Richard stopped with his overloaded old Toyota pickup for a night in St. Paul on his way up north. Patty was already into a bottle by the time he arrived, at three in the afternoon, and did not acquit herself well as a hostess. Walter did the cooking while she drank for the three of them. It was as if he and she both had just been waiting to see their old friend so they could vent their conflicting versions of why Joey, instead of joining them for dinner, was playing air hockey with a right-wing dolt next door. Richard, flummoxed, kept stepping outside to smoke cigarettes and fortify himself for the next round of Berglund fraughtness.

“It’s going to be fine,” he said, coming inside again. “You guys are great parents. It’s just, you know, when a kid’s got a big personality, there can be big dramas of individuation. It takes time to work these things out.”

“God,” Patty said. “Where did you get so wise?”

“Richard is one of those bizarre people who actually still read books and think about things,” Walter said.

“Right, unlike me, I know.” She turned to Richard. “Every once in a while it happens that I don’t read every single book he recommends. Sometimes I decide to just-skip it. I believe that is the subtext here. My substandard intellect.”

Richard gave her a hard look. “You should cool it with the drinking,” he said.

He might as well have punched her in the sternum. Where Walter’s disapproval actively fed her misbehavior, Richard’s had the effect of catching her out in her childishness, of exposing her unattractiveness to daylight.

“Patty’s in a lot of pain,” Walter said quietly, as if to warn Richard that his loyalty still lay, however unaccountably, with her.

“You can drink all you want as far as I’m concerned,” Richard said. “I’m just saying, if you want the kid to come home, it might help to have your house in order.”

“I’m not even sure I want him home at this point,” Walter said. “I’m kind of enjoying the respite from his contempt.”

“So, let’s see, then,” Patty said. “We’ve got individuation for Joey, we’ve got relief for Walter, but then, for Patty, what? What does she get? Wine, I guess. Right? Patty gets wine.”

“Whoa,” Richard said. “Little bit of self-pity there?”

“For God’s sake,” Walter said.

It was terrible to see, through Richard’s eyes, what she’d been turning into. From twelve hundred miles away it had been easy to smile at Richard’s love troubles, his eternal adolescence, his failed resolutions to put childish things behind him, and to feel that here, in Ramsey Hill, a more adult sort of life was being led. But now she was in the kitchen with him-his height, as always, a breathtaking surprise to her, his Qaddafian features weathered and deepened, his mass of dark hair graying handsomely-and he illuminated in a flash what a self-absorbed little child she’d been able to remain by walling herself inside her lovely house. She’d run from her family’s babyishness only to be just as big a baby herself. She didn’t have a job, her kids were more grownup than she was, she hardly even had sex. She was ashamed to be seen by him. All these years, she’d treasured her memory of their little road trip, kept it locked up securely in some deep interior place, letting it age like a wine, so that, in some symbolic way, the thing that might have happened between them stayed alive and grew older with the two of them. The nature of the possibility altered as it aged in its sealed bottle, but it didn’t go bad, it remained potentially drinkable, it was a kind of reassurance: rakish Richard Katz had once invited her to move to New York with him, and she’d said no. And now she could see that this wasn’t how things worked at all. She was forty-two and drinking herself red-nosed.

She stood up carefully, trying not to wobble, and poured a half-dead bottle down the drain. She set her empty glass in the sink and said that she was going upstairs to lie down for a while, and that the men should go ahead and eat.

“Patty,” Walter said.

“I’m fine. I’m really fine. I just had too much to drink. I might come down again later. I’m sorry, Richard. It’s so wonderful to see you. I’m just in a bit of a state.”

Though she loved their house on the lake, and had been retreating there for weeks at a time by herself, she didn’t go there once during the spring Richard spent working on it. Walter found time to go up for several long weekends and help out, but Patty was too embarrassed. She stayed home and got herself in shape: took Richard’s advice about the drinking, started running and eating again, gained enough weight to fill in the most haggard of the lines that had been forming in her face, and generally acknowledged realities about her physical appearance which she’d been ignoring in her fantasy world. One reason she’d resisted any kind of makeover was that her hateful neighbor Carol Monaghan had undergone one when her hateful boy-toy Blake appeared on the scene. Anything Carol did was definitionally anathema to Patty, but she humbled herself and followed Carol’s example. Lost the ponytail, saw a colorist, got an age-appropriate haircut. She was making an effort to see more of her old basketball friends, and they rewarded her by telling her how much better she looked.

Richard had intended to return to the East by the end of May, but, being Richard, he was still working on the deck in mid-June when Patty went up to enjoy some weeks in the country. Walter went along for the first four days, on his way to a money-tree-shaking V.I.P. fishing trip that a major Nature Conservancy donor was hosting at his deluxe “camp” in Saskatchewan. To make up for her poor showing in the winter, Patty was a whirlwind of hospitality at the lake house, cooking up splendid meals for Walter and Richard while they hammered and sawed in the back yard. She was proudly sober the whole time. In the evening, without Joey in the house, she had no interest in TV. She sat in Dorothy’s favorite armchair, reading War and Peace at Walter’s long-standing recommendation, while the men played chess. Thankfully for all concerned, Walter was better than Richard at chess and usually won, but Richard was dogged and kept asking for another game, and Patty knew that this was hard on Walter-that he was straining very hard to win, getting himself wound up, and would need hours to fall asleep afterward.

“More of this clotting-of-the-middle shit,” Richard said. “You’re always tying up the middle. I hate that.”

“I’m a clotter of the middle,” Walter affirmed in a voice breathless with the suppression of competitive glee.

“It drives me crazy.”

“Well, because it’s effective,” Walter said.

“It’s only effective because I don’t have enough discipline to make you pay for it.”

“You play a very entertaining game. I never know what’s coming.”

“Yeah, and I keep losing.”

The days were bright and long, the nights startlingly cool. Patty loved early summer in the north, it took her back to her first days in Hibbing with Walter. The crisp air and moist earth, the conifer smells, the morning of her life. She felt she’d never been younger than she’d been at twenty-one. It was as if her Westchester childhood, though chronologically prior, had somehow taken place in a later and more fallen time. Inside the house was a faint pleasant musty smell reminiscent of Dorothy. Outside was the lake that Joey and Patty had decided to call Nameless, newly melted, dark with bark and needles, reflecting bright fair-weather clouds. In summer, deciduous trees hid the only other nearby house, which a family named Lundner used on weekends and in August. Between the Berglunds’ house and the lake was a grassy hillock with a few mature birch trees, and when the sun or a breeze discouraged mosquitoes Patty could lie on the grass with a book for hours and feel completely apart from the world, except for the rare airplane overhead and the even rarer car passing on the unpaved county road.