“Unless she meets someone along the way.”

“Goodbye, Daddy.”

Hanging up, he remembered what the Truro thing was all about. By way of apology for the end-of-semester cock-up, Joy had suggested they drive out to the Cape after the wedding and see if the inn where they’d honeymooned still existed, maybe check in for a day or two. It’d be kind of romantic, she said, threading her fingers through his. There’d been a time when that particular gesture would have meant romance right then. Lately, it had come to mean that she might be amenable to the idea in a week or so, under the right circumstances, if he played his cards right, if he didn’t do anything between now and then to fuck things up. Which had made him grumpy enough to go to Boston without her.

The afternoon had grown pleasantly warm and, having slept poorly the night before, Griffin soon nodded off, the first of his student portfolios unread in his lap. A breeze awakened him an hour later, manuscript pages strewn all over the porch. Several had blown up against the railing, one slipping between the slats and impaling itself on a rosebush. After he’d retrieved the scattered pages and put them in order, three were still missing. He found one a block away, stuck to a telephone pole like a flyer for a lost pet. The other two were probably on their way to Nantucket. Jesus, he thought, his resemblance to his father wasn’t just physical. He’d been famous for losing student work, whole stacks of research papers going missing at once. “If you don’t want to read them, don’t assign them,” Griffin remembered his mother always saying when yet another batch disappeared without a trace and his father was forced to ask his students to resubmit their work. “I’d set the whole weekend aside to read them,” he said, feigning (she was certain) disappointment.

Griffin ’s mother loathed grading papers, too, of course. Who didn’t? But she was meticulous about correcting errors, offering style and content suggestions in the margins, asking pointed, often insulting, questions (How long did you work on this?) and then answering them herself (Not long, one hopes, given the result). But such industry was possible, his father always countered, only because her courses were about a third the size of his own. Only the bravest, most ambitious English majors took her classes, which she explained was evidence of her rigor and he cited as proof that she was a bitch on wheels.

His father’s larger, more diverse classes made that laudable attention to detail impractical, or so he claimed. At the end of each paper he would affix a large letter grade and a general reaction like “Good” or “Could be better,” unless the student was a pretty young woman, in which case he’d suggest she come see him during office hours. With his male students, many of whom were athletes, he had an unspoken understanding. He would give them one letter grade higher than they deserved, and in exchange they were to leave him alone. His students enjoyed his affable, slightly distracted manner in the classroom, as well as his fondness for bad jokes and that he kept up on the issues of campus life, which other professors considered beneath them. He generally liked them, too, though at the end of the semester he wouldn’t have been able to pick a single one out of a police lineup, where, according to Griffin ’s mother, most of them belonged. By contrast, she knew her students well enough to dislike them as individuals, for their intellectual laziness, their slovenly dress, their conventional instincts, their religious upbringing. They mostly disliked her, too, though a few wrote her after they graduated to thank her for the tough discipline she’d instilled. She always shared these notes with his father, remarking how little editing they required by comparison to the moronic screeds (often beginning Yo, Prof Griff) his former athletes sometimes sent him.

Griffin, now entering his second decade of teaching, feared that as a teacher he’d inherited the worst attributes of both parents. He was popular, like his father, but then screenwriting courses always were. His students appreciated that he had real experience, that several of his and Tommy’s screenplays had been produced and that, if pressed, he could tell them cynical Hollywood stories. He liked them personally far more than he expected to. Except for the scholarship kids, they were the children of entitlement and privilege, but it turned out that just meant lots of books and music around the house, plenty of piano lessons and travel to shape their personalities. Their politics were mostly liberal, like their parents’. All that was fine, but by temperament he was more like his mother than he cared to admit. He offered his students far more comment and advice than they wanted, and the vast majority paid it exactly no attention whatsoever, given that their subsequent efforts were riddled with the same mistakes. Lately, he’d begun to wonder if his father’s indolence might in the end be more beneficial. Informed that his work “could be better,” a student of his might actually pause to reflect on how, whereas Griffin ’s detailed analyses of various shortcomings simply caused the heavily edited pages to become airborne. This screenplay with the missing pages (airborne ahead of schedule) was typical. Its narrative, he felt certain, cohered about as well without them. It would take him a good half an hour to explain why, labor that was probably for his own edification anyway.

It was so disheartening to contemplate, especially on such a lovely afternoon, that he stuffed it and all the others back in his satchel. When he redialed Sid’s number, it again went directly to voice mail. How disappointed was Joy going to be, he wondered, if there wasn’t time to go to Truro before he flew out to L.A.? Probably not very, he decided. It was nice she considered the idea romantic, but Truro, if she actually thought about it, was more likely to expand their recent conflict than to shrink it. Where they would honeymoon had been the first real disagreement of their relationship. She had favored the coast of Maine, where as a girl she’d vacationed with her family. Every summer they rented the same rambling, ramshackle old house, not far from where her mother grew up. It was drafty and creaky, its floors so pitched that if you dropped a Parcheesi marble off the kitchen table, you’d end up chasing it around the living room. But the place was familiar and had scads of room for her parents, the five kids and their weekend visitors. Joy had many fond memories of family dinners and evening excursions to a nearby amusement park, of all-day Monopoly and Clue tournaments when it rained. Even after her father got transferred and the family moved out West, they returned to Maine each July, never mind that its beaches were rocky and its water too frigid to swim in. Joy had even suggested the same house might be available for their honeymoon. Which begged Obvious Question Number One: why had Griffin talked her into the Cape instead? Given the opportunity to imitate a happy marriage-and there was no denying that Joy’s parents had one-why choose to follow his own parents’ miserable version?

Still, they’d been happy in Truro, hadn’t they? It wasn’t like he’d bullied her. They discussed, finally agreed, and it had been fine. They spent the whole time making love and excitedly mapping out the rest of their lives. It was there, walking hand in hand among the Truro dunes, that Joy first talked about the sort of house she dreamed of them owning one day. It seemed to be a cross between the Syracuse house she grew up in and the summer rental in Maine: old, inconvenient, graceful, full of character, a house that had a rich history before you showed up and might even harbor a benign ghost or two. That Joy believed in ghosts was one of the more endearing things he’d learned about her on their honeymoon. She was certain the Syracuse house had been haunted. The whole family-even Jared and Jason, her much younger brothers-had sensed the ghost’s presence; it was, they all agreed, a woman. Only her father was immune, but he didn’t count, she explained, because he never noticed anything.