He said, “Pretty good.”

It was really very hard to visualize Denny’s personal life.

Nor were they always entirely clear about his occupation. They did know that at one point, he had a job installing sound systems, because he volunteered his expertise when Jeannie’s Hugh was wiring their den. Another time, he showed up wearing a hoodie with KOMPUTER KLINIK stitched on the pocket, and at Abby’s request he offhandedly fixed her Mac, which had been acting a bit sluggish. But he always seemed free to come and go, and to stay as long as he liked. How do you reconcile that with a full-time job? When Stem got married, for instance, Denny came for a solid week to fulfill his best-man duties, and although Abby was thrilled about that (she fretted about her boys’ not being close), she kept asking if he was sure this wouldn’t cause him trouble at work. “Work?” he said. “No.”

On one occasion, he visited for nearly a month with no explanation whatsoever. Everybody suspected that it involved some private crisis, since he arrived looking very seedy and not in the best of health. For the first time, they noticed faint lines at the corners of his eyes. His hair straggled unevenly over the back of his collar. But he didn’t refer to any problems, and not even Jeannie dared ask. It was as if he had his family trained. They had become almost as oblique as Denny himself.

This stirred some resentment in them, from time to time. Why should they tiptoe around him? Why should they have to deflect the neighbors’ questions about him? “Oh,” Abby would say, “Denny is fine, thank you. Really fine! Right now he’s working at … Well, I’m not sure exactly where he’s working, but anyhow: he’s just fine!”

Yet he did provide something that they counted on, somehow. He did leave a hole when he was absent. That first time that he skipped the beach trip, for instance, the summer he claimed to be gay: nobody knew that he wasn’t coming. They kept waiting for him to phone and announce his arrival date, and when it grew clear that he wasn’t going to, everyone experienced the most crushing sense of flatness. Even after they’d arrived at the cottage they always rented, and unpacked their groceries and made up the beds and settled into their usual beach routine, they couldn’t shake the thought that he still might show up. They turned hopefully from their jigsaw puzzle when the screen door slammed in an evening breeze. They stopped speaking in mid-sentence when somebody out beyond the breakers started swimming toward them with that distinctive, rolling stroke that Denny always used. And halfway through the week … oh, here was the strangest part. Halfway through the week, Abby and the girls were sitting on the screen porch one afternoon shucking corn, and they heard Mozart’s Horn Concerto No. 1 playing out back. They looked at each other; they rose from their chairs; they rushed through the house and out the door … and they saw that the music came from a car parked across the road. Someone was sitting in the driver’s seat with all the windows rolled down (but still, he must be baking!) and his radio playing full-blast. A man in a tank top; not an item of clothing Denny would have been caught dead in. A heavyset man, if you judged by the girth of the elbow resting on the window ledge. Heavier than Denny could be even if he had done nothing but eat since the last time they had seen him. But still, you know how it is when you’re missing a loved one. You try to turn every stranger into the person you were hoping for. You hear a certain piece of music and right away you tell yourself that he could have changed his clothing style, could have gained a ton of weight, could have acquired a car and then parked that car in front of another family’s house. “It’s him!” you say. “He came! We knew he would; we always …” But then you hear how pathetic you sound, and your words trail off into silence, and your heart breaks.

IN THE WHITSHANK FAMILY, two stories had traveled down through the generations. These stories were viewed as quintessential — as defining, in some way — and every family member, including Stem’s three-year-old, had heard them told and retold and embroidered and conjectured upon any number of times.

The first story concerned their earliest known ancestor, Junior Whitshank, a carpenter much sought after in Baltimore for his craftsmanship and his sense of design.

If it seems odd to call a patriarch “Junior,” there was a logical explanation. Junior’s true name was Jurvis Roy, shortened at some point to J. R. and then re-expanded, accordion-like, to Junior. (This was a fact so little known that his own daughter-in-law had to ask his name when she was briefly contemplating making her firstborn a III if he turned out to be a boy.) But what was even odder was that Junior was not some distant great-great, but merely Red Whitshank’s father. And there was no evidence of his existence prior to 1926, which seemed an unusually recent year for the start of a family tree.

Where he came from was never documented, but the general feeling was that he might have hailed from the Appalachian Mountains. Maybe he had once said something to that effect. Or it could have been mere guesswork, based on the way he talked. According to Abby, who had known him since her girlhood, he had a thin, metallic voice and a twangy Southern accent, although he must have decided at some point that it would elevate his social standing if he pronounced his i’s in the Northern way. In the middle of his country-sounding drawl, Abby said, a distinct, sharp i would poke forth here and there like a brier. She didn’t sound entirely charmed by this trait.

Junior’s few photos revealed a face that was just a little too fine-boned — a look that people back then felt no compunction about referring to as “poor white trash.” In coloring he was pure Whitshank, black-haired even in his sixties with very white skin and squinty blue eyes, and he had the rangy, gaunt Whitshank body. He wore a stiff dark suit every day of the year, Abby said, but here Red would interrupt to say that the suits were a later development, when all Junior had to do was tour his work sites checking on things. Most of Red’s childhood memories featured his father in overalls.

At any rate, Junior’s first recorded appearance in Baltimore was as the employee of a building contractor named Clyde L. Ward. This came to light in a typewritten letter that was found among Junior’s papers after his death, telling Whom It May Concern that J. R. Whitshank had worked for Mr. Ward from June of 1926 through January 1930 and had proved an able carpenter. But he must have been more than merely able, because by 1934, a tiny rectangle in the Baltimore Post was advertising the services of Whitshank Construction Co., “Quality and Integrity.”

It was not the best era for starting a business, heaven knows, but apparently Junior flourished, first remodeling and then building from scratch various stately houses in the neighborhoods of Guilford, Roland Park, and Homeland. He acquired a Model B Ford pickup with an interlaced “WCC” painted on both doors above a telephone number — no mention of the company’s full name or its function, as if everyone who counted surely must know, by now. In 1934 he had eight employees; in 1935, twenty.

In 1936, he fell in love with a house.

No, first he must have fallen in love with his wife, because he was married by then. He had married Linnie Mae Inman at some point. But he never had much to say about Linnie, whereas he had a great deal to say, reams to say, about the house on Bouton Road.

It was nothing but an architect’s drawing the first time he laid eyes on it. Mr. Ernest Brill, a Baltimore textile manufacturer, had unfurled a roll of blueprints while standing in front of the lot where he and Junior had arranged to meet. And Junior glanced first at the lot (full of birds and tulip poplars and sprinkles of white dogwood) and then down at the drawing of the front elevation, which showed a clapboard house with a gigantic front porch, and the words that popped into his head were “Why, that’s my house!”