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Doc.
    For a while, after the accident, when she couldn’t cook or do much of anything around the house and heaven knows she didn’t want Ned touching her, Doc gave her some little yellow pills to take. She didn’t want them, but under Ned’s insistence she caved in. They were tiny, octagonal-shaped pills potent beyond what their size suggested, making everything in sight seem sallow, jaundiced. Wavy and dull. After a while this was worse than anything, so she quit taking them. Plus all those drugs are chemicals, and Rose doesn’t trust chemicals. Who knows what they are really doing to a person? No, she thinks, better to wait and not let on to Ned about the red-edged mole that itches.
    She twists her head on the pillow and looks at her husband, studies his face in the slippery light of the moon. Even in sleep he looks tired. She doesn’t need her glasses to see the deep lines that etch the skin between his eyes and make gutters from his nose to his chin. He is fifty-seven. We’re getting old, she thinks. Her heart almost softens.
    Sometimes she wonders why it is so easy for Ned. Isn’t he angry about all the things that have been taken from them, simple things they have every right to expect would come to them, like Todd growing up, marrying, having a child of his own? For five years she has tracked all the things that will never happen, bitter anniversaries that keep grief alive and sharp but that she cannot stop her mind from recording: Todd’s senior prom. His high school graduation. The fall he would have entered college. Doesn’t Ned ever think about these things?
    Once, three years ago, they were staring at some program on television and she blurted, “He would be in college now.”
    â€œFor Christ’s sake!” Ned shouted. The green recliner snapped to an upright position, and he stalked from the room. As far as he is concerned, Todd is over, closed subject.
    Men are different, she thinks. But no, look at Claire Covington. The summer after their son drowned, she was back swimming at the lake, in the very water that still held the molecules of Brian Covington’s last breath. But maybe, Rose thinks in sudden inspiration, maybe submerging herself in the water was Claire’s way of getting close to her son. Lord knows, Rose can understand that. Then she pictures Claire laughing, splashing in the water, dressed in a bathing suit a good yard shy of the amount of material appropriate to a woman of her age. No, when Claire Covington went to the lake, it wasn’t to merge with whatever remained there of her son.
    ALTHOUGH SHE CANNOT REMEMBER FALLING ASLEEP, SHE must have dozed off, for the next time she looks the clock reads 6:00. Beside her, she feels Ned move. Soon he will get up, releasing her. She’ll take a shower, let cold water flow over her stomach, cooling it down.
    Ned moans softly; then he’s awake. This is how he does it every morning. One minute he’s asleep, the next he’s talking.
    â€œTime to get up,” he says.
    â€œYes,” she says.
    She lifts the weight of his arm from her ribs and takes a little breath, inhaling dawn. In the morning light, for one brief moment, she can almost believe she has only imagined the itch, can almost believe that she has already experienced her lifetime’s allotment of pain and grief.

CHAPTER 2
    ROSE
    THEY GET THROUGH BREAKFAST COURTESY OF THE Today Show. Four years ago, Ned installed a thirteen-inch Sony on the counter beside the refrigerator. The TV and his newspaper have erased much of the need for a whole lot of conversation, and what is spoken tends to be one-sided. This morning he switches on the set the second he walks in the kitchen, then folds the Springfield paper open to the Sports section. Dependable as daylight. Rose waits for him to tell her who won what game the night before. Every morning, he fills the air with news of scores and draft choices, the hiring of million-dollar