“Boyhood home gets rave review,” she said.

O’Neil’s parents’ house had been turned into a restaurant, called Le Café. Beside the picture of the house there was a second photo of the restaurant’s owner, smiling and shaking hands with a woman O’Neil had gone to high school with, who was now the mayor of the town. The owner, who was also the chef, was a tall man, handsome and bald, with a neatly trimmed goatee. He had trained at Cordon Bleu, it said, “in Paris, France.” “It has always been my dream to open a country inn,” he told the reporter, “to return the finest cuisine to its source, such as one finds in the hills of Tuscany or Provence.” Before moving to Glenn’s Mills he had owned a successful restaurant in Manhattan.

O’Neil looked the article over then put the newspaper aside. “Unbelievable. A fucking restaurant.”

“I’m sure it’s a shock.”

“This place in Manhattan. How successful could it have been, if he ended up here?”

Mary dipped her grilled cheese into a small pool of ketchup. “What kind of food do they serve?”

O’Neil searched the article again. “It doesn’t say, not in so many words. Seriously, how would anyone around here know the difference?”

The waitress, an old woman in a ruffled apron, came to their booth and refilled their coffee cups. O’Neil looked out the window at the snowy town.

“There ought to be a law against this sort of thing,” he remarked. “It’s like a desecration.”

Mary looked at her sandwich. “I do see your point. On the other hand, I would like to see your old house. And we could use a good meal.”

Mary stayed at the table while O’Neil went to call about a reservation. The waitress brought her the pie she had ordered-cherry, with a dollop of vanilla ice cream-and she decided not to wait for O’Neil to return to begin eating. The cherries, she could tell, were canned, but the crust was excellent-light and buttery and still warm from the microwave.

O’Neil returned, shaking his head. “They couldn’t take us until eight-thirty,” he said. He sat across from her, frowning. “I remember when everybody around here was in bed by then, if they weren’t beating their wives. That was always a problem in these parts.”

“Oh, idle threats,” Mary said, forking the last of the pie into her mouth.

After lunch they returned to their hotel, watched the second of the three movies, napped through the afternoon, and awoke to the disorienting early darkness of a winter evening. O’Neil went to get more beer while Mary showered, and returned to find her lying on the bed wrapped in a thick towel, reading from the Bible she had found in the bedside drawer. Her hair was wet and thick, and she had scrubbed her face so hard it looked dusty.

“Now here’s something,” she said, and began to read aloud from the Bible, squinting without her glasses at the tiny print. Her eyesight was very poor, and yet she often read this way. “‘When a man hath taken a new wife, he shall not go out to war, neither shall he be charged with any business; but he shall be free at home one year, and shall cheer up his wife which he hath taken.’” She lifted her blue eyes from the page. “It’s interesting to me that this is not a widely mentioned part of Scripture.”

O’Neil opened a beer and handed it to her. “I’m not sure dinner is such a hot idea.”

Mary closed the Bible. “Well. Tell me about that.”

He sat on the bed beside her; the cold of the outside still clung to the wool of his coat. “We could eat someplace else.”

“This is true.”

“I haven’t been back there in almost twenty years, not since we sold it.” He removed his coat and opened a beer of his own. “You know, when Kay and I got home after the accident, the first thing we found was a huge pile of mail in the front foyer. Our folks had been dead for a couple of days, but the mailman had been shoving it through the mail slot just the same. So there it was, this pile of letters and bills and magazines, all mailed to dead people.” He shook his head mournfully and took a long swig of beer. All day long, Mary realized, he had been thinking about this melancholy pile of mail. She understood this was unavoidable-the mind went where it wished-and yet, deep down, she believed such brooding was profitless. O’Neil sighed hopelessly, as if he had heard her thoughts. “Now lawyers from Albany are sitting around the living room, praising the pot stickers.”

“So you found out what kind of food they serve,” Mary said expectantly.

“Sino-French.” O’Neil sipped again and wiped his mouth. “The guy at the 7-Eleven told me. Apparently, the chef does something very nice with duck.”

At eight o’clock they left for the restaurant. Mary fully expected O’Neil to change his mind at the last minute, sending them out onto dark country lanes searching for something to eat, but he surprised her and drove straight there. They parked at the curb across from the house, and sitting in the cold car, O’Neil gave her the lay of the land. The house, set back from the street, was not immediately recognizable as a restaurant, and the sign by the front door was so small it would have been possible to miss it altogether-to pass the house by, thought Mary, without knowing it was in any way different or special. O’Neil spoke quietly, as if they might be overheard, as he pointed out the details: the stone walkway his father had laid one summer, the crabapple tree that had been a sapling when his parents died but now stood fifteen feet tall, the window on the second floor that had been his room, before he had gone off to college. He spoke only of the exterior; his mind, it seemed, did not want to go inside the house.

“We sold it to a couple with kids,” O’Neil said. “I think their name was McGeary. After that I just lost track.”

“How does it feel?” Mary asked, and took his hand.

O’Neil looked at the house once more, taking it in, and sighed through his nose. “Strange,” he said. “In most ways it’s just the same. But probably the inside is all different now.”

It was. They boarded the porch and stepped through the front door to find themselves in a single open area, generously lit, with fluted white columns supporting the structure where load-bearing walls had once stood. A half-dozen tables occupied the dining room, which flowed to the open kitchen at the rear of the house. From where they stood in the entryway, Mary and O’Neil could see the gleaming range, the copper pots hanging on chains. The air was moist and smelled like garlic, and quiet violin music dribbled from speakers in the ceiling.

“Son of a bitch,” O’Neil said quietly.

The man whose picture they had seen in the paper came out from the kitchen and showed them to their table near the fireplace. The room was small enough that, as they sat, the other parties around them fell silent.

“I guess it’s quite a change,” Mary said.

O’Neil cast his eyes about the room. “You know, I think this is just about the spot where Kay and I used to play Chinese checkers on the floor. There was a sofa right there, and two chairs across from it. I don’t know why I played with her, because she always beat me. So maybe that’s why. It made her so happy.”

Mary took a roll from the wicker basket on the table. Steam wafted up as she pulled it into halves. “I just want to know,” she said, “is the whole evening going to go like this? It’s all right if it is.”

“They were perfectly good walls,” O’Neil said. “They were the walls of my childhood, and now they’re gone.”

Mary held out the basket. “Try a roll, O’Neil. They’re fresh.”

They were finishing the bread when a young woman appeared at their table and lit the candle between them with a long match. She was pretty, with brown hair that fell to a straight line across her shoulders, and small dark eyes.

“Have you been with us before?” the woman asked.

“Not in the way you mean,” O’Neil said.