“What do you want?” Chloe said by way of greeting when Dale made the long trip up from the city Monday morning, marveling all the while at the heavy traffic in the other direction. The commute hadn’t been part of his life for four years, and memory was imperfect, always. Still, the congestion had to be exponentially worse than it had been even a year ago. Why did people live like this? Oh, because his father had enabled them to-his father and the builders and the state officials, who delivered the wide, smooth roads, which persuaded people that the trip to the city would be a snap. After all, it seemed an easy enough drive on a Sunday afternoon, when optimistic families made the journey to tour the open houses. On a Sunday you could make it downtown in thirty minutes. But come the first weekday after all the paperwork was signed, it would take almost an hour.

“The funeral director thought it would be nice to have a photograph of Kat at the service. He’ll have it enlarged, but it requires something more formal than I have.” Dale had many snapshots of Kat, in his condo and the office, but they were not only too casual but also too old, the most recent taken during her sophomore year. How had he gone two years without acquiring a new photograph of his daughter?

“Do you want the painting?”

“God, no.” After all these years, he still couldn’t tell whether Chloe was ironic or obtuse. “She was ten when that was painted.”

“Eleven,” Chloe contradicted, then waited, presumably for him to acknowledge that she was correct. Chloe loved to catch Dale in errors, no matter how small, and insisted on verbal affirmation that she was right and he was wrong. Today, however, he stayed silent. “Okay, wait here, while I go look for something.”

Wait here? Wait here? It was as if he were a repairman or some shifty deliveryperson, denied permission to venture farther than the foyer. This was his house, no matter what the deed said, no matter what the lawyers had decided when they were carving up Dale and Chloe’s property so gleefully. The old stone house, the last original structure within the boundaries of Glendale, had been his father’s wedding gift to the couple, and Chloe had complained about it endlessly. But came the day when this house was all she wanted-the house and the eight acres behind it, which were virtually worthless as long as the Snyders and the Muhlys refused to sell their land. She had claimed that she wanted the house for Kat’s sake, but Dale never doubted that Chloe’s real purpose was to deny him something he loved.

Defiantly, he left the foyer and wandered the first floor. Given its age, the old farmhouse was a quirky place, in some ways the polar opposite of the homes that Glendale ’s architects had designed and refined over the years. Its rooms were small, the ceilings low, the pine floors almost wavy with age. It was, in short, lousy with charm-beamed ceilings, plaster walls that made it a bitch to hang anything, a huge kitchen with a stone fireplace. While other families gathered in the “great rooms” that were endemic to all the Glendale homes, no matter the price range, the Hartigans themselves had spent most of their time in this kitchen/dining room, not unlike the families who had lived here since it was first built in the late 1700s.

And it had been redone, Dale realized with a start. Redone at great expense. New cupboards of wide-planked pine paneling, with the same finish on the dishwasher and the refrigerator, a design trend he loathed. Why should appliances be forced to disappear from the kitchen in this trompe l’oeil scheme? Chloe also had installed a new freestanding sink, although “new” was a bit of a misnomer, for the piece was an antique, cleverly reworked. In fact, Dale had seen this very island at Gaines McHale, a high-end antique dealer that also trafficked in custom-mades. “Trafficked” was the right word, for it was a pricey place, more ruinous than a cocaine addiction for Baltimore ’s décor freaks. At Gaines McHale such a piece would cost at least twenty-five hundred dollars. Perhaps this was the reason Chloe had ordered Dale to stay in the foyer. She didn’t want him to know how much money she was spending, even as she was bitching about how hard it was to make ends meet.

The portrait of Kat, in all its tacky glory, still dominated one wall over the dining room table. The painting had been his Christmas gift, the year Kat turned ten. (Chloe was wrong about that. Kat was definitely ten, not eleven.) Behind his back, Chloe had hired a society painter, someone best known for painting dogs. But the painter was technically quite skilled, and her work usually appreciated in value. Unfortunately, she had let Chloe call the shots on Kat’s portrait, and the result might as well have been painted on black velvet and offered at one of those starving-artist sales at the flea market.

In the painter’s version, a falsely thin Kat was imprisoned in a white ruffled dress, quite unlike anything she had ever worn in real life, posed amid the ruins of some ancient civilization. But while the landscape was ominous and foreboding, the sky above it was cloudless blue, marred only by the yellow of a kite flown by Kat. If the painting had been the work of some addled religious zealot or prison inmate without any training, it would have been a masterpiece of outsider art, suitable for the Visionary Arts Museum. As it was, it was simply an embarrassment, a reminder that Chloe’s membership in the bourgeoisie was an eternal high-wire act.

Chloe picked up on Dale’s horror the moment he unwrapped it. He tried, he really tried, to pretend to the emotions that would make Chloe happy, but she had always been quick to see through him.

“What’s wrong with it?” she demanded, not even waiting until Kat was out of earshot. She never waited.

“Nothing,” he said. “It’s beautiful. I’m just overwhelmed that you and Kat managed to keep a secret such as this.”

“It took almost a whole year,” Kat said, studying the painting. “I had to go for sittings every week.” Dale’s stomach clutched a little as he tried to figure out the cost of such an extravagance. (He was still working for his father then, and earning less than he might, for Glen was receiving the exact same salary for doing nothing.) It wasn’t that he begrudged Chloe the money, just that such an expensive gift demanded to be hung in a prominent place, where everyone would see it.

“It’s beautiful,” he said, adding, with far more sincerity, “You’re beautiful. But you’re even more beautiful in real life than you are in this picture.”

A week later, on New Year’s Day, Chloe looked up from her checkbook and said, “I need ten thousand dollars.”

“What on earth for?”

“The painting. I put the deposit on my credit card and carried the balance month by month, so you wouldn’t know. But now that you’ve got it, I can pay it off.”

“That painting cost ten thousand dollars?”

“She sometimes gets as much as fifteen thousand. It was a deal.”

“And you carried ten thousand dollars on your credit card for twelve months, incurring finance charges?”

“Don’t be stingy. It was only, like, a hundred or two hundred a month. I cut some things out to make up for it.”

“Such as…?”

“Things. What do you care? It was for you. It was all for you.”

Chloe began to cry. They had been married long enough by then that the effect of these lusty tearfests, as Dale thought of them, was not as great as it once was. Still, he hated to see Chloe cry, if only because she seemed so dangerous and out of control.

“I wasn’t being critical, Chloe. Or ungrateful. It’s just that…ten thousand dollars is a lot of money for a painting, and the finance charges probably added another thousand dollars to the cost.”