Now that he was on his own, acquaintances sometimes asked if he planned to move in with Ruma. Even Mrs. Bagchi mentioned the idea. But he pointed out that Ruma hadn't been raised with that sense of duty. She led her own life, had made her own decisions, married an American boy. He didn't expect her to take him in, and really, he couldn't blame her. For what had he done, when his own father was dying, when his mother was left behind? By then Ruma and Romi were teenagers. There was no question of his moving the family back to India, and also no question of his eighty-year-old widowed mother moving to Pennsylvania. He had let his siblings look after her until she, too, eventually died.

Were he to have gone first, his wife would not have thought twice about moving in with Ruma. His wife had not been built to live on her own, just as morning glories were not intended to grow in the shade. She was the opposite of Mrs. Bagchi that way. The isolation of living in an American suburb, something about which his wife complained and about which he felt responsible, had been more solitude than she could bear. But he enjoyed solitude, as Mrs. Bagchi did. Now that he had retired he spent his days volunteering for the Democratic Party in Pennsylvania, work he could do from his computer at home, and this, in addition to his trips, was enough to keep him occupied. It was a relief not to have to maintain the old house, to mow and rake the lawn, to replace the storm windows with screens in summer, only to have to reverse the process a few months later. It was a relief, too, to be living in another part of the state, close enough so things were still familiar, but far enough to feel different. In the old house he was still stuck in his former life, attending by himself the parties he and his wife had gone to, getting phone calls in the evenings from concerned friends who routinely dropped off pots of chicken curry or, assuming he was lonely, visited without warning on Sunday afternoons.

He was suddenly tired, his vision blurring and the words in the guidebook lifting off the page. Beside the small pile of books there was a telephone. He set down the book, lifted the receiver, checked for a dial tone, and set it down again. Before coming to Seattle he had given Mrs. Bagchi his daughter's phone number in an e-mail, but it was understood that she was not to call. She had loved her husband of two years more than he had loved his wife of nearly forty, of this he was certain. In her wallet she still carried a picture of him, a clean-shaven boy in his twenties, the hair parted far to one side. He didn't mind. In a way he preferred knowing that her heart still belonged to another man. It was not passion that was driving him, at seventy, to be involved, however discreetly, however occasionally, with another woman. Instead it was the consequence of being married all those years, the habit of companionship.

Without his wife, the thought of his own death preyed on him, knowing that it might strike him just as suddenly. He'd never experienced death up close; when his parents and relatives had died he was always continents away, never witnessing the ugly violence of it. Then again, he had not even been present, technically, when his wife passed away. He had been reading a magazine, sipping a cup of tea from the hospital cafeteria.

But that was not what caused him to feel guilty. It was the fact that they'd all been so full of assumptions: the assumption that the procedure would go smoothly, the assumption that she would spend one night in the hospital and then return home, the assumption that friends would be coming to the house two weeks later for dinner, that she would visit France a few weeks after that. The assumption that his wife's surgery was to be a minor trial in her life and not the end of it. He remembered Ruma sobbing in his arms as if she were suddenly very young again and had fallen off a bicycle or been stung by a bee. As in those other instances he had been strong for her, not shedding a tear.

Sometime in the middle of the night she'd woken up in Akash's bed and stumbled into her own. Normally Akash came into her bed at dawn, falling asleep beside her for another few hours before waking her up and wanting cereal. She didn't mind Akash coming into her bed, especially when Adam was out of town. But this morning the bed was empty. She no longer felt sick in the mornings. Instead, her first thought was of food; she wanted a burrito, or one of the egg and cheese sandwiches from the bagel shop near their old apartment in Park Slope, a reminder that all through the night, as she slept, her body had been hard at work. In the kitchen she saw that the dinner dishes, washed and dried, were at one side of the countertop. In the drainer was a clean bowl, spoon, juice glass, and mug. Beside the stove, on a saucer, was a drying tea bag, reserved for a second use. She heard Akash's voice coming from somewhere outside, but couldn't see him through the window. She went onto the porch, where the sound of his voice was more distinct. "But I didn't see a turtle," she heard him say, and she gathered that he and her father had taken a walk down to the lake. She took her prenatal vitamin, put on water for tea. She was making toast when her father and Akash came in through the kitchen door.

"We went to the lake and Dadu put me into a movie," Akash said excitedly, pointing to the video camera strung around her father's neck.

"You're wet," she observed, noticing that the straps of his sandals and the front of his shorts were darkened by water. She turned to her father. "What happened?"

"Nothing, nothing. We thought we saw a turtle, and Akash wanted to touch it," he said to Ruma. "He is asking for cereal."

"Come on, first you need to change," she said to Akash. When she returned she saw that her father had opened up the cupboard. "Is this the one he takes?" he asked, holding up a box of Cheerios.

She nodded. "When did you wake up, Baba?"

"Oh, I was up before five. I sat on the porch and had my breakfast, and then Akash joined me and we went outside."

"I can take over," she said, watching her father pour milk into the cereal bowl.

"I don't mind. Have your food."

She opened the fridge for butter and jam, prepared her tea. When she was finished, her father took the kettle, put the dried-out tea bag into the same cup that was in the dish drainer, and added the remaining hot water.

"Dadu, outside?" Akash said, tugging on her father's pants.

"Soon, Babu. Let me finish."

As she ate her breakfast she mentioned the places they could see during the course of his visit-before his arrival she had looked up hours of admission, ticket prices, and in her mind she'd already conceived of an itinerary, something to keep them occupied each day. She hadn't had the time or energy to explore much of downtown Seattle, and thought the week with her father would provide the opportunity. "There's the Space Needle of course," she began. "And Pike Place Market. There's an aquarium along the waterfront I've been meaning to take Akash to. They have ferry rides across Puget Sound that are supposed to be nice. We could go to Victoria for the day. And then there's the Boeing factory, if you're interested. They give tours."

"Yes," her father said. He looked tired to her, his eyes small behind his glasses. "To be honest," he said, "I wouldn't mind a rest from all that."

She was confused; she had assumed her father would want to see Seattle with his video camera, just as he was interested in seeing so many other places in the world these days. "Well, otherwise, there's not much else to do here."

"I don't need to be entertained."

"That's not what I meant. Whatever you'd like, Baba." Her confusion was followed by worry. She wondered if there was something he wasn't telling her. She wondered how it was in the condominium, whether there were too many stairs to climb, if he had any neighbors who knew or cared about him. She remembered a statistic she'd heard, about long-term spouses typically dying within two years of one another, the surviving spouse dying essentially of a broken heart. But Ruma knew that her parents had never loved each other in that way.