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you'll become, if you're foolish again."
    The rosebud mouth tightened and the stare locked. "What was I like?"
    "You were partially paralyzed and in a wheelchair."
    "But what was I like? Didn't I have a life?"
    "You sat. You waited to die. You couldn't climb things anymore and you were unhappy."
    The thought that if she did paint herself younger she would have to bury herself, struck Ariel as absurdly comic at first. But as she pictured the details of dragging her own body out of the house and into the woods, she became terrified and disgusted. What would her cold flesh feel like? Would her clothes become torn in the dragging, her hair raked wildly in every direction? Without a coffin, the hole would have to be deep to keep animals from unearthing her. Would she be able to arrange the body in the grave? And most of all, would she be able to forget raining clods of dirt down over her own face and form?
    "Paint me again," her husband, Thomas, pleaded that very night. "Paint me with legs."
    "I'd have to get rid of the body you have now."
    "I'll bury myself if you paint me with legs."
    "What was it like to be dead?" she asked urgently. "Are the bodies still in the graves?"
    "Paint me whole and I'll tell you."
    "No, thank you. I've already lived that life."
    "You're insane."
    "Careful, careful."

Chapter 2
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    D enny Bryce rehearsed it all evening and in the dawn. The delivery. The four words. And each repetition sounded more like a lie. Finally he said it to his father: "Let's go see Mom."
    The old man sat in his chair—the recliner throne about to be abdicated—and his eyelids pulsed without opening. "She's in the kitchen."
    "No, Dad. She died, remember? You were at her funeral."
    The eyes opened, the head came up. Martin Bryce gasped as if the wind had been knocked out of him. Beth dead. The terrible reprising of shock, tension knotting at the bridge of his nose, his lips spreading in a grimace to contain the pain. "I forgot," he said apologetically, and Denny stroked his silver hair.
    "It's okay, Dad. It's okay. I meant her grave. Let's go visit her grave."
    He felt lower than a scavenger, as despicable as a bully. His faithful, hardworking, dependable, trusting father. Throw him out, Denny. Take away his house, the only thing he has left, the citadel of his memories. Let me see you do that.
    "While we're out, I'll show you some things. . . . Okay? Okay, Dad?"
    Nod.
    He isn't listening. Tell him, but don't tell him. Soothe your guilty conscience. He doesn't understand. But you can pretend he did.
    He had never lied to his father in these latter years. Never manipulated him. Not since high school. He had told him straight up what the medical prognoses were for his mother, for the old man himself. He had told him the truth about his sister, Tiffany, when she had committed suicide seven years earlier. Wretched Tiffany, who at age forty-seven had finally tired of fighting drugs and depression. He could have said it was an accident or a medical thing—God knows she had enough wrong with her—but he hadn't. Why let his parents doubt? He had told them. Told them everything on his almost daily visits. Investments, mortgage, insurance, repairs, scams, health—everything. More than they understood or needed to know; but they listened in order to hear him taking care of them, like he always did, mowing the lawn, shoveling the drive, plunging the toilet, changing the screens, raking the leaves. Acts of love to which his parents were happy spectators as well as recipients. How grateful they were, and it was sometimes hurtful to see that—as if they were surprised that he should give back to them. So, above all, they trusted him.
    "What do other old people do who don't have a son like you?" his mother would say.
    Nothing she had ever given him—and she had given him everything—could be as important as those words.
    And now the great betrayal. Why couldn't he just sit down on the couch and tell the old man