“Isn’t that true?”

She stares at our son’s grave as if he were listening and would be embarrassed to hear us. “I guess.”

“Are you really getting married?” I feel my eyes open wide as if I knew the answer already. We are like brother and sister suddenly, Hansel and Gretel, planning their escape to safety.

“I don’t know.” She wags her shoulders a little, like a girl again, but in resignation as much as anything else. “People want to marry me. I might’ve reached an age, though, when I don’t need men.”

“Maybe you should get married. Maybe it would make you happy.” I do not believe it for a minute, of course. I’m ready to marry her again myself, get life back on track. I miss the sweet specificity of marriage, its firm ballast and sail. X misses it too, I can tell. It’s the thing we both feel the lack of. We are having to make everything up now, since nothing is ours by right.

She shakes her head. “What did you and Pauly talk about last night? I felt like it was all men’s secrets and I wasn’t in on it. I hated it.”

“We talked about Ralph. Paul has a theory we can reach him by sending a carrier pigeon to Cape May. It was a good talk.”

X smiles at the idea of Paul, who is as dreamy in his own way as I ever was. I have never thought X much liked that in him, and preferred Ralph’s certainty since it was more like hers and, as such, admirable. When he was fiercely sick with Reye’s, he sat up in bed in the hospital one day, in a delirium, and said, “Marriage is a damnably serious business, particularly in Boston”—something he’d read in Bartlett’s, which he used to leaf through, memorizing and reciting. It took me six weeks to track the remark down to Marquand. And by then he was dead and lying right here. But X liked it, thought it proved his mind was working away well underneath the deep coma. Unfortunately it became a kind of motto for our marriage from then till the end, an unmeant malediction Ralph pronounced on us.

“I like your new hair,” I say. The new way was a thatch along the back that is very becoming. We are past the end of things now, but I don’t want to leave.

X fingers a strand, pulls it straight away from her head and cuts her eyes over at it. “It’s dikey, don’t you think?”

“No.” And indeed I don’t.

“Well. It’d gotten to a funny length. I had to do something. They screamed at home when they saw it.” She smiles as if she’s realized this moment that children become our parents, and we just become children again. “You don’t feel old, do you, Frank?” She turns and stares away across the cemetery. “I don’t know why I’ve got all these shitty questions.