On the other end of the line, somewhere in the glass-and-steel expanse of Narita Airport, Tori began to weep. It was not the weeping of a broken heart; it was the sharp, angry sob of a child whose favorite toy had been placed on the top shelf.

"Caleb says Myrna sounded completely cold," Tori sniffled. "She hung up on me, Mom! She hung up on me and went to get a pastry!"

"Good for Myrna," Patrice said. "She has spent the last five years being your unpaid scullery maid because she was too polite to tell you that Charles’s death didn't make her your property. Now, listen to me very carefully, Victoria."

Patrice picked up her legal pad.

"The children are clean. They have eaten actual vegetables for lunch—carrots, Victoria, which grew in the dirt and did not come from an aluminum pouch. Maggie has taken a seventy-minute nap without a white-noise machine. And tomorrow morning, Eli is going to help me weed the hostas behind the garage."

"Eli hates gardening!"

"Eli," Patrice said, looking through the archway at her grandson, who was currently watching her with wide, reverent eyes, "is discovering the satisfaction of manual labor. If you call this house again before six o'clock tomorrow evening, I will take the red folder, I will put it into the chiminea on the back patio, and I will light it with a match. Do you understand me?"

A long silence hung on the line.

"Is Caleb there?" Patrice asked.

A muffled noise, then Caleb’s voice came on, cautious and defensive: "I’m here, Patrice."

"Caleb," his mother-in-law said, her tone softening just enough to make the knife go in deeper, "your father was a deacon at First Presbyterian. He was a man who knew how to apologize when he had backed his car into a lamppost. You have backed your car into both of your mothers simultaneously. I suggest you spend the next twelve days in Japan considering how you are going to pay for the bodywork."

She hung up the receiver.

She smoothed the front of her beige trousers, walked back to the dining room table, and picked up her pen.

"Eli," she said without looking up.

"Yes, Grandma?"

"Page one hundred and fourteen. What were the primary causes of the Franco-Prussian War?"

Eli smiled—a real, wide smile that showed the gap between his front teeth—and turned the page.

***

Chapter 6 - Sintra’s Mist and Hard Truths

On the fourth day of the tour, Joyce and I stood on the battlements of the Pena Palace in Sintra.

The mist had rolled in from the Atlantic, thick and white as sheep’s wool, wrapping itself around the vivid yellow and scarlet towers of the palace until they looked like something dreamed up by an eccentric king who had never quite grown up. The stone beneath my fingers was damp and cold, covered in tiny rosettes of gray lichen that had taken two hundred years to grow the size of a five-cent piece.

"Charles would have hated this," Joyce said, pulling her wool scarf tighter around her chin. "Too many stairs. He would have stayed down in the café with a ham sandwich and told you to take pictures of the tiles."

I laughed. The sound was bright, clean, and entirely free of the old, dragging weight that usually accompanied his name.

"He would have," I agreed. "He would have complained about the bus driver’s shifting, too. He always thought he could drive a manual transmission better than any European alive."

"He was a good man, Myrna," Joyce said, looking at me sideways. "But he took up a lot of room in the room."

I didn't answer right away. I looked out over the parapet, watching the white fog drift through the crowns of the giant ferns that grew in the valley below.

Joyce was right. Charles had been large, loud, generous, and completely central to the orbit of our life. When he was happy, the house was full of light; when his back hurt, the whole house tiptoed on carpet. Caleb had inherited that same quality, but without Charles’s weight. Caleb had learned that a man could simply exist at the center of things and let the women around him arrange the furniture so he didn't bump his shins.

My phone buzzed in my pocket.

It wasn't a call this time. It was a text from Caleb.

*Can I call you? Just me. Please, Mom.*

I looked at Joyce. "Give me five minutes," I said.

She nodded, pointing her crossword pencil toward a stone archway. "I’ll be in the queen’s bedchamber. Apparently, her husband had worse taste in wallpaper than my first husband."

I walked down a flight of stone steps into a small, secluded courtyard paved with black and white river stones. The air was cool and smelled of wet cedar. I dialed his number.

He picked up on the first ring.

"Mom?"

He was alone. I could tell by the quality of the background noise—the low murmur of a hotel lobby, the clink of porcelain, the absence of Tori’s sharp, rhythmic breathing.

"Hello, Caleb."

"Where are you?"

"I’m in Sintra," I said. "On a mountain. There’s a castle here painted the color of an egg yolk."

He was quiet for a long moment. When he spoke, his voice was small, stripped of the corporate confidence he used like armor. "I’m sorry, Mom."

I leaned against the mossy wall. "Why are you sorry, Caleb?"

"Because... because I knew," he whispered. "I saw the text you sent in April. I had it on my calendar."

"Then why did you let her do it?"

The question hung between us, heavy and cold as the mountain mist.

"Because it was easier," he said. The admission sounded like it had been dragged out of him with pliers. "It was just... easier to let her believe you’d say yes than to tell her we had to cancel the vouchers. Tori’s had this promotion hanging over her head for six months. She’s been impossible, Mom. Everything in the house is an emergency. The laundry, the kids' tutors, the lawn service. If I disagreed with her about Japan, she would have spent three weeks making every dinner feel like a deposition."

"So you gave her me instead," I said.

He didn't speak. I could hear his breath hitching through the receiver.

"Caleb," I said, looking down at my shoes, which were spotted with wet gravel from the palace paths. "Your father loved you very much. But he taught you that keeping the peace was the same thing as being good. It isn't."