herself she should have called her mother by now, but there simply hasn't been time. When she finally turns on her phone, she sees four missed calls from her husband, who never leaves messages. He answers with "Where have you been?" She says, "At Leda's." He asks if she is okay. He and his sister are going through papers: love letters, camp letters, insurance policies, electric bill stubs, report cards, dress patterns. Daphne waits for him to ask how she is. He doesn't. Instead he tells her about unopened Vogue patterns from the fifties and sixties, worth money, and about the baseball cards. Daphne asks if he called the service that takes everything away. No, the patterns killed that idea. Daphne tells him she called Eddie. Jonathan is glad, says they should get together. Then Jonathan starts talking to someone else, and Daphne lets him go. She tells him she loves him because she does.

There is always a period of adjustment after school lets out. The ghost memory of obligations follows Daphne into June. She thinks about weeding the raised beds, buying tomato plants, cleaning the refrigerator, finding an old Philip Roth novel and spending the day on the couch. But she calls her mother instead.

Her mother always makes Daphne feel like a telemarketer trying to rope her into a time-share. Daphne says she's thinking of coming to see her. Her mother asks if she is in town, with an edge of nervousness. Daphne says no, she's home; school is out and Jonathan has gone to Wisconsin to help his sister clean out their mother's house. Her mother didn't know Jonathan's mother died. Daphne wonders if she deliberately didn't tell her.

Her mother asks when. Tomorrow, maybe? Christopher and his family are coming over tonight, her mother says. Christopher, Daphne's half-brother, lives close by with his family, and that proximity is the great and abiding joy of his parents' lives. Her mother says she needs to talk to Lucas and see what the plans are. Daphne says sure, but then she goes ahead and tells her: she and Jonathan ran into Eddie Triplett at the Met on Thursday.

Her mother responds brightly, almost like Daphne ran into her best friend from high school. "Eddie? Oh my god, how is Eddie Triplett?" She talks about Eddie's great eye for art, how he took her to the MFA, the Gardner, and the one at Harvard. Anything she knows about art today, she says, Eddie taught her. She tells Daphne that Eddie loved her, adored her, and that after that car accident he was torn up about having hurt her. Daphne says, "He didn't hurt me." Her mother says, well, he was upset about the scar on her face, all those stitches, that she looked like someone had hit her with an axe. Is Eddie still at Random House? He must have retired by now. Daphne has to pick which sentence to address. "You knew he was at Random House?" Her mother read Publishers Weekly even after she stopped working.

Eddie hasn't retired. He's still working. Her mother says bravo for Eddie, that publishing is short on wisdom these days. Daphne takes the phone away from her ear and stares at it. Her mother is still talking. She says it's been such a long time since she's seen him. "Forty-four years," Daphne says, mystified. Her mother can't believe it. She remembers publishing functions over the years where Eddie's name came up, someone saying what a good editor he was, and none of those people knew they'd been married. She asks if Daphne will see him again. "I do," Daphne says. "Will you tell him hello for me?"

Daphne sits down on the couch. "Mom. What the hell?" Her mother is quiet. "You're not mad at him?" Her mother says, "Well, forty-four years is a long time." And then Daphne says something to her mother that she has never said before, at least not since the car accident. She tells her mother she needs to help her understand. Her mother thinks about it for a minute and tells her to come up tomorrow. Tomorrow would be good.

Leda says she hates having a job. Daphne says she loves her job. Leda does love her job, but she would like to be in the room for this one; she wants to hear what their mother has to say firsthand. Leda tells Daphne to call the minute she leaves the house. Daphne asks why they never asked their mother about Eddie before. Leda says because they weren't thinking about Eddie; they forgot about him. Daphne wonders if that is the question she should ask their mother: How had they forgotten about Eddie?

Daphne calls Jonathan next. He asks why she is going to her mother's, why not go to Leda's if she is lonely. She isn't lonely; she needs to talk to her mother. And if she goes while Jonathan is in Wisconsin, her mother won't get her feelings hurt. Jonathan is always the one their mother wants to see. He says he hopes she goes and has a wonderful time. The clean-out is still going: they found an entire second house's worth of crap in the attic. He's amazed the second-floor ceiling never caved in. "Are you ever coming home?" "Someday," he says. "After you visit your mother, you might want to think about taking a bus to Wisconsin."

Daphne remembers the year of her commuting relationship with Jonathan. He got the job in Manhattan six months after they started dating, but it took her another year to decide she should be with him, which was stupid. She loved him, he wanted her there, Buddy was dead, and nothing was keeping her in Boston. On weekends she took the bus to New York because it was cheaper, living on a schoolteacher's salary with credit card debt from taking care of her father. Every week she brought a tote bag full of student papers on the bus and marked them up over the length of Connecticut. Jonathan hated the thought of her on a bus, mostly because it meant she started and ended her trips in bus stations. He kept offering to buy her a train ticket, but in those days her feminist standards made the idea of letting the man she was sleeping with pay for her train ticket seem tantamount to signing away her freedom.

Every time she waited in line to board the bus, some young woman would attach herself to Daphne and ask to sit with her. Daphne never understood it until one Sunday night going home, when a girl told her that her mother had instructed her to identify the safest-looking person on the bus and ask to sit with her. "That's you." Daphne could see she was right: she was a little older, she was grading papers, she was always going to be the safest-looking person on the bus. She used to daydream about the train, about a mythical future with money, a ticket on the Acela, the fast train, and paying extra to sit in the quiet car.

Two days after the Hotallings' fiftieth wedding anniversary, Daphne takes the Acela to Boston, booking a seat in the quiet car. She means to read, but she spends most of the time staring out the window, thinking the whole thing through. Her mother and Lucas have stayed in Winchester, a suburb that offers both the small rental house Daphne lived in as a child and the stately spreads where they raised their sons. Her mother had been enthralled with the grander side of town back when she was broke, so once she had money she knew exactly what she wanted: to walk to the Boat Club for lunch. Daphne sees the similarity. Her mother set her sights on the five-bedroom foursquare, and Daphne wanted a train ticket on the express. They moved through Winchester strategically over the years, her mother quietly improving their circumstances by knowing when to sell and when to buy. This one is the apex of her mother's real estate dreams.

Her mother picks her up at the station and says