“I just don’t want any embarrassment for Laura,” Joy was saying. “I can help if-”

“No, I should be fine,” he told her. “Mom actually left some money.” Though this wasn’t true, either, really. Her insurance had just about covered the hospital and nursing-home expenses, the cost of cremation. He’d sold a few of her books and given the rest away. Her laptop and printer and a few pieces of furniture had netted a couple grand. His father had left the world in about the same financial condition. Not much to show for a life, he couldn’t help thinking, though Thoreau would have been pleased. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity.

“Were you able to get Dad’s ashes from my office?”

“Yes, but can we do that later?”

“Of course.”

Laura was waiting for them in the hotel foyer, her eyes full, Andy at her side. The expression on the young man’s face was frank puzzlement, and Griffin couldn’t imagine why until it dawned on him that halfway across the parking lot, without realizing it, he’d taken Joy’s hand.

“Daddy,” his daughter said, choking on the word, and Griffin was glad he could think of nothing to say because he was incapable of the slightest utterance.

“I don’t have a doubt in the world about that boy,” Laura assured him as they entered the maze.

She and Andy had just parted as if it would be an eternity before they saw each other again, and she now turned to wave goodbye one last time before her fiancé and her mother disappeared from sight. His daughter’s idea that the two of them go for a stroll in the maze seemed to surprise neither Joy nor Andy, and that made Griffin apprehensive. Had they all thought further about Griffin ’s presence at the wedding and decided against it? Did Laura plan to explain this to him among the tall yews, far from witnesses, in case he objected or broke down in tears? But of course he knew better than that, so he took a deep breath and told himself to relax. Laura’s need for a private, father-daughter moment wasn’t about him or the myriad ways he’d failed her and her mother since Kelsey’s wedding. She was just a bride, and fatherly reassurance was part of the program. Enjoy it. Who knew how long it would be before his presence was deemed necessary again?

“Andy’s terrific, darlin’,” he said, putting his arm around her shoulder and feeling a wave of gratitude when she allowed herself to be drawn toward him. “It’s hard to imagine anyone more smitten, except for your old man, of course.” He meant this to elicit a smile, but it seemed to make his daughter even more thoughtful, and for a time they were quiet, turning first left, then right, then left again among the hedges, until he was good and lost.

“I guess the one I worry about is me,” she finally said. “What if I end up hurting him?”

“Why would you do that?” he said, feeling another wave of guilt. Would his daughter have harbored such self-doubt this time last year, or was it his doing?

A park bench had been thoughtfully placed near what Griffin guessed must be the far end, and here they took a seat. It was darker in the maze, very little of the remaining daylight penetrating its black branches, and Griffin was visited by a childish, irrational fear that they wouldn’t be able to find their way out. Laura would miss her wedding and that, too, would be his doing. He took her hand, unsure whether he meant to dispense comfort or receive it.

“Do you ever feel like you’re not who people think you are?” she said. “Like you’re pretending to be this person that people like? And the worst part is they all believe you?”

“Only every day,” he admitted. “Unless I’m mistaken, that feeling’s what people mean by original sin. Only sociopaths are spared. Trouble is, if you take it to heart you’ll never do anything, never pursue any happiness, for fear of hurting people.”

“I should ignore it?”

“Everybody else does.”

She seemed only partially convinced. “I’ve been thinking a lot about Grandma lately,” she said.

That surprised him, and he paused before responding, half expecting his mother, who was, after all, right over the hedge, in easy shouting distance, to offer her own two cents’ worth. Perhaps the maze had confounded her. “Any idea why?”

She shrugged. “Seeing her like that last December, I guess. All the tubes and the oxygen. She looked so tiny and all wasted away.”

How well he remembered. It had been December when she visited, just a couple weeks from the end. By then, mentally and emotionally exhausted, Griffin had checked into an extended-stay motel near the hospital. The doctors had warned him that patients like his mother sometimes lived on for months after being put on morphine, but it seemed to him that his mother was dying as she’d lived, on the academic calendar. He doubted she’d begin another semester.

The day of Laura’s unexpected visit had been a particularly difficult one. Several times during the night his mother had been awakened by nurses taking her vitals and talking noisily in the corridor outside her room. As a result she’d been irritable all morning, convinced she’d not been given her morphine, though both the duty nurse and her chart testified otherwise. At midday Griffin had gone back to his motel to shower and eat something. When he returned, he discovered that his mother had a visitor, her first, not counting himself. A woman was sitting on the edge of the narrow bed, her back to the doorway, holding his mother’s hand. Joy, he thought, and felt some ice dam in his heart break apart at the possibility. Back in November she’d called him in L.A. to say she had to fly to Sacramento the following week. She could stop in Indiana going or coming back if he needed her to. He’d wanted desperately to say yes, but he heard himself say no, he had things under control. When he asked if everything was okay in California, she said yes, that it was just some family stuff she had to attend to. And not his family anymore, was her clear implication, which he had to admit he had coming.

His first thought was she’d decided to come anyway, but of course this couldn’t be Joy. His mother never would have allowed her daughter-in-law to hold her hand. “Look who’s here,” she said. Only when Laura turned to face him did Griffin recognize her. “Would you mind absenting yourself from felicity awhile?” his mother said after he and his daughter had embraced. “My granddaughter has come a long way to see me, and she can only stay an hour.”

“It’s okay, Daddy,” Laura told him when he tried to object.

“Yes, do run along,” his mother said triumphantly, pleased, he could tell, both by his reluctance and the fact that he would have prevented this visit if he could’ve.

They’d had very little contact when Laura was a child. His mother had visited a couple months after Laura was born, “to help out,” but when Joy handed her the baby, she’d grasped her as gingerly as you would something unclean. Laura had regarded her grandmother with interest, smiled, then projected a stream of sour yellow milk onto her. Quickly handing the baby back to Joy, his mother had spent the next fifteen minutes at the sink, scrubbing her blouse with a dishcloth. She’d planned to stay for a week, but after two days, during which she never changed a single diaper, she made a flimsy excuse and flew back to Indiana. “Who changed your diapers, I wonder?” Joy said, finding the whole episode amusing, whereas Griffin had been homicidal.

The two thousand miles separating them had been an adequate buffer during Laura’s childhood, but even after they moved to Connecticut, things didn’t change much. Only when Laura was a junior in high school and thinking about where to apply to college did her grandmother begin to show much interest. She thought Laura should go to Yale, of course, and turned up her nose at the small liberal arts colleges her granddaughter was most keen on, the same ones where she and Griffin ’s father had once hoped to secure jobs. “Safety schools” was how she now regarded them. “Dear God, not Williams,” she told Laura. “Do you know the kind of people who send their progeny to Williams? Rich. Privileged. White. Republican. Or, even worse, people who aspire to all that.” Not so unlike your other grandparents, she meant. “Their kids aren’t smart enough to get into an Ivy but have to go somewhere, so God created Williams.” Griffin couldn’t imagine why, but Laura actually seemed to enjoy talking about all this with her grandmother (who called it brainstorming), and sometimes their phone conversations went on for forty-five minutes or an hour. It probably served him right that these all took place behind the closed door of his daughter’s bedroom. “Your grandmother has a lot of opinions,” Griffin told her. “That doesn’t mean they should carry much weight.” What he was doing, of course, was fishing, curious as to just how many and which opinions she was sharing with his daughter. “Oh, I don’t know,” Laura had responded noncommittally “She has some good ideas.” But she didn’t say what they were.