and elderly, each customer more tragic, sunken, and shambling than the next. Her cart was overly large and difficult to keep on course. Her uncomfortable heels smacked against the linoleum to the time of the piped-in music all around her. Canned plum tomatoes, no-boil noodles, bags of shredded cheese, ground beef, oregano, cumin. She needed everything. She could smell dust here on the porch, the sour odor of decomposing leaves. A breeze touched her face, and she knew from the weight of the air that it would rain soon. She’d finally changed into jeans while the lasagna baked, filling her cabin with an extravagance of scent that made her ashamed of the lacks it had suffered on her watch. She’d never cooked. There was so much she’d never done. The dish she held was too hot, too heavy for her to bear gracefully; she raised one foot off the ground and tried to balance it on her knee, where it teetered, the foil she’d laid over the top and forgotten to crimp under the handles sliding partly off. She’d made enough for eight people, but she hadn’t known how to reduce the one recipe she’d found in the cabin in a Joy of Cooking that her mother had relegated to a shelf there, probably for the sake of decoration rather than out of any real faith that Knox would put it to proper use.
Bruce opened the door. He wore a loose T-shirt with the suit pants he’d had on earlier. A burp cloth was slung over his shoulder. He held on to the edge of the door, as if he wanted to be prepared to close it after her, once she’d gone.
“Are the boys down,” Knox asked. She whispered out of habit, though the room her mother had prepared for the babies was well out of earshot.
“Hopefully,” Bruce said. He didn’t smile. “They’re in their cribs, anyway.”
Knox stood still, waiting to be invited in. Bruce watched her.
“I made lasagna,” she said stupidly.
“Thank you,” Bruce said.
“It was a long day,” Knox said. She took a breath. “It wasn’t what I wanted, either. I just wanted you to know that.” As she said this, she became so dizzy with sorrow for herself that she felt she might have to hang on to the door, too. Her throat pained her, and she knew she was going to cry.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It does.” She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment and tried to compose herself. At least she could show Bruce she didn’t mean to be crying, and was fighting to stop. “I’m—could you take this fucking dish?”
Bruce laughed, then, a laugh that degenerated into coughing and then renewed itself while he moved to relieve her.
“Sorry,” he said. He opened the door wider, still laughing. It was a laugh she hadn’t heard in New York—there was something reckless in it, as if he might have given himself permission to go mad. He looked straight at her, one of his hands balancing the lasagna. Knox ducked past him, though she hadn’t formally been asked inside. Where else did she have to go? Robbie was headed back to school the next day; Ned was lost to her; it was too cold to swim. What she really wanted, she knew the instant she entered the desolate hallway, was to hold one of the babies. She wanted her arms filled with them, to smell their heads and their lotioned, still-skinny bodies inside their pajamas. She wanted to rub her index finger along the ridges their spines made, over the brief jut of their shoulder blades, rest one of their soft, diapered butts on her forearm, press them against the length of her torso, and stay. She resolved not to stop moving and crossed toward the stairs. She could hear Bruce set the dish down somewhere behind her, and his footsteps on the bare treads climbing after hers, but he made no effort to stop her.
The door to their room was open; a humidifier hummed somewhere inside. In the glow from the nightlight stood two round cribs, trussed up with gingham and eyelet, along the walls of what Knox remembered now was a former study, paneled in some cheap veneer. The trappings of the nursery were incongruous with the soul of the room, but the preparation her mother had put in was everywhere: there were two matching hampers, a storage system with coordinating baskets, an elaborate mobile hung from a hook in the ceiling. The plush rug underfoot muted