“What?”

He shook his head.

“Will I what? Ask me.”

He studied my face in the way he did sometimes. He paused with the marker in his fist, deciding what to write.

“Are you asking if I’ll stay in Miami?” I said.

He put the marker down and nodded, swallowing.

I thought for a moment, and then said, “Of course I’ll stay. This is my home.”

And I justify saying it, because Dennis was alive and sitting beside me, and as long as he existed in this world I would have stayed. How could I answer him except this way? As long as he was flesh and blood and had the ability to ask the question, that was my answer, and in this moment I even partly believed it myself. And I think my answer gave him peace.

We’d graduated from so many gadgets by this time: the cane, the walker, the voice box, one electric wheelchair, and then a better one. By April, when the mangoes started to ripen on the trees and the frangipani trees started to drop their pinwheel blossoms, he wasn’t speaking or walking at all, and could barely make it down the swimming pool steps to exercise with Lola. Instead, they lay on the back deck and she pushed his muscles around for him, bending his knees to his chest or stretching his arms above his head. By May, by the time of my fifty-first birthday, he had no more use for the dry-erase board; it was too difficult for him to write. By June he was eating almost exclusively from the tube, and staying almost exclusively in the living room, because it was too difficult to move him back and forth. Marse bought him some expensive ergonomic footrest pillows, and I bought soft flannel sheets for the living room sofa. People still came by all day, every day, flowing into and out of the house, but instead of congregating on the back deck or in the kitchen, we hung around in the living room, mostly, and once or twice a day someone helped Dennis into his wheelchair, fitted a blanket over his legs, and took him for a walk around the block. We played a lot of board games—Dennis was still good at them, though they tired him out. For Scrabble, I sat next to him and he pushed the tiles he wanted to use toward me, then gestured to the spot on the board where he wanted the word to go. I kept the windows open all the time, and changed the sofa sheets every time Lola or Stuart took Dennis for a bath. I bought him several pairs of pajamas—he was usually chilly, even in the heat of the day.

In July, Paul and Marse picked us up and we went in Paul’s truck to a drive-in movie in Fort Lauderdale. We sat in camp chairs and ate marshmallows—a treat that had become one of Dennis’s favorites—and drank very cold beers. Paul had become a deacon at his church. He explained what this entailed, but I wasn’t listening. I was watching a foursome about our age at the site next to ours, sitting in camp chairs and eating sandwiches out of plastic baggies. They laughed a lot, loudly, and I felt that I truly hated them. I was relieved when the movie was over and we could get back into the cool car and drive silently back down the crowded expressway. Paul and Dennis continued to go fishing almost every weekend, but they returned early, usually without fish, and Dennis slept for hours afterward.

In August, Paul and Marse sold their condos and bought a house on the Biltmore golf course, a mile north of ours. After they moved in, I dressed Dennis in a sport coat and put on a dress and invited Margo and Stuart to come with us to the new house for dinner. He wore a tie and she wore a black dress and red heels. Stuart helped Dennis into the passenger seat of our car, then folded the wheelchair and lifted it into the trunk—this was something I could not do on my own—then put out his hand. “Do you mind if I drive?” he said.

His blue eyes flashed with something I couldn’t quite define—anger, possibly, or frustration. We hadn’t exchanged two words since they’d arrived at the house, fifteen minutes late, so I surmised that whatever it was, it had nothing to do with me. “I’d rather drive,” I said.

“Suit yourself.” He stepped into the backseat, forcing Margo to shift over.

In the rearview mirror, I tried to catch my daughter’s eye. It had been months since I’d stopped hunting for clues about Stuart and Margo’s relationship—were they happy?—or, for that matter, about Stuart’s relationship to Lola, who was still an almost daily presence in my home. Nothing had been revealed to me since the day when I’d seen them in the pool, and Margo and Stuart were the same as ever: affectionate in bursts, independent of each other. But as I drove, I found myself wishing they would fight. A fight, in my presence, would at least shed some light on what transpired in the private space between them.

Margo kept her hands in her lap as we drove. We came to the bridge where she’d crashed Dennis’s car when she was sixteen, and as we passed, Dennis raised one hand and made a grunting sound. “My bridge,” said Margo in response, and she reached into the front seat and put an arm on her father’s shoulder. “I think I see the Buick’s fender in that bush over there,” she said. “There’s one of the headlights in the gutter.”

Marse and Paul came outside while Stuart was still helping Dennis into his chair. Paul’s aftershave hit me before he reached the driveway. Marse was stunning in a pink halter dress. It was a crisp, warm early summer evening, and the light streaming through the oak trees was the color of watery tea. The house, which I had seen the day they’d moved in, was a hacienda-style ranch with a gated driveway and long, wide carport. We went inside, Paul driving Dennis even though he was still capable of maneuvering the electric steering. There was a board leading from the brick walk up two steps to the front door; Paul had secured it with sandbags at each corner, and though it buckled a bit when Dennis’s chair rolled onto it, it didn’t shift or drop.

We entered a wide, open kitchen with new appliances and marble countertops, then continued through a family room onto a sunporch, then outside onto a back patio that overlooked a swimming pool. Beyond the fence was the Biltmore golf course, where Paul boasted he’d shot two under par in a round that very morning. Dennis touched Paul’s arm and gestured around the yard, then forced his right hand into a thumbs-up. “Nice, eh?” said Paul, putting his hand on Dennis’s shoulder. “OK if we eat outside?”

Dennis nodded.

“Can I get you a beverage?” said Paul.

Dennis nodded again.

Marse and Margo and I went to the kitchen. Marse handed me a bottle of red wine to open while Margo admired the house. “I’d like a big kitchen,” she said. “Next house, I want a really big kitchen. It doesn’t even matter that I don’t cook very much. I just love a big kitchen.”

“I don’t cook much,” said Marse.

“I don’t remember the last time I cooked,” I said.

“The benefit of having a spouse with a feeding tube,” said Marse. She was the only one who could say things like that to me. “Paul expects dinner at the table every night. He’s had my chicken carbonara a dozen times.”

“And the rest of the time?” I said.

“Takeout.”

Marse collected beers from the fridge and poured one into a plastic cup for Dennis—it would fit perfectly in an attachment that swiveled up from the side of his wheelchair—and in the cup she placed a long, aqua-blue straw. It touched me, the efforts they’d gone to. She left the kitchen to deliver Dennis’s beer, then returned and started arranging a plate of cheese with strawberries. Margo said to Marse, “Are you going to marry Paul?” and we both looked at Marse expectantly.

She looked mischievous. “Do you think I should?”

“Oh, my Lord,” I said. I put my hand to my throat. “Are you engaged?”

Marse held out her hand—I was ashamed that I hadn’t noticed—and on it was a beautiful (and elegant, and not at all showy) diamond ring. I grabbed her and shrieked. Margo came around the counter and hugged Marse, saying, “Congratulations!” and for a moment I just stood there, my hand over my mouth, watching my friend. She was as happy as I’d ever seen her.

Paul and Stuart and Dennis came into the kitchen. “I guess you heard,” said Paul.

Margo hugged Paul, and said to her father, “Did you know?”

He nodded.

“You knew?” I swatted his arm.

He nodded again, smiling.

“We’ll toast,” I said, handing everyone a glass. “To our friends. May your life together be long and happy.”

Dennis grunted and we all looked at him. He gestured to me, then to himself, then back to me.

“As happy as yours,” said Paul quietly. Dennis again gave his awkward thumbs-up.

“Hear, hear,” said Marse, and when I looked over at Margo, I saw that she had started to cry. Seeing this, Stuart threw up his hands and left for the backyard. Marse recovered for all of us. “We’ll eat,” she said, pulling a lasagna out of the oven. I put my arm around Margo and, seeing that the lasagna was in a carry-out container, said to Marse, “So sweet—you slaved!”

“Shush,” she said. “I’m going to be a wife.”

We carried water glasses to the back patio, where a table was set. I looked around for Stuart but didn’t see him. Margo said, “He’ll probably walk home.”

“That young man is temperamental,” said Paul “Am I right?” He looked at Dennis and Dennis nodded.

“I remember another temperamental young man,” I said to Paul.

He looked up to see if I was smiling—I was. “Guilty as charged.”

“Don’t defend him, Mother,” said Margo.

“She’s not defending him,” said Marse. “She’s equivocating.”

“Don’t equivocate,” said Margo.

Dennis laughed and a bit of his beer spilled. Paul wiped it up and said, “Better an interesting marriage than a perfect one, I say. Am I right?”