After Sunday lunch, while Red was upstairs napping, Amanda told the others, “It’s not like Dad needs a real caretaker. I grant you that. But someone should make sure every morning that he’s made it through the night, at least.”

“A simple phone call could establish that much,” Stem said.

Jeannie and Amanda raised their eyebrows at each other. It was a remark they would have expected from Denny rather than Stem.

Stem wasn’t looking at either of them. He was watching the children playing a board game on the rug.

Denny said, “Ah, well, maybe sooner or later Dad will find himself a lady friend.”

“Oh! Denny!” Jeannie said.

“What?”

“Yes, he could do that,” Amanda said equably. “Part of me wishes he would, by and by. Some nice, nurturing woman. Though another part of me says, ‘But what if it’s someone who’s not our type? Someone who wears the back of her collar up or something?’ ”

“Dad would never fall for a woman who wore the back of her collar up!” Jeannie said.

Then Red’s footsteps could be heard on the stairs, and everybody fell silent.

Later that same afternoon, when the girls had collected their families and were saying goodbye at the door, Red asked Amanda if he should let their lawyer know about Abby’s death. “Goodness, yes,” Amanda said. “Haven’t you already done that? Who is your lawyer?” and Red said, “I have no idea; it was years ago we made our wills. Your mother was the one who took care of that stuff.”

Stem made a sudden, sharp sound that resembled a laugh, and everybody looked at him.

“It’s like that old joke,” he told them. “The husband says, ‘My wife decides the little things, like what job I take and which house we buy, and I decide the big things, like whether we should admit China to the U.N.’ ”

Jeannie’s Hugh said, “Huh?”

“Women are the ones in charge,” Stem told him. “Make no mistake about it.”

“Isn’t China already in the U.N.?”

But then Nora stepped in to say, “Don’t worry, Father Whitshank, I’ll track down your lawyer’s name,” and the moment passed.

On Monday, while Red was at work, Amanda arrived with more cartons. You’d think she didn’t have a job. She was dressed in business clothes, though, so she must have been on the way to her office. “Tell me the truth, Nora,” she said as soon as she had set the cartons in a corner of the dining room. “Can you imagine you and Stem staying on here forever?”

“You know we would never leave Father Whitshank if he really needed assistance,” Nora said.

“So, do you think he does need assistance?”

“Oh, Douglas should be the one to answer that.”

Amanda’s shoulders slumped, and she turned without a word and walked out.

In the front hall she met up with Denny, who was coming down the stairs in his stocking feet. “Sometimes,” she told him, “I wish Stem and Nora weren’t so … virtuous. It’s wearing, is what it is.”

“Is that a fact,” Denny said.

Red told his sons that he’d heard somewhere that after a man’s wife dies, he should switch to her side of the bed. Then he’d be less likely to reach out for her in the night by mistake. “I’ve been experimenting with that,” he told them.

“How’s it working?” Denny asked.

“Not so very well, so far. Seems like even when I’m asleep, I keep remembering she’s not there.”

Denny passed Stem the screwdriver. They were taking all the screens down, preparing to put the storm windows in for the winter, and Red was supervising. Not that he really needed to, since the boys had done this many times before. He was sitting on the back steps, wearing a huge wool cardigan made by Abby during her knitting days.

“Last night I dreamed about her,” he said. “She had this shawl wrapped around her shoulders with tassels hanging off it, and her hair was long like old times. She said, ‘Red, I want to learn every step of you, and dance till the end of the night.’ ” He stopped speaking. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose. Denny and Stem stood with a screen balanced between them and looked at each other helplessly.

“Then I woke up,” Red said after a minute. He stuffed the handkerchief back in his pocket. “I thought, ‘This must mean I miss having her close attention, the way I’ve always been used to.’ Then I woke up again, for real. Have either of you ever done that? Dreamed that you woke up, and then found you’d still been asleep? I woke up for real and I thought, ‘Oh, boy. I see I’ve still got a long way to go with this.’ Seems I haven’t quite gotten over it, you know?”

“Gosh,” Stem said. “That’s hard.”

“Maybe a sleeping pill,” Denny suggested.

“What could that do?” Red asked.

“Well, I’m just saying.”

“You think every one of life’s problems can be solved by taking a drug.”

“Let’s lean this against that tree,” Stem told Denny.

Denny nodded, tight-lipped, and swung around to back toward a poplar tree with the screen.

That evening, Ree Bascomb brought over an apple crumble and stayed to have a piece with them. “There’s rum in it, is why I waited till I thought the little boys would be in bed,” she said. Actually, the little boys were not in bed, although it was nearly nine. (They didn’t seem to have a fixed bedtime, as Abby had often remarked in a wondering tone to her daughters.) But they were occupied with some sort of racetrack they’d constructed to run through the living room, so the grown-ups moved to the dining room — Ree, Stem and Nora, Red and Denny — where Ree set squares of apple crumble on Abby’s everyday china and passed them around the table. She knew Abby’s house as well as she knew her own, she often said. “You don’t have to lift a finger,” she told Nora, although Nora had already started a pot of decaf and rustled up cream and sugar, mugs and silverware and napkins.

Ree sat down at the table and said, “Cheers, everybody,” and picked up her fork. “They say sweets are helpful in times of sadness,” she said. “I’ve always found that to be true.”

“Well, this was nice of you, Ree,” Red said.

“I could use some sweets myself tonight. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but on top of everything else now, Jeeter’s died.”

“Oh, what a pity,” Nora said. Jeeter was Ree’s tabby cat, going on twenty years old. Everyone in the neighborhood knew him.

Red said, “My God!” He set his fork down. “How in the world did that happen?” he asked.

“I just stepped out on the back stoop this morning and there he was, lying on the welcome mat. I hope he hadn’t been waiting there all night, poor thing.”

“My Lord! That’s awful! But surely they’re going to investigate the cause of death,” Red said. He looked shattered. “These things don’t just come about for no reason.”

“They do if you’re old, Red.”

“Old! He wasn’t even in nursery school yet!”

“What?” Ree said.

Everyone stared at him.

“I remember when he was born! It wasn’t but two or three years ago!”

“What are you talking about?” Ree asked.

“Why, I’m … Didn’t you say Peter died? Your grandson?”

“Jeeter, I said,” Ree told him, raising her voice. “Jeeter, my cat. Good gracious!”

“Oh,” Red said. “Excuse me. My mistake.”

“I did wonder why you’d turned into such a cat person, all at once.”

“Ha! Yes,” he said, “and I wondered how you could act so offhand about your only grandchild passing.” He gave an embarrassed chuckle and picked up his fork again. Then he peered across the table at Nora. She had her napkin pressed to her mouth, and her shoulders were heaving and she was making a slight squeaking sound. It seemed at first she might be choking, till it emerged that the tears streaming down her face were tears of laughter. Stem said, “Hon?” and the others stared at her. None of them had ever seen Nora get the giggles before.