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liquor on his breath and she always stayed clear of him then. His flash point, once seemingly nonexistent, was steadily growing lower and lower. He had never struck her in anger but that didn't mean she felt he was incapable of it. And his temper could be formidable. When he was angry and arguing he had a way of stalking her, moving toward her and then away and then forward again, each time getting closer to her, back and forth, until he was shouting right into her face.
    There were times she considered leaving him.
    She could do it. She hadn't much savings of her own but she could always dust off her nursing job again. They might be scraping a little but she could get by.
    Then just before Christmas of '93 her mother died. The woman had been shoveling snow in the driveway, impatient with waiting for the overdue hired snowplow. The heart attack was swift, sudden and unexpected.
    All three of them drove to Wolfeboro.
    She was a basket case by the time they got there and her sister Barbara, who was living over in Hanover now, wasn't a whole lot better. They had never even considered their mother dying. Sixty-two wasn't old. And sixty-two-year-olds didn't come more vigorous than Kerry McCloud. After their father died she'd turned most of her backyard into a garden, grew her own vegetables and herbs and berries there, canned the vegetables and berries and gave them away. She worked on fundraisers for two charity groups, the public library, and the local Democratic Party. She held down a part-time job she didn't need in a bookstore just to be around the latest in hardcover fiction. She had bridge nights and a women's group for single widows. The only thing she didn't do was date.
    And everyone knew the reason for that.
    Just as everyone knew that Kerry McCloud had a drink or two every evening and slept, not in her marriage bed, but on the couch in the living room.
    But Lydia and her sister were stunned at the loss. She found herself staring blankly at walls and remembering conversations and events as though they were being played out in front of her directly on those walls like a screen into her mother's history. A bookmark in an unfinished book, her mother's name on the daily junk mail which still arrived, a roaster left in the freezer—all were enough to undo her, to reach out to her unexpectedly and move her to sudden tears.
    Robert, who was almost seven by then, had loved his grandma too, and despite the toys and books and games he'd brought with him could not seem to pry himself away from the adults and the spectacle of their grief. She doubted it was good for him. But it was harder to tell him to go out and play or banish him to another room while they were arranging for the funeral or on the phone with friends and relatives than it was to simply accept his presence, seeming always on the verge of tears himself—especially when she or Barb or both were going at it.
    The real surprise was Arthur.
    Not that he took charge—she almost would have expected him to take charge in some ways—but the surprise was the apparent grace, tact and dignity that he brought to the occasion. More often than not it was he who got the phone when it rang, fielding dozens of well-meaning but impossibly intrusive calls, telling the story over and over, how paramedics had rushed to the scene but failed to revive her, at least it was fast, yes , how there was no history of heart disease and no, none in the family history either.
    To these calls and others of a more mundane nature—the sheer brain-numbing business of dealing with a death in the family—Arthur brought a kind of calm, a serious yet unsentimental style that relieved the burden on both sisters. There was to be no viewing. They both thought it barbaric. So that with Barbara divorced—she'd been more than right on that one, Barb's wedding had been the happiest day of her marriage—Arthur was the only man around most of the time all the way up until the funeral, and he was as gentle