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“Well, he’ll call us if you forget.” And Artie nodded. The gardener wrapped all the neighbors’ bushes around the same time, and it was getting colder now. “I noticed that the Peabodys’ are already done,” Evie said.

But this was difficult for Artie, talking this way, his head felt very swimmy, he was afraid he would make a mistake in what he was saying; he could not really pay attention. However, Evie did most of the talking and he marveled that she seemed to not notice anything different about him. He found that to be astonishing.

Later that night, he said to her with hesitation, “Did Carl Jung believe in free will?” Evie had not yet gone up to bed; they were both sitting in the living room. He saw immediately—he thought he saw this on her face—that she did not know the answer.

Evie sat back, swinging one leg over the other, and said, “Carl Jung believed in the collective unconscious, and he coined terms like ‘extroversion’ and ‘introversion,’ and he believed in archetypes—”

“But did he believe in free will?” Artie asked again.

“Artie, what is this with you and free will?”

“Nothing.” He shook his head.

—

But they now sat in the living room with this huge thing silently between them; Artie’s mind had a lot of trouble taking this in. And then he thought: We have always sat in this room with this huge thing silently between us.

Only it had not been between them because he had never known.

But Evie had known. Night after night for twenty-eight years she had known this about their son.

In any event, this began the part of Artie’s life where he lied to his wife. He lied by omission, but he lied all the time.

At certain moments he would think, as he did that night when he had returned from seeing Rob: Well, she is lying to me too. And so they lived their lie, only now they were living it together.

4

The first thing Artie shoplifted in his fifty-seven years of life was a comb. A man’s thin, plastic, almost bendable small comb, with a small price tag stuck on the side of it. This was in the drugstore in the next town over from where Artie lived. He’d had no intention of stealing it. But the comb was in a little area near travel-size toothpastes and powders and small deodorants, and Artie kept standing there gazing down at the combs, and he picked one up. Looking around casually, he thought that he was not being watched, and so he squinted at the comb and picked the price tag off it. The price tag split into tiny quarters, but still, it came off, and Artie walked away, and as he turned the corner of the aisle he slipped the comb into his pants pocket.

Memories began to pop up like mushrooms after a fall rain. For example, one late summer afternoon when Rob was about twelve, he and Artie were kicking a ball near the playground in the middle of town and Reginald MacDonald had suddenly appeared and watched them. “Like this!” Artie had yelled at Rob, showing him how to get the ball behind his foot, but Rob couldn’t manage it. And Reginald MacDonald had said, “Cut him a break, Artie. Maybe he’s not going to be a soccer player.”

—

Another memory: Reginald MacDonald standing up after Rob’s high school graduation speech. Rob had been valedictorian of his class, and Reginald had stood up and cheered. Artie remembered this now: how he had turned slightly and seen that man standing up and clapping hard.

—

And his wife saying rather recently that Reginald had married Flossie because Flossie had lied about being pregnant. How would Evie have known that except through Reginald?

And how Evie knew what Reginald had said on his deathbed.

He thought of the different dinners the two couples had had throughout the years until that last one when Rob called Sophie a prissy little prick. Artie remembered now that Reginald used to smile at Evie in a way that made Artie happy; she had been liked and this was a good thing. Artie had liked Flossie, and Reginald had liked Evie, and so it worked out. Artie had thought this. Now he thought again of Danny Marino’s father weeping on the edge of the bathtub. What had the man said that day? Something like: How did I not know this was happening? I thought everything in my marriage was good. Something like that the poor man had said.

—

He remembered bumping into Reginald at the post office after Rob’s accident, and how Reginald had approached him with great seriousness, asking him how Rob was holding up.

Jesus.

—

And then—this seemed to come to him with clarity—he thought of how often Evie had mentioned Reg since his death. Had she been missing him? Yes, of course she had. He thought of how Francesca said that perhaps Evie had been a little bit in love with Reg on and off as they both watched Rob growing up. Reg had said in his letter that Rob’s mother had been to see him recently on his “godawful deathbed.” So Evie had of course felt a real sadness, had been living with that deep sadness as she lived alongside Artie, and Artie thought then of his own loneliness—enough that he had wanted to die!—which he had attributed to Flossie’s leaving town. But it was, he thought now, his wife who had left town. Left him.

—

For Artie it was as though he had lived these many years looking at things from one angle, and now it was as though someone had turned him partly in a different direction and everything—everything—looked different.

“Where did this come from?” Evie was squinting and holding out the comb that Artie had stolen a few days earlier.