But, “I’m doing fine!” he told friends. “Never better!”

He saw the adjustment in their expressions, a sort of clicking over from solicitous to shocked to carefully neutral. “Well, good for you,” they said.

They said, “It’s wonderful you’re able to get on with your life this way. Put it all behind you! Very healthy.”

He and Xanthe moved back to Baltimore in the fall. It was an admission of defeat; he was learning just how much rearing a toddler could take out of you. He rented an apartment not far from where his mother and his sister lived, and he started teaching at the Fremont School-a comedown, no doubt about it. At his university he’d held an instructor’s position and he was starting his dissertation. At the Fremont School he taught history, not even his field, only peripherally related to the philosophers he loved so much. But it was a very prestigious school, and without any education credits he felt lucky to have been hired.

He put Xanthe in a daycare center that seemed to be closed more often than it was open; it observed holidays he didn’t even know existed, which meant he was always scrambling to find sitters. He relied heavily upon his mother, inadequate though she was, and a few older black women provided by an agency. Xanthe endured these patchy arrangements without objecting-in fact, without reacting in any way whatsoever. She was a stolid child, solemn-faced and watchful and very obviously motherless. Somehow she gave off a visible aura of motherlessness. Her lack of a mother was so pathetically apparent that women took one look at her and turned into crazy people. They brought Liam muffins and cookies and giant country hams. They stood at his door smiling dazzlingly, offering to tidy his place a bit and wondering if his daughter had any particular food preferences. Xanthe ate barely any food at all. He didn’t know how she stayed so chubby, as little as she ate.

These women had extra circus tickets and free passes to Disney movies. They knew of a special spray that would ease the tangles out of little girls’ hair. They loved, loved, loved having picnics on Cow Hill.

Liam himself hated picnics. He hated the two spots of dampness that always developed on the seat of his trousers even in the driest weather. He seemed to be a magnet for mosquitoes. And it took so much effort to rise to these women’s high pitch. They were all of them, every last one of them, full of gaiety and enthusiasm. He sat by their checkered tablecloths feeling like a puddle of a man, sunken and speechless, next to his speechless child.

Barbara, on the other hand, had required nothing of him. He got to know her when he started eating lunch in the school library in order to avoid the other teachers, two of whom were Picnic Ladies. Of course eating in the library was not allowed, but his lunch was unobtrusive-a slice of cheese, a piece of fruit-and Barbara pretended not to notice. At the time she was in her early thirties, a friendly, pleasant-faced woman a couple of years older than he, not someone he gave any special thought to. Generally she left him to his own devices, or they would have, at most, a brief conversation about some book he’d slipped at random from a shelf. She wasn’t at all like the others.

Through his first year there and half of his second, he plodded along in his comfortable, undemanding routine. Fall semester, spring semester, fall semester again. Young students who were likable enough, by and large, and who occasionally showed a spark of interest in his lessons. Lunches in the library, with Barbara stopping by his table to exchange a few words or occasionally settling for a moment onto the chair beside his. She knew the bare facts of his life by now, and he knew her facts, such as they were. She lived alone on the third floor of an old house on Roland Avenue. She had a father in a nursing home. She found her job very congenial.

One day, as she was showing him a new book about the city-state of Carthage, he kissed her. She kissed him back. They were level-headed adults; they didn’t make a big to-do about it. He certainly didn’t feel that tremulous elation that he’d felt in the early days with Millie, but neither did he want to. He appreciated Barbara’s cheerfulness. He liked her self-reliance.

Oh, but probably he should have made a to-do. He must have been a terrible husband. (Well, obviously he had been, if you considered how it all ended.) When he thought back to how Barbara used to dance at the students’ proms-throwing her whole heart into “Surf City” and “Dr. Octopus”-he asked himself how he could have been so blind. She must have wanted so much, underneath! And he had given her so little.

All this dwelling on the past was Eunice’s fault. If not for her-or the loss of her-he wouldn’t be thinking about such things.

In the most unforeseen way, Eunice really had turned out to be his rememberer.

Kitty came back from Ocean City with skin the color of caramel, except for the bridge of her nose, which was pink and peeling. She walked in with her bag slung over her shoulder, leaving the door wide open behind her. “Poppy!” she said. “Hi there!”

It was Sunday morning, and Liam was fixing scrambled eggs for breakfast. It took him a moment to register her presence.

“Can you give Damian a ride?” she asked him.

“Where to?”

“His mom’s, in a while. Otherwise he’d have to go right now with his aunt and uncle.”

“I guess so.”

She threw her bag on a chair and spun around to return to the door. “It’s okay!” she called in a piercing voice. So much noise, all of a sudden! Liam felt a bit dazed.

When she came back, she had Damian with her. He was carrying a knapsack and he was as white-skinned as when he’d left. “At least someone heeds the warnings,” Liam told him.

Damian said, “Huh?”

“The dermatologists’ warnings.”

Damian looked blank.

“He lay out as much as I did,” Kitty said, “but the sun doesn’t affect him.”

Liam said, “Really.” This seemed a bit creepy, as if Damian were some sort of vampire, but he put the thought out of his mind. “Anybody want breakfast?” he asked.

“Breakfast!” Kitty said. “It’s almost eleven.”

“I got a late start.”

“I’ll say you did.”

“It is the weekend, after all.”

“And you look like a homeless person. Are you growing a beard or something?”

“It’s the weekend!” he said again. He rubbed his chin.

Damian said, “I could go for some breakfast.”

“You ate breakfast hours ago,” Kitty told him.

“That’s why I could eat again.”

“Not now, Damian; we’ve got to talk.”

Liam was puzzled (hadn’t they had the whole beach trip to talk?), but then he realized he was the one she planned to talk to. She stepped up to face him and said, “Poppy, I’ve been thinking.”

He braced himself.

“I’m thinking I should stay here for the school year,” she said.

“What! Stay with me?”

“Right.”

He felt a confusing mixture of reactions to this proposal. How about his privacy, how about his nice solitary life? But also, he was conscious of an odd sense of relief. He set down his spatula. “There’s not enough room, though,” he said. “There’s only my study.”

“You’re not using your study!”

“I haven’t been able to, might I point out.”

“What would you be doing there?”

He couldn’t come up with an answer. He said, “Oh, well, let’s talk about this later. We’ve got plenty of time to discuss it.”

“No, we don’t. Summer’s almost over.”

“It is?”

“School begins in two weeks.”

“It does?”

Last Thursday, a woman had phoned from a place called Bet Ha-Midrash and told him she had heard he might be interested in a job there. “A job,” he’d said, caught off guard.

“A job as zayda in our three-year-olds’ class.”

“Oh,” he’d said. “Okay…”

“Would you like to send us your application?”