Liam raised his eyebrows.

“I phoned you just this past Saturday, when you were moving in!”

“So you did,” Liam said.

“And I’ve brought you this nice beef stew, which you haven’t even tasted!”

“Sorry,” Liam said.

It was true; all he had on his plate was the one slice of bread. He helped himself to some stew. There were carrots, potatoes, and celery chunks along with the meat-enough to make a meal of, if he just scraped off the gravy.

“Your father’s been a picky eater all his life,” Julia told Kitty.

“It’s not so much that I’m picky as that I’m out of the habit,” Liam said. “If I went back to eating meat now, I doubt I’d have the enzymes anymore to digest it.”

“See what I mean?” Julia asked Kitty. “There was a period in his childhood when he would eat nothing but white things. Noodles and mashed potatoes and rice. Our mother had to fix him an entire separate meal.”

Liam said, “I don’t remember that.”

“Well, you were little. And another period, you would eat only with chopsticks. For one solid year, you insisted on eating everything including soup with these pointy ivory chopsticks they shipped back with Uncle Leonard’s belongings after he died in the War.”

“Chopsticks?” Liam said.

“And you had to have this old record played every night before you went to bed: ‘It’s Been a Long, Long Time,’ with Kitty Kallen. Whatever happened to Kitty Kallen? Kiss me once, and kiss me twice,” Julia sang, in an unexpectedly pretty soprano. “It was how Mother taught you to kiss us good night. You would blow kisses in tempo. Kiss to the right, kiss to the left… big smacking sounds, huge grin on your face. Wearing those pajamas with the feet and the trap-door bottom.”

“How come you always remember so much more than me?” Liam asked.

“You were only two, is why.”

“Yes, but you come up with so many details. And some are from when I was ten or twelve, when supposedly I was a fully conscious being; but still they’re all news to me.”

Although total recall was not an unmixed blessing, he had noticed. His sister could hold a grudge forever. She collected and polished resentments as if it were some sort of hobby. For over half a century now, she hadn’t spoken to their father. (He’d left them to marry a younger woman back when they were children.) Even when he suffered a heart attack, a few years ago, Julia had refused to visit him. Let him go ahead and kick the bucket, she’d said; good riddance if he did. And she insisted on using their mother’s maiden name, although their mother herself had stayed a Pennywell till she died. It may have been this bitter streak that kept Julia single. She had never even seriously dated, as far as Liam knew.

“I can see you plain as day,” she said now. “Your little red cheeks, your sparkly eyes. Your fat little fingers flinging kisses. Don’t tell me you didn’t know exactly how cute you were being.”

There was an acid edge to her voice, but even so, Liam envied how she envisioned this picture so clearly, hovering in the air above the table.

Cope Development’s offices were on Bunker Street, near the train station, according to the telephone book. You would think Ishmael Cope could have sprung for a better address-something around Harborplace, say. But that was how the rich were, sometimes. It might be why they were rich.

Shortly before noon on Friday, defying medical orders, Liam drove down to Bunker Street. When he reached Cope Development he pulled over to the curb and shut off the ignition. He had hoped for a little park of some sort, or at least a strip of grass with a bench where he could sit, but clearly this was not that kind of neighborhood. All the buildings were scrunched together, and their wooden doors were chewed-looking, the paint on their trim dulled and scaling, their bricks crumbling like biscuits. The place to the right of Cope Development sold plumbing supplies; the place to the left was a mission for indigent men. (That was how the sign in the window phrased it. Would indigent men know the word “indigent”?) Apart from a hunched old woman dragging a wheeled shopping tote behind her, there wasn’t a pedestrian in sight. Liam’s original plan-to blend in with the crowd on the sidewalk, trailing Ishmael Cope and his assistant unobserved as they strolled to some nearby café-seemed silly now.

He sat low behind the steering wheel, arms folded across his chest, eyes on the Cope building. It looked as dismal as the others, but the plaque beside the door was brass and freshly polished. Twice the door opened and people emerged-a boy with a messenger bag, two men in business suits. Once a woman approached the building from the direction of St. Paul Street and paused, but she moved on after consulting a slip of paper she took from her purse. It was a warm, muggy, overcast day, and Liam had rolled his window down, but even so, the car began to grow uncomfortable.

He hadn’t planned what he would do after he’d followed them to lunch. He had imagined finagling a table next to them and then, oh, just worming his way in, so to speak. Joining them. Becoming a member.

It was just as well that they weren’t showing up, because this would never have worked.

Still, he went on waiting. He noticed that although he was watching for the two of them, it was the assistant he wanted to talk to. Mr. Cope himself had nothing to teach him; Liam knew all there was to know about forgetting. The assistant, on the other hand… Unconsciously, he seemed to be crediting the assistant with specialized professional skills, as if she were a psychologist or a neurologist. Or something more mysterious, even: a kind of reverse fortune teller. A predictor of the past.

It was this thought that made him come to his senses, finally. Not for the first time, he wondered if the blow to his head had somehow affected his sanity. He gave himself a little shake; he wiped his damp face on his shirt sleeve. Then he started the car and, after one last glance at the door (still closed), he pulled out into traffic and drove home.

Barbara called on Saturday morning and said she wanted to come get Kitty. “I’ll stop by for her in, say, half an hour,” she said. “Around ten or so. Is she still asleep?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“Well, wake her up and tell her to pack. I’ve got a busy day today.”

“Okay, Barbara. How have you been?” Liam asked, because he felt a little hurt that she hadn’t inquired about his injuries.

But she just said, “Fine, thanks. Bye,” and hung up.

He would be sorry to see Kitty go, in some ways. Having another person around was oddly cheering. And unlike her two sisters, who seemed to adopt a tone of high dudgeon whenever they talked to him, Kitty often behaved as if she might actually enjoy his company.

On the other hand, it would be good to have his own bed back. He noticed when he stuck his head in to wake her that already the room had taken on her scent-various perfumed cosmetics mingling with the smell of worn clothing-and it was strewn with far more possessions than could have fit into that one duffel bag, surely. Bottles and jars covered the bureau; T-shirts littered the floor; extension cords trailed from the outlets. The bed itself was shingled with glossy magazines. He didn’t know how she could sleep like that.

“Kitty, your mother will be here in half an hour,” he said. “She’s coming to take you home.”

Kitty was just a feathery tousle of hair on the pillow, but she said, “Mmf,” and turned over, so he felt it was safe to leave her.

He laid out breakfast: toasted English muffins and (against his principles) the Diet Coke she always claimed she needed to get her going. For himself he brewed coffee. He was starting on his second cup, seated at the table watching the English muffins grow cold, before she emerged from the bedroom. She still had her pajamas on, and a crease ran down one cheek and her hair was sticking up every which way. “What time is it?” she asked, pulling out her chair.