flawed and arbitrary, so unreliable, so wanting. The thought made her panicky. She looked at her father and was struck by her deep knowledge of him, by the way their lives were wrapped around each other's, the many times she'd seen him walk into a room. How she'd longed, she supposed, for his approval.
Her father was now shockingly small, nearly her own height. In her childhood, when she'd first learned him, her father had been immense, massive-chested, towering over her like a cliff. His head was in the upper regions of the air; she'd had to call up to his great height, her own voice tossed and tiny. Even when she'd grown up, her father had been tall. At her wedding, walking down the long aisle of the church, her father remote and distant beside her, in his dark suit, she'd felt his looming, powerful presence.
But now her father's eyes were nearly level with hers, and his movements slow. Now his forehead rose to the top of his head, and fine white hair ringed his bare pate like a tonsure. His hair was too fine and weightless to lie down, and it stood up wildly, as though blown by a small personal wind. His nose had become bulbous; on his pouched yellowy cheeks were faint brown stains. His small piercing eyes were faded blue, and deep disapproving lines were etched from nose to mouth.
He wore old khaki pants, ponderous white running shoes, and a stained blue windbreaker, zipped up to his chin. He wore the jacket every day, indoors and out, as though it were the only thing he owned. This was not the way he'd used to dress. Julia remembered him leaving for the hospital each morning wearing elegant suits, dull silk ties, soft leather shoes. Now he looked like a poor person, homeless. Which was what age did to you, it stripped you of what you'd had, of your presence in the world. The sight of him like this, shuffling, heavy-footed, in his stained windbreaker, made Julia feel helpless with tenderness.
Her father frowned at her. “Do you have an atlas?” he demanded. “I want to look up where we are.”
At once Julia forgot her tenderness, her anxiety. He had restored himself to despot. His manner—autocratic, imperious—never ceased to exasperate her.
“We do have an atlas,” Julia said. “I'll get it for you.”
She strode into the living room, bare heels thudding confidently on the floor. Crouching by the bottom shelf, where the big books lay flat, she ran her fingers briskly and uselessly down the spines: the atlas, she could see at once, was gone.
She looked further, her gaze ranging back and forth across the shelves, lunch unfinished on the counter, her father standing ponderously behind her, judgment gathering in the silence. The atlas had its own place on the bottom shelf, everyone knew it. Why, right now, her father's frown embedding itself on his forehead, was the atlas elsewhere? More evidence of her inability to run a household. Where could it possibly be, that big ungainly volume?
Julia sat back on her heels. “It's not here, Daddy. Sorry.” She made her voice brisk and offhand.
“It's not there?”
“Someone's taken it and not put it back.” She stood and headed for the kitchen, head high.
“I wanted to see just where we are on the coast.” Her father shook his head. “You don't have an atlas.”
“I do have an atlas,” Julia corrected him. “Someone's taken it.”
There was a pause.
Edward said, “I don't see how you can say you have an atlas if you don't have it.”
“I do have an atlas,” Julia repeated. “I just can't find it right now.”
Edward shook his head. “I'd call that not having one,” he said, almost to himself. “Do you have a map of the region? A local map? I want to see where we are on the coast.”
“We're Down East,” Julia said. “That's what you say up here. You don't say north or south, you say Down East. Because of the schooners, and the prevailing winds.”
“I know that,” Edward said. “I know about being Down East. What I want to know is where. I want to look at a map and see exactly where we are on the coast.”
“There might be a map in the car,” Julia said, though right now she doubted it, “but I'm in the middle of making lunch. Can it wait until afterward?”
What her father made her feel was incompetent: the missing atlas, the absent husband, the shabby house. Don't say anything more, she silently commanded.
She peeled off a translucent slice of ham and laid it carefully onto the bread. Her father waited for a moment, but she did not look up.
Frustrated, he turned away. She heard him heading slowly down the hall, the floor creaking beneath his steps.
At once she was ashamed.
Why did this happen? Why did she snap at her father like an adolescent? Why did he unsettle her? She was an adult. She had two wonderful sons, an ex-husband, and a possible new boyfriend; she taught at a distinguished university, she was a working artist, she showed her work regularly at a good gallery. She should be far beyond the reach of her father. But her father, though he himself was diminishing, still cast a long shadow over her life.
Julia and Wendell had bought this house years ago, when the boys were small. It was supremely inconvenient—an eight-hour drive from Manhattan—but supremely cheap. Even so, the upkeep and taxes had always been a struggle, and many times they'd almost sold it. The house would never be worth much, though; it was not on a fashionable part of the coast: no presidents or Wyeths or Rockefellers lived in this small stretch of bays and coves and wild islands.
The clapboard house stood at a little distance from the weathered barn. This was unusual here: during the old, bitter winters it had been too dangerous to venture outside. The old farmhouses were connected to their barns by a telescoping series of constructions. Bighouse, little-house, backhouse, barn, they were called. Julia liked the notion of continuous shelter, and she liked the rhythm of the phrase. Sometimes she said it silently to herself as she passed an old farmstead.
This house—now entirely hers—was lapped by meadows. In the upper field, above the house, were ancient apple trees gone exuberantly wild, their branches tangled into a sweet green net. The lower field was only grass, soft and silky, sloping mildly down to a sheltered tidal cove. Now, in late summer, the grass had turned a tawny pink, and glowed mysteriously at sunset. Julia's studio was in the barn overlooking the meadow. Through the big picture window she had painted this many times, the rich rippling grass, the moving water beyond it, the glittering sea-bright light. It was a symphony; she had never come to the end of it.
Julia and Wendell had always planned to fix up the house properly, but they could never afford it, and the house had stayed shabby. The white paint peeled in the scouring Maine weather, the shingles turned mossy, the shutters drooped at the windows. “Look on the bright side,” Wendell said. “No one would break into a house that looks like this.”
Every summer Wendell and Julia had worked together on the house. Since the divorce, it was Julia and the boys, Steven and Jack. Julia tried to paint one outside wall every other year. It was peaceful work. She liked sitting high on the stepladder, scraping at the worn paint in the bright sun, no sound but the wind sifting through the grass.
Inside, she'd learned basic maintenance—fuse boxes, simple plumbing. How the window sashes worked, the hidden weights plummeting inside the wall. She liked knowing the house in this intimate way, the dim earthy spaces of the damp cellar, the cool touch of the pipes, the tiny beads of moisture on the singing metal. The hot motionless air of the attic, the sloping eaves, the faint desultory hum of wasps. She liked using the solid-headed hammer, the long gleaming nails. She liked the screwdriver, the firm twists sending the grooved shaft spiraling deep into the wood. She liked responding to the old house, earning her ownership.
Wendell had loved the house, too. It had been the biggest issue in their divorce, but Julia had been obdurate. At first Wendell had been furious, but then he'd married a woman who didn't like Maine. It was too far away, pronounced Sandra, too cold. They went to Bridgehamp-ton. If Wendell had kept the house, he'd have sold it when he married Sandra, and